My Business Trip to NY

Yesterday I had to travel with some others to New York City.

First let me explain something: I'm not really supposed to blog about my job, as I now work in public finance. Many of you may wonder or have wondered why I've failed to even mention, much less talk about, my new job. Well, it's a cool job in which I get to help with the building of bridges and schools and hospitals and saving cities in distress. That said, given the nature of the business, should anything we work on become a matter of public interest or investigation, everything I say in any venue about it can be subpoenaed. Plus even without a subpoena I might get in trouble. Basically, I'm happy to talk about a lot of it with people (especially since I'm still in training)--so feel free to bring it up when chatting--but we've all been strongly advised not to scatter lots of written records and opinions all over the world. Also, in many cases we'll have a "no comment" on-the-record policy with the press unless specifically asked to explain something by a client (and we can't say "no comment" while posting online comments)...and I know at least one journalist who reads this blog fairly regularly. Sorry, Lizmonster.

So back to my story, a bunch of us had to go to New York, and the line of the day came from someone who had lived in NY for a while an loved it. For some reason I'm thinking of "Princeton" from Avenue Q as a good way to describe him, so we'll go with that pseudonym.

Princeton: "Why does it smell like urine?"
Me: "Because we're in a train station and we're in New York."
Princeton: "Oh. Right."

Also the weather sucked. True story.

And for those of you who lived with me in college, I ran into a certain panda bear near ground zero. 4 million people on the island and I actually ran into someone I knew. The mathematics behind the probability of that happening are more interesting than anything else that happened on the trip.