I’ve Started My New Job

It’s only been a couple of days, but so far so good with the new job. I think I am starting catch on with all the systems and processes that are in use here. The people here are great and the atmosphere is amazing. One of the biggest things I have noticed was how people have welcomed me to the company. I am used to hearing “welcome to the company” or something else to that affect. Here, you tend to hear “welcome to the family”. This is a philosophy that is passed down from the top. The company offers free soda in all the break rooms and in the main break room on the first floor, we got a ping-pong table.

My only issue with the whole transition has been related to sleep. Sunday I was so paranoid about oversleeping that I took a sleeping pill and crashed at about 8:00 pm. Well, at 2:00 am I woke up feeling like I slept for 12 hours and could not fall back to sleep. I had no choice but to suck it up and just stay awake. Monday was better, but I still woke up much earlier than I wanted too – I guess you can say it is new job jitters.

My first day on the job was spent at a new hire orientation class, and of course obtained my new pink [magenta if I want to be correct internally] badge. These classes are typically pretty boring because they don’t have anything to do specifically with your job, but rather about the corporate policies and procedures. One important element of the training is going over the benefits; definitely paid attention to that. We had approximately 20 people in the class, but I would say about 50% of them came from AT&T. What do you think that says?

Tuesday, my second day, was spent shadowing some of the team members. I’ve been reading over training binders that the team created to get familiar with the terms and systems. I’ve got a lot to learn because everything is different – we use SAP rather than Oracle.

Today has been much better. I am actually accomplishing things. I’ve ran some weekly reports for the team, started to play around in SAP, and also started working on generating some orders with some team oversight. My manager took myself and the rest of the team out for a welcome lunch.

Honestly, from what I can tell so far, this company is a great place to work at. I’ve got some familiar faces that I once worked with at AT&T Wireless and the people here are truly wonderful. I definitely don’t feel like an outsider and they’ve all been very welcoming to me. Some things drive me nuts; particularly some IT policies. I completely understand the reasoning behind them, but it still sucks – our machines are completely locked down with no local admin access, so that means no software installations. From a desktop stability & security standpoint it makes perfect sense, but loosing out some on some great free tools that I once used really will become a pain down the road. Such is life in corporate America these days, so I can’t really complain. I have absolutely no regrets about starting this new job and really look forward to all the new opportunities that could/will be presented to me.

Make no mistake - I still miss all my colleagues at AT&T. They really are wonderful people and they all played an important role in shaping me into who I am today.

I am still catching myself refer to AT&T as “we”. I guess I got my old job still hard coded into my brain.