We can rebuild it, we can make it stronger, faster, cheaper...

Yesterday morning, our receptionist called Howie to the front. I heard him say over the phone, "Who's here? Huh...? Oh...oh! Yes! Okay!" He went to the front, I heard a female voice, and then he returned with a young woman: Tara, an intern I worked with for a couple of months back in the summer of 2008 but was laid off in that same fall. Evidently, with Intern Timmy and Liz moving on to bigger and better things, Howie suddenly found himself in great need of good but inexpensive help on a sudden rush of small projects. Tara, to her immense credit, had worked mostly with Jann during her few months here, and Jann emailed her one day recently to ask if she had any availability to work with us again. Tara jumped at the chance to get back on track with getting her internship hours, now that she just finished grad school.

I suppose I'm not surprised that Howie would hire someone like Tara to help him out. He's got a lot of stuff to do, plus he's not the easiest person to work for, so he really needs youngish interns because a) they bill cheap on projects but know how to use lots of different kinds of software, and b) especially right now they're not in a position to push back when he leans on them (work harder! faster!! more!!!) I asked Tara how much/long she'll be working with us, and she said Howie hadn't really told her. I mentioned that we'd all just gone back to 40 hours a week, and she said she might have it to do--evidently, Intern Kimmy told her that she'd worked nearly 80 hours last week and more than 50 a week for several weeks so far this year. I suddenly thought that perhaps I could have been helping her, but then I remembered: Howie needed cheap help.

Either way, it was great to see Tara again, and frankly it was nice to see a new employee. Seeing anyone get hired here lately made us breathe a little, though we know that no one's really publicized the hire. Still, nice to have her back and to see Kimmy get some help.