July 31, 2000

on the first day

I walked into building 420 and was completely baffled. All the buildings look alike, see, but I could've sworn it wasn't the same building I had my interview in. Everything was backwards. The reception desk was on the left hand side. It was on the right hand side, before. And then there was the kitchen area, which had mysteriously moved to the right hand side, where it was on the left hand side before.

Thing was, the receptionist was exactly the same.

I stared at her. She grinned.

"This isn't right," I announced. "What is this, the Twilight Zone? How'd you do that?"

"I remember you," she informed me, and waved. "So you got that job?"

"Yup. Weird, isn't it? Go figure. Why is everything backwards? Or am I just spatially dyslexic?"

She waved at the glass doors and the identical building across the short courtyard. "You're in the wrong building. I go all over the place. You want 430."

I thanked her and wandered over to the other building to investigate. Thankfully, everything was exactly where they should be. My new manager came padding out after being paged, and greeted me by name. Always a good sign, when your manager knows your name.

Orientation, which started at nine, lasted over three hours.

"My last job was a start-up," the woman behind me told someone during our halfway-break. "Orientation was, like, 'here's your desk, here's your computer, go to it.'"

Today I started my new job as an International Project Coordinator at excite@HOME. In many respects, it's my dream job. At least, I think it might be my dream job. It's difficult to tell because, despite the fact that I was there for 9 hours today, I didn't actually do any work. No, that's not quite accurate, either. I cleaned the copy room. That's work, isn't it? I scheduled three meetings for tomorrow. I met the admin assistant, the Project Coordinator for Deployment, several techs, and made friends with one of the Engineers in my group.

I also unpacked my cubicle.

Here's the thing. For some reason, the person in charge of the groups forgot that I was going to start work on Monday until last Friday, at which point she hastily informed the admin for the group and filed a requisition request for a computer and telephone for me. A perfectly understandable thing to have happen if one is really busy. C'est la vie.

Facilities, who has been deluged by new hires, snorted. According to the admin, their general sentiment was along the lines of: "When pigs fly." The admin came to check out what I needed in my cubicle on Friday afternoon, and discovered to her horror that there was literally nothing in there. No furniture, no chair, no computer, no filing cabines --- nothing.

She spent Saturday at the office with her kids, stealing furniture from empty cubicles and stuffing it into mine so I would at least have a chair to sit on. Above and beyond the call of duty, that is. I blubbered my gratitude to her.

In the meantime, I don't have a computer or a telephone or an email. Those will come along eventually. My first day at this very high-tech firm was spent being almost aggressively low-tech. I scribbled little notes to myself on stickies and pasted them to the walls of my cubicle. I poked through a textbook I can't make heads or tails of. I drank a lot of tea.

I went to the bathroom a lot. I drank more tea.

Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow I have meetings. Today was laid back, casual, and relaxing. Not a bad first day of work.

My manager walked me past the reception desk. "I've been out for two weeks," he told me, "and I just got back in today. You'll be sitting here--" He guided me through a magnetically sealed door, steered me to a cubicle, and stared at the empty desk. There was nothing on it except for a cardboard box labeled "Office in a Box," put out by Staples. We peered into it and discovered office supplies.

"Well," he said, weakly. "At least you have a stapler."