So this morning my boss comes in and says “hey Sarah, you free at 10 to go talk to a flight director about ATV reentry?” Of course, I say. Cool, I think. Something new. Becca whispers “notice how he came to you,” knowing my frustration with the whole footprint chain-of-command. For a moment, I let myself think that I really was the footprint person.
But I’m not. We went to the meeting, where I sat quietly while somebody else did all the talking. Sigh. I am never going to progress beyond being the footprint grunt worker unless I either a) start being really rude, i.e. interrupting people at meetings to try to get a word in to convey the fact that I understand what’s going on, or b) purposefully circumvent the footprint analysis chain of command. Option A is not really my style, while Option B could make me look ignorant, vengeful or disgruntled…or all three.
I don’t know what to do. I just feel like I’m the number cruncher, and that no one feels like I understand what we’re doing other than how to run the numbers that somebody else gives me. I know I’m not the most experienced, but how am I supposed to become experienced when I never get the chance to do anything but run sims??
Agh. It is so frustrating. I am just really not happy with the way things are going right now and haven’t yet figured out what to do about it. I wish I had thought about grad school earlier; this fall is looking like it would have been a great time to go back.
Last night after work I finally got down to setting up my new computer. Took the second hard drive out of my old computer, stuck it in the new. Took the Firewire card out of the old computer, stuck it in the new. Closed it back up, started it up, upgraded the Windows XP Home that it came pre-installed with to the Windows XP Pro that Irwin got me a while ago. Had to change all the display settings to make it less stupid-user-friendly and more Sarah-friendly. But everything seems to be lovely, and now I just have to reinstall a bunch of software. But I have a new computer, hurrah! And the flat panel monitor that was a free upgrade sold on Ebay last night for $410, meaning that with that, my computer cost a grand total of $300. Three hundred bucks for a Pentium 4, 2.8 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM. Nice.
Before heading over to Becca’s to watch the basketball game, I found two geocaches in a Seabrook park, including Debbie’s DVD exchange cache. I dropped off a DVD of Gosford Park that I never watch and scored The Patriot in return, which I will watch. Awesome. The park was cool; I need to go running on those trails sometime.
