Interns get orientated. Boy howdy, do we ever. Yesterday we got four hours of orientation, by the end of which we're practically screaming, "Please let us go work? Please?"
We get told almost immediately about the national day of mourning for Reagan, so that ends the suspense for me.
We get a presentation about the different fields of research at our facility. Various aerospace things, space things (Mars!), Earth-observing and monitoring technologies, and so on. The speaker is emotionally involved with the subject matter, especially when something environmental comes up. He shows us a graph. "Look, CFCs have leveled off and that's good, but this line represents the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. See how it's going up and up? A 'certain political party' thinks that this is not a problem and we should 'don't worry be happy.'" At one point we see slides of Glacier National Park with photographs of a glacier taken in 1910 and within the last decade. The glacier has shrunk to a fifth of its 1910 size. "And by 2015 all the glaciers will be gone. So what the hell are we going to call the national park then?"
We get a safety video which includes instructions on how to walk down stairs. Just in case we haven't mastered that yet. And how to call 911. And then we get a PowerPoint presentation of the same information. What about these chairs? My back is killing me. Workplace injury!
We are told about all the things we cannot tell foreign nationals or people who are not foreign nationals, but may talk to foreign nationals. Or post to the Web where a foreign national might see it. What will I write about this summer? Oh, look a million dollar fine. But none of that applies to public domain or publicly available information which is—whatever they say it is.
We are instructed about IT security by the IT security guy and his html-based presentation. Each of about a million pages includes an audio track that reads the text on the page. Each page includes a link to the next page which the IT guy right-clicks and opens in new window. Netscape can only take so much of this until the audio locks up and then starts playing the audio for multiple pages at once. "Hmm. I don't know why it's doing this…" I sense the forward twitch of the crowd as we all restrain ourselves from surging forward to straighten out the poor, beleaguered laptop. Three-fingered salute! Task Manager! Augh! Let me fix it.
When we've had all that we can take, they give us a seven minute break and the fun continues while we're informed about special stuff for the interns: luncheon, mandatory lectures, volleyball (not mandatory), and our proximity to the beach. After telling us how this is the biggest group of interns they've ever had in the program, they make us pass around a microphone and introduce ourselves, triggering more sotto voce pleading to be released from me and Skipper (one of my classmates who's also in this internship program). No! No! Not that. Let us go. Ple-ee-ease.
And then we're told to stare into the sun so we can see the Venus transit.
543 words | June 8, 2004 07:31 PM | Rocket science