It's begun!!

No, not the apocalypse. That's not for a few hours yet. I'm talking about my first day in which I forgot to blog. The end is near. Cherish all you hold dear in this world.

In other news, should the world be rent by shattering earthquakes at some time between 6:00pm and sunset EST (because of course the End Times would be with respect to time zones), I'll be at 330 West 16th Street, New York, NY 10011, about 4 stories underground. I'll either be alive in the bunker that is Atlantic Stage 2, or I'll be buried under Source4s and all the cool gadgets at the Google office upstairs. Either way, I wouldn't bother coming to look for me.

Yesterday was endless. If anyone ever says to you, "Hey, would you like to become a fireguard in NYC?" your answer should be not in a million years (unless your employment depends upon it). It is not a particularly daunting task, being a fireguard. Nor is the exam for your "Certificate of Fitness" rigorous or difficult in any way. No, what sucks is the process. FDNY has carved out for themselves Hell on Earth at 9 MetroTech Center in Brooklyn. If the end of the world happens and we don't get Raptured, this place is where we're all going. Imagine, if you will, an ill-maintained, high-ceilinged room from the 1960s. Now imagine a sea of chairs occupied by the most dejected looking people, slumped in defeat and near total loss of hope. You are just now beginning to picture this terrible place. There are really no instructions. You just get into a line and hope that it's the right one. All the while, a cool female voice is calling out alpha-numeric codes that are being served at various windows, in no particular order (many people would look up with hope when the number before theirs was called, thinking they were next, only to have their hope die utterly when the subsequent number to be called went back by 100). After waiting in line to get an application, you have to wait in the same line to turn in your filled-out application. You then receive your code. That's when the real fun begins. Before that cool female voice calling out the codes was just meaningless background noise. Now it becomes a matter of life and death, and you join that faceless throng living and dying with each announcement. Eventually, hooray!, your number is called, and you report to your window. Any thoughts of that being the end of the process are quickly dashed, however, since that is really only the beginning of the process. You must then wait for your number to be called again so that you can go to a different window. And then another window. And then another. You get bounced around like some horrific ping-pong ball of despair for the amusement of the totally unamused city employees. Finally, joyous day!, it is your turn to take the exam. 25 multiple choice questions testing whether or not you have a pulse and understand the most basic information about things being on fire and how that's not so good in places of public assembly. And then you must wait. And wait. And wait. And finally, if you're lucky (and not everyone was), you learn that you have passed, you are given your Certificate of Fitness with your mugshot on it (a souvenir for how you've become a miserable lifeless hull of a human being), and you leave as fast as humanly possible before that cool female voice makes you go insane and start throwing chairs. As I stepped out of the processed air and fluorescent lighting and into the glorious rain, I was informed by a kindly old gentleman on the sidewalk, "Hey, I guess Jesus is coming tomorrow. Keep an eye out."

I just don't understand what it is about governments that breeds such inefficiency. I felt like the only thing that would make the process worse was a ticker showing how many tax dollars were being spent while you waited.

The rest of the day went relatively well, though I couldn't get the sound of that cool female voice out of my head. I had an interview with Binder Casting for an internship, and met with the General Manager at Angelo Fraboni Productions (my friend Rico's dad) about the possibility of doing some company management for them in the future. The show went well, and I was able to get out just a few minutes after 8:00pm. Met James and Stephanie for dinner near St. Agnes at an Italian place on Lexington and 39th, and then made the trek back to the 'boken. A bunch of people were supposed to get drinks in the city, I suppose in honor of my arrival, but everyone bailed on us at the last minute and Court was seeing The Importance of Being Earnest, so I just went back to hang out with Matt, partially fulfilling our dream of having no friends together, drinking beer, and making snarky remarks to each other.

Matt was watching October Sky when I got back, which is that movie about Sputnik and coal mines. My cell phone rang, and he said "You're phone is ringing, Dude." I looked at him quizzically, since "dude" is not usually part of his vocabulary. Apparently I had missed a reference from that classic film The Big Lebowski which I had never seen despite nearly everyone telling me that I must. Naturally, we corrected that sad state of affairs. I get all of those references now (unless the reference comes from the last 20 minutes of the movie, which we didn't finish because we were all lame and fell asleep).

An interesting side note is that this week I met Ethan Coen of the Coen Brothers, one of the writers of TBL, and also a playwright for 10 x 25 Evening A. That's right. I'm name dropping.