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working yet again
Monday, March 24 2025
Today was the first day of my employment with a new employer down US-209 on the west side of the Mohonk Ridge. It would be a salaried position with my highest salary yet, though only just. The CEO had told me he likes his employees to get in at 7:00am every morning, which seems kind of early. But if that's the culture, and we're getting out at 3:30pm, it's something I can live with. And then I learned that I could show up at 8:00am this morning, so I split the difference and got there at 7:30 after getting out of bed without the help of an alarm a little before 6:00am (it was hard to sleep knowing my alarm would go off at some point). [REDACTED]
The receptionist let me in and took me to the head of operations, the nice (and surprising funny) director of operations. She gave me a bunch of forms to fill out, including tax forms and things to sign. One of these was a little unnerving and explained that I had no expectation of privacy while using company equipment and that I wasn't to disable any surveillance software. Well, no going back now! I filled out and signed what I could. And then M, the lead developer, came down and led me upstairs to my cubicle near the doorway to a dark room holding about six cubicles total. As I stood there, a couple IT guys were trying to set things up. There was a nice fairly-new laptop that was to be the one that I would be using, a couple monitors, and USB-C-based dock. But the dock wasn't allowing anything but the monitors connected to it to work. While they tried to figure out what the problem was, all the developers who were there came out to say hello. This was a nice ritual, but it felt a little awkward and forced. Eventually, while M the lead developer was showing me the basics of how the company's software is organized, the IT guys finally got my laptop working correctly. So then I could change my Windows domain password, start doing some initial clones from git repositories, and setting up my accounts on several applications that do things like organize passwords or allow me to log my hours. (I'd hoped that being a salaried employee would mean not having to log my hours, but in this company people log their hours. And there's even a key fob that tracks when we enter the building.)
Later I saw V, a young woman I knew from back when I worked at SCA in Red Hook. She'd been working there when they hired me and had even played a roll in my hiring. But I soon was assigned to the other half of the company and no longer worked with her, and then at some point she quit. But now, maybe five or six years since I'd last seen her, here she was at this company that just hired me! She now goes by a much shorter version of her name.
This afternoon, an introductory task had me wading into the weeds with Nuget in Visual Studio and absolutely hating my work-issued laptop, which runs Windows 11, a terrible operating system from which lots of the features I depend for my user experience have been excised. (It still defaults to hide the extensions of known file types, the single biggest reason computer viruses spread fastest and most aggressively among Windows computer.) Another problem was that I wasn't the admin of my own computer, so I couldn't install anything on it. It turned out that I was permitted to administer it after all, but it was in a way that required me to type in credentials (the long, ugly kind demanded by onerous password requirements) to make even the most basic of changes. I was having such a miserable time from all of this that it actually crossed my mind that I should just get up and leave, never to return. But I stuck it out, figuring I was just suffering from the first-day-back-at-work blues.
For lunch, I ate leftover mushroom tacos from the Garden Café. I'd brought a bunch of tea with me that I'd bought at the Kroger in Staunton, but I couldn't find any way to get hot water besides using a microwave, and my only cup was a stainless steel travel mug. So I ended up just pouring cold water on my tea bag.
Things improved markedly, at least in my brain, when the CEO called M and me down to have a meeting in his meeting room with his director of operations. Initially it looked like the kind of meeting you have when you're being fired, and it must've looked like I was thinking when the CEO saw me, because he said, "Don't worry, your're not in trouble yet!" He just wanted to know how my first day was going, and I lied and said it was going great. Soon we were all shooting the shit and joking around like we'd all done during my job interview, and I remembered why I'd wanted to work there.
I left the workplace at 4:00pm and stopped for a few groceries (mostly cremini mushrooms) at Mytown Marketplace (formerly Emanuel's) in Stone Ridge. That store is more ghetto than I remember; it stocks tofu and tempeh, but they're not the kind Gretchen and I like. As I was checking out, it seemed like the checkout girl had just had a meltdown or something, initially telling me she wasn't in service even though her light was lit. But then some other staffers nearby said I could totally use that cashier and she relented. She then said something about how she'd worked there for three months as though that was the reason for her weird behavior. She then almost had another meltdown about the technique I used when swiping my credit card. Good help is apparently still hard to find!
Back home in Hurley, I quickly made a spaghetti dinner in my usual way, frying up a pan of tofu, mushrooms, and those cremini mushrooms, along with a few bits of leftover asparagus. Gretchen and I were excited to watch the latest episode of The White Lotus, which we'd been waiting for for over a week. Later I took a bath to wash away the stress of my first day back on the job. Then I went to bed early to make up for a sleep deficit I'd run up last night.
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