in which I babble about work

9:10 am - Don't get me wrong. I'm glad to be going back to work. I won't deny I enjoyed being home, but it will be good to make money again. But I hate the beaurocratic nonsense attendant on first days. Forms and paperwork and procedures and tours. Damn it, just give me a desk and something to do. Right now, I'm sitting at a conference table, with Steve - the other new hire - waiting for someone to come tell me which anally-retentive process we'll have to follow when filling out timecards and expense reports. Then someone else will come and tell us about the corporate credit cards, and then we'll go on the grand tour. I figure it'll be after lunch before I know who I report to. Gotta love big corporations. I was mostly alert and awake before they showed us that video.

9:30 am - Expense reports, yippee! Lots more potential travel with Syscon, though, so I guess I shouldn't scoff. Now we're waiting for someone to come tell us about charge codes and timesheets. The receptionist is starting today, too, though she was a temp before. Sheesh. More paperwork.

10:10 am - Electronic timecards to be filled out in 15-minute increments. This has all the earmarks of a major pain in the ass. Ooh, boy, I think we get to go on the tour now!

3:50 pm - I actually got a desk before lunch. 11:00 is before lunch, right? I then had about an hour to install Visual C++ 6.0, since it hadn't already been done. I finished in just about enough time to go find my dad for lunch. The tradition is that one's supervisor takes one out to lunch on the first day, but my supervisor is a social hermit with a broken car. My supervisor is CK, the guy who grilled me the hardest during my interview.

At lunch, I told my dad I'd been assigned to him, and Dad told me that he thought it was a good position within the company - that CK's team is more or less considered the programmer elite of the office. They're also the most socially inept group, truly introverted geeks with a high variety of peculiar quirks... As Matt said when I was chatting with him via Instant Messenger, "Well, if you start squealing in binary, I'll know to request that you be transferred to another team!"

My officemates are the Two Mikes. (I'd use first and last initials, but they're both MB, even.) The entire hour I was in here before lunch, they didn't speak a word, except for a brief phone call to Mike I Can See. Mike Behind The File Cabinet was completely silent except for the slight noise of his monitor bouncing on the desk as he jiggled his leg. I wondered if they had taken an instant dislike to me - I'm the only female in this suite (the company is spread over four office suites) and I might very well have squashed any number of male bonds, or something.

At lunch, I found out that they are notoriously silent, so I felt better. After lunch, CK came in for a brief meeting, and they actually spoke to me to pass on some information. I brought in a tin of peppermints and told them to help themselves. They haven't, of course, but when I dropped the lid on the floor and cursed, Mike I Can See looked up and grinned. So I guess I'll be OK. I really need to get some CDs and my headphones in here, though - my office with Jeremy was never this quiet.

So. CK's geek quirk is that he loathes MFC and C++, and he's asked me to learn how to write Windows programs using plain C code. Eep. Luckily, there's a book. Mike Behind The File Cabinet dug it up and turned it over to me. I've managed to actually get the first program to compile and run. I'm not complaining too much - it sounds like CK doesn't have a real project to throw at me for a while yet, so I've got at little while to plow through this book. It'll even be helpful, I think, because writing more involved code will give me a better idea of how the system works - when I learned C++ (by being given a project; 3GI had a very sink-or-swim attitude about things) I was using Wizards which set up all the interactions for me and left lots of unnecessary code all over the place. It made writing applications much faster, but since I didn't know what was necessary or useful, then I couldn't figure out how the pieces fit together.

Note to self - wear cooler clothes tomorrow. And buy some more slacks.

The internet connection here is pretty choppy - my Instant Messenger was losing the connection about once every forty-five minutes or so - and so I doubt I'll ever update my journal from work. I suspect the pattern will be that I write during the day while taking breaks, and then upload everything in the evenings. We'll have to see how it goes, I guess. It's possible that the connection is smoother here in the morning.

I've got a whole list of things to bring in:

• Water and coffee mugs
• Wall calendar (I'll need to go buy one, I guess.)
• Decorations (pictures for the walls, monitor pets - the Two Mikes have nothing in the way of decoration)
• Kleenex
• CDs and headphones
• Various software installations

The good news is that my machine has a Zip drive, so I can drop all the software stuff on a Zip disk and carry it back and forth like that.

I'll have to stay until about 4:45 today - I didn't come in until 8, since it would have been pointless for me to sit and twiddle my thumbs until then, and my lunch with Dad took about 45 minutes. But I was ready to go this morning by 7:15, so I can start coming in at 7:30 and leaving at 4:30 and saving any time left from short lunches for Fridays or something, which is nice. How far you can stretch your flex-time is pretty much up to your supervisor, and CK seemed pretty lax in that area, so that's nice.

I think things might be okay here. I'm about as far removed physically from the icky politics as I can be, and I get the impression that simply being on CK's team gives me a little shielding. We'll see, of course - first days are hardly good impressions - but I'm glad to have a job again.

Ye gods! Mike I Can See actually smiled at me and wished me a good evening as I left!