The View From Work

Okay, this isn’t the view from work. It’s the view from the parking garage at work. Wait! That isn’t quite accurate either. How do I explain? [Deep breath …]

Several weeks ago I hired on at a temp agency. They said they’d put me to work in a week — and they didn’t. I called in every day. In fact, it got to where the receptionist recognized my hello, and I wouldn’t even have to give my name! Yesterday when I called in instead of telling me, “Sorry. Thanks for calling,” she said, “One moment please.” I was routed through to a rep and asked to attend a job interview. I went.

The job interview was for an outsource company who picks up records and send them off island to their CPAs. My job is to do pick up. I sort, file, scan, photocopy, etc. all the necessary records and see that they are digitalized and sent via network to the CPA. Once I am trained I will get to travel between various businesses here on the island and gather their paperwork into sensible bundles for both the clients and the CPAs.

The thing that attracted me to this job was the movement. It will be nice to not be stuck in the same place all the time. Other perks — great health benefits, paid downtown parking, and nice coworkers (of course the girl training me is soon to be a stay at home mommy, so she’ll be replaced by someone I’ve not yet met because she’s away on her Honeymoon.)

After my first day the thing I like most about my job is the respect I received. It was startling to me. I never realized how profoundly my last work experience effected me until I recognized my amazement at being treated like an equal. It was wonderful.

I will never be able to tell you some things about my work because of client confidentiality. I have given my word, but I can tell you about the office in generic terms and most probably will.

Visit Alice to find more players in her photo challenge, Bridging The Gap.

Crossing The Canal

OC can tell you the name of this canal, but considering that he is in SF, I cannot turn to the other end of the couch and ask him. All I can tell you is that to stop erosion of precious land, most of the streams have been paved. When one lives on an island each inch of space an millimeter of soil takes on greater significance. It ISN’T replaceable. There isn’t more where that came from. Gone isn’t moved down stream to someone else’s yard, it’s GONE.

The water you see here is shallow, and it isn’t flowing out to sea, it is the sea, flowing in. Here is the upstream view. LEss than 100 yards away the puddle ends and only a small trickle makes its way down stream.

Merging Canals

Two streams come together here. If you biggie the photo and look up the right branch, you will see just the edge of a foot bridge connecting pedestrians to the road. A sidewalk leads to that bridge. I took a photo of it, but for some reason it downloaded with stripes through it.

Path To School

A bit further up the left branch is another foot bridge (biggie the photo). These bridges are necessary to provide walking access to the school, other wise people would have to come all the way out to the main road and cross the big bridge with all the really fast moving cars.

Shopping Cart

The canals, like the edges of the highways, are often used as dumping places for things no longer wanted. There was a school of fish swimming around and about this basket. I took the water hoping they would show up, but the sun was too bright on the water and I couldn’t get a decent focus on them. I suppose clearer water would have helped, but I didn’t have clearer water.