I ran into my cousin Kristen today while heading back to work after lunch. I hadn't really had a conversation with her since last September, I had heard she moved back to CA, but I thought it was only for the summer before she had to drag back to Virginia. Well, happily, she is back on this coast for good! She hated the East Coast so much that she did two years of graduate school work in one and can write her thesis anywhere. Good for her! And she's finally looking into applying to law schools like she always wanted to.

(I know, I know, now is the worst time ever to go to law school. But she's wanted to do it all her life, so she might as well actually DO it rather than circle around it.)

I told her that if she actually knows what she wants to do, then she should go for it. I wish I knew.

In a totally unrelated topic, I have been having some deep thoughts about my old and new job.

Ever since I stopped being a newspaper reporter, when people ask what I do for a living, I either name the office (which universally gets an "oh, okay" reaction of total boredom) or say that I do data entry. I don't think anyone really is gonna give a shit about the nitpicking details of what I do, and the answer is universally dull so who cares, let's just move on.

(On a related note to that, my mom ran into my middle school orchestra teacher on her cruise to Alaska. He was completely unimpressed to hear how I was doing. I pointed out that I was not his favorite student because I sat in the back, played third violin and never practiced, and generally was fucking off a lot. She was totally shocked. This kind of thing is why when I saw my high school orchestra teacher at Disneyland, I didn't say hi. I'm sure he would have appreciated that.)

My old job, towards the end of it, involved a lot of editing and fixing data that was being automatedly supplied to us. Now, I started doing this way back when we were working off papers and I was literally looking up every single detail all the time, so I pretty much had a very long time to figure out exactly what the hell to look for as to what might be wrong and what things need fixing.

Several months ago, I basically had my old job handed back to me--along with everyone else in my new group--since my old group was down to one person and they decided to move him into another area of the office. (One I wanted to move into and never got the job to do....wah. Lucky bugger. I guess it's better me than him in this job, though. This job would fry his brains what with all the noise and people and dramaz on a daily basis.)

So they took it away from him and handed it to us, and he and I have been training the other folks in it. But since he's done his bit, I'm the one on hand when they are actually trying to work with the data. And it is....kinda driving them crazy. Without going into way too much detail, I am realizing that there is a lot of shit that I specifically know to look out for, and they just have no idea. I am trying to be nice about all the things I keep finding that they have to fix, but they find it discouraging, and I can't blame them. I've considered that job to be "easy" for years, but now I'm realizing that it's actually very hard to pick up and learn to the extent that I, and the other guy, have. It's a lot more analytical, as my boss might say.

Go figure, I am smarter than I thought?

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