My Second Week of Internship

Well after spending the weekend, which included Monday (memorial day holiday) as well this time, lazing and gazing around... I thought second weekend of my internship will be fun. After all I had my computer with me now! Alas… this wasn't supposed to be the case. So on Tuesday morning, when for some strange reasons I was feeling too tired to go to office, when my mentor gave me a list of projects (yes projects!) to be done this summer, I was least excited. However, hiding that I ended up reading some white papers on the search engine on the net. Trust me reading in your new office is not all that fun. First of all you don’t know how much others know so you tend to read more than required. Secondly, at the end of the day you hesitate to share your learning for the fear of sounding trivial… and last but the most important thing is that you don’t have anything to show as productive at the end of the day. However, I decided to showcase my knowledge and asked some questions at the end of the day (for some strange reasons my mentor thought them to be "Great"… now that’s one adjective I am most afraid of… it is okay? good? Or simply confusing… never mind! Wednesday and Thursday again went by in more reading and more questions. To add to this, I have been to these funny events organized by the HR team here - Rooftop party at 6 in the evening (when it is crazily hot here and you have to keep smiling all the while to avoid any suspicions from HR that you are not enjoying your project) and Ice-cream socials (where the HR team-member kept of rambling about the ice-cream vendor - how she started, how they serve, how many shops are there, how have they expanded… and yes it is Authentic Austin… in the end it turned out to be good for a Kroger Chocolate Vanilla combination). By the way, I forgot to mention that so far my third project (of which I have no clue so far) has been changed twice already! So came Friday this was and came the big launch night and oh boy that was fun…

So to build the context here, we update our website twice a year and Friday, June 1st was that time of the year. My mentor asked me if I am interested to see things, and seeing some opportunity for excitement, I readily agreed. Little did I know about that… Accepting that offer meant I get Friday whole day off and I had to show up at 10 in the night to office - thus staying till 6 in the morning of Saturday night!!! There goes my plans for the Friday night partying… on top of that spending the whole day doing nothing once again was not to cool either. What did I do - actively searched for the friends I have lost touch with on Orkut (yes and why else you wonder that I have suddenly added 200 friends in my list!!!)… At 10 in the night the office was sort of alive (much alive than at 5 PM on most of the days)… and people started testing the applications of which I had no clue. So I sat in the corner of that meeting room and as I was rightly suggested by my manager to bring my laptop there, I made full use of the same by learning things that have troubled me the most ever since I have come here - Baseball, Poker and Golf. After reading about then for around 5 hours - when I suddenly felt the feeling of - "I know kung-fu" (Matrix I)… I started searching for some articles on TV programs, Economists views on Child Labor, how to plan a trip on east-cost etc etc. It was a fun night finally. I think the most important thing for today was to find the freakonomics blog today. It is really a great evening read once you are done with the work. Anyways, I will come to that sometime later… so having spent my entire time with that, search finally went live at 4 AM and I did my bits by running some test cases. At 6, I was done and over with everything I wanted to know and came home.

When your weekend starts on the note of "I need to go to bed now" it is harder to sleep and you cant even call anyone for fun at 6 AM in the morning! So I went back home and straight away went to the pool. Swam for a good hour or so and the chlorine effect further delayed my sleep by a good 3 hours! My body was almost swaying with tiredness and I simply could not catch any sleep… watching "Ek Chaalis ki Last Local" finally helped.

The summary of the weekend - Swimming pool (3 hours), Grocery Shopping (2 hours), and a wonderful tour to Lake Travis and dinner at Downtown (Good Saturday evening)… By the way on Saturday, while roaming around these lakes around Austin, I finally realized what a beautiful place Austin really is (thank goodness for that)!!!