Hmm, office life. I clean off our desks every day and somehow there are 15 more papers on the desk five minutes later. The culprit: Mandla or Thuso. They won’t admit it, but they come out into our area and leave their papers everywhere and then I have to return them to their desks. Mandla just made of point of grabbing my attention, crumpling up paper and throwing it into the trash. He missed the first time, second time success. I yell at him everyday for the papers after he yells are me for the desk being messy looking. It is the never-ending cycle. I am in charge of organization in the office, surprise surprise, especially of the equipment room, where we keep balls, nike gear, pennies, vuvuzelas, small South African flags, goals, and signage. Like the magically appearing papers, the Nike shoes magically disappear on occasion and I have to keep changing the inventory list I made. Then I have to call Mandla and scold him for taking the shoes without marking which ones. Thank goodness I set up Thuso’s office in the back yesterday while he was out because now his personal items don’t show up on our desks…unwanted. Haha, we shut him off in the back of the office by himself, I wonder if he gets lonely. Just kidding, he is all of 5 feet from Albert’s desk back by the kitchen, where you know I spend most of my time. I wish we could put Mandla back there because he is always walking around talking loudly on the phone. Yesterday he took a solicitation call and put it on speaker and actually talked to the guy. Who does that! These guys are crazy. Mandla also sings to Thuso all the time because Thuso’s surname (last name) is Jones, so when he wants Thuso he sings the Mr. Jones song, but replaces Mr. with Thuso.
Albert and I are experiencing a lot of free time (i.e. the blogs are being written) because of this strike and slow-moving additional initiatives. We will probably be bombarded tomorrow when they decide we are going to run a SKILLZ holiday next week. Awesome. That’s how it works; they give us as minimal amount of time to get a task done as possible. Gotta love it. So we are currently writing blogs, letters, and postcards, while trying to figure out how we are going to get to the music festivals in Cape Town and Malawi in October. Mandla just asked us what we are doing this weekend and tonight and we told him we are thinking of going to the Mokala National Park outside of Kim and we invited him again for “teambuilding,” but he declined even though he has never been there. Mandla thinks he is too important for us, we keep inviting him on our weekend excursions, but he seems to always be out of town. Questionable. Everything we do together I refer to as “teambuilding” and Mandla and Thuso just laugh at me when I am like we should all go to the gym together for teambuilding, we should all go to the “Big Hole” for teambuilding. I also think we should steal the unwanted office supplies from the DeBeer’s office and call it teambuilding. What, Albert and I really need a table for our house. Mandla is a little nervous about what the headline in the DFA (the local newspaper) would be. “Grassroot Soccer Interns Making Their Presence Known in Kim” or “American Interns Stealing Desks from the Diamond Company.” Alright, alright, I know those are so not creative headlines, that is why I do not work for a newspaper.
My favorite part of this office is that we all have rolly chairs, and so when I have to go from office to office, or to the equipment room, I don’t even have to stand up! I just rolled into Mandla’s office for a meeting then back out again. Then I did get up to go to kitchen. Lunchtime around here consists of Albert and I eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at our desks. Sometimes we walk down the street to The Sandwich Shop (creative name) when we are tired of the same old same old. We also have a drawer full of snack food right next to my desk for our constant snacking throughout the day. Good thing we go to the gym every afternoon. We could just go on Mandla’s diet; I don’t think I have ever seen him eat, he just works all the time. He is the definition workaholic. He is here at 8 a.m. everyday and stays until at least 7 p.m. sometimes later. Thuso is on the cigarette and coffee diet, but again I haven’t seen him eat anything of substance outside his bowl of cereal in the morning and sometimes a meat pie. Today Albert made cookies for the coaches’ meeting and when we got here we found out the meeting was moved to tomorrow. What to do with the cookies…they are already gone. Whoops. Good news, I just set up a teambuilding lunch at the bar-ba-que place tomorrow, so maybe I will actually see Mandla eat.
On a different note, I just created work for myself, so I should probably go work on that for a while. I decided it would be a good idea to create a timeline and task list for the upcoming HCT in Kim. It will either be on the 11 September 2010 (if we partner with the Department of Health) or 18 September 2010. Oh, and look out for my intern profile on the GRS website, I have submitted it to CT (Cape Town) so hopefully they will have those up soon.
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