Tuesday, August 24, 2004

The end of the summer

Sorry it's been so long... but, the last few weeks on the job were a little hectic. Then I spent a week in the middle of nowhere North Idaho at my parents lake cabin. Now, I'm back at school.
Well, I guess it wasn't so much that the last few weeks on the job were hectic... it was more like... the stuff I was doing after work was hectic. The job was as easy as ever. But, it was cool because I did actually have some work to do, which meant that the days went by way faster.
I have a few comments about the major components of my summer: Seattle, Boeing, and Miscellany.
Seattle: rules. Living in Seattle whilst attending UW wasn't nearly as fun as living in Seattle whilst making money. The cool thing about a big city is that its easy to blow your money. Although, I did save more money this summer than I made at my job last summer. What did I spend most of the money on? Food.
    Reasons to Love Seattle:
  • Food. SO many awesome restaurants. Aladin's Gyrocery. Thai Thom's. Jai Thai. Blue C Sushi. The 5 Spot. The list could go on for days... b/c I went to 1000 different restaurants while I was there.
  • Lakes. While there, you can meet at least one person who lives on a lake (Jo, you're the greatest!). And, lakes are where fun was born... and still resides to this day.
  • The People. Growing up in a quasi-big city (Spokane), you end up thinking that the only thing more people will do in a town is clutter it up. WRONG. More people in a city means that there is cooler stuff to do. And, people that grow up in Seattle are willing to go out more often too. The small-town folk are used to... um... doing sheep.

    Reasons to want to shoot Seattle in the f**king face
  • Traffic. There are not enough explitives in the languages of the world combimed to explain Seattle traffic. Would you think that you can could stuck in traffic at 8:30-10:00PM? PM!? It took me 30 mins to move a mile IN THE DARK! I've never even knew such atrocities existed!
  • Cost of Living. Microsoft must've really hosed us on that one. Everything is honestly like 3x more expensive than it should be. I'm trying to think of a specific example of something that was stupidly more expensive that it should have been... but I think my rage may be blinding me... time to move on.
  • Street Layout. Here is the meeting for the initial city planners of Seattle.
    Planner 1: I've got this excellent idea for the streets. This will make finding everything super easy, and no body will ever have any problems?
    Planner 2: You wanna go smoke some drugs?
    Planner 1: Yeah... let me grab my 'peace pipe'
    Planner 2: I'll go get my crayons so we can come back and make this city as f'ed up as possible
    Planner 1: Jolly good.


Boeing
    Reasons for loving it:
  • Benefits. They're pretty gosh dang sweet out of school. A pension, a 401k, and a decent salary. Health/dental/dismemberment (no kidding)/life insurance. You know, the normal ones... then we get to the good stuff. The Learning Together Program, but since its at Boeing, its the LTP... and its referred to as nothing else. Since I'm on an educational leave of absense (ELOA) right now, they're going to reimburse me (read: my parents) for this last bit of school. Then, they'll end up giving me 100 shares of stock (worth $5077 at the moment). And, they'll pay for whatever degrees I may want to get too. As many of 'em as I want (as long as they're different degrees). Can you say 3 masters' degrees and a Ph.D.... b/c... why not! Being smart is fun.
  • Oppurtunites. About 60% of the Boeing workforce is going to be retiring in the next 10 years. There are going to be lots of cool, high paying jobs coming open. And, I think I'd do a bangup job make! (Apprently the ISCFP doesn't think so though).
    Another cool thing about Boeing, is that it's loaded with OTHER jobs that I may want to do. I want to go work on Boeing's unmanned stealth bomber

    Reasons why someplace else might be cooler than Boeing
  • Boeing is HUGE. We have only slightly more beaucracy than the government. It can be hard to get anything done when you've got 20 page documents to pump out every day explaining the other paperwork you did last week, which explained the 15 minutes of actual work you got done a month ago.
  • The atmosphere. Boeing is loaded with old people. I got in trouble at Boeing for posting some completely innocent material in my email away message (it was something like: "funny comments from people's performance evals"). The material was barely even funny... because I didn't want it to offend anybody... yeah... talk about a failure. Someone called the HR dept, because apprently it was in violation of some Equal Employment Oppurtunities thing... but whatever... my manager was totally cool about it.
    I had the oppurtunity to go to Microsoft and talk to some people about their jobs, and whatnot. You could literally feel that this place was different. High energy. It was incredible. I was talking to a program manager there, and he said something interesting: "You need to decide what kind of career you want. You can have a job to finance the fun you want to have on the weekend. Or, you can have a job where you want to work on the weekend, because its fun and you love it. Everybody here is the latter." I think it could be cool to work for a place like that.

Miscellany
People that need to be thanked and explained. Last names are dropped for anonymity.

  • Jo. She took me wakeboarding. But, not only that, she was unrelently nice and unbelievably fun to hang out with. Oh yeah, her boat and house are amazing... It might sound wrong, but... she was definitely a friend with benefits :)
  • My mentor. Another incredibly giving person. He was definitly more than just a work mentor, he went out of his way to make my personal life easier. An all-around amazing guy. Plus, he got me really drunk one time. Then we went to the Mariners game, and blasted Michelle Branch really loud.
  • Ronald. I was listening to Dave Attell's stand up (extremely funny). And he said something like: "have you ever had a friend that you made so much fun of, that you thought you should thank him for all the good times?" Well, here's to you Ron. You know we all loved you and your wild and zany antics that left you more open than... well... lets just say a barn door.
  • My email buddies: Kristin and Kara. I think combined... I sent almost 600 emails to these fine young ladies (in probably a 2 month span). I already miss the 'envelope of awesomeness' popping up in my system tray, telling me that I've got an email from them.
  • Everyone else. This post is already about 5 times longer than it was intended to be, but... if you're reading this... you know who you are. HOLLA!

Anyways, I don't know if there will ever be anymore posts. But, there may be... especially if I decide to go back to Boeing. It's been fun, thanks for reading (for now!)