Can I get a job running down escalators?

Jump to Comments

This may sound a little cliche, but every morning on my way to the ferry, I take a shortcut through Starbucks. I don’t mean that I stop and buy coffee; it actually is a shortcut. There’s a big bank building on the way to the ferry with a Starbucks on one end and a pair of escalators at the other end, and, that early in the morning, the only way into the building is through Starbucks. I feel bad about not getting coffee sometimes, but I tell myself that lots of people use that shortcut, and anyway, they should unlock the main door earlier. And the baristas never give me the stink eye, so I think I’m okay.

Today the down escalator wasn’t working. Thinking how great it is that an escalator never really breaks, it just becomes stairs (which happened to be Google’s quote of the day, oddly enough), I ran down the first escalator toward the street.

Then I thought, hmmmm… I’m running four minutes early (yes, I really do keep track that closely), the down escalator is broken, it’s 5:30 in the morning, there’s no one around, why not?

And I ran down the up escalator. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. So fun.

I was pretty excited about that, so yeah, I actually told my friends at work. They all said things like, “You’ve never done that? You’re lame! I did that when I was like eight! Even if there were people in the way!”

I guess I was just a good kid.

So I should have written a while ago about sea trials and my alleged trip to Hawaii, but I’ve been a little bitter about the whole topic of “work” lately. On sea trials, I was amazed at how little work we did. There we were, on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean, playing a LOT of cards. We did observe some cool stuff and learn a lot about systems, but we were SO not filling up eight hours a day. I actually felt pretty guilty about it until the end of the week, when one of our teacher-types said to me, “I can’t believe how hard you guys worked this week. I did way less than this when I was on sea trials.” Huh.

I felt even less guilty about it the next week, when our coordinator told us that we’re not going to Hawaii for eight weeks like we thought, more like a week and a half, and we’ll probably be working more than eight hours a day, every day. “So,” he said, “If you already bought tickets to go out there, I hope they were refundable.”

This is not the first time we have found out like two weeks in advance that our schedule is going to be way different than we thought. My friend David’s wife had actually quit her job because she was going to go to Hawaii for eight weeks, and then David was supposed to get sent San Diego for three months. Now it turns out that both those things won’t happen.

Our poor coordinator feels really bad that he has to keep spreading around the hate and discontent. He says we’re caught in the “perfect storm of suck” and that things usually aren’t like this.

But everybody else just tells us to get used to it. The schedule doesn’t get any better.

I’m really frustrated with work right now. So frustrated that I’ve been avoiding my blag because I didn’t want to just sit here and vent. But I did upload some pictures from sea trials to Flickr, and I’ll post some of them as soon as I figure that trick out (Adam? Uncle Kevin?), maybe tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’m back on the sub I was working on a few months ago, the Nevada. I’m going to have to figure out some more things that I really like about my job so that the totally unreliable schedule doesn’t get me down. I’ll add the shortcut through Starbucks and down the (potentially broken) escalators every morning to the list.

1 Comment

Filed under aircraft carrier, culture shock, ferry, friends, hawaii, seattle, work