So, How's It Going, You Ask?

This is a great week. The new job is everything I could have asked for. I keep remarking how it feels like IBM used to back when IBM was good, and that was very good indeed.

The first day, after a 1/2 day of boring orientation, I met with my manager and she took me to my cubicle. She had personally ordered and stocked my desk with office supplies, and cleaned it herself on Friday evening. A brand new Thinkpad with a docking station was installed and working, with all the applications I need already installed. She had already requested all the passwords I would need (only half of them were processed by Monday, but that's certainly not her fault!) I had a nice new office chair, and my phone had the instructions for setting up voice mail taped in front of it. She had printed out my ID's and passwords and handed them to me personally.

This company uses the "buddy system" for new hires. The Senior Business Analyst was my buddy and she had prepared a binder for me with business processes, all the current requirements that the team was working on, org charts, maps of the building...just about everything I needed to know.

This company is VERY strict about use of their IT assets. NO NON-BUSINESS USE INTERNET! And their IT team is actually competent because there's no way around it. If you try a non-approved web site, it's blocked. If you try an approved site outside of the firewall, you get 10 minutes on a timer before it starts tracking you. Chat clients are blocked. No goofing off.

Now, the above might have been a bad thing for me in the past. My previous jobs have sometimes had the work run dry, leaving me with not much to do on occasion. Well, the good thing here is that there is a great deal of work to do, all of it interesting, and the day seems to pass quite quickly. I don't mind getting up in the morning (much) any more.

Now that I'm no longer employed by my previous employer, I have to say that the worst part of working there was the people. I swear, there weren't three people working there that I would have spit on to put them out if they were on fire. Arrogant, abrasive, unhelpful snobs, every one of them with very few exceptions. All of them were indispensible because of their knowledge and experience, and they were very jealous of it and wouldn't spend a moment trying to teach you anything. I spent two years there and never found anyone I wanted to go to lunch with. Until this week, I didn't realize how that experience completely drained me every day. I don't know how I put up with it for so long.

Anyhow, I've already executed a test script, uncovered some bugs in the code, rewritten the same test script, and documented the business process that takes the requirements from concept to production with a Visio flow. Once I get access to some SQL databases, I should be full speed ahead.

Did I mention that I like my boss?