Oh, I'm dreaming of the afternoon

Meanwhile in the things which make me laugh, the owner called me down to the first floor so that I could be introduced to the main software the company really makes its money on. This is only three years after I started working there, or at least showing up regularly and mostly on time, although in everybody's defense I haven't really needed to use that software except in passing. The person-in-charge-of-training also let me in on the secret that under Outlook, in the publicly shared folders, are manuals for all the software and explanations of what the various database items are supposed to contain. I would never have gotten far enough into the sub-folders to find that on my own.

The training was, at the suggestion of the trainer, supposed to start at ``9 or 9:30'', with my sense being she quite preferred 9:30. At 9:30 I went to find her and learned she wasn't in yet; on asking around I was told that she's rarely in that early. She comes in late because she works late, one person explained, drawing the standard cynical ``yeah, right'' from the other side of the room. She got in about 10:30, and asked if I were free, and came up with one of the computer room people (one of the lunch room crowd, in fact), who ultimately found he didn't have to actually do anything since I already had a password to log in to the software. [1] He also suggested getting another chair, so we could all sit, but he wasn't fast enough to grab it from another office himself.

Major result of my training: I know now what one of the mysterious acronyms of the company stands for, at least so far as anyone remembers. The major databases were not so much designed as accreted, and there are tables for each client explaining how that client's database varies from the standard model. Mercifully, I can do my work with almost no information about the semantics of the databases.

[1] They mentioned the password I used --- given me by the company owner --- to log in meant that any changes I should make on any entry would be accepted into the main database. See earlier comments about the company's interesting views of security.

Trivia: Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson opposed using Secretary of State George Marshall's 1947 Commencement Speech at Harvard to publicly propose the European Recovery Plan for the reason that no one listens to commencement speeches. Source: Truman, David McCullough.

Currently Reading: A Voyage Long And Strange: Rediscovering The New World, Tony Horwitz.