After living in a desolate wasteland of all white, Mormon Utahans, being in any sort of diverse environment has become somewhat alien to me. So when I started my job at the Irvine Water District, I was surprised at the incredulous amount of Asians that I worked with: Dave, Dave, Tammy, Dave, Alex, Tang, Katrina, and Dave. While they are all very nice individuals, I did feel a little bit out of place, being one of two white people in the lab.
I came in at 6:20 and was given the tour of the lab when I met Dave. Dave, being one of the senior Asians in the lab, has worked there since he was 18, but is now much older than 18 (although I cannot ask how old he is without breaking the law). Dave found me in the lab because he heard somebody who was a little too chipper for six in the morning. He introduced himself and assumed that I had helped myself to the gratis coffee in the break room, but when I told him I don’t drink coffee, he was more than surprised. “I can’t be drinking coffee. I don’t want to stunt my growth.” This statement becomes somewhat ironic while towering over the Asian man.
The rest of the crew filed in after about an hour, somewhat shocked that I commute two hours in and two hours back for work. After we gathered for a group meeting, I noticed something was different about Dave. Whenever he was in front of our boss, he developed an Asian way of speaking. Ls interchanged with Rs, and I just stared over at him in complete stupor. The lab manager couldn’t care less if he had an Asian accent, so why did he put on this front during the group meeting? Obviously I was out of the loop.
My next coworker I came to know was Katrina. She was a temp like me a year before and was hired on for a permanent position in the company, so I knew that if she trained me, I would probably end up on the more likely side of a permanent job. As she taught me, I noticed that she would lunge across the room to every lab station. I can understand the purpose of exercise, being fat before, but this woman was in desperate need of putting on weight, so why would she be lunging everywhere? I asked her why she was lunging and apparently, she is mocked for having the tiniest butt of all her friends, so she lunges to gain a larger backside. “Well, to be completely honest, I don’t have a butt either, but I have butt pads that I wear when I need to fill in my pants a little more. Like when I interviewed for the job here, I wore my fake butt.” On a side note, I feel that my butt boosters pushed me one step above my competition; therefore, getting me my job.
My job is a very simple one. I sit in a chair and wait for water samples to come into the lab. From there, I take the water and run three tests on them: pH, turbidity, and electric conductivity. This seems like it could be rather enjoyable, but the difficulty comes in with the sample types. The water I test mostly comes from the water reclaim, and half of the samples are ground up sewage. One of my coworkers was mixing a batch of raw sewage, splashed some in his eye, and now has an infected eye. How he was able to do that with goggles on, nobody knows, but I assume it is because the sewage is alive and has devious plans for the chemists.
None of my operating procedures require gloves while doing the tests, but every time I grabbed for a water sample, Katrina would scold, “GLOVES!” (Sometimes she says, “GROVES!” but that is neither here nor there). I had no clue why she was so concerned about me wearing gloves if I made sure that I washed my hands after touching bottles, but she was adamant that I always wear gloves. I soon found out why she was so paranoid about me wearing gloves when she tested the water for suspended solids. In the suspended solids test, water is filtered through paper, and then the filter paper is dried in the oven and then weighed to see how much solid there is in solution. This particular day, she found two white fish in her water samples. I was confused to how a white fish would make it into the water and wanted to know if it was alive and cute, but instead, I learned that white fish is how the Asians classify a used condom. How a used condom was able to make it through the grinders that all of the water goes through before sampling is past all of our comprehension, but somehow, this white fish had managed to make its way through. I thought I was disgusted enough until we had a shout out about finding another white fish. “Two in one day? So clazy!”
Besides that rest of the Daves, I met Tammy half way through the day. She is the most Asian of the entire lab, and works across the lab station from me. I have never seen more than her eyes because I have to peer through shelves of folders to just see her, but she is a nice woman. Actually, she is very similar to the neighbor in Home Improvement; I see nothing but her eyes and she gives me very nice advice about life. Even when I leave the station to go find water samples, I only see the back of her head, which is covered in the straightest, black, Asian hair I have ever seen. It may have only been my first day on the job, but I assume that I will probably only ever see her eyes and the back of her head.
After eight hours of taking water, putting a probe in it, putting a different probe in it, putting another different probe in it, and then going for another water sample, I think that I am rather prepared for this job. Although, most of the time, I just sit, waiting for more water samples to come in. And then I look confused for about an hour, wandering around the lab, trying to find where the other chemists have placed the water samples, and then I go back to trying to probing sewer water. And that is my job: sitting around sewage; waiting for sewage; testing flushed, toiler water and sewage; and sitting around Asians. This is what I call my career.
