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first day of my West Hollywood job
Monday, April 18 2016
location: West Hollywood, California
My internal timepiece was still on Eastern Daylight Savings Time, so I woke up early and went out to the kitchen area to see what sort of caffeine options might be available. Otherwise, the only food I had any claim to was part of a bag of overpriced peanuts I'd bought at LAX while waiting for Ky to pick me up. A cup of green tea was going to have to work for the time being.
Ni had been to the office before, but Da and I didn't know anything about the lay of the land, so Ky led us down Santa Monica to the condemned faux-New-Orleans-by-way-of-Cherokee Art-Deco building where the IT department had set up a temporary office. They'd only rented one room, though they'd managed to expand into a second one that nobody was using. This was essential, because in addition to the three other people I've mentioned so far, there were two other developers: Ca, someone whose specialty seemed to be CSS and an emailing system, and Ha, a recent hire living in Riverside (out in the east). Ha had been rearended this morning on the drive to work and, due to the resulting medical issues, we wouldn't be seeing much more of him.
My first assignment was to read through some documents that Jo had recently written establishing standards for the code. Evidently Da had been given early access to these documents and was already scratching his head about some of things he'd seen. I mentioned Jo's JQuery aversion in yesterday's entry, but there were other things as well, including the now-unfashionable coding standard of putting both curly brackets belonging to a code block alone on their own respective lines (something I still do, but which I'd thought nobody else had ever done).
For lunch, our entire six-person team hiked up to a mall-like cluster of businesses on Sunset Blvd and dined at Veggie Grill, the vegan fast-casual chain I've only experienced on the West Coast. Like most of the others on the team, I ordered a Buffalo Bomber, a supposedly spicy sandwich that I found a little disappointing. I'd brought my bottle of Dave's Insanity Sauce and made a bit of a spectacle of myself applying it to my food (mostly in the ketchup for my fries). At some point Ni asked me how I'd become a vegan (assuming that I was, which is an unspoken job requirement for this organization). I told the story of how, back in 2010, I'd been home for two weeks in a vegan household and how that had broken my addiction to cheese.
My document reading continued through the afternoon, occasionally punctuated by friendly non-work conversations with Ca and Ni whenever Jo and Da were elsewhere (they were mostly in the other room). At some point in the afternoon when my body's need for caffeine was at an all-time high and I would have otherwise been taking a nap, Jo showed Da and me the various admin tools and CMS of the website(s). I tried my best to pay attention but my brain wouldn't play along. I nearly nodded off several times.
Work ended at 5:30, and Da, Ni, and I set out in search of some place to have dinner. (Ky had invited us to the nearby Kung Pao Chinese place, but that was also functioning as a job interview for a potential hire in another department, and it seemed like it would've been weird for us to go). Using the HappyCow app, we eventually decided on a small vegan falafel place called Fala Bar. On the walk there, we stopped to look at a real estate material for an ordinary-looking house being sold on a side street near Santa Monica. Ni asked Da and me to guess its price, so Da (thinking like an Atlantan) guessed something like $400,000. I said "$900,000." The actual answer was $1.4 million.
As we ate our falafel, Da continued to reveal himself by showing more than telling. Not only is he always on, but he's also always at work. Thus our dinner discussion centered mostly around web technologies. With his oddly rapid-fire Atlanta accent and his name-dropping of unfamiliar technologies, it wasn't always easy to tell what Da was going on about. There was something appealing about his enthusiasm even though on some level it would have been nice had he shut the fuck up.
Always the good host, Ky came from the thing at the Chinese restaurant to pick us up from Fala Bar in his own car (not the one belonging to The Organization). He drove us to Trader Joe's (up at the same place as Veggie Grill) so we could buy groceries we might need for the week. I knew all the things I wanted there and got two bags of stuff, including a box of knock-off Cheerios, roasted sunflower seeds, frozen pizza, and a bag of frozen tempura cauliflower. We also went to the Whole Foods down near Santa Monica Blvd., and, though I didn't buy anything there Da decided to load up on many bottles of kombucha for some reason.
Still being on Eastern Daylight Savings Time, I turned in a little after 10:00pm, though Da would stay up late for an additional four or five hours coming up with a visual redesign for The Organization's internal IT task management system. I don't know how he can maintain such levels of energy with only five hours of sleep.
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