Lots of little things went wrong but it went fairly well overall.
I got through big stack of paperwork in orientation without a hitch and arrived at the work-site one minute early. The guy that walked in the door just ahead of me used to run the Tuesday night handgun league at one of the shooting ranges. We probably haven’t seen each other in five years or so. I chatted a bit with him as he picked up a temporary badge and I checked in with the receptionist.
The guy I was supposed to report to didn’t answer the phone and the receptionist sent him an email. About 20 minutes later another guy I used to work with at Chromium Communications and one of my firearms students showed up to have a meeting with people at my new employer. We chatted for about five minutes and the receptionist made attempts to find someone else to come out and greet me. The guy I was supposed to meet finally showed up about 30 minutes late with the excuse that his phone was turned off or something. Whatever… it doesn’t matter. Just lead me to my office and computer. Oh, the computer that has been on order for me for two weeks still isn’t here. We had to scrounge for one.
I had a domain account and password but when I tried to set up my email the Outlook Exchange server said the account didn’t exist. Checking with other people revealed some servers recognized me and others didn’t. It probably will just take some time for the email alias to propagate to all the servers. It still hadn’t made it to my server by 17:30 when I left for the day.
As various programs were installing I started reading up on C# and wrote my first “Hello world!” program in it. That will be the dominate language in this new job. It’s past time I learned it and it’s great they are paying me to do so.
Probably the most amazing thing to me is that just a few months ago both Ry and I were living in Moscow 300 miles from where we now work and now we are working so close to each other that we can easily walk to lunch together. And there was no “intervention” by him to get me my job or vice versus.
April 2004 I started a contract in your building. My boss was much more considerate about getting down to the lobby. Nonetheless, one of our first orders of business was to wander the halls to scrounge a compute. Can’t complain too much, as I wound up with a dual-proc Xeon.
Similarly, the gig afforded an on-the-job opportunity to dig into C#. An entertaining, decadent language. In no time at all you’ll be defining your own attributes. Check out NUnit, a worthy framework for unit testing C# code. Brace yourself for WTT.
“My” computer is on loan from a co-worker and isn’t nearly as beefy as yours was. It’s more than adequate for the tasks at hand so I can’t complain.
WTT is ass.