New Job

I started my new job on Monday. I have had to get up early, take the bus downtown, and spend 8 hours in the office. So far all I have done is orientation we have some real training starting tomorrow. In the next couple of days we will be learning a variety of general tasks; mostly twists on professional writing and presenting to firm clients. The office is great, everyone is incredibly friendly and helpful, the support staff (people that help us develop deliverables and other items for clients and the IT staff) seems to be very professional and capable, and there are many resources for us to do our best job.

The presentation by the technical staff was actually quite amusing. It wasn’t amusing because of anything they did. It was amusing because it was so similar to the presentations we gave at the CSOM help desk to the MBA students. It seems that IT departments have the same problems with users everywhere. One point they made that was a big deal for our department as well was to always be honest. IT departments don’t care what you did to your machine – they aren’t going to think poorly of you. They just need to know what the problem is and how it happened so they can fix it. People being scared or embarrassed about having problems with their machines was actually a big problem for use. Another problem is when users get advise from their friends this usually caused more problems, we always would rather they had just asked us. This was also the case at work, the IT department specifically gave
examples where this caused problems.

This morning was also amusing because we took a whirlwind tour of the office, I still don’t really have a clue where to go, got our badges and watched 15 year old videos. The videos were funny because the situations seemed dated. The subject matter was serious and obviously of real concern so everyone took them seriously for that reason. But even the trainers had to laugh at some of the scenes. It has been overall exciting though and all the new hires are having a great time (myself included). It is also nice that they’ve taken us to really nice lunches the last two days, and we had a welcome dinner last night attended by some managers, consultants, and partners. I do get the impression that we will have a lot of work to do very soon.