Orientation
November 10, 2008 – 3:22 pmToday is my first day at the new company. I spent the first half of the day reading employee manuals, which are so boring that I had to exceed my normal dose of caffeine to stay awake. The second half of the day I wrestled with eight login accounts and eleven passwords: one for corporate email, one for work email, one for corporate portal, one for secured remote access, one for intranet site, one for enabling the propulsion rocket under my ejection seat. (Okay, I make up the last one.) There is no table on my floor that people can sit down and eat. In place of a lunch table, there is a ping pong table, probably for the sake of giving a cool image of the company. In my last company, there was a ping pong table too. It was used for a grand total of two times last year: once for the United Way fund raising campaign, and once as something to step on in order to change the dead light bulb.