They're Coming to Take Me Away, Haha, Hoho, Heehee!

So… I am slowly going insane.

I have been calling for the gala all day everyday ALL WEEK. Here is how today went, for example.

6:30- got up and took shower. Water was actually warm, surprisingly.

7:20- Ate breakfast of porridge with cinnamon and instant coffee in it… don’t ask me, that’s how I like to flavor it.

8:00- Begged off of raking/ scoffling center pens so that I could go shoot footage of some of the interns at the goat pens… got wrangled into helping hold the goat down while they put meds on her injured foot. I have now progressed from petting-zoo experience only to goat care.

8:30- went back to the center pens and filled an ENTIRE TRASH CAN with yard debris and pointy sticks, then went to rake the last pen in penance for ditching.

9:00- went to the genetics lab to start phoning people for the gala until 12pm… that’s three hours straight of phoning people. Luckily, there were a few others helping me today (rare). Jessica, Casey, and Claire were all assigned to gala, so I made Claire and Jess do some calls while I tried to organize the new contacts excel sheet to Laurie’s specifications. (I already spent ALL DAY YESTERDAY as well working on that.) They got sick of it and started expounding on how much they hate calling people and how rude some people were on the phone within an hour. I tried not to mention TOO MANY TIMES just how many days I spent up to 7 hours phoning people BY MYSELF with no one to talk to. Yeah, when I say that I am getting sick of talking to people over bad phone lines who vaguely speak English and hate getting phoned for donations, I REALLY mean it.

11:30- Got to be part of the cub walk team! A BREAK! AT LAST! Steph and Jess, who do the schedule, have made it a habit to try and schedule me with the cubs AT LEAST every other day because they know phoning for the gala sucks. It means I get to work with them more than the other non-cub-care-specific interns which makes me happy. Also, Casey is USUALLY willing to let me hang in the cubs pen with her on occasion. They feel sorry for me. Anyways, we walked Peter and Senay out to meet some German tourists who were very nice. I could understand what they were saying in German, but I couldn’t formulate answers! Luckily, they had a sort of spokeswoman who spoke English for them who asked questions. But this was the first time that I got to actually answer questions instead of standing around wishing I had a black suit jacket and a discreet earpiece. Cub bodyguard Heather FTW!! This time, their tour guide introduced me (I usually don’t get much of an intro beyond “This is Heather, she’s an intern. Moving on”) and I lead the group over to the cubs at the predator playground, so they asked me lots of questions. I could actually answer all of them!

12:30- back to the gala

1:00- LUNCH TIME!!!! Pasta with meaty, mushroomy, bacony gravy! And bread! It was delicious!

2:00- ..... gala. Had Lauren to help enter data into the sheet while I called people. This one guy hung up on me. It was depressing. But not the first time. Others refused to donate because they had not been “thanked in a timely enough manner” last year. *rolls eyes*

4:30- stopped calling, finished sorting the contacts on the excel sheet. I swear I was becoming dyslexic by the end as I struggled. Ugh.

5:00- finished up the spreadsheet (Casey came in to remind me to stop working at 5, as she always has to, but I was almost done, so she let me finish) and then wrote this blog. My brain feels slightly like it did on paper number 4 of 5 in finals week: like mush soaked lead. Ugh. But hey, I get to look forward to dinner and tomorrow is a half day… hopefully. You never know. It’s a half day unless someone finds something for you to do. Same with our “day off” on Sunday.

Well, for all my complaints, I’m still having fun. Everyone’s really nice in the intern house and some of the girls I was more wary of a week ago are fantastic now. Also, the video I promised my mother has become… more epic. I told one of the girls about it and now it’s more of a tour of CCF/ epic intro to all of the interns that will eventually go up on youtube… so yeah. It may take another week or so… and I feel like a stalker going around recording people constantly… yeah. Wish me luck!

TSCHUSS!