I was in Manhattan, KS for the past three days. Four of us rode up together, my boss who isn't an engineer but is the acting Construction Engineer for this office, the Construction Engineer from the other office and another EA1 like myself. It was nice to talk with young engineers like myself, but they were like the typical Civil Engineer, lovers of the outdoors, hunting, and drinking. I still got along with them better than I do with my co-workers. The first night was just checking in, so I went to the dorms to hang out, as soon as I got the opportunity.
Tuesday, the conference went from 9am-4:30. Followed by a Social hour from 6:30-7:00pm, then a dinner. Some of the sessions were interesting, some just bored me to sleep. Luckily I wasn't the only one sleeping. I think my favorite speaker was the Secretary of Transportation. She started the conference by correcting a slip up she made last year. She accidentally said, "We have been having great sex with our partners." Then she tried to cover it up, and dug herself deeper. She meant to say "great success." So this year, she announced that KDOT will no longer be having success. We will have victories. I enjoyed the rest of her speech too, even though she shouldn't be qualified for her position. She has a degree in sociology, while the assistant secretary is required to have an engineering degree. The fact that she's not an engineer is probably why KDOT switched back to the english system, after switching to metric several years earlier.
The social hour, or happy hour as everyone else called it was interesting. They had an open bar in the student union. I thought alcohol was not allowed on campus, except in the bowling alley. So the whole second floor was filed with drinking engineers. And it's not like it was closed off, we were all out in the open, and anyone could have joined us and gotten free drinks. There was varying levels of dress too, a couple of people did look like students. Walking around the union with my drink, I finally felt like a professional. The dinner wasn't too bad either. I left in the middle to watch the Japanese Yosakoi Dance Club practice, since they were just downstairs. After that, I just went back to the dorms. Apparently everyone else went to the bars or to the motel room of a very popular salesman, who supplies them with all alcohol they can drink.
Wednesday was a boring day of sessions. I don't really care to learn about thermo reflective painting for striping. I actually skipped two sessions, and slept through another. Luckily the conference was over by 3:30pm.
Today, I finally got my new truck. It's a dark green Chevy pick-up. We got three new truck, I wanted the silver one, because the license tag was 11337. But since I'm the lowest, I got last pick, so I got 11335. Oh well, it's still a very nice truck, smooth and quiet ride, and cruise controller, I can't really ask for more than that.
I was surprisingly busy today. I never even finished checking up on my daily sites or finished my episode of Dead Like Me. First, I had to go get my truck, then lunch got cut short, because I have to work on the 402 (estimations), then when I came back from that, I had to check some numbers. Kinda nice to be busy.
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