Last Thursday I was down at Cal Poly – a mid-size university (~17k students, I’m told) in the rather nice town of San Luis Obispo, not far from Santa Maria, and very close to the famous Pismo beach, courtesy of Bugs Bunny. Career fair, of course; not a social visit, sadly. There were six of us this time around, so it wasn’t nearly as strenuous as Atlanta; I actually had enough time, at this one, to occasionally get a drink of water or quickly stuff down some kind of bready-scony-poppy-seedy-sultana-thingy… apparently they’re just “scones” here, but imho they don’t actually have scones here. Which really sucks, because I really miss them and didn’t get the chance to have any when I was back in Oz last November.. :(
Anyway, the fair went well – lots of very promising people, including a few that were quirky, but intriguingly so. There were also a heck of a lot of business students (“business” in this context meaning everything other than engineering, of course :P ). It was a little sadly stereotypical at times… “hmmm, girl, business dress… hmmm, yeah, finance, over there”… :) ..though I was overall surprised at the number of engineers all dulled up a bit… how is anyone supposed to know you’re an engineer if you actually look half decent, I mean really… pfft…
It was nicely refreshing to get the heck out of the valley and into a town with, you know, an 18-30 demographic. It made me miss college a bit, in a whimsical way – young people everywhere, chillin’ out or studying, enjoying a life that’s comfortingly divided into hour increments, repeating weekly…
I guess you could say you’ve passed out of youth when it’s your social life that’s regular, and your job unpredictable…
Luckily I’m not quite there; everything’s unpredictable for me for the moment. I often wonder if life passes faster when rigourously scheduled, or random… it seems like the latter flashes past; I’m forever fighting fires and trying to keep up. I wouldn’t mind at all a bit of regularity, maybe to help pace things.. but then I get onto thinking about what’s more productive, and my bias is towards random, since regularity tends to imply meetings (in a work context), which while hardly Dilbertesque always provoke a subtle uneasiness, that laziness is triumphing motivation.
Plus I do better with improv in any case, so..
This has become a pretty awesome ramble from what was supposed to be purely informative. My apologies.
Red rode with me down to SLO and back. It was good to have company, even though it’s not that far, and somewhat surprisingly we talked the entire time, about random geeky stuff and whatnot. [[ surprising in that I’m not usually such a conversationalist ]] All good. :D Also, though I didn’t belabour the point, I cannot fathom how he’s still with his highschool girlfriend, seven years later. *boggle*
We had dinner, the six of us, at Firestones, which is basically a burger joint with that queue-for-your-food, fast-food style that I dislike.. but the food itself was very good, and the atmosphere was nicely busy.
Afterwards, back in the hotel, I chided myself for not bringing either of the two books I’m technically reading at the moment (OS X Internals and the red book), since it was only 9pm or somesuch… as tired as I was supposed to be (more on that later), I wasn’t sleepy, so I lulled myself gently into drowsiness by watching The Punisher. :D
Also, prior to that in the short time between us arriving and heading out to dinner (given we collectively took three cars, not particularly synced, and Red & I arrived first) I killed time by watching <some show/movie that I’ve forgotten> intermingled with Disney’s Robin Hood. I haven’t seen that since I was a wee tacker! And now I see where so many random Disney clips & quotes originate.
Anyway, all in all not a bad trip. Though it did mean I missed two days of work, more or less, which I didn’t have to make up, but, you know how it is – just because you’ve clocked the hours doesn’t mean the work gets done. So, I was in on Saturday as well to catch up a bit. That went better than expected, so I was only in for a few hours anyway. And it was quiet and I had my office all to myself, so it was quite pleasant. :) Plus my office gets way more sun than my bedroom at home, so it’s probably healthier too, disturbingly. :)
Also, some random company called “Dreyers”, that apparently makes rather nice ice cream – kinda Magnumy, not quite as good – were at the fair and providing freebies, so Red scored a bunch of that for us at the end, which was a sodding good way to round up a day’s work. :D
