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signing bonus as part of my job offer, with half of that already paid to me. So even without a summer job, I had a couple thousand dollars to spend having a good time during my last summer before joining the “real world,” as my Dad liked to put it.
    Labor Day arrived and shortly after noon that day, I powered down my cell phone as my nonstop flight to Miami – almost five flying hours, plus losing three more hours because of the time zone change – took to the air from Sky Harbor and I began this next stage of my life.
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    The last thing in the world I had intended to do during the eight weeks of training in Miami was get involved with someone... at least someone in my training program, and definitely not anything even close to a “relationship.” I figured that if I made friends with some of the other girls in the class we would be going to South Beach clubs on weekends, and there was a good chance of hooking up with some guy down there. But that would be it.
    As it turned out, though, the first opportunity any of us had to go out to any clubs was in a group consisting of ten of us; almost one-third of our entire new college hire class. That was the first weekend we were in Miami, but only after we had endured four incredibly long days that began the Tuesday right after Labor Day.
    Our long week started when they had us in our training room at 8:00 that Tuesday morning even though most of us finally made it to the hotel fairly late Labor Day night, and for four days they brought in lunches and dinners while we listened to lecture after lecture, broken up only by group exercises where we at least got to talk with one another. We didn’t even get off of the training floor of the building until after 8:30 each night... only to go back to our rooms for about two or three hours of reading and assignments that had to be completed by the next morning. This was turning into something like a college finals week on steroids; non-stop, exhausting, and stressful.
    Still, I was already enjoying my plunge into the full-time, post-graduation work world and figured that even if the training program remained this intensive the entire time (which I had heard wasn’t the case; supposedly at the halfway point they lightened up a bit), it was only for eight weeks and then I would be off to L.A. and the temporary corporate apartment they would be putting me up in at no cost until I found my own apartment or located a house to share with some of the other new consultants, or whatever I would decide.
    That first Friday night, almost everyone was too exhausted to do anything more than break into smaller groups to go to dinner at 9:00, or even later, after they let us go for the weekend. I was so tired that I went to the hotel restaurant with six of the other girls in the class, and immediately after dinner we all went up to our rooms for the night. I started watching a pay-per-view movie, some rom-com I had missed over the summer that had gotten only mediocre reviews anyway, but wound up wasting twelve dollars since I think I fell asleep no more than ten minutes into it.
    The next night, however, was a different story.
    I slept until almost noon that Saturday then went to the hotel’s exercise room to work out. I had done nothing exercise-wise for five days now and was already feeling “meh” because of it. I figured I would go through a circuit on the weight machines and then go outside to run, even though I was having a lot of difficulty with the Miami humidity. It gets pretty hot in Phoenix during the summer, but our dry heat that everyone makes so much fun of (“Yeah, it’s a dry heat... but it’s also 130 degrees!”) was turning out to be easier on me than the high humidity here in southern Florida. Still, I figured I could get a couple miles of running in without too much trouble.
    I never made it outside, though.
    There was only one other person in the exercise room; this guy Josh Chamberlain from our