Me habla espanol

This entire week has been productive and interesting, but today felt especially good.

We had our weekly conference calls, but without the Germans or the Quebecois who make things so much more amusing. As we were sitting down to start it, my boss looks at me and asks if I speak Spanish. I had told him as much on several occasions, but, being timid, had never spoken a word of it in front of him. Even though the Mexicans on the conference call always speak English to us, it is obviously forced only for our benefit, all side conversations amongst themselves are in rapid fire Spanish. The Mexicans were going to be in the fire for our conference call today.

Once we finally start, late, we get into discussing some of the documentation that had been sent to us earlier this morning. It quickly comes about that we need more information, but the Mexicans can't understand what we're trying to get at. My boss, deciding to test me, asks if i can explain that they need more captions and explanation, along with any quantitative data they can provide. In a matter of two sentences I've managed to ask the OMex for what we want, only needing them to repeat their answer once to understand. I report back that they'll have it for our next conference call while my boss stares at me, jaw hanging open. The man from the glass plant across the table asks when if I'm planning on working at OMex, to which my boss responds, "She is now." There are some times when that semester in Mexico was more than worth it.

After that start to the day, everything else seemed to follow suit on being wonderful. All four of my simulators are at least functional, if not completely working and forming actual product. I've spent the last month troubleshooting pneumatics, wiring (without a diagram, with a multimeter from 1984), programming, stepper motors, and vacuum systems. Although there are some code bugs a level below the one I can reach and some additional parts would be useful, the machines are all to the point where it's possible to work around the problems left. I spent the afternoon working blissfully without backfiring on how to seal and tip fluorescent light bulbs. Lunch was spent discussing CS Lewis with an engineer from Central Research who has definitely been swayed to being my advocate. I had a great meeting with my mentor about line downtime and planning. It didn't even bother me when my boss paged me at 4:30 to work on a timeline he needs to present tomorrow. We came up with an elegant way to present data from a Gantt chart in a more visually comprehensible fashion. Even though I was at work until 7 working on it, my boss had basically left assuring me that anyplace I want to end up in the company is open to me.

I'm starting to believe it, and it feels good.