My Co-Worker

I whine a lot about my job in various places, but - in all honesty - most of it's not that bad.  It certainly beats the alternative.

We've had a lot of turnover in the three years I've been here, and one of our newest hires is also one of the most interesting.  She's a recent immigrant - she's been in the US less than five years.  Before that, she lived in Moldova.

She is one of the sharpest people I've ever dealt with. There are some very tricky components to the job, and she's managed to avoid getting tripped up by the most common pitfalls.  We knew after two days that she would be a good fit in a number of ways - our only hesitation was her command of the English language. And that's a minor hesitation, honestly.

She's very self-conscious about her accent. To help with that, we make an effort to engage her in idle chit-chat when it's slow. At one point, she mentioned that she'd learned English while working at McDonald's. Not only that, but she taught herself to speak English over three years of working at McDonald's.

At one point, she made an off-handed statement. "I'd never heard of McDonald's before I came to this country," she said.

It started us wondering - if she'd never had McDonald's - the very most American of American things (like it or not, McDonald's and Coca-Cola are the biggest symbols of America to those outside the country), what else was she lacking?

So we've started gradually introducing new things to her.  This blog will catalog the new things and her reaction to them.

To protect her privacy, I will call her "Dasha," which is (obviously) not her real name.

It will update weekly at first - until I've worked through the (fairly short) backlog.  After that, it'll update every Thursday in which something new is introduced.