The Sea Life Center

Being at work by 6 a.m. is pretty tough. I'm working morning shift with Mary (my supervisor) while I'm in training, and then I get to switch to evening shift: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. I actually enjoy being up early, but going to bed early enough is hard. I usually decide around 8 o'clock that it's time for bed, but I don't actually make it there until about midnight because I'll get to talking or someone will put in a movie and invite me to watch with them or offer me food or something. Because I've been up late and then rising super early, when I got off work yesterday, I stopped by the library for a few minutes to check e-mail, then went straight home to the camper and crashed. Didn't wake up until 10 p.m., when Cindy came to check on me because nobody had seen me all day, and she was worried.

I like my job so far, except I hate automatic sinks and toilets. Actually, "hate" isn't nearly a strong enough word. Loathe, abhor, despise… I don't know words to describe the sheer raw hatred I hold for them. There's a special place in hell where people have to spend all day trying to clean an automatic toilet that basically flushes repeatedly every time you move at all. I can clean a toilet in thirty seconds flat, but in that time, I'm not exaggerating, some of those stupid toilets flush five or six times. Not a nice quiet "sploosh" flush where the water goes down cleanly, no. We're talking the kind of flush that's like a freaking explosion, where water actually sprays out of the toilet because it flushes so hard. We're talking the kind of flush that makes small children cry. The kind of flush that is the reason some children are scared of flushing the toilet. Five or six times. Every stall, except the blessed ones where the sensor is broken. And, Asgard forbid, if the door is hanging at the wrong angle, the toilets think there's a person leaving, so they like to flush themselves more. I bet in the space of a week, those bathrooms waste more than enough water to completely fill up the sea lion tank. Twice.

And as if it's not bad enough having to put up with the toilets flushing themselves, the stall doors are probably the product of Satan-worshippers too. For one thing, they're the cheap ugly wooden kind. The stalls are uncomfortably small, but the worst part is that the doors refuse to stay in the position you try to put them. If you go in a stall and try to clean the toilet, no matter where you put the door (unless you completely shut it and bolt it), it swings and bumps into you constantly. And, of course, this is while you're busy swearing about the toilets flushing. It's like having a kid yanking on your arm to get your attention while you're busy trying to put out a fire in the oven while blocking out the sound of the fire detector blaring in your ear. Except worse, because it goes on and on, whereas putting the fire out would only take minutes.

Then there are the paper towel dispensers and trash bags. The trash bags are irritating because they don't want to open. I don't know how much time I wasted my first day of work trying to get those darn bags open before Mary taught me the trick: get your fingers wet in the sink, then put the trash bag in your fingers and snap your fingers. The paper towel dispenser is the kind where you put in a stack of C-fold towels. Side-loading. That means that if you bump it wrong, a stack of paper towels two and a half feet high comes cascading down onto you, and if you're unlucky enough to catch the stack with your arm, it's hell trying to get it back into the dispenser. And the whole time, they're dropping off your arm while you're fighting to save as many as possible because once a paper towel touches the floor, it has to go straight in the trash.

Then there's the automatic sinks, which turn on if you so much as walk past. I swear, walking to the end of the bathroom is like doing the wave, only instead of people standing up and throwing their arms in the air, it's sinks turning on and off. Sounds funny, right? Well, trying washing the hard water spots off a sink when it insists on running if you accidentally set off the sensor. Not that I'm bitter.

Other than that, though, it's a pretty great job. My favorite place is the underwater viewing area. In the morning, we have to keep all the lights off there. Something about not disturbing the animals. But the tanks are open to the outside, so light filtered down through the water, letting in blue light. My first day there, I was looking at a tank with pretty blue light shining into the room, admiring the water. I turned around to say something to Mary, turned back, and jumped about six feet when I came face-to-face with the 1500-pound sea lion, Woody. Seriously, he's huge! He swam right up to the glass while my back was turned and watched me, saying, "Wait a minute, who are you? Are you going to feed me? What's going on out there?"

Today I got to see the Catacombs. Basically, there's a large part of the building that never got finished. Nobody really goes there: there's nothing there except the unused building supplies. There's no electricity, no doors, no floor… nothing but gravel, concrete walls, and a few pipes. It was a pretty cool place.

The people who are special enough to have offices or cubicles like to bring in plants to make their offices look prettier. Unfortunately, it seems that most of them don't have time to repot their plants ever, so a lot of them are falling out of their pots, completely root-bound, with sprouts going off every which way in a desperate attempt to find more dirt. So far, if I say, "Wow, that's a lovely plant!" the people who own the plants say, "Why, thank you! Would you like a cutting?" I've acquired four new plants (two of them spider plants that I plan to give to the kids if they survive), and am hoping to get an
Aloe plant pretty soon too, since a lot of the scientists have those, and I've seen at least one or two that are shooting out stuff I could cut and repot if they let me.

Outside the bird exhibit is funny first thing in the morning. The birds are hand-raised, so they love people. They get bored at night, and when they see us cleaning first thing in the morning, they jump out of the water and come up to the glass and follow us around, saying, "People people people yay people! Are you gonna let me out? You should let me out! Hey, can we go play? Wanna give me food? Will you take me with you? Are you cleaning? Can I help? Yay, people!" I don't like birds much, but I can't deny that these guys are darn cute.