Strongly Worded

I Am So Ordinary

So I do not have anything monumental to report. I am not newly pregnant, like the beagle-owning, tap-dancing Jen, nor have I recently birthed a second child, like the hilarious, 7-Up chugging Big K. Nor have I completed a really cool documentary-spawning road trip like Marigoldie (whose blog is password-protected).

So what non-monumental things have been preventing me from regular blogging? Sleepiness and malaise caused by the cocktail of drugs that are supposed to lessen migraines and generally improve my neurological well-being. (The jury is very much out on that one.) Going on some decidedly non-monumental dates (unworthy of UpDATES, at least for now.) And working rather hard, visiting more students in intern-land. (I did, by the way, give an email smack-down to the .05% most brilliant student, but he never wrote back.)

This has proven to be exhausting and also interesting, since I meet separately with supervisors and students and act as a kind of double agent. One of our students is working on a revolutionary aircraft that will be test-flown in the Fall, and he's assembling some vital parts and sanding them down. "If you sand them too much," he told me, "you get holes, and then you have to patch them, and if you do that incorrectly, then you get air bubbles and that could cause a serious malfunction." I was taken aback and asked if that made him constantly stressed, given the responsibility and his friendship with the test pilot.The student was cavalier, confident that he was doing a good job, and that any errors on his part would be picked up by other members of the assembly team. The supervisor thought otherwise. Point blank, she said: "there are serious problems with his craftsmanship. I have pointed them out, but he doesn't seem to get it."

Another student seemed very happy at his placement, especially about his flexible hours. He did, however, express some scorn towards his supervisor's "traditional style," because he arrives each day at 8:00 a.m. precisely, and leaves at 4:00 on the dot. I snickered along with the student and introduced him to the term "clock watcher." Then I spoke with the supervisor and learned that the student's "flexible" hours are in fact erratic, and that he once rolled in at 3:00 p.m. and was late for an 11:00 a.m. meeting. I also learned that the "clock watching" was the result of parenting, and that the supervisor has a child at camp that needs to be picked up and dropped off at specific times, yes, on the dot. I felt like an idiot, but could not go back and say anything to the student, because unlike a real double agent I maintain confidentiality.

That's pretty much it. I've seen robotic arms, and learned about all kinds of software, and emerging markets for hydroelectric power and how they relates to salmon populations. Who knew?

Posted by Dori at 11:12 AM