Week 3 at FOP

This entire week was our office’s clean sweep, so you can imagine what my task consisted of. I am a neat freak to put it mildly, so usually I am excited about organizing and cleaning (lame I know). However, I wasn’t prepared for the task that lied ahead. The FOP building is considerably dated and spaciously challenged. There are 8 employees (not including myself), and only three have individual offices. As for the remaining 5, someone works the front desk and someone sits in the computer lab. However, there are still 3 employees who don’t have their own space, so they kind of just have to get in where they fit in. The largest office was my supervisor’s, but it was so cluttered and over time it just became a storage room for supplies, paperwork, etc. Actually my supervisor didn’t even have an office at all, which makes it two people with offices. Anyway my supervisor decided to downgrade to a smaller room and utilize the larger space as a general office, so at least this way everyone has someone where to work comfortably.

During this process we used one of the classrooms in the building to sort out everything we were removing from different rooms. Unfortunately, there was so much stuff that we didn’t have room to sort anymore and it just became a room full of madness. After a while we just had to put stuff wherever there was space in the room and the items ranged from bikes to office supplies. These rooms hadn’t been touched in quite sometimes so there was a lot of bugs and dust everywhere. I probably set a record for the most sneezes in a day. In the end we were able to clean out the offices and set them up for the staff, but we still have a classroom filled to our necks that we still have to sort through.

Aside from cleaning I attended a meeting with IPH (Institute for Public Health) discussing rules and regulations for site leaders and monitors to follow. Well no one actually knows what that means, so I should probably explain. Different organizations around the city run a Summer Lunch Program for kids 1-18. You don’t need to show identification or anything so it pretty relaxed. Also for individuals with disabilities the acceptable age increases to 26. These organizations encourage all kids in the neighborhood to partake in eating a healthy lunch and expressed how they just want to help feed the kids because many go without as many meals as they should have. It was really great to meet the different people who participate. I definitely enjoyed it.