First Day of Real Work

Today the sorority girls, and a few other kids, mainly a handful of international students, moved in. It was a pretty long day, starting at 6 am. The worst were the two hours I had to spend outside in the middle of the day, directing traffic. I was the only one from my hall's staff working that location, so they more or less ignored me since they were more used to working with each other. It rained quite badly during this time.

Even though I had my umbrella the streets were flash flooded to over my toes, and moisture came in sideways so that even my hair was covered with droplets, and my pants were absolutely soaked. When people would come to talk to me, their windshield wipers threw cups of cold rainwater straight at me. Oh, Missouri rainstorms. The whole atmosphere was frantic and depressing, the skies were so grey and wet that it was hard to see. Before the rain started there were only a few of us doing the traffic, and we could yell orders from about ten cars down. After the rain started we had to be five feet apart, and had to run back and forth giving directions. Even at five foot I was lucky if I could either hear them yell or see how many fingers they were holding up. Still, I was working and it was just part of my job. I was in clothes that could get wet, it wasn't freezing cold outside or anything like that. I felt much sorrier for those who were moving in, whose wardrobes and pillows were getting drenched.

I think the secret to my sanity throughout the day was that whenever things got really slow and the staff was just sitting on the sofa watching golf for an extended period of time, I would steal away to my room for ten minutes and have a snack in peace and quiet. When I woke up this morning I cooked a cup or two of jasmine rice, and when I had a few minutes I added to that the chicken I sauteed the other day, and a teaspoon from a Cantonese spice packet I've had for a startlingly long time. It was, perhaps surprisingly, quite yummy.

I'm on call for the first time tonight - I'm actually the first one of us to be on call. It involves carrying a pager and if anyone gets locked out of their room or has some other problem, they page you and you rescue them, and no one cares if it was 4 am and you were fast asleep. You also have to make a few rounds of the building and make sure everything's okay. I've been on call for almost an hour now and I've done my first walkabout. There were some boys with their music on extremely loud and their door open, so I asked them to either turn the music down or shut the door. They shut the door. Not a big deal. :)