April 28, 2010

I worked at John Tierney's office on Tuesday and Wednesday, for a total of about 12 hours I believe. I actually got in a car crash unfortunately on my way to work on Tuesday, so I was a bit late that day.

However, literally all I did the entire time was help clean the office. The other people who worked for Tierney had found closed cases that they had long stored away when they were cleaning, and the secretary (Claudia) gave them to me to file. I would record them in the computer (the name of the person with the request, the issue, and the date it was resolved/closed) and then bring them to the basement to file them in that year's box. There were literally hundreds of cases for each year. I did that for all cases closed prior to 2009. For the ones closed in 2008, I placed them upstairs in a file so they're closer to everyone, because it's more likely they'll need those for reference than the older ones.

They literally have hard files back to the late 1990s downstairs in case the case isn't accessible through the computer, it's amazing how much information is down in the basement. They clear the cases after 6 years (so the ones closed in 2009 will be gotten rid of in 2014).

The two new things I did were cleaning up the newspaper files and logging into Tierney's District Office website with a confidential username and password. The newspaper files were all messed up and looking really bad, so I just organized them. They get daily newspapers from literally every newspaper in the county to see when Tierney's name or the Federal Government is mentioned. And then they store the newspapers if they need to come back to them. I got rid of the newspapers prior to April (they only keep them for one month) and stacked them up in a nice, clean way. I also got to look at a more compact way to navigate around what's going on in DC (the bills being debated, passed, and their specifics) by logging in with the help of the secretary. It has literally all the information one could ever need in there, it's quite interesting. I wish it was available to the general public, I don't believe there were any real secrets in there at all.

It was kind of boring these past two days, but Claudia mentioned that I may answer phones soon, so hopefully it'll get more interesting