New interns at TTD

I met two Ricardo’s today: my trainer at Slender Health, and one of our two new interns at The Travel Department. The other intern is Rebbecca, an Irish girl who studied journalism at DIT and interactive media at Trinity—pretty similar to my choice of education. Except I wouldn’t quite compare Columbia to Trinity, but still, we seem to have a bit in common. She has a cool sense of style (she wore a sweet grandma-turned-hipster floral print dress today), and she seems pretty easy going. The only reason she loses points is that she has connections to Canada; one of her parents is Canadian, and she chose to live and work there for like 10 months last year. Unforgivable.

I’m kidding of course. I love Mounties really.

Ricardo is a decent guy too, at least from what I can tell after exchanging about a half dozen sentences with him. He thinks his English is bad, but it’s actually not too difficult to understand. He was probably just nervous, being surrounded by English-speaking people on his first day at a new job. I think he’ll loosen up in time, though. Jenny will be exposing him to all sorts of dirty British slang. He probably has no idea what he’s in for, poor guy.

The other Ricardo I met today at the gym, on the other hand, was very difficult to understand. He had a pretty thick accent (I didn’t ask where he was from), and it didn’t help that they were blaring dance hits on the speaker system in there. I think he kept trying to crack jokes, but I was totally missing the point every time. He’d do stuff like go to program in my age into a machine and say “35, right?” And I’m thinking to myself, did he actually confuse the word “23” with “35”? Is he that dumb? But then he just laughed and changed it. It was a bit of a communication breakdown.

But he also showed me lots of different toning exercises I can to with the weight machines, and I learned some good stuff that will probably make my workouts a lot more effective now. I’m usually too scared to go try weight machines that I’ve never used before, but now I can do just about anything in the gym. My next goal is to get Joe to join, too, so I don’t have to go by myself all the time!