July 2, 1999
Working

At 6:45 AM my alarm went off and I heard the radio turn on. This was the first indication that I needed to get up. The second came when my mom stuck her head in the door and said, “Lauren, it’s time to get up.” I had to get ready for my first day of work. Since it was Friday and the day before a long, holiday weekend I left my house at 7:30 AM instead of any earlier. I walked into the office at 8 PM almost exactly and they put me right to work. I was under the impression that I had to take some safety training courses and get some other preliminary stuff out of the way first, but apparently I was wrong.

My first job has to do with calculating how much more air conditioning will be needed in two rooms of the Biomedical Building. The department will be moving some freezers into the rooms and they will give off a lot of heat. I know this job doesn’t sound too incredibly interesting, but I am going to learn a lot about practical engineering applications. The version of AutoCAD that I am using is much newer than the one I used at the Magnet Lab last summer so I spent a lot of time finding the drawing tools I needed. By the time I left (I work from 8 AM until 4:30 PM) I had made floor plans of the two rooms in question and I had drawn rectangles for the freezers so we could determine where they would fit in the rooms. I guess that was a pretty big accomplishment for my first day at work. If I had been familiar with the software the job wouldn’t have taken very long at all, but I don’t have that luxury yet. As far as I know I will be working full time for the next five weeks so I should be proficient by the time I have to go back to Gainesville. Look at it this way: I am getting paid to learn how to use AutoCAD rather than paying to take the class at UF. That’s a good deal.

Imagine my surprise when I got in the car to go home and the radio was working! I didn’t notice at first because I had turned it off, but then I saw that the clock was actually showing the time (not the right time, of course) and I successfully listened to the radio for the first time in a few days. Even with this positive change in my car’s behavior I am still taking it to the dealer on Thursday for another new radio.

This entry was finished on Monday, July 5th so I can’t remember anything else memorable to write here. Stuart came to visit over the weekend, but that will be covered in my entry from July 5th. Please read the next entry to see how the weekend went. Thanks!