Title says it all really.
I guess to understand this, you'll need some background information. I work for a national franchise charity called Young Advisors.
Young Advisors trains and qualifies young people to practice as Regeneration and Renewal Consultants. Young Advisors has roughly 32 schemes running nationally, encompassing around 400 young people. These schemes are usually hosted by Local Authorities, Connexions agencies, or New Deals for Communities (NDC) schemes. The branch that I work for is hosted by the London Borough of Waltham Forest, hence Waltham Forest Young Advisors.
Anyway, my school uses Edexcels excuse for a work experience manager "Trident". They're terrible, so I decided to find a private work experience placement. Namely, to continue with my already very interesting job as a Young Advisor. So it begins:
Day One ( Monday September 1st)
Today, I woke up at 8:40, and rolled out of bed, crawled to the sink, washed, dressed and coffee'd myself. My two weeks of work experience were to be based around the timescale of 10am - 4pm. Deciding that remaining in the house would only stress me out, I decided to step out into the warm September morning, dressed in a shirt and jeans. It was lovely. I stroll down to my bus stop, and have a nice conversation with a lovely old lady who used to Foster for the borough. She seemed pretty interested in what I did, but I bade her farewell as my bus pulled up. I hopped onto the 97 and away I was whisked. Changing busses at The Mount, I waited for a 158, and once again, away I went. This bus was running on rockets this morning. I turned up at Silverbirch house almost half an hour early, much to the surprise of Lisa (Lisa is one of the awesomest people in the world), who was to supervise me for the first week. After a quick tour of the office, and a cup of coffee, I set to work on a bid that Waltham Forest Young Advisors were making. The Myplace Fund, provided by the Dept for Children, Schools and Families is a pot of money totalling around £190 million that's available for the building of State-Of-The-Art youth facilities. Everyone in Lisa's office are really really nice. I felt involved in conversations and was offered tea or coffee many a time. Everyone was also congratulating me and wishing me luck on for an interview I'd been shortlisted for. More about that in a bit. Soon it was lunch, and Lisa and I went to a nice cafe down the road, where she insisted on paying for me.
After lunch, I finished the first draft of the preliminary bid, and sent it to our group manager to review it. Then I started planning a Youth Conference. It was four o clock before long, and I said my goodbyes and headed home. Narrowly avoiding an oncoming Ambulance.
Day Two (Tuesday September 2nd)
Rolled out of bed at around 9, and did my morning act. Then, 97, 158 Office. We had a team meeting in the morning, which wasn't as boring as I thought it'd be. I continued revising the Myplace bid, until Suzzane, our manager met with Lisa and i to discuss it. Following this, I did some work on the Forest Flava website. Then lunch at a closer cafe, where Lisa once again insisted on paying. I saw a few collegues from other teams in the council in the cafe (it gets a lot of use becuase it's so close to the office building) and had a few discussions about things. Back to the office, more planning, laughing, spying (we were phoning youth centres in diferent boroughs to see what sort of facilities they had. I was pretending to be a young person looking for something to do). I left at around 4:10.
Day Three (Wednesday September 3rd)
Lisa and myself were invited to attend a feedback event for an inspection that was carried out in the borough back in June by young inspectors from the GLA (Greater London Authority). So, today I was up at the unholy hour of 8am. Morning ritual took about half an hour, and then I cycle up to Chingford Station, and board the train on Platform 2. After all, this is the logical thing to do, because the sign says "08:33 Liverpool St Station, Platform 2". This logic is soon blown away, as all of my fellow commuters suddenly get up and walk off the train. I realise it's probably best to follow suite, so I too, get up and follow them. We walk all the way back down to the station end of the platform, around the train tracks, then all the way back up on Platform 1, where I am pleased to see there is a lovely new National Express East Anglia train waiting for us, instead of the crusty old "one" trains that normally frequent my line. Upon arriving at Liverpool Street, I join the hoards of commuters galloping down the escalators to the Central line (it's the red one on the map, for all of you forest-dwellers out there). I realise I'm not going to get on the first train that pulls in, so I wait for the next one. Three minutes later, it screeches to a halt, and I begin to dislocate various joints in order to increase the chances of somehow managing to fit myself into it. One stop later, I hop out at Bank, nearly flattening some poor old lady against a wall, and race down the platform to the interchange tunnel. I then balance my way along the edge of the Nothern line platform, hoping some Japanese national equipped with a Fujifilm camera doesn't swing around and start snapping photos of trains and accidentally push me onto the tracks. Train pulls up, and I hop on. Thankful that trains going south never seem to be so packed. One stop later, I step into London Bridge station, and race around the tunnels until I find a Jubilee line platform. Fortunately, there's no risk of being manslaughtered by Japanese people this time, as the lovely perspex barrier shields me from the big bad track. Jubilee line train comes, I hop on. I always find it funny how they sound like spaceships when they accelerate. Get off at Bermondsey and realise I'm 20 minutes early.
25 minutes later I see Lisa, and we head of, armed with a map, looking for the "Salmon Youth Centre". Who'd name a youth centre after a fish!?
We found this place eventually, after becoming increasingly worried about the number of little dark backroads we were walking down. The first thing we noticed about this place was the climbing wall up the side of the building. Upon entry, we became rather more aware that this place was a serious competitor to our proposed Myplace bid. We went upstairs to register and get our name badges, or at least most people did. They forgot about me, so I drew my own name badge! After all the trouble it had taken to get to this place, I was rather dissappointed as to the actual content of this meeting. It was pretty boring. We all said how we thought the inspections had been, and, as at most meetings, someone got really excited and started dragging us all along the idea that the project should be given more funding (and training, imo), and be carried out nationally and whatnot.
I nodded along, by this time half asleep, only awake because of the sheer amount of coffee I drank before we started. Eventually we finished, and were all fed some nice free food that made up for the mundanity (is that a word?) of the meeting. I was then given the rest of the day off, and so was rather chuffed.
After an afternoon out with my girlfriend, I got back to Chingford station and looked at where I'd locked my bike up.
"Hmm, I swear that bike is where my bike was..."
"What's that red thing on the floor? Oh, it's a bike lock... Wait, shit, it's MY bike lock! Why's it cut in half!?"
"Shit, where's my bike!?"
I walked home. Fuming.
The bike itself was probably only worth £20, as it was bought for £60 2 years ago. It's not the value, but the inconvenience that annoyed me.
Anyway, Days 4 and 5 coming up in the next installment, because if I write this post all the way through til Day 14, you won't get it until December.
Seany out,
xx
Too much to do, and it's not even the schoolwork, it's the combination of school work and my job, which seems to have gotten even more hectic. Anyway, apart from that, I had a strange moment the other night. I was reading through a blog, a very very good one, at that, written by a guy who works for the London Ambulance Service, as a call taker/dispatcher. This guy, was the person who took the very first call back on the 7th of July, 2005, when 4 bombs exploded on the London transport network, killing a total of 56 people, and injuring around 700. Having read this blog post, and been suitably touched by it, I went link-surfing, and stumlbed across a wikipedia article about the bombings. Right at the bottom of this article, was a list of all 52 victims, and a short description of where they were going, and what they had just done. Within minutes, I found I was crying. That's not something that happens to me very often. Normally I can seperate myself from emotion, especially when it concerns something that didn't really affect me, and chirst, it was over 3 years ago... but seeing the names, and the little bit after them such as "she had just called her parents to tell them she was okay, after being evacuated from Kings Cross station, when she boarded the number 30 bus..." seemed to add a human value to everything. It was .. moving, to say the least. As for that blog, 
