My Job and Communism, 8Sept, Day 27

Re-reading this title, I think it’s strange that these two topics were serendipitously paired together. Anyway, first my job.

I’m working on the 5th floor of the Palazio Larice where people sit in small silent clusters of 4 with shoulder-high dividers separating the computers. I would like to know who invented the cubicle paradigm because I think it must be one of the 10 worst ideas of the century. OK: surely there’s a certain context where isolation from the other coworkers is necessary, but not in design engineering house! My only other complaint is that they keep the lights off. Our building has enough windows that one can see with natural lighting, but I think it makes things a bit gloomy.

My coworkers seem to be a nice crew. They seem pretty accepting of the new, foreign guy, and only mechanical engineer on the floor. We don’t have a cafeteria, but there’s a lot of restaurants nearby where we go out for lunch. I still find it hard to keep up with the chatting (in Italian) unless I’m involved enough in the conversation that I can predict what’s being said. I think being handicapped by limited knowledge of the language places me in a more challenging position, and I hope to prevail over this hurdle by mid-October. I have a 3 step plan: practice, read, and study in that order. So now I need to find a conversation partner(s).

At lunch on Friday, I was invited to go to (if I understood correctly), a communist festival. I didn’t know there was still communism here, but I guess there’s still a small pack of them. If nothing else, I thought this sounded like it was sure to be an interesting experience. So I left the office with Giovanna and her husband Marco Nero, a funny antipode to Marco Bianco. We picked up a friend, and the 4 of us sat in traffic for probably an hour to reach our destination in Milan.

The festival was something like a fair with lots of tents serving as makeshift restaurants. We went to the mushroom house where I had porcini and pasta. The food was good, but the host was a much more memorable character. I’m not sure if this guy was drunk, on speed, or just a very theatrical leprechaun.

After the mushrooms we met another Marco and went to a bar near the fair. The bar’s here are different from home. A typical visit to an Italian bar seems to consist of sitting at a table spaced slightly too far to hear comfortably over the music what anyone is saying, ordering some sort of drink from a long list of varietals that all look about the same, and well that seems to be it. Maybe I’m just used to a more dynamic night on the town. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the company of the group despite feeling pretty tired.

The tiredness is a strange thing. I’m sleeping more than in college, but feeling more tired now. I think there’s a strange inverse correlation to my activity-level. In other words, I’m doing less, but feeling like I have less energy, not more. I’m not really sure how this works. I guess I’d better go to bed…