daydream

Today during lunch I completely zoned out. We were having a lecture on "leed" [ which is a huge bunch of bullshit if you ask me ]... but was a topic that the older people in the office were really heated about. The lady partner who I've never even met before was up, and boy did she have alot of snarky comments to make... not to mention corrections about almost anything people were saying. Then, there was the grumpy partner sitting at the front who also interjected at every other opportunity... also to correct everyone on what they were saying. Through all of this jibber-jabber and back-lashing comments I started to drift off into a daydream.

In my future do I really want to sit around a huge table discussing leed with grammar-crazy maniacs? Do I really care about the equations for the amount of airflow through a building and which way it should be calculated? Do I really care to work under a bitchy old woman and a grumpy old man?

Not really...

I mean maybe it's just because this is a firm made up of mostly older people... people who would rather be down at their Florida office, doing some work, but more just reaping the benefits of a cheap crew. Maybe it's just these people who want to be rich and don't really care about the quality or looks of what they are producing... well I guess the 'quality' is good.. but most of the work really looks like a mcdonald's playground. And I'm not just saying this to bash these people... they are doing something with their lives... but it's just something I don't want to be stuck with. I'm scared of being stuck with. I mean it's a step up from being in some bullshit product company, or managing who knows what for noone you'll ever meet. It's probably better than number crunching, too, although the people from Ellis finance are good company and interesting people.

But caught up in this daydream I saw that my future would be made up of meetings like these... in offices probably not too different from this one. It was coming down to the conversation I want to have everyday... to the people I want to be surrounded with. And would this conversation get better as I got older? Would it be better at a different firm? Or would it still be stingy, intellectually annoying bickering about leed points and airflow? If my days were filled doing site visits, or walking around verifying things... trust me, I would be happy. Beyond happy... I would feel at home.  But if I have to sit and listen to people argue for the validity of leed or sit around a boardroom waiting for one person to look up an airflow equation, then I swear - I quit. I don't want this sort of thing to last longer than this five-week break.

Now, I don't want to completely blow this place out of the water. There are some decent people at my work. I think it's just the atmosphere they all participate in. No one seems to talk to one another, and everyone is especially on-edge when the partners are around. I'm also getting the feeling that they aren't so welcoming to newcomers. A couple of the people in the firm are relatives, and all of the partners went to rpi together... so they are sort of a tight-knit group already... maybe that's what also makes me feel sort of impermanent. But all-in-all even if this isn't the best fit for me, I'm soooo thankful to have been given this experience. Seeing Ellis hospital was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. To learn just how complex hospitals really are blows my mind... they are a small city, with people rushing in from the cold on one side of a wall, to someone getting laser-eye surgery or being treated in trauma 1 on the other side. It's amazing to me how many machines and people are always buzzing around these places... I understand a hospital as a living organism now... always changing and always full of life.... it does of course have its moments of silence... the OR for example... when time froze as I saw four people cloaked from heat-to-toe in their sea-green scrubs... they all walked swiftly with the coattails falling behind them, and all looked at me and Angelo as they passed into the electric sliding doors and down the huge OR corridor. It was like seeing superheros, or some strange, amazing intelligent humans grace you with their presence... only for a second though, before they passed into doors that very few people will ever see. So.... sorry, that was sort-of off topic, but I think you get the point - walking around the hospital was an eye-opening experience. I feel like I completed med school in two days after seeing everything I did. But ahhh, what to do when I'm not the person hired to walk around with funny people from finance... what happens when I become the cad monkey and sit-in on lunches about leed and listen to my superiors argue over things I don't think even make sense in the first place?

- c