So my blogging capacity has been greatly reduced, and the
responsible culprit is work. For two reasons – 1. I sit at a desk for 8 hours
just about everyday and there’s not much I can write about that that even my
mom and grandma would want to read, and 2. I completely crash when I get off
work and cannot make myself do anything that involves thought or a computer.
Typing a blog is too much like what I do at work so I just can’t do it when I
get home. They work me hard, man. I am one hardworking little intern. This is
not a complaint, just a statement of the facts. I would 100% rather have a job
where I always have too much to do and stress out about than a job where I
don’t have enough to do and am bored.
Anyway, so this week I’m at work and am feeling particularly
stressed out about this “evaluation” report I’ve been given to assess for
quality and usefulness. I am to do so using a very intense and detailed rating
system in a long spreadsheet called the EQAT. I think that stands for
evaluation quality assessment tool or something. The particular “evaluation”
report I have been given is not really an evaluation of anything, unless you
want to use the term evaluation very
loosely. Its about 100 pages on how the labour market, in particular, wages and
wage formation, is shaped by bargaining councils. It starts with a loooooooong
history and description of labour laws and bargaining councils, followed by
some descriptive statistical analysis on a somewhat unclear sample of
historical data. I’m still hanging in there at this point. Then it goes into a
section of multivariate analysis (shoot me) using dummy variables to represent
different categories such as people who are members of bargaining councils
versus those who are not. Then spits out all these horrific dummy variable
coefficients that I cannot for the life of me interpret into tables that take
up entire pages and mean nothing to your average non-connoisseur of
econometrics. I just sit at my desk and want to cry. I feel a wave of dummy
variable coefficients crashing over me and drowning me and I just want to cry.
So I go eat lunch. Oh and I’m really sorry if you stuck it
out and read the entirety of that paragraph. But it was therapeutic to write
it. Lunch was slightly therapeutic as well. When my supervisor came in the
boardroom to eat too I asked her if she understood how to interpret dummy
variable coefficients. Not because I thought she would be able to, but just to
whine about how hard my work was in a covert manner. And to lower her
expectations for the EQAT I was about to produce.
I go back after lunch and finish reading the report, in its
entirety and feel like I have a decent enough handle on this thing to do an ok
job (for a non-econometric Ph.D. holder) of rating it. Yea so I did, I think I
did ok. I guess I’ll find out next week when my supervisor reads it. And the
good news is, I didn’t die. But the bad news is, instead of celebrating this
small victory, I have to dive into the huge stack of work that I was neglecting
while drowning in dummy variable coefficients. Wahh. I finally leave work and
just want to crawl into a cave and be left alone for awhile. Instead I make
myself go for a run in the company gardens. Its beautiful there, until a big
rat runs across the path in front of me with this giant chunk of bread in its
mouth! Gross.
Work today, however, is something worth writing home about,
so stick with me here. Yesterday, one of the consultants tells me about a
workshop that the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME,
aka the people we been doing all those stinkin’ EQATs for) is having at the
Mandela Rhodes Place, a super nice hotel on Wale Street. Yes, I would LOVE to
go and get out of the office! She also tells me she’ll be a little late because
she refuses to give up her personal training session for this workshop. I
totally get that and tell her I’ll save her a seat. I didn’t know how late she
would be exactly, so this morning I find myself chillin’ in this nice hotel
conference room with a bunch of government officials, university professors,
m&e consultants, and free coffee. Dena is nowhere to be found still as the
workshop is underway and we have been broken into small groups to review the
evaluation standards document the government wants to adopt.
Something weird happens to me in small groups - it happened
all the time in college and especially grad school – my personality just wants
to take charge and organize everybody. And I do it again, with this small group
of super adult government officials. Its kind of like an out of body experience
watching myself do it , but there I go, making sure we all have the appropriate
forms and starting discussions. Seriously, I am an intern who has taken one
course on program evaluation last semester and have been at Southern Hemisphere
under a month… who am I? But I just can’t help but raise points about clarity
of some of these standards and appropriateness of placements of certain
sentences, etc. Sometimes the other people in my group argue with themselves or
with me about points being raised. At times its valid, at other times I think
it’s a bit excessive but just sit back and think, “Oh well, if your country’s
standards for evaluation aren’t that clear or awesome…..” Ha.
Small group breakout number 1 comes to an end as we’re nearing
a tea break. I look at the lady from the Dept of Safety who likes to talk/argue
a lot and ask her if she would like to be our spokesperson to report back to
the large group. She shakes her head. I look at the next lady from the
Secretary of the Treasury’s office. She shakes her head too and says, “You need
to do it. You took the notes so you’ll know what to say.” Oh yikes, guess I’m
headed up to the podium…
So I go up to the front of the room and get close to the mic
at the podium to introduce myself and my group members. I can see in some
people’s faces that they are registering my accent. I start talking about what
we discussed in our group and it was the ultimate case of fake-it til ya
make-it. Good thing I can speak confidently even in situations where I’m not
entirely sure about what is going on. When I finish blubbering about stuff we
discussed I conduct a questions/comments section and tried to pretend to answer
people’s questions. This included some dramatic pauses waiting for someone else
to jump in and help me out. And then I go back to my seat and think to myself
about how cool yet comical that whole thing was. Oh and my consultant colleague
came in in time to see me present.
After all this, we have reached the time allotted for lunch.
I think this means we will have to go out and buy lunch somewhere, but then I
look over as hotel staff opens the doors to the tea/coffee room which has now
been turned into a totally luscious buffet. Yes!!! This is the greatest day of
work ever!!
I’m gonna cut this off because its past my bedtime I am very
serious about sleep now that I work a killer 9-5. But just FYI – the Mandela
Rhodes Place has a FABULOUS rooftop bar and pool. I did not hang out there more
than 10 minutes after the workshop however, because I went back to the office
to make sure I didn’t get behind on stuff. Oh, and to finish the newsletter,
because I’m the intern J
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