Independence!

On Wednesday, February 13th, I took Caltrain to Lisa's office for the first time. I hadn't taken it solo before, so I was a little nervous, but I ended up enjoying watching all the businesspeople glancing awkwardly at each other.

As previously mentioned, I began working in their storage "closet". Lisa asked me to catalog all their print resources, which were mostly product sample brochures and catalogs. I set up my laptop in my little corner and spent the next hour and a half recording the titles, publication years, and categories of all the magazines I could get to before I had to catch the train home. While my job was obviously mundane, I enjoyed it enough. Everyone knows office work is boring, and I wasn't expecting much to begin with. I had a four-page-long Word document I had to show for my work by the end of the day, which made me feel more accomplished than I otherwise would have. I managed to catalog about one fourth of the book-like materials in the storage room. They have a lot of pamphlets from the 80's.

I got really excited from looking at their product catalogs. Call it sad, but seeing what kinds of materials and finances go into a typical building project intrigues me. It was almost like reading picture books, just more educational. I started to get inspired by what I was looking at, and I realized that that's the exact reason why I've always been interested in this field: I see materials, and I want to create and build things. I was pretty tempted to appropriate some of their more colorful magazines, but I resisted.

My plan for the following Wednesday, and probably the next few visits after that, was to continue compiling a database of the office's reading materials (and continue to take Caltrain, like grown-ups do). This visit marked the last 90 minutes of my project, setting a running total of four and a half hours completed.