TOKTW Day!

Today was Take Our Kids To Work Day (yay!). Which meant no ICS2O (aww...), but it was a really cool experience and definitely very insightful.

I went with my friend Julia, along with her friend Catherine, to her mom's workplace, Symcor Incorporated. It is a really big company which offers data processing services. Created by BMO (Bank of Montreal), TD (Toronto-Dominion) Bank, and RBC (Royal Bank of Canada), Symcor works with many large companies to process its cheques, bills, and other information.

Because the company is so big, there were actually quite a lot of kids there &mdash around 30. It was really nice because the company had organized a special program for us. First off was a power-point presentation on Symcor's history. Then there was a tour of the three buildings at our location. The place had really heavy security, because of the highly-sensitive information it processed. Thus we each had our own security cards, which we had to swipe each time we entered and exited a building.

After the tour was another presentation, this time about Internet safety and privacy. The speakers talked about reading privacy policies fully, and changing privacy settings on social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. We also learned about browser cookies (a data trail which tracks your activities on a website), and even got an actual one (Chips Ahoy!) to accentuate the point!

Next came lunch. Did I mention it was free? There was a really nice cafeteria there &mdash with clean tables and a few TV screens &mdash so we spent all of lunch eating and chatting away there.

And then it was time to "shadow" our parents/sponsors &mdash look at what they actually do, and try bits of it out for ourselves! Julia's mom worked in the Data Entry department, which is like a fancy word for entering in monetary amounts from cheques so that the information can be stored in a computer. We mastered the basics quite easily, so one of her mom's co-workers was kind enough to open a program just for the three of us, and we spent the rest of the afternoon doing actual Data Entry for the company!

All in all, I must say it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I think TOKTW Day is really important &mdash more important than I thought in the first place &mdash because it helps us to understand both the importance of getting a good education, and how hard our parents work each day! The program at Symcor was really great, and we certainly experienced many new things. It was a really cool day altogether... not to mention the free coffee mug we got at the end. :)

Thank goodness I read the daily log today... Or else I probably wouldn't have written this. Thumbs up for last-minute thinking!