I was on the road by 6:45am and driving up a switchback of sunny and foggy weather up to San Jose. I was also starting to get sleepy by the time I hit Salinas and don't really remember much of the road from there since I was trying to stay awake. Finally gave in and turned off the freeway on Dunbarton Road to take a snooze for 20 minutes. Refreshed, I continued my journey north.
Exiting Bailey Ave. I continued down the road past IBM Silicon Valley Labs and headed up McKeen and onto Harry. It was a beautiful road in the hillsides and a lake! I kept following the directions and slightly confused I turned into what looked like a park entrance and pulled up to the arm. A camera looked back at me and I sat there until the box started talking to me and then let me in. I drove up the road past an old barn and hills, arriving to the IBM Alameda Research Center. Parked, touched up, and walked into the main lobby.
Meeting up with Ray I was surprised to find myself not very nervous about everything. Perhaps I was too tired to be anxious. Ray was my paperwork helper for the day...and quite the character. I take it he goes through all the interns and coops and other people as well being part of HR. He had the system down and led me through the papers like a breeze. Yet I was in the office for a long time since like I said the man's got character.
"I like to work to music, what kind of music do you like Michelle?" I said everything from rock to country, to which he gave me a hard time about country. "You don't look like the country-lovin type." To which he proceeded to turn on some hip-hop. The conversation during paperwork turned then to relationships. The tax forms were asking to mark me single or married or whatever and he asked "Do you have a boyfriend back home?" I said no. He looked at me and said "Ah but you did. Let him go sista let him go, there are plenty other guys out there and you're still young." How did he get all that from me saying no? He kept asking me more questions about it, and he talked about his family, life, culture, and his side job of being DJ Sugar Ray for weddings n such. Kewl guy, very optimistic, and his best advice (which funny enough I heard talking to Steve and Tyler in SLO) was that we can't control shit from happening in our lives, but we can control how we take and handle it. It was like deja vu.
Very interesting first taste of IBM. He gave me a ton of IBM goodies, asked me to be on his internship/coop events team (to which I said yea sure...another team currently of only two!...just like my real job team lol), and sent me on my way to the SVL.
I stopped to look at pictures of the Fellows, and the first hard disk drive...gigantic thing...and had a capacity of 5MB.
I met up with Victoria and got my badge, went to eat, got setup with my "office" and laptop, and then went to meet up with Brandon for more instruction on what to do, since he was going to be my lead n all. Course, turns out that the deadlines for the team had been moved up a whole year, so he's pretty stressed out and didn't have much time to prepare for me and any training. Plus he was giving a presentation today at 2pm so he had to prepare for that. I almost nodded off during the presentation by the way. That's something to note not to do. It wasn't cause it was boring though, mostly cause I was just so tired from being up so early.
I went back to my "office" after the presentation to just hang out and get more familiar on my fancy new IBM Thinkpad. These are quite nice. I say "office" this way because it's my temporary place...in a mobility center...next to a main printer that's going off every 5 minutes. So I sit next to the door and printer and people are just walking in every 5 minutes or so from wherever. And I get to listen to 5 or 6 British guys in the room (temp hires or something), talk stuff about IBM employees and how they don't notice anything and random stuff about each other. I don't really care though. The fact that I'm working here is pretty kewl.
[Whoa, a train is going by the house right now and everything in here is shaking.]
Ah yes, so I went out and took a walk around and got some more food at the cafeteria before coming back to my "office". Since I don't have a secure place yet, I have to carry this laptop everywhere I go...no case. I'm afraid of dropping it. I wonder how often that happens. I kind of almost did that twice today. I printed out a few housing directions and information before calling it a day. And then it was on to finding a home.
Place #1:
Nice house and very pretty back yard. Located near the Alameden exit on the 85. The lady Jen wasn't there, but the other roommate Emily showed me around.
Pros:
- Very clean
- Sweet kitchen
- Large closet
- Bed is already in the room!
- All female house
- Everyone keeps to themselves
- Nobody even uses the awesome living room
- Feels really anti-social
Further down Alameden Expressway towards IBM. Near Via Valiente crossroad.
Pros:
- Sweet place, very clean with pool table and a pool
- Younger crowd (still older though)
- Cute kitties
- Responsible owner, cool guy
- Close to work...really close
- Near Starbucks with the really kewl workers I met there today
- Room is nice, and has a sweet closet
- Guy said he does all the chores, utilities are included
- The guy lowered the rent for me!
- Takes about 10 minutes to get to the freeway
- Unfurnished room
Newly remodeled house. Right near Kaiser Permanente (Cottle Road).
Pros:
- Nice place, pool
- Place is anti-social or people are just always gone
- It's almost too fancy with a plasma tv and built in speakers in the ceiling
If you haven't figured it out already, I think I'm gonna go with Place #2 unless I find something better by tomorrow. It's a little closer to work than I'd like, but that's not really a bad thing. Place opens up officially for move in this weekend...so if I do take it, I still gotta rough it for the week.
I stopped for Starbucks after Place #2 and just started talking to the baristas working there. They were really cool, round 19 years old (at least the guy was) and the girl's name was Kelsey. They suggested some places for me to visit here in San Jose, and told me to come back to see them real soon lol.
I'm now at my cousin Kim's house sitting in Huy's bed (thanks for the room Huy). What a long and eventful day. I got here and had spaghetti and watched Heroes with Kimber...interesting plot they got going on. Bac Hiep came home pretty late. He takes the train/lightrail/bus/whatever to and from Cisco every day. I took a shower and feel worlds better. I'm going to have to get used to this whole waking up early in the morning thing. I have to get up oober early since Atherton is nowhere even close to IBM. It took me over a half an hour to get here driving round 80 mph. Sheesh, I don't even want to think of the drive to work tomorrow...through traffic.
But ah well, it's been an adventure today. I've been so busy that I haven't had much nostalgia. I wonder when it'll kick in though. I wonder what everyone is doing back home in SLO...
