This is it. My first day on the job at Urban Airship. I am a Professional Services Engineer and I work at Urban Airship. Me. Wow. It’s surreal. I am so fortunate and thankful and elated, nervous, excited! I’m pretty much ready to dive in and fill my head with lots of new information. Here I go!
Wayne dropped me off because he’s wonderful. I was to be there at 09:00 but arrived a bit early so talked to Wayne a bit before going in. He wished me luck and in I went. The woman at the reception desk remembered me and was happy to welcome me back. We talked for a bit while I waited for someone to come down and get me. I am horrible with names on a good day but even worse when I am nervous so I am sad to say I do not remember who came to get me. She was really nice though and I think her name was Andrea. Anyway, we decided I could skip the full tour since I had been there before and we went straight to the benefit and onboarding paperwork. That was a pretty quick process. She gave me my laptop and my badge and then someone else came in from IT and now that I think about it her name was most likely Andrea. Yeah, I suck at names. Andrea or not Andrea helped me get all the programs set up. It was easy because they just re-enabled the accounts I had before and thanks to my laziness I still had my login/password info stored in my password manager. Easy! But still a shit ton of things to set up.
John, my boss came to get me and take me to my desk. The pods take up the entire third floor of the Vestas building in the Pearl and they encompass the perimeter while meeting rooms are mostly in the center. Most of the walls are glass and it’s pretty much an open office setting but with different teams in separate areas. I was totally used to how to get to CE where I had interned but it was kind of cheating since it was right next to the elevators. My new desk is on the opposite side of the building. I get to sit next to John which will be handy since I will have 325,600,987 questions to ask him. He had my new keyboard, trackpad, giant monitor and the obligatory Nerf gun and ammo already set up for me. This pod was going to be different than the CE pod for sure!
I’m picky about my keyboard and John was nice enough to order me a CODE 87-key with Cherry MX clears. It’s sweet! He helped me get a few things set up and then we had a meeting to attend. I didn’t understand anything people were talking about but I’ll get there. After the meeting we went back to our desks and I set up more stuff. John took me to lunch at a Thai place across the street. We sat outside in the beautiful weather and talked about this and that. He’s really nice! He has a very calm, laid back demeanor. He seems to believe in me and my abilities and that makes me want to work extra hard to get up to speed quickly. That and the very interesting schedule we both have for the next month or so. Yes, today was my first day and tomorrow I get on a plane and head for Salt Lake City, Utah for YAPCNA and then to Ottawa, Canada for BSDCan. I’ll be gone for a week and then when I get back it will be John’s first week of his three week vacation! But that’s not all. I’m back for a week before we fly back to Pittsburgh for another week and then I’m back for two weeks and leave again for two weeks to go to Calgary, Canada for two weeks. Sheesh, it’s intense but I plan on working as much as possible while I’m gone. It will be interesting.
After lunch we went over more things. So, so many things. So many things. It was apparently the finals of a table tennis tournament at UA and John was in it so he left a couple of times to play. Lots of people welcomed me back. They were happy to see me and I was happy to see them too! I met a lot of new people as well and wow, the names. I have no idea. I stayed until about 17:30 when Jordan called to let me know he and Wayne were downstairs waiting for me. I packed up my stuff quickly and headed down. My head was sufficiently stuffed full of new information and I had a LOT to go over. It was a great first day.
Today I learned so, so many things.