work,work

I've got some new duties, that primarily entail the oh-so-exciting work of data entry. But I'm also helping out with the grant apps. So, I'm going through a stack of applications, rejecting the blatantly half-assed ones and passing all the others. Because the apps are so short and not that specific it's pretty hard to discern who are the real serious players, so we're gonna have to take a shotgun approach and have a lot of firms just give us proposals. This will be a lot of work on their end and on our end because we have to read them all. Unfortunately, it's our only real recourse.

Power at the tourism bureau has been incredibly spotty this week. We lost power and internet for the last 3 hours of the day yesterday and we lost power for three hours on Monday. Not sure what the deal is, but it makes work all but impossible for a lot of our duties this week which require a lot of email correspondence. But we persevere and try and stay on schedule. I've got my first staff coordination meeting later today and I hope I can impress upon the group the potential strength in exploiting the expertise of the professors I've been working with. Folk seem really hesitant to include them because they aren't business owners and they don't want them to dominate. Those are legit concerns but I feel we can communicate those issues with the profs and they'll be sympathetic. In the meantime, we're ignoring a big resource. We shall see.

Also, on a totally unrelated note, I am not nearly stylish enough for this country. Everyone here with a decent job is forever decked out in something that is fashionable. My standard scruffy grad student style of a tshirt, loose jeans and flip flops gets as many looks as my hair. At some point, I'm gonna have to step my game up. I gotta make a note of that when I get home.

Anyways, back to my apps.