Update: Week One

So, I hear you clamoring, how’s the new job?

(Okay. Actually I don’t hear a damn thing. Mostly this is because I haven’t been on the web at all, practically, since Monday. There are a lot of reasons for this, but we’ll get there.)

Short answer: The job is awesome. I love it. The people are cool, and even the commute isn’t as horriblicious as I thought it would be. And atmosphere-wise, it is a million, billion, trillion times better than that Hole Where I Used To Work. I think I’m gonna like it here.

That’s the short answer. The long answer, predictably, is a little more complicated and a teeny bit more equivocal. None of my small misgivings is insurmountable, and none of them is even the least bit able to shake my unutterable joy at having a job again, after 5 ½ months of unemployed-ness….I suppose all I’m saying is, the place itself weirds me out a little bit. And I can see one or two of the people becoming small thorns in my side—but again, nothing of the magnitude of weirded-out, thorn-sidedness that was the last job. Mostly I’m just happy to be there.

I’ll start at the beginning, then. Monday morning I got up bright and early, put on my going-to-a-new-job outfit—slacks, a top, a blazer, trouser socks and nice shoes—and left the house at 6. Work starts at 8, but I wasn’t sure about the commute; better early than late, I thought, and thus was parked out front of the building at about 7:15 AM. This was a good thing, since I’d parked where I thought the building was, not knowing that the little door in the side of a shop building was leading to my new workplace.

The office itself reminds me of that passage in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where someone says a particular object was “on display on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory, with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'” That’s a fair description of where this company’s office is: behind the restaurant, through the door next to the old house, up the stairs, around the corner, past the company with the incomprehensible name, then finally past the bathroom, past the kitchen, down towards the cul-de-sac, through the door on the right that says “Please knock.” The inside of the office is even better—rooms leading into rooms, rooms twisting around corners, a general riot of confusion. It took me the better part of the first day to find my way to the supply closet.

My desk is in a large communal room, occupied by all the other techs. There are ten desks, but not all of them are occupied at any one time; there are some who work at home, others who work here only on certain days. There seems to be a core of six of us who have been here every day—the other new guy and myself, plus four veterans. There are two other women in the tech department, plus the boss, whose office is down one of the twisty halls.

So far, along with getting acquainted with my co-workers, I’ve been working on getting accustomed to the first program I’ll be supporting. It’s for the educational market, and it’s something I wish I could have used when I was a teacher—very comprehensive and, I would imagine, very helpful. Oh, and very, very complicated. My boss has given me worksheets full of questions to answer by reading the manual and working through demo files, and it feels wonderful to have any kind of training at all! (Contrast #1 with Place That Fired Me: I spent my first two weeks there puttering around at someone else’s desk because they didn’t have a space for me, they didn’t have a computer for me, and there was no one there to train me because my boss was on vacation.) Apparently, they schedule training thus: first and second weeks, working on increasingly-harder demo problems, then Monday of the third week you start taking calls. It’s a really quiet time of year right now—spring break—but apparently it gets more hectic in late spring, and wildly insane in September and October, to the point that vacations at that time are frowned upon most emphatically. So I should be well-trained and ready to go by the time the rush is upon us.

My co-workers are an interesting mix (Contrast #2 with Place That Fired Me: there are actual MINORITY people here! More than one of them, even!). Most of them have kids, which is unfortunate; I’ve found that, just like people with cats talk about their cats, people with kids tend to talk about their kids. And the part of the office in which I sit is populated solely with parents—one woman with 2 kids and one on the way, one woman with a daughter, and one guy with a son. Yesterday I got to overhear about Adventures in Potty Training—who poops when, and under what circumstances, and the whole “sitting down/standing up” issue with little boys—and today, it was the Trials and Tribulations of Raising a Tween in Paradise. A quote: “Well, you just have to tell her that you’re okay with her being a B student, if she feels she wants to focus on her extracurriculars, but that she has to keep in mind that a B student is NOT gonna be a doctor!” (The child in question is in seventh grade. Yesterday I heard about which of the girl’s friends have incipient eating disorders. The school’s solution? They’re going to enable parents to monitor their childrens’ school cafeteria purchases online, so the parents can see if their kids are eating enough. And college administrators wonder about where these “helicopter parents” are coming from…)

Personally, I’d rather talk about my cats. And luckily, one of the guys at the other end of the room is a cat-person; he’s also one of two office smart-asses, and one of the veterans here. (No, there’s no potential there; there’s no potential in any of these guys, I don’t think. They’re either married, or substantially older, or substantially younger. And really, I’m not looking—though of course, if someone of the caliber of the Brit were to appear, I’d certainly consider changing that tactic. But not every guy, alas, is a Brit.)

The thing that has struck me most, though, has nothing to do with the company. I’ve touched on it above—this office is located in the middle of an exceedingly wealthy northern suburb, one of those suburbs that always appears near the top of the “quality of life” and “highest property values” lists. I thought that Two Jobs Ago Place was fairly swanky, but this ‘burb, although it’s only a few miles north of that one, blows it completely out of the water. Even just taking the train up here is a revelation, let alone walking to get something for lunch…let’s just say, for now, that I’ve never before been intimidated by a grocery store. And also, that I will be grateful beyond imagining when the company moves downtown this summer.

That story, and my other musings on this place, are subjects for another post …if I can ever get enough peace and quiet at home to write one. Every time I sit down at the computer, Tim takes that as his cue to come out of his room and talk. Now, I love the bejeezus out of Tim, but I am by nature a solitary soul, and I have been CRAZY to write something all week—and I can’t write in the presence of a talking Hovercraft! He was out last night, but last night I didn’t get home til nearly 8 (I missed my damn train) and I was tired beyond reason and went pretty much straight to bed. He works tomorrow night, thankfully, so perhaps I shall have some time then.

Until then: It’s going well, yeah. Very, very well. Thank heavens.