I work in a weird place

A government place, but a weird one.

The past few days was the Annual Trademark Expo. Well, I guess I don't work for Trademarks (we patent people kind of have no idea what they do...) but their expo was all over the part of campus that belongs to the city of Alexandria! There were booths for Caterpillar, UPS, Microsoft, Miller High Life...

Anyway, just wanted to post a picture I stole from someone else with the lineup of the mascots that were dressed up who were supposed to represent various trademarked...things?

I love Master Chief thrown in there.




p.s. I've definitely just been lurkily collecting blog links of people we know. =P Don't be weirded out! And let me know if it should be taken down ever.

Tales of a hahvahd Undergrad

Hi all! In case you didn't know, I've been keeping myself busy deep in the Place of Evil. That's right, hahvahd. I started working as a full-time research assistant in a developmental psycholinguistics lab there in July, and on the whole it's been pretty good. Sure, I have to walk across "the yahd" to run lab errands every now and then, and yes, at new employee orientation I had to watch three short videos about the glories of this ancient and revered university and the prestige we employees gain from it. But the linguistics stuff is interesting, the professor really has it together, I get to occasionally play with four- and five-year-olds, and I go home at five, whether the project I'm working on is finished or not. Basically, I'm paid to be a half-time student. Excellent!

As the title of the post implies, however, there is a hahvahd undergrad working at my lab. There were other undergrads there for most of the summer, in an internship program, but this girl wasn't part of the program, so she's still around these last few weeks in August, finishing up work before school starts (late here, of course). It wasn't so apparent when there were other people around to draw attention away from her, but recently it has become increasingly clear that this girl (Kelly) is either the worst employee ever or unbelievably stupid. And since I love anything that reflects badly on the cantabs...

Exhibit 1) Upon arriving at the lab, Kelly had no idea how to enter data in Excel. That's right, enter data. Not that she didn't know how to do stats with it or organize it -- she had literally never used the program. And it's not like she figured it out, either: someone had to show her how to enter the numbers in the desired cell and hit enter to move to the next one.

Exhibit 2) Today Kelly was supposed to go start transferring files from our current lab office, on the 2nd floor, to filing cabinets in one of our new lab rooms, on the 1st floor. She was sent down with the first carton of files, and came back in about 5 min, saying that she couldn't figure out how to get the filing cabinets open; they wouldn't come unlocked.
Since the keys to these filing cabinets are literally sitting in their key holes, I was somewhat surprised: "Did you try the keys in the hole above the drawers?"
"Yeah, I did. It felt like it was unlocking, but when I tried the drawers, none of them would open."
"You used the key in the lock?"
"Yeah. I don't know what's wrong..."
"I'll check it out."

I checked it out. The filing cabinets were unlocked. These filing cabinets just happen to be the kind with the little slide next to/below the handle that you have to push over when you open the drawer. This was apparently too complex to be readily apparent.

I could go on, but I think it's clear from the evidence above that either Kelly is incredibly inexperienced (well, she does go to hahvahd...) and none to bright when it comes to figuring anything out for herself, or she's a terrible employee, basically refusing to do anything without causing as much work as possible for everyone around her. The evidence, combined with what we all know about hahvahd already, was enough for me to decide which I believe.

like thurr

Here I am at work, being delinquent per usual. Everyone else was given time to fill out a form I already incorrectly filled out in a tizzy and handed in. It's great 'cuz I can't correct it but I assume they'll call if it's a problem. :-)

An important thing to point out is that some people at work actually pronounce their "air" sounds (marriage, their, etc) like "urr". I am the only one who finds this amusing enough to have to actually stifle a smile when it happens. I am a bad person.

I feel like pictures of my apt or my building are to come at some point, but not now, since I'm at work and they've been warning us about how everything we do is recorded. :-) Not super worried.

Orientation week has been all over the place. There are 7 "labs" in this training class, and about 16 people per lab. We're still filling out forms into next week but also we've drawn pictures representing ourselves and presented them, and then worked as a lab to come up with a "shield" representing our lab as a whole. We've done some patents, a mock interview with a lawyer (who turned out not to be a lawyer) and then we wrote and perform skits. And then we have class after lunch! Most of us are straight out of college, so I expect a lot of happy hours.

Oh also strange and/or sweet...we get two huge flat screen monitors (for all of the documents we have to look at yuck) and a webcam (in case our supervisors are working from home and we still have to talk to them). But for now, the webcam is just creepy 'cuz it's always on.