workworkwork

I've been busier than I think I've ever been these days... but in a good way, for the most part :) On Saturday I went to Chinatown to interview for a volunteer job. If I get it, I'll be helping high school kids with the college application process and occasionally run classes on such topics. Saturday night i went to the mall with my friend... and can I just say that it is ridiculously hard to find a good pair of black patent heels, which you'd think would be really easy to find because they're so common, but apparently not. And then Sunday I went to the beach all day :)

Just a note before I begin talking about work: I am not allowed to identify myself online as an employee of the company I work for, so I shall henceforth refer to it as The Company. (You guys shouldn't name The Company for any reason either.) Apparently there was one incident where a negative article was posted on nytimes.com about The Company, and an employee wrote a comment on the article defending The Company, but subsequently got in trouble with InfoSec (Information Security). Seriously, they have a team of people just searching for this stuff and making sure employees never post anything, good or bad, about The Company unless they have authorization. Crazy!!

Last Thursday and Friday I had orientation at the Jersey office. Orientation mostly consisted of a bunch of speakers from The Company talking to us about the firm, their business principles, etc. Friday afternoon I met up with my buddy (every intern gets assigned somebody who joined the firm fairly recently and has been through the internship process), who is super nice and cool; she's from Hawaii :) She introduced me to most of the people on our team, and they all seem nice. I feel really bad when I talk to this one guy who is really nice and willing to help but for the life of me I can't understand what he's saying sometimes because of his accent. And it turns out that one of my managers is my mom's friend, as in somebody I've been on vacations with...so having to report to her is going to be really weird.

I was also shown to my cubicle on Friday. It's not a typical cubicle though; the partitions are very low so that you can see and talk to everyone around you. I have dual monitors, but unfortunately the main one is damaged in one part so there's a permanent black spot on it :\ Feel free to email me at my work address because I'm not allowed to access personal accounts at work -- my username is the same as my gmail username and for the domain, put the two initials of The Company and then .com. Don't send me emails with any sort of content that could be remotely construed as inappropriate because InfoSec will come for me!

Today I had training for the database and programming language I'm going to be working with this summer. It's gross, I don't like it :( The editor is all text-based and looks like DOS with more colors; it literally looks like something from the 80s, which I was not expecting from a firm that, in their own words, uses "cutting-edge technology." And they basically invented their own programming language, which I'm having a hard time getting used to. I so envy those other interns that get to use Java and C/C++...! I really wish I got to use one of these languages because then I could at least apply whatever new skills I acquire at school and at other jobs, but since this language is proprietary this knowledge will be totally useless everywhere else :\

The best part so far has been meeting some of the other interns. Everyone around me blows my mind. I met somebody who wrote an operating system, somebody who wants to hike up Wachusett Mountain (seriously), somebody who wrote a program to simulate a Turing machine, somebody from Zimbabwe. The geek in me felt so at home when somebody asked me what my preferred operating system is XD Unfortunately I won't get to work with any of the other interns as I'm the only intern in my group :(

The stupid Company won't pay me until the last day of this month, which means I'm going to run out of money again. Monthly LIRR ticket + monthly MetroCard + work clothes = broke!