My job consists of babysitting a room that’s sort of an
adjunct media room/lounge for the U.S. governmental offices. It’s
really not bad. Of all the assignments, my personal belief is this is the
easiest. The main show is about a 30-minute drive (no traffic) away, so I have
the residuals. I’m on the day shift; it’s busier at night, I think, because
some of the people are staying in this hotel. Since that’s waking hours in the U.S., my guess
is they’ll be working a lot at night.
That’s a guess because even though this is Day Five of me
sitting here, it’s only the first day of the actual event, which ends on
Monday.
It seems that everything with the State Department involves
a lot of planning, calendars that cover minute details and countless “countdown”
meetings.
And lots of emails. Lots and lots of emails. And since I am
in an adjunct facility, and the fact that none of these meetings take part in
our office, I have to get the emails off site.
All this, in turn, means that I’ve been issued a Blackberry.
It took seven seconds to hate it. It probably took seven minutes for me to
establish a password that fit all the requirements, then type it – twice – with
my fingers and/or thumbs.
Now, I feel like Pavlov’s dog with the damned red blinky
light. I completely understand why they call these things “crackberries.” They
are the devil’s idea so far as I’m concerned.
The emails come two and four at a time, with relays of
“such-and-such car started its engines” and “such-and-such car left the site”
and goes on to it being 10 or five minutes out, arriving or whatever.
And that’s just one example. All kinds of emails go back and
forth. The first day, when I was bored, another bored person at a different
location and I had them flying back and forth as to how bored we were.
It’s not healthy. I swear, I do not understand why people
love their smartphones. This thing is a tether. I don’t want it and cannot wait
to give it back.
Hopefully, that will be Wednesday. Let’s just say that
Thanksgiving is going to be awesome. Everyone is looking forward to that here.
At this point in the post, I was going to change the subject
to New Zealand
but then a wonderful illustration of “overstaffing” just meandered by.
A new person from one of the agencies just arrived and she
said something about, with some change, she was unsure of her role. The guy she
was talking to said, “you just need to stand around.”
That’s your tax dollar at work, folks!
New
Zealand’s tax dollar (how’s that for a
segue?) is really at work for tourists. The place is fantastic. The beaches are
fantastic. The ferns are fantastic.
Ferns are the national plant (or something) of New Zealand,
with good reason. They’re everywhere. The silver fern is used in the logo of
the All Blacks rugby team (I think it IS the logo). And on all the hikes you
do, ferns are everywhere.
They’re not like ferns that I’ve seen before, either. They
can be HUGE – like, the leaves are the size of my leg, which ain’t tiny. They
also grow into what look like trees. I waffled and wondered if they were palm
trees because they were so big. Are ferns and palms related?
The beaches are just wonderful, not that you swim in them.
It’s too cold, for one, but mostly the surf is too rough. I’m not even sure
that anyone other than Bodhi would tackle them.
The juxtaposition of the beach to the green (or white, as in
the case of the glaciers) never ceased to amaze me. I think people got tired of
me saying, “It’s just so beautiful.”
It was.
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