Trial by fire

The dreaded first day has passed, my trial by fire has left me alive and unscathed. Like most first days at a new job, nothing went as planned.

I left a bit early to make sure I would arrive early, or at least on time in case of bad traffic, which was the case for me since I took University west through Tempe, not knowing that there was massive amounts of construction taking place there. I managed to arrive five minutes early at 7:55am to find out that none of the people I was supposed to be meeting were actually in the office yet.

At 8:20am, the security guard at the front managed to get a hold of someone in the company with some authority. A cute girl from some other department came and walked me over to the area that I would be working in and left me to fend for myself and meet a few of the people that were actually there. After a few minutes of walking and introductions, one of the people that I had interviewed with, a woman named Saru, found me and led me over to the team's area. She was quite clueless as to what I was supposed to do--rightly so, she isn't a lead or supervisor--so she started showing me the project that we would be working on.

A little after 9am, the lead (Daniel) and supervisor (Rey) showed up and were quite surprised to see me. There had been a decision late last week by the company's CFO to put our project on hold, but the job recruiter I went through had worked for over 20 years in Phoenix and managed to pull some strings to get them to at least bring me on for now. That was obviously not communicated to my superiors. Apparently no desk was ready for me, so they had to drag out a spare laptop and LCD monitor for me, but I still didn't have an account or email.

Shortly after getting all the hardware set up, lunchtime came around, and I was invited to eat with everyone on my team in the fancy company cafeteria. I met the fourth person in the company so far named Dan by this time as well. This was about the only thing that went right all day, as it was a nice time to unwind and get to know the others that I would be working with a little more.

After lunch, I pretty much spent the remainder of the afternoon fighting with my computer to install the basic software I would need to get some work done. I still hadn't been assigned a login to the network or email either, so I couldn't contact the temp agency or clock in or out. Hopefully today I will have everything in place and can get yesterday's time punches fixed so I get paid correctly.

All in all, it seems like a very friendly and nice place to work. It reminds me of the old days back at my previous job when it was GFS, before the merger, only with a much larger building and the company has significantly deeper pockets. The schedule is fairly flexible, I can come and go as I please as long as I work 8 hours a day, which is good on the mornings Kaylee is less than cooperative. There don't seem to be any overly-strict software policies--possibly because of the department I work in--so it seems to be up to our best judgment in that area. I was even encouraged yesterday to do some web surfing to get some ideas for the project, and let them know of any other software that would be useful and relevant.

The first day wasn't perfect, but it also could have been much worse. Things are looking good so far and hopefully this turns into something long-term and permanent. I don't have any regrets on making the change, except for the loss of some of the great co-workers from the last job. Now it's time for the second day!