The Job

As promised, I am going to share a bit about my new job in this post! I am a co-op student at the airport out here and assisting with work on the baggage system.

As everyone probably knows now, airport security is pretty intense. Luckily, my experience in pharmaceuticals has prepared me for this. I am also developing a new vocabulary. Currently it includes a lot of:

- terminal
- airside
- out-of-gauge
- access
- restricted
- section drawing
- elevation
- inbound
- outbound
- transfer
- domestic
- international

And pretty much any three-letter combination of A-Z you can imagine in acronyms. I literally have an acronym dictionary printed out and pinned to my desk bulletin board (luckily I found this on the internal website).

I have also been able to spend time down in the baggage system and out on the tarmac. One of my colleagues had the best description of what the baggage system looks like: the mine levels in old school Donkey Kong. Out on the tarmac, I walked next to huge planes and even completed some training out at the fire station!

Even though this all sounds quite glamourous, my office definitely isn't. It's in a trailer. Yep, a trailer. The area looks like a little town of portables like we used to have in elementary and high school. Even though the terminal area is beautiful, I was told when I first started not to get used to it because that's not where I would be spending most of my time. The cool part about the trailers? They are just outside of the restricted area fence. This means that planes are literally driving right by. So cool! Here's some pictures of my walk from the SkyTrain to the trailers.

The only scary realization I had about this fence came today. We have company cars that can be used to go to different areas of the airport if needed. I only started driving them today and it just so happened that the way I backed out meant that I had to drive in the one-lane-wide space between the trailers and the fence. Having not driven in two weeks and driving a car I wasn't used to, I was paranoid that I was going to run into the trailers on one side and wreck half the offices or the fence on the other side and breach the restricted area. Ahh!

Well, this has been about long enough for now, but to leave you feeling jealous, here are some pictures of the beach I can go relax on after a tough day of being paranoid about running into fences.

Also, don't forget to sponsor me for the Great Strides Walk I'm doing out here on May 26th!