So today was my first day on my externship. It has been raining all night and day so I left early at Gabrielle’s suggestion. Good thing I heeded her advice, as I left 30 minutes earlier than needed, I just barely made it to the associates meeting on time. I’m also glad that Gabrielle and I ran out the day before to see where this building was, because I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have found it panicking about the possibility of being late on my first day. So, I made it to the building and dashed inside to find dozens of identical rooms on a very confusing floor plan. I don’t know who designed this building (IBS–a site dedicated and set up for large business meetings)but they were obviously on very good drugs. As most of us are used to room numbers are consecutive with the occasional “a” or “b” subnote for the room number. Well, this building has multiple rooms with the same room number with about 10 subnote designations (ie: room 208, room 208a, room 208b, etc); ok, not so bad huh, wait it gets better…the designers didn’t use all the letters, deciding to skip some entirely so walking down a hallway was like (room 207, room 207a, room 207k, room 257c, room 212a, room 212c)…arrrghhh….maddening. Anyway, so I make it to the meeting room just in time, but of course very few seats are left and I spy an end seat on the far side of the room. I pardon myself as I knock people about to get to the seat…settle myself and sit down.

It was they typical…our organization is the best and most wonderful and if you ever think of leaving us and don’t perform well you and your family will be eliminated by a gang of psychotic carnival midgets who belong to the MAFIA. This goes on for awhile and then it comes to audience participation…yuck…so we are to turn to the person next to us and interview each other. I was sitting to a nice girl, obviously bored by the numerous doodles on her paperwork, named Kelly Fox. We chat and hit it off nicely. We never got called on so we didn’t have to embarrass ourselves in front of the group. Our next assignment was to write three things why we chose to work at Advocate Health Systems…as we are writing I notice Kelly wrote “my dad.” Being the nosy person that I am, I ask Kelly what does her dad do at the hospital. At this point, she smiles, lowers her head, leans over and whispers, “my dad is CEO of Good Samaritan Hospital”

It is at this point, I am glad I didn’t say anything stupid about her father, Advocate or whatever that may have been embarrassing. For the rest of the day we chatted and were bored by HR craziness. So, let the lesson be that you never know who is listening, talking to you, or watching.