The First Couple Days

I made it into the office on the third day of my orientation. I got there just in time to get introduced to the team and sit in on the morning meeting. To my surprise, I was not the only new person around. All together, the person in the group with the most experience, the team specialist, has only 3 years experience. I was, for the most part, instantly welcomed. A lot of people joked saying I should probably know how to make coffee and take some heat. That really wasn't the case. Sure I did a bit of go-for and some light work but it was kind of expected. Most of the stuff I started out with was database work. Making some spread sheests for the team to reflect some important information they needed allocated into a single place. And (with much thanks to my physics and experimental aerodynamics labs) I'm pretty good with Excel and could breeze through anything they gave me.

Now I am taking on some heavier work now that I know the system a bit more. There is a lot of stuff to know about the different types of paperwork. There is a different procedure for everything you want to do. And if you want to do something, you better have some paper that authorizes you to do it. EVERYTHING is documented and made official. Good thing they use recycled paper. Currently I am updating OMIs (Operation and Maintenance Instructions). For everything that gets processed on the Orbiter, there is instructions on how to do it. That's what these are. When the group runs the book, they often find things that are wrong, or should be updated to make the operation run more effectively. So in order to make a change to the book, you have to write a Deviation (Dev.). When you get so many deviations things can get messy. So every once in a while someone will sit down and incorporate these deviations and "red lines" through the book, into a new draft and so that the OMI can be sent of to OMD (Operation and Maintenance Documentation) and OMD will make their own revisions and approve the document for release and it can be used for the future. Then the process starts over again.