week eight

hi guys! it was a hectic and annoying one, but i hope you guys had a great week! ~Lin-chan ^.~

monday: spent most of the day hanging out. a couple people involved in this meeting thing came to say hi to me in the morning, and also to tell me that not everyone's flown in yet. so there was a lot of waiting. and waiting. i did end up having an extra packed lunch from last week that i was able to eat. so that worked out. and then at about 330, s and i (i will further refer to my cohort as S) decide to go to the conference room and scope things out. and that's right when they said that the meeting would be starting. so yay.
apparently our little grouping is an initiative from our company to gather and train resources (employees) for predicted 'hot areas'. mobile app development being a huge thing in today's society, with constant growth. so anyway, come to find out, the day's shindig lasts five weeks. 5. weeks. TT_TT not only that, but i didn't get to leave work at my usual time because i'm salary..not hourly....and they can do what they want. so we left around 515, and i usually go in at 8. TT's and 晚上's.

tuesday: we were supposed to have a conference call at 830, so we all arrive by 8 or so. the person ended up rescheduling to 5. like 5PM. so we dawdled around looking at some of the information said individuals sent us to try and figure out what they wanted to talk about. [and by we for the next several weeks, i mean, most of the other people in our group because they've got years of experience with what s and i have been training on.] 10 rolls around and we have a conference call with someone else. she was american. it was awesome and informative. 11:30 rolls around and we didn't have a break since 8. pretty terrible, and we take one. then by 12, one of the guys realizes s and i don't totally understand a fundamental topic and he proceeds to explain it to us. 1220: he says, "it's 1220, we should take lunch soon." and i'm sitting there, stomach grumbling........ then he proceeds to finish talking about what he was teaching us for another 15 minutes. teh paul was a nice hubhub and made me a few containers worth of lunches on monday.
we come back from lunch around 130 and do basically nothing until 4, between demoing stuff that the other people in our group made, and fighting with installing software, etc. around 4, there's a conference call for some other party regarding a demo we have. 5 rolls around and it's the worst thing ever. i have no freaking clue what these people were talking about, in part because of their accents, but also because one of them was a mouth breather and another (or the same person) was driving around and you could hear boss lady (as my great grandmother refers to it---his gps) talking in the background. it was awful. i didn't leave until 6. 8 am to 6pm of feeling like i haven't learned much or contributed to society. that is super crappy.

wednesday: we didn't really end up doing a whole lot over the course of the day. or rather, the 3 "smart" people were in their own little world, kind of showed us what was going on, and then kind of kept to themselves. and that was pretty much the whole day. really sad. the project manager did take us out to dinner, which was nice. we went to a local seafood restaurant (closer to where most of the students live) that teh paul and i rarely go to because it's in the $25 range....anyway, it was teh yums and it was enlightening about various things that have happened to people that worked for our company (and how they got terminated, etc), as well as expectations of us over the course of the next 4 weeks. and of course, there was informal, getting-to-know-you random conversation. so it was actually kinda nice. i didn't end up getting home til 845. so 8am to 845. eeek!

thursday: spent most of the morning in partial silence, mixed in with a bit of playing around with a few other programs that we installed. at 11, the 4 of us from our location had a conference call with an HR lady. so we went into a nearby conference room to listen. in the meantime, one of the people had to leave to catch his flight. at noon, we finished the call and broke for lunch. the remaining 3 out-of-town-ers decided to call it a day because their flights were pretty soon too. lunch was so nice, we walked over to the marketplace thing with the chinese restaurant and i got more chinese food. i really wanted to go to the waffle & crepe place to try them, but their line was longer. we went back to work to have lunch in the break room. afterward, i started looking over some new training material that we were sent. then at 4 i decided to leave, since i got like 1.5-2 hours extra from the past few days.

friday: the day was pretty much nothing. i worked on my training from thursday, but pretty much i didn't get too far because a bunch of people kept coming by our desks to talk to us and kill time.......otherwise, nothing really exciting happened.