Killer first day

Oh my gosh, what a brutal day.

I got a new pair of shoes just for work, and I wore them for the first time today. This was a bad idea, to say the least.

Within just the half hour commute from home to work -- 10 minutes to the subway station, 10 minutes on the subway, and the 10 minute walk to work -- my shoes had rubbed through two layers of skin and opened large sores on the inner quarter of my heel.

Having arrived to work before my new boss, and knowing there was no way I could tolerate the rest of the day like this, and I embarked on a bit of shoe surgery. I figured that there was no way I could return the shoes as they were (blood had stained the interior of my right shoe), so I took a pair of scissors and make vertical slices along the backs of my shoes. SY was saddened to see the new shows she bought for me mutilated, but that was the best thing I could think of at the time.

When my boss came in, I got the walk-through, met the other four interns (three of whom were from summer and will leave in a week), and got familiar with the organizational chart.

After that everyone met with a visiting Deputy Assistant Secretary. He listened to short statements about what everyone did, including the interns, and I wondered what I was supposed to say. When it came my turn, I just said I was a graduate student at the University of Hawaii and added "I'm sorry; this is my first day so I really don't know what I'll be doing." That got a few laughs.

In the afternoon, I did some searching on the Internet for various things -- a resume by a Nanjing official, any large U.S. companies' headquarters there -- and did some translating work with the help of AltaVista's Babelfish.

Quitting time came at 5:30, and what a relief it was to get home, take off my shoes, and relax!