Being the new guy

While I'm sitting around waiting for the guy who's job I'm getting to show up to teach me how to do his job, I thought I'd make a few observations of my first few days in DC.

Today was my first day of work. Everyone talks about how awful the traffic in DC is, so I thought I'd wake up at 7, leave my apartment by 8 and get to work by 9. Well, the ended up being -- waking up at 6:45 to the sounds of the garbage men emptying out the dumpsters outside, still managing to leave at 8, and getting to work at 8:30. Apparently, all that talk about the traffic applies to the people who actually work IN DC, as I was pretty much the only person on my side of the highway, flying past a 30 mile long parking lot on the other side. That's good to know.

So like I said, I roll into the paper at 8:30 thinking that I'm going to make a good impression on the boss for being early. Well, I suppose I would have had he been here. I was so early that pretty much no one had gotten in yet, so it was pretty much just me and the secretary for about 30 minutes.

Come to find out that in the news business, apparently people don't show up til like 9 or 10, sometimes even 11. But being on the Editorial Page, we don't have to be as 'current' as the other people working on the daily news. That's also good to know. No more waking up at 7 for me.

So far I've gotten two letters in. One was more or less an extended ramble about some law in Maryland that I hadn't heard of nor care about, and the other was a rant about how awful George W. Bush is. Neither of these letters were actually responding to any articles in our paper, so I'm not really sure what to do with them.

The rant about George W. Bush was actually a little entertaining. The author is obviously so extreme nutjob that lives for hating the President. The entire letter is rather long and redundant, but here's my favorite exceprt:

"All arguments that Saddam was a bad man, that he tortured and killed his own people, that he cheated the U.N Oil for Food Program, or that he possessed or had weapons of mass destruction programs, have now been proven irrelevant by the “Downing Street Memo.”"

Yes, I completely agree. The fact that George W. Bush WANTED to remove Saddam Hussein from power renders all of Hussein's crimes against humanity irrelevant. He gassed his own citizens, had political opponents tortured and killed, and invaded his neighbor, but because the president wanted to remove him from power, none of that actually happened. What brilliant reasoning!

So I guess that means that since FDR wanted to remove Hitler from power that the Holocaust and Hitler's conquest never happened, either. Someone get Mel Gibson's dad on the phone. I owe him an apology.

And I suppose that also means that because I want to take out the trash, that it's not really stinking, growing bacteria, and taking up space in my apartment.

Sometimes I'm amazed that these people have enough intelligence to use a computer, much less write an irrititating e-mail.