nawl

Highly amused. The world here is filled with mysterious and complicated processes that appear to have grown organically, and with mysterious magical people who can only perform one specific task in any given process.

I showed up to the dorm housing here, but the dorm people didn't know I existed and so couldn't give me a key. I was given a phone number of someone to call, but calling her and assuring her that I was a real person didn't work either. I needed my mentor to talk to the AT&T person in charge of housing, who then talked to her, who then worked things out with the people at the dorm, and then they could give me a key. When I arrived back at the dorm in the afternoon, the security guard didn't want to let me in because I wasn't on any of the lists (duh), and he was shuffling through papers trying to find out who to call about this difficult situation when another security guard recognized me and told him I'd been there before. I have a key now.

I showed up to work at 9:30 am, but nobody was there to take my paperwork. Another intern signed me in as a guest for the day. I'm told that the interns who got here three weeks ago basically had to sit around in the lobby every morning until a real employee appeared who could sign them in. Also that the process for getting a key-card is long and involves several people, any of which could fail to be around at any point in the process.

I got to my office, which is called the fishbowl because it's glassed in on half the sides (this is the normal intern office), and there was a computer with my name on it, but no account. I think the process usually goes: mentor talks to person a, who talks to person b, who emails the person in charge of creating accounts that it's ok to create an account for the intern. But person b was working from home today. I did, however, finally get an account. It didn't have a home directory. That got fixed. The email server didn't recognize my login. I haven't figured that one out yet.

My actual assignment has quickly evolved into scary real math described by scary words like lattices, theta functions, and modular forms. This is the first "easy" problem. I have much to learn.