Week Full of Surprises in DC

First full week in DC is in the books, and I don't think it could have gone much better. I will try to stay in chronological order, but will lead off with the best story of the week. On Tuesday morning I didn't go in to work until 1 because my team was still out of town, so it was the perfect opportunity to go to the DMV and get a street parking pass. A little background information, I am currently parking on N street, where there is a 2 hour parking limit, so I need to get a city pass for the summer so I don't get a ticket. Another semi critical fact is that the DMV is open Tuesday-Saturday.

The DMV was inside of this mall near my place that is similar to City Center (R.I.P), but about half the size. It's like City Center in the late years where they have super random stores, I think they even had a school inside at one point in time. Anyway, it was on the bottom floor of this completely dead mall. I knew it was in the mall but it took me about 15 minutes to find it, the legend was so hard to read.

When I walk up the line looks like an Apple release day. There are 75-100 people in line, with probably half that many waiting for their number to be called. I had nothing else to do so I waited.

More back information, I am terrified of cross dressers...you know how some little kids are afraid of clowns...When I see a cross dresser it's like I have 100 clowns surrounding me.

While waiting in line I made some friends, I figured I was going to be posted up for a few hours, might as well be social to pass the time. Thankfully someone else made the time go quickly.

I was outside of the DMV, probably about 25 people from the entrance, when all of the sudden someone is getting thrown out, there are screams and out of nowhere 5 DC cops show up. They are very intimidating and they have three people sitting down, separately, outside of the DMV and they are questioning all of them. From what I could overhear, cross dressers (man trying to be a woman (does it go the other way?)) were trying to get drivers licenses for the 'alias' and when they were told no they snapped. They got aggressive and my favorite quote from one of the cops was. "what did you think you would get away with, there are 26 cameras inside of there."

What made me uncomfortable was that he was denying being a man, and that's what prompted the fuss and police. Maybe I don't have the mindset of a cross dresser, but I have never seen a woman with size 14 feet...not sure where you found feminine flip flops that were that big...

I was too freaked out by the cross dressers to take a photo, I know the journalist in me should of, but I really couldn't. Here is a general shot of the DMV.

Oh, and I was told no for the pass I waited two hours for, awesome.

That was way longer than I wanted to talk about the DMV so I will speed through the rest.

Sarah [my roommate] and I went to the Capitol building on Friday (NatGeo has 'green Friday's' where we get every other Friday off). We didn't go inside, just walked from it to the National Monument, the weather was perfect.


We got off the Circulator at a random stop, we thought it would be the best way to explore. We wandered around and then came up to an area that was guarded by a man with a shotgun across his chest. I walked up with a smile and asked, "What are you protecting...What are those big buildings behind you?"

He laughed and explained that the Senate offices were directly behind him. We went to Ohio Senator Rob Portman's office and applied for a tour of the White House. I called my dad real quick and he reminded me that one of his friends from high school, David Carle, w0rks for Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy. His office was down the hall from Portman. I told the secretary that I was the son of Carle's high school friend, he came out and took us back into Leahy's office [he was out for the day]. We sat down and chatted and through our conversation found out that he wrote for The Lantern when he was at Ohio State.

We chatted about a wide variety of stuff for about half hour, very neat experience.

I got my ID badge, I feel so official walking around DC.


One of the things I do at work is go through photos submitted by users via My Shot. Every month they run a few My Shot photos in the magazine, which is a great incentive to submit to this online community. As I was going through photos for a gallery I was working on I saw this 'raw' photo, and it was at My Shot that had run in this month's magazine. Maybe that's super nerdy of me, but I thought it was cool to stumble across the same photo than ran in the magazine. 963,227 photos have been uploaded to the site.


That's all I have for now, going to be a lazy Sunday. Happy Father's day! I helped pick and edit that photo for that story on NG :)

First Day at National Geographic

After many weeks of high anticipation, I finally arrived in DC on Saturday night, got settled in and started work at National Geographic this morning. I took the Circulator from home to work last night to plan my route after dinner near Dupont Circle with one of my co-workers, Leigh. It was a great way to have last minute questions answered, get familiar with the area and enjoy the perfect weather.

When I got home from dinner my roommate and I took a walk/jog tour of Georgetown right before dusk. The campus has a very Hogwarts feel, very gorgeous and a lot of detail put in to every piece of architecture.

I woke up around 5 am and wasn't able to fall back asleep because I was so excited to get my young professional clothes on and roll in to work. I left plenty early because I wasn't sure how long it would takes the bus to get to work considering how crazy traffic is in the city. The bus got me about 4 blocks away from work, so I arrived in plenty of time. I the lobby of my building they have a photo gallery so I spend 20 minutes in awe of the photography.

The National Geographic Society is composed of three buildings, I am on the fourth floor of the building on the left side of the image.

Leigh came down and took me upstairs. Moments after I sat down I was invited to the weekly staff meeting where members from the different departments come together to get on the same page, very similar experience to the daily budget at The Lantern and weekly web marketing meetings at M/I Homes. After the meeting I found my way to my desk, which was all set up with a 27" iMac.

Everyone here has been really nice, they have low cubicles so there is a lot of open communication and it's easy to get involved in random conversation, I took part in one about how amazing Oregon Trail was in elementary school.

I worked with one of my team members, Alexa, who one of her projects is the NG Photo of the day to start picking out photos for the month of July. It was amazing scrolling through thousands of photos in order to find the 31 most interesting in the bunch. What made it fun was each of us having different opinions and expressing them, but when we both were blown away by a photo it was clear within a millisecond.

As a photographer who would love to work in the fast-paced environment the coolest thing so far has to be a program called MediaGrid. It is an aggregate of wire services and other photo feeds.

I sat for five minutes and watched photos from around the world flow in. The Pope, Obama and Luke Fickell to name a few.

Most of my team was out of town today at the Webby Awards in NYC, NG won four.

I'll post some photos of our house and Georgetown area soon.

Andy

Moving to D.C. in 17 Days

Finals week of spring quarter has been kind of exciting over the past few years. Freshman year I was looking forward to getting back and working a lot at Brookside, last summer I was really excited about working at M/I Homes on the internet marketing team, this summer is unlike anything I've ever done before. I went to college about 7 miles away from home, so I've never really had the chance to get away. I will be packing up and moving to Washington D.C. on June 11th to work at National Geographic to work on their web photography team.

I found a house on craigslist right off of Georgetown's campus, it looks really cute based on the google maps street view. The house has a weird setup, one three person bedroom and one, one person bedroom. I will be living with a friend from high school and a friend from The Lantern, they are both great people so it should be a lot of fun. Every person who I describe the location of the house to tells me how awesome of a place it is, so I'm super excited to see first hand.