7/12/10
Today was uncharacteristically hilarious. I almost want to save some of the good stuff to write about tomorrow because there’s a good chance we’ll just be back to normal. Anyway, this morning we had a visit from Charles, head of the International Business department. He informed us that we would be welcoming a new member into the Boston Room, another American student who lived in Taiwan who would be helping us with our projects the rest of the summer. My initial thoughts were: our office is going to be very crowded, our projects probably can’t support the work of another person or we’ll finish this week, and I hope he’s not going to ruin our already hilarious office dynamic, basically in that order.
A few minutes later, Zach walked into our lives, and I’m pretty sure we’ll never be the same. I don’t really know what to say about him here (in the same way I don’t know what to say about James and Evan here). He launched right into some of his stories (which I predict we’ll be hearing a lot more of) which were positively hilarious to me. I don’t think he meant them to be, but I was thoroughly entertained. Basically, it’s like we’re in an office sitcom and he’s the new character that the director forgot to tell us was added for the rest of the season. At first I was pretty hesitant as to how well we’ll all work together (let’s be honest, I was pretty sure I didn’t like him at all) but then I realized how much entertainment this kid is going to provide me with, and I am now okay with the change. Right now I’m anticipating a whole lot of silent laughter getting me through the rest of this summer.
After we got over the shock of a new guy in the office, we headed to our bi-monthly office meeting, conducted entirely in Chinese. These meetings are pretty hilarious; a quarter of the attendees are passed out in their chairs, another quarter are playing games on their cell phones, and the rest are politely gazing into the middle distance in the direction of the speaker. This is a little window into Chinese courtesy, though I’m not sure you’d find anything too different if you were to visit a similar lecture at any American university.
After this meeting and a little lunch break (Xuejing told me Chinese fairy tales for an hour which was fantastic) we got back to work and proceeded to train our young padawan, Zach. At about 2:30 (if you’ll remember, this is our funny hour) Evan went to re-alphabetize our spreadsheet. At about 2:45 we discovered a major problem having to do with the companies and fund names of some of the funds on the spreadsheet and spent the next twenty minutes trying to untangle the mess. At 3:10 we realized that something had gone wrong during the re-alphabetization and all of our company names that had previously been attached to specific mutual funds had been switched (now alphabetized) while their funds had stayed in the same place on the spreadsheet. If you’ve ever made a spreadsheet of 900 mutual funds, you’ll know how big of a problem this is. So Evan and James are freaking out, Zach is sitting there looking confused and wondering why he picked this day to come into work, and I just start laughing. Like, we’re talking uncontrollable laughter. I definitely realized how big our problem was (we’re talking hours and hours of work to redo) but I could just not help myself and was overcome by how funny this all was. Anyways, at about 3:25 Evan figured out that he could just ‘undo’ enough times to fix the problem, but we had quite the scare. Quite the hilarious scare.
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