20 September--Orientation, Part 1

Today was spent in the Raytheon Polar Services Company's headquarters.  Actually, it's not a company, it's a program of Raytheon Technical Services, the director took pains to explain, but what the heck.  There had at one time been plans to make it a company and the name sort of stuck.  Late in the day he assembled all of the Centenial staff and all of us in the big auditorium to hear the news that Raytheon's contract has been extended for another year, expiring at the end of March 2012. 

All the normal sort of orientation things that you'd expect, plus a self-paced tutorial on computer security.  Also issued money to cover expenses for the time until we land on the Ice: $220 each.  For many people the most valuable thing was to get to know more of the people we'll be working with and rooming with for the next 5 months.  There are definitely a lot of much larger than life characters among the returning OAEs ("Old antarctic Explorers").  Tales of practrical jokes of years past.  More tales than I can recount of off-season travels: Nepal, Guatemala, Cuba, Thailand, China, etc., etc., etc.  Making me feel quite the stay-at-home and very domestic.

Tomorrow's agenda has a morning of more orientation and then our us ride to the Denver airport (DIA, which, when taken as an acronym, must have already been made into some sort of humorous zinger.



The hallways of power at RPSC in Denver



RPSC in Denver