Everyone say a big mazel tov to Bear. Bear is my Russian Blue kitty. Not only did she celebrate her 17th birthday this month, she just got a fantastic check up at the vet today! Taking her in for her blood work always makes me nervous - you never know when the health of a cat that old will go south.
Mom is proud!
My internship is finally over! Thank G-d, I've had no time to do anything. Sunday is an 9 hour day at least at work, Mon - Wed I've been gone from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. at an absolute minimum. After school, work, and internship, all I've done when I walk in the door is eat & crash. And of course I'm at my vacation home in downtown G'ville (a.k.a. Chip's apartment) most of the weekend. Yeah, my cats are pissed. Mom isn't home to snuggle much. This term I'm taking an extra class so I can get the hell outta there, so I'll still be busy as all get out. The proverbial light is at the end of the tunnel though - 5 weeks and I'm done!
So this internship was quite the experience. I ended up doing it at the call center that I've worked for over the last year. The first two and a half weeks I worked on some documentation (thank goodness I took a technical writing class) for a new software application they're about to release. I learned shortly after starting the internship that the second half I would be building a web based application. To give some background, us phone working slaves are "shopped" once a month. Our bonus money is determined by our score. They've been using good old fashioned Excel spreadsheets, but decided web stuff would be cool and up with the year 06. So I'm thinking, okay, easy enough, I'm just turning their Excel form into a web page, nothing to it.
So one morning, the IT Project Manager, the Operations Manager, two people from Quality Assurance and I have a meeting to figure out what all this web app needs to do. The Project Manager starts out by saying stuff about how this will be part of the software package that THEY ARE GOING TO BE SELLING. I'm sitting there thinking "It's going to be what? Sold?", probably totally bug eyed. Nice of them to tell me. Christ all frighty, I'm the intern, I have no idea what I'm doing! Then they tell me that the user has to be able to dynamically create their own shop forms. Then I'm told I have to write this thing in C#. This is a programming language I don't know, by the way. Of course, once you know one, you can learn new ones quickly, but obviously this is going to be a big learning curve. I've been totally thrown under the bus.
The good news is, this project is an awesome learning experience. They've offered to keep me on for the next 5 weeks as a contractor to continue working on it. There's a good chance I'll be hired on permanently once I graduate. Even if once the 5 week gig is up I end up not being hired, it's a great resume builder & will definitely help me find other opportunities.
It's the home stretch!
