Thursday, October 26, 2006

You Say Goodbye, I say Hello

Tomorrow is my last day in the Melbourne office.

It's almost sad, really. Almost.

I will be sad to leave my office mates, as I have become accustomed to belting out random disparaging comments about the Queen for Toby's benefit and other quips against poms in general. (Toby sits to my right.) Don't be sad for poor Toby though, as I assure you that I get quite the variety of anti-American drivel under his breath at random times during the day. OK, well, it's usually after I've called him on something, but that happens randomly anyway.

Jason sits diagonally from me, and Sally sits on the other side of Toby and regularly pops over to have a chat or ask a question. Jason and Sally are native Australians, and they get lots of questions (from me) about how things are supposed to work with all this strange bureaucracy that the Australians have built in to their environmental system. Sally does mostly Phase I's which means that she can find obscure references to site histories pretty quickly. Handy to have around! Drew sits to my left, but he is on holiday this week. He is my source for Aussie sports knowledge and movie quotes.


Over my wall is Richard, Cybele and Carl. Richard and I have an unfortunate habit of talking to each other over/through the wall, (it's all work stuff, I promise!) but we try to keep it down most of the time. This leads to Richard standing on his desk to look over the wall and have a normal-voiced chat and lots of my time sitting in Jamie's chair (Jamie sits on Richard's left and is out of the office most days) working through the issues that are DTP. Carl and Cybele are my resident slang experts and they help to make sure that I use my newfound vocabulary properly. It also helps keep the pom jokes coming towards Richard. (I like to deflect the immigrant issues whenever possible!)

This morning I had my exit interview with the boss. He offered me a job. (You knew that was coming, didn't you?) He also said he doesn't want to be accused of poaching from the other offices, but how many exchange people have gone back to their home offices in the last few years? One. I'd say he really doesn't have that much of a problem with poaching. Anyway, I told him that I would consider it. I'd really like to get home before I go making any life-changing decisions!

On tap for tomorrow: Trying to finish this dang DTP groundwater report. It's like a washed-up classic rock band in concert: so many false endings, you end up leaving before it's over to beat the traffic out of the park. Hmm. A bit like that anyway, because I certainly do have one foot out of the door, and we keep finding more twists and turns to how things are working, more historical data that changes our conceptual model, and more figures and tables and supporting documents than I know what to do with. It's going to be a good report when it's done though. I would have liked to finish it myself!

Oh, and the pub for lunch. That is definitely on tap for tomorrow.


Vocab of the Day
Squiz: look, examine.
You can "give a squiz", "take a squiz", or "have a squiz".

When Paul came up to give me the latest version of the contour map, he asked me to give it a squiz and let him know if there were any changes.

1 comment:

K said...

What an exciting offer!!!

I hope you do go home to consider it. You might realize that Denver is where you need to be, or you might miss the hell out of OZ. And if you don't go home first, your sweet tempered mother is going to become verrrry verrry hostile! :)

And besides, can't miss Homecoming, right?
Wish we could be there.
We leave for hell... ummm, I mean AZ tomorrow morning.
It's October and they are still in the upper freaking 80's!! We've had snow and they are still in swimming weather. GAH!