Parties and Babies

I am officially on summer shutdown break here at Nissan!

Production closed at 4:15 PM on Friday (yesterday) and will remain stopped for all of next week. The closure is to perform annual maintenance operations on the machines and lines, as well as to prepare some retrofits for the 2009 Altima we will start making once we return to work on Monday, July 7th. (The design and body style for the 2009 model is largely unchanged; I've been told there's only a change to a weld somewhere on the Altima's unibody, to make it stronger. Nonetheless, we have to re-tool that part of the line.)

Well, I really shouldn't say 'we' have to re-tool that part of the line.....the section managers have to. I will be pleasantly enjoying my week off, sitting pool-side at my apartment, working on my tan and latest Jane Austen novel.

Originally, the plan was for me to come back to Wisconsin this week, but after working through my first month here and realizing a few strengths inside of myself I thought I never had, I've realized I really don't want to test those strengths again by going back home by all of you nice folks. You see, going back home would mean having to go through the good bye process all over again. I suck at good byes.

So, instead I leave the anticipation to continue to build, for I will see you all in August when this internship comes to a close. (And I'm sure by that point I'll be crying about leaving Mississippi, versus crying about leaving Wisconsin!) I really do love it here....I just wish we could squish the height of the United States down, so it wasn't so far of a distance from the top end of the country to the southern end of the country!!



This last week of work had its ups and had its downs. My boss, who is like 70 months pregnant, has had her share of hormonal rampages, let's just leave it at that. (I know she'll never find this blog, but she openly admits to all of us that she realizes her lashing-outs anyway.)

However, we threw her a surprise baby shower at lunch on Thursday and it was so much fun! It was my first time being a part of a 'SURPRISE!!!' party, I loved it!! My favorite part was being able to yell out the actual word and seeing the look on her face as she walked in the door, even though she is a tough cookie to please.

Apparently as she was having her baby shower, my first week's boss, Erik, was at the hospital with his wife, where she was in labor delivering their first child, a son.

And Momma was telling us that she was having her fish dreams again.

You see, Momma has oracle capabilities: she dreams about fishing every time someone gets pregnant. The story goes that the more fish she catches in her dream, the more children that pregnancy will produce. This foreshadowing 'gift' worked with our current boss that we had the baby shower for...Momma dreamed about fishing and three days later the boss announced to the team that she was expecting a baby. Momma also had this dream when her pianist's wife conceived a child, as well as for her cousin. (Side explanation: Momma has a pianist because she is a professional gospel singer. She actually travels up to Memphis to record albums in a studio and releases them to be sold and everything.)

No matter what, women should NOT drink the water at Nissan, because something to do with procreation is obviously in it!!!

To close the surprise-baby-shower day, everyone simultaneously celebrated the good-bye of longtime Nissan employee Channing, for it was his last day of work at Nissan. (Channy was the guy who trained me on my first week here at Nissan.) The guy who has never set foot outside of Mississippi and thinks snow is something you can get in a paper cone with blue-raspberry flavored dye poured onto it, is moving up to Marion, Ohio, to work for Whirlpool.

The engineering crew all had a party planned for him at some local bar here, and while I figured I should have gone to try to build my networking abilities, it really made me uncomfortable to have to do all of this over alcohol and get-drunk-fast schemes. I'm not much of a drinker, never have been and never will be. It didn't help that everyone down here knew I was a Wisconsin girl, so they expected me by nature to just be able to sink them under the table because Wisconsinites make Miller products and drink beer at all those Packer games!

Uhhhh, sorry, not me. The bar scene and drinking scence has always made my toes curl, I just hate bars. They're pointless...dark, noisy, scuzzy, loud (which is different than being 'noisy' in my opinion)...so how can you have a conversation without going hoarse or using a flashlight to pan the face of the person you're talking to???? Anyway, I managed to snake out of going to this shindig and just put up with their "Where were you?" whines the next day at work.

I could tell by the number of people with bloodshot eyes and stanky breath, how much of a 'fun' time everyone had had the night before.

The one plus though, is that part of the crew went out to lunch with me and they brought this guy Austin with them. :) (Don't worry Joe! Even though this guy does look like a rugged John Krasinski/Jim Halpert, I'm just messin' with ya.) He's the last of us Lab II crew members that I had to meet so it was a plus that all of the introductions are officially over with now.

Four weeks of work in the bag - my halfway point will be the week after shutdown! WHOA.