|
|
|
at least as shy as I am
Tuesday, September 4 2018
I woke up early, before my alarm could go off, and then got ready for my first day at the new job across the Hudson. It had been so hot last night that I'd drenched my part of the bed with sweat, so it seemed prudent to also take a shower. For some reason I left the house at least a half hour before I needed to, though I did stop on the way at Target (which in my mind keeps turning into Kmart, the place I bought my first computer back in 1983) so I could have a thermos coffee mug solely dedicated to this new job.
When I walked into the office of my new employer, nobody there knew who I was. They wanted to know how they could help me. "I work here!" I declared with some satisfaction. A skinny older guy with a standing desk seemed to be in charge at that moment, and he took me upstairs to meet the head honcho after I'd mentioned his name. It turned out that I wasn't crazy, that indeed I had been hired. I was soon set up with a desk, though it took awhile for anyone to get around to even giving me the WiFi password, and everyone seemed so busy that I didn't want to disturb anyone. So I fucked around with my phone, because that's always an option.
Eventually I had my WiFi password and even a Gmail-hosted email address at my new employer. It felt so great to use my Christian Christianson Google Chrome profile for this new workplace identity; it had been the one I'd used with Mercy For Animals up until they fired me. My first task was perfect for me: it was easy to define but would take hours to complete. There was a MySQL database whose dump file was 48 GB zipped. My job was to extricate the documents from its blob columns and put them in a file system. Since it was a brand new job and I had nothing to start with, I decided to do this with a mix of MySQL and Python, the latter being a scripting language I have on my resume but which I barely know.
Anything done with a file that size takes forever. It took a couple hours to download it over a fast internet connection of 6 megabits/second, but then trying to copy it from my personal laptop to this other laptop I'd been "given" (a powerful HP Envy X360 with 8 gigabytes of RAM and Windows 10), the machine-to-machine bottleneck was so terrible that I ended up downloading it off the internet on the loaner laptop a second time. Unzipping that file took another half hour. And only then could I attempt to install it on the LAMP installation I'd set up on the work computer.
I should mention that I don't have much experience with Windows 10, and, in the course of installing all the software I need (Atom text editor, Notepad++ text editor, Cygwin, WAMPServer, Python, etc.), I did what I could to make it UI resemble the look of Windows 2000 as much as possible. That's how I want to work; on Windows XP, I found the default setup patronizing and infuriating. The same was true of Windows 7. It's impossible to make Windows 10 look and act like Windows 2000, but I got part of the way there. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any way to dejunkify the Start menu (or whatever it is called these days) or Windows Explorer (by which I mean the GUI view into the hierachical file system). Under Windows 10, all of that stuff is so cluttered with stuff I don't need and don't want to see (some of it provided to third parties as advertising space) that it makes me want to cry (and it also makes me want to stick with Windows 7 on the computers I use). I should also say that the whole Metro æsthetic, with its flattened, often colorless icons and overlarge (but unadorned) sans-serif fonts strikes me as hideous and overly-reliant on the language parts of the brain, a design choice that will strike design experts as a boneheaded thing at some point in the not-too-distant future. I also hate the fact that now the horrible ribbon idiom that I hated in recent(ish) versions of Windows Office now seems to be poisoning the entire Windows UI. And one final point cannot be stressed enough: even in Windows 10, the OS hides file extensions by default, presumably because they look too "technical" for some computer users. This is why those same users are still routinely fooled into believing a .txt.exe file is actually a .txt file. In 2018. I'd much rather the OS had a way to hide or suppress all the visual noise that crowds around and jumps up to do things I don't want it to do.
I was kind of hoping that someone would invite me to lunch or something like that just to pull me into the workplace culture of my new job. But this wasn't that kind of workplace. The people here avoid eye contact, and everybody to a person seems at least as shy as I am. But I'm the new guy; I'm supposed to be shy, and everybody here looks super-busy. So it's not like I'm going to be marching up to random people and making introductions.
Until I got my non-compete agreement, I wasn't even sure what my new employer did exactly. Today it was clear that they make software for municipalities to handle their taxes, water bills, and all the other stuff municipalities need to do. It's basically a government contractor, but for small-scale things-really-need-to-fucking-work local governments. This is something I can totally get behind, and the programming challenges are likely to be in my wheelhouse. I just need to find something to love in my co-workers, and things will be golden.
Without anybody inviting me to lunch, I walked the several blocks to the downtown of the village and went into a lunch-type place that, on the web, seemed to sell good burritos. Nothing seemed vegan-friendly on the menu, but it turns out they understood what vegan meant, and the bean & guacamole burrito they made for me was almost of San Franciso quality. It even came wrapped in aluminum foil! I ate it on a park bench near the village crossroads and then walked back to the workplace, cleaning the chipotle sauce off my pants in the small bathroom my employer shares with several other businesses in the workspace.
So far, my big connection at my new job is Alex, the keywording guy who had to get a job here when his keywording business fell on hard times. He's a good guy and did some of the things one expects of existing employees when a new person comes on board. Late in the afternoon, he and a new colleague named John had a hilarious conversation about whether or not Sgt. Pepper is the worst Beatles album, and Alex saw to it that I contributed to the discussion. Being the new guy, I was in full-on "troll mode" and offered that I actually liked Wings better than the Beatles, which, surprisingly, John took as an almost-acceptable answer. He's about my age or perhaps older, and he seemed to know about music from that period. He even brought up one of my favorite bands, the Moody Blues. I was thinking: "I just need one night at a bar with these guys, and it'll all work out!"
At around 5:30 I took off, arriving home at around 6:00pm. I found Gretchen and the dogs hanging out in Gretchen's porch, where the fan made the temperature absolutely perfect. We chatted some about my new job and its weirdnesses. "The first day is always the worst day," I declared.
On my way to perform an automotive task, I happened to notice a large puddle near the end of the basement hallway near the boiler room. That was an emergency that would take up most of the rest of my evening.
I eventually discovered the source of the water: a tiny trickling leak from the well's water pressure switch. That switch contains a lot of steel, and (over the 24 years of its lifetime) corrosion had managed to eat its way from the surface to where the pressurized water was. While I was diagnosing this, Gretchen was making yummy "wet tacos" based around kale, mushrooms, tempeh, and soy curls. Things were stabilized enough after my diagnostic work for me to eat that dinner before driving out (with both dogs) to Lowes to get a new pressure switch. Installing it and using a wet vac to slurp up the puddle turned out to be less of a chore than I expected, though it left a lot of air pockets in our household plumbing.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180904 feedback
previous | next |
