Corporate Social Responsibility aka Please Don't Hate our Company

To combat the laziness I've been feeling lately, I turn to my blog to get the mental juices flowing.

Like many other corporate entities, to appease main street America, my company sponsors and organizes a city-wide community outreach event. It's mostly for PR boosting and to stop people from gathering their torches and pitchforks when prices are raised or god forbid, the company makes money. I guess our situation is not as bad as banks though. I highly doubt cosmetics caused the global financial crisis. More like a certain Calabasas-based mortgage firm, which is now part of an evil banking empire. I kid, I kid.

Anyways, our day starts off bright and early at 9:30 as I head off towards the Lower East Side Ecology center, part of the 52 acre East River Park system.

Walking along the East River Park is actually quite nice as long as you don't mind a freaking highway right next to you.

Nothing like a 6 lane highway next to your park. Only in NYC.

In our company provided free t-shirts we were a noticeable group in the park. Ready to do some volunteer work. There were like 5 activities to choose from. Painting a mural. Planting trees. Weeding and planting. Mending fences. I figured the LES eco center didn't want a Picasso-esque (not in a good way) mural I chose to weed and plant a garden.

An even scarier, crappier version of that would be what a drawing of a girl would look like if painted by yours truly. Seriously, I got a C in sculpture in high school. 

All activities were grouped into small teams of 10 and thus I headed off with my team. As usual, I was the only male on the team. It is very different working in a mostly female company. Now that I think about it, over the last week I've been in about 8 big meetings, of which there were probably only about 6 males total across all meetings. I can't pinpoint exactly what is different but it's definitely not like my old job where there were no females working except for admin. Anyways, 

As the first stage of our activity was weeding, we were told what to yank out and what not to. Amongst those pictured above is the one you're not supposed to yank out. I'm glad they made it painfully obvious for us city-folk.

We got lucky and the weather was beautiful. I was a bit worried because the week prior to this we had a couple of days of 100+ degree days. With the Williamsburg bridge in the background it made the day quite enjoyeable.

I wish I had taken a before picture because it was pretty crappy. Weeds everywhere and there was no semblance of a real garden but we turned it into an area worthy of our overall city beautification project.

After 4 hours of hard, physical labor it was time for me to head home.

Along the way I passed under the Williamburg bridge. Apparently one of the few free bridges connecting Manhattan to the outlying boroughs.

In this shot you can actually see the UN building. It's the white rectangular building.

I found this neat trail but it was only like this for about 100 feet. I can't figure out why they built such a small section. I guess by Manhattan standards this is like Yellowstone though. Old Faithful replicated by the homeless gentlemen peeing all over the place while yelling obscenities at me. I love NY.

So this weekend it's back to LA to celebrate the wedding of one of my closest friends. I'm only gonna be in LA for about 40 hours so it'll be filled to the brim with stuff. Exciting.