My Brain Hurts

Exactly 2 months to the day I left my last job, I started a new job.

I know how this goes. I've been down this road a number of times - life as a contract worker.  This time I can't find anything really different in the situation other than to say I now work in a building and a team that is 99% men.

Case in point, I used the Women's Restroom (no idea why I capitalized that) 4 times today at varying intervals and never ONCE saw another woman in it. 4 our of the 5 stalls still had the seats up from presumably the cleaning crew. 

Still, I got up and managed to get myself out the door and to the building by 10am.  That will not be my normal working time, its just what fit in the new boss' schedule. The sun was out today so I drove top down as I determined the best route to the new building.

I now work in a "studio" building at Hotel CaliforniaSoft. The "studio" buildings are reserved for Xbox development, windows phone dev, and other entertainment type development. They aren't buildings the project manager has ever been in. So Studio X is my new home and in traditional Hotel CalifoniaSoft manner the layout appears to be designed by blind monks in Italy. Nothing makes sense. There is  no straight hallway in this building. There appears to be little "cubby" areas where a few offices reside - you wouldn't know they were there unless hypothetically you got lost coming back from the rarely used Woman's bathroom.

My first meeting was with the new boss L and a new co-worker G. The new boss laid out what I would be doing and provided me a nicely typed out "itinerary" of this new role.  It's all very exciting and I sat in this hard director's chair trying to appear like I knew what he was talking about, all the while wishing I was back at home sitting on the couch watching "I almost Got Away with It."

Such is the first day in any new job. There's new people to meet, new locations, new information and new acronyms. Oh man how Hotel CaliforniaSoft love their acronyms. I already have 20 on my quickly growing glossary I started at 10am.

Then it was off, down the hall, around the corner, down another hall to my new office. Oddly enough my new office (officemate included) has a window. It's rare, very rare, for contractors to have a window office and yet we got lucky. I don't have the story as to why yet, but I'm sure I'll wiggle it out of the new officemate.

The new officemate is a 20 something guy who's relatively new to his job too - 3 months new.  He'll be one of my main stakeholders in this project and from what I can tell, I'm going to thoroughly enjoy working with him. He's bright, he appears to shower, he didn't smell and he pronounced my last name correctly.

I then spent the remainder of the day reading.  Oh boy did I read. Naturally, nothing really found a home in my brain so I'll be re-reading tomorrow.  Still I found by the end of the day I felt more confident about this job than I had about the last.

So what is it I'm doing?

I'll be creating a data map for this team showing where all the data they receive from subscribers lives, what's being collected, and what, if any, audits are done with this data. Sounds easy enough, and I suspect that I may be a bit naïve about how "easy" this will be. There are "studio" sites all over the globe from whom I'll be tracking down this information. In some case, not many, we have contacts at this locals. In most we do not. So if herding cats, and finding a needle in a haystack sounds fun to you - this could have been your job.

I suspect this job will end by June 30th. The talk today was that I should be able to complete this task for the Xbox side of the entertainment house by the end of the fiscal year. Which means I'm done. There was some discussion about, depending on how successful this is, continuing on and doing this for Windows Phone and a few other areas this team is responsible for. So there is a "small" chance it'll be extended - we shall see. In any event, I'm planning as if it will end June 30th.

The ingrates who live with me (aka the demons/kittens) didn't even bother to greet me at the door when I returned tonight. In fact, for a moment as I climbed the stairs to the living room I thought maybe they had 1) killed each other or 2) got locked into a room or something (don't laugh - Linus locked himself into the bathroom the other day). As I crested the stairs to the living room, there they both were, still blinking lazily (is that a word?) as if I interrupted their nap. Good for nothings. Here I was all worried that they'd miss me, and from what I can tell...they did not. There's always tomorrow I suppose. Assuming I can find my way to the new office and back from the Woman's Restroom again.