Yesterday Pt. 2

Before I went into work I took Dogger for a walk. I didn’t need to be at the office until 8am, practically in the middle of the afternoon for me and so I had a lot of free time before I needed to leave for the day. I took Dogger out and she kept looking at me Do you know what time it is? Do you have any idea what time of day it is? This isn’t walky time, this is sleepy time. I want to go back to sleep. Why are you still here? Go to work!. It was kind of weird, it was 7am and I was walking my dog when I was usually sitting down at my desk. It felt kind of freeing.

The day before my first day on the new job, on the last day on the old job, I gathered up my things and took them down the hall. I spent some time taking all my pictures down and gathered up all my stuff and neatly boxed them up. The first day of the new job I took my things out of my boxes and put them back up. The old job required tape for this, the new job, thumb tacks. For five and a half years I had no use for thumb tacks. The only thumb tacks in my life were the ones on an unused cork board leaning on the wall outside my door. Suddenly, I am was about thumb tacks.

Having arranged all my stuff, I took my seat at my new desk. And I sat there and sat there. The phone rang a couple of times but when I answered it there wasn’t anyone there. The new job comes with a different phone from the old job. It has a lot more buttons. I learned to stay away from the phone. Eventually, 60 percent of my time is going to be spent on that phone, I hope someone tells me how to use it.

Still sitting there. I tried to log on to the computer but it wouldn’t let me log on under my name and then it told me that I needed to call IT if I wanted to go forward. So I sat there and felt my blood pressure creep up. My new supervisor finally came in and we got to training.

We sat down and she started to explain everything and pretty soon I was totally over loaded and I discovered that just because we worked with the same programs, we spoke to those programs in different ways. This is very scary for me. I knew we spoke different dialects but it seemed like we weren’t even speaking same language and there are all these things to learn and I spent several hours watching my supervisor do all these tasks and learning the tasks and the first time I tried to do something, I couldn’t do it. I hate the first day.

You know what would be great? If you could just walk into a new job and be able to do right off the bat. You know, just hit the ground running. That would be great.

The good thing was that due to all the training, the day flew by. The IT person changed out the computer on the new desk with my old computer and by 3:30 I was able to check my email. It was the first time I exhaled all day. I could delete my spam. I was at home.