you probably don't want to read this one

3 years of engineering school, countless nights staying up way too late to study, sleeping in the engineering center, waking up early to finish homework before class, working for 25+ hours on projects for class, not getting nearly enough sleep, food, or free time and it all culminates in me sitting here in a cubicle writing in this blog, drawing pictures of strange 3d shapes on a piece of paper. Is this what all of my hard work was good for? I know i bitch and whine a lot about this job, but i feel like if i write one big, horrific, tell all thing about why i hate my job, maybe it'll be out of my system and i can move on and get past the next 5 weeks with as little social and emotional damage as possible. seriously. i turned down an internship at BNSF railroad, which would have had me possibly inspecting rail yards, locomotives, and doing other actual work to come here. i spent about $800 on plane tickets to move out here, had to put my stuff in storage, and left all but one or two friends to move here this summer. 7 weeks ago i moved here, started this job, and have nothing to show for it. i was supposed to be here a week earlier, but due to some... unexpected circumstances, i ended up getting here a week late and i "missed" my opportunity to work on a real exciting project. because of that, the higher ups here decided that i was no longer going to work on that project (for reasons i can't possibly understand) and was instead going to be assigned to another manager who didn't have anything for me to do. i think what really happened was that they said "hey, we've got an intern coming in to work for you" and he dug around through some old files and found a couple things that needed to be updated, but not badly enough where anyone who already worked here would have done it. In short, had i not even showed up here to work this summer, none of the things that i've done would have ever gotten done. it's like that stain on the carpet underneath the couch. you could move the couch, get out the scrub brush and some chemicals, and get rid of the stain. instead of spending the time to do that, you decide to do something more important for about 5 years and neglect the stain knowing that you probably will never move that couch and nobody will ever see the stain. there were a few databases that were a little bit out of date, and everybody has more important stuff to do, so they just didn't update them for 5 years. the numbers kept getting worse, but it wasn't a big enough deal to warrant putting someone on the task of figuring out why. then they got an intern. an intern who knows nothing about how multi-billion dollar corporations work, disagrees with outsourcing important jobs, and doesn't know anyone who works here, and you hand him one spreadsheet, tell him the numbers aren't working out, and go back to doing your job. for 7 weeks.

as for what i've done this summer, i think i can think of two actual pieces of progress. i fixed one spreadsheet that took about 5 weeks of harassing, bothering, and otherwise chasing around various engineers and asking them for input. i got handed several contacts in thailand, malaysia, and here in california who might know something about the numbers i'm looking for, but after asking them, got passed off to even more engineers in asia who passed me off to even more people because either they have NO idea what i'm talking about (which was pretty much verbatim speculation from my boss who, i later found out was really just spitballing with me), or they don't have the information. my problem at this point was that i had 1 job to do, and that was to find these numbers and fix this spreadsheet. the people i was bugging had about 100 jobs to do, and the job that involved humoring the summer intern took a back seat way more often than not. after 5 weeks of chasing these people around and getting in their hair as much as possible, i finally fixed that problem, and was looking forward to maybe getting put on a current project where i would get to make some actual decisions and do something other than hump a spreadsheet for 9 hours a day, make phone calls to people who don't know what i want (and why i would even want such information, even after an explanation), which brings me to my current project

after finishing that project, my boss said ok good now that you're done with that, we have another issue with some numbers that aren't coming out right. why is it that it took 3-5 years of getting bad numbers that they decided to actually fix these problems? so i got about 8 different products to look at, 8 different engineers who are busy and have no time for me, and another smorgasbord of spreadsheets to sift through, and am expected to do almost the exact same thing that i did in the last project. this time, however, instead of having just a few people to chase around, i have 8 different engineers who are busy, so they pass me off to other engineers who are busy. when i ask them for information, i get the feeling that they humor me by sending me little emails and spreadsheets similar to the ones i asked for, but aren't actually the ones that i asked for. then when i ask them for what i really need, they either don't have it, or they give me the emails of 4 people in china who might have it, and if they don't, then it got lost because so and so changed departments 6 months ago and they don't know where he or she went.

at this point, on this project, i've only made 1 step of progress, have emailed 50 different people looking for the information i need, just keep getting answers of "yeah, that's not how we do that" or "this is how this process is done... we did it different this time" or "i don't really understand what you're looking for, but i don't think we have it", and am ready to walk out of here, quit this job, and sit on the beach for the rest of the summer. sitting alone at my desk finding ways to pass the time is a waste of my life.

there. i'm done. i turn 21 in 2 weeks, move back to boulder in 5, and hopefully i won't quit before then.