Saturday, February 17, 2007

A brand new world

I realized, not without some degree of surprise, that a whole week has passed me as a wink of an eye and that I hadn't time to even think about writing something on my blog. The reason is simple and it's indeed a good reason: my new job.

It's surprising how time passes quickly when you have something to do, I had forgotten the feeling of discovering it's past lunch break not because you have been staring at the clock every five minutes or so, but because your stomach is sending noisy protests (not that he stops afterwards, considering that until I' allowed to be back to the pool, my lunch consists of one banana and a yogurt, but that's another story) or the surprise of rising your eyes from a paper or a PowerPoint presentation to realize it's time to go home or that, as it has happened the last two days, that you should already be there.

Now, to be honest, it could not be always like that. For a series of delays of the HR department I happened to start the new job much later than the date planned, which originally should had been the 1st of January and then was moved to the first of February, just in time for me to be in hospital. That, in turn, made me start the new work two days before the new Board of Directors took office and in a week where, for one reason or the other, the personnel of my department was reduced from 6 to 2 members, one being the totally inexperienced me. So it happened that I had my baptism of fire in the worst situation possible (I didn't even know where the documents were stored, not to mention how) and to make things even heavier, 2 senators and a member of parliament chose exactly this moment to start asking things to the Government about us and on, obviously, who's asked elements about the answer if not the "Institutional Relationships" department?

And yet, despite a lingering feeling of being inadequate, or at least totally unprepared to face the situation, it was exciting to deal with all of that and I probably have spoken more with my new boss over the past week than I did with my former one over the last three years. All in all, I still have no clue for real about what I'm doing in a general prospective, but in the specific I'm pretty happy, even if, having lost totally the habit of working, days of intense use of the brain for 8 or 9 consecutive hours left me exhausted in a way that I hadn't faced since the last weeks of thesis redaction at University.

The funny thing is that in less than a week I already established myself as the computer-savvy guy of the department, especially when it comes to PowerPoint presentations and graphical editing (which, considering we are also a PR department, come handy) and that without doing anything really special but revamping the limited knowledge I had acquired and then never used again since University time, but such is life I suppose.

On the wrong side, because there's no rose without thorns, I've just arrived there that rumors about my boss being removed by the new CEO are spreading around and a few, older, members of the department (even if not of my same area) more or less evidently feel threatened by me. once again, I might be facing in the near future a cold war I did nothing to provoke.

A brand new world, in the end, but with some elements of the old one indeed.

1 comment:

shinsengumi said...

I'm glad to hear that you're finding your new job engaging thus far and that you're enjoying your work. And, of course, I hope you manage to dodge the bullet of office politics.

Take care! Oh, and happy lunar new year ^_^