Well, I've now been working for three whole days at...geez, I can't keep calling them Company B, can I? I'm not exactly the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. Um, okay, let's call them Hot Stuff.

So far, it's been a nice place to work. People are friendly -- new people keep popping into my cubicle to introduce themselves. There are such on-site amenities as an exercise room, a cafeteria that actually serves pretty good food, and a bookshelf next to one of the Coke machines stocked with paperbacks for browsing. (And yes, there's plenty of science fiction.)

The work I'm doing right now is fairly unglamorous: basically, I'm updating an old set of manuals that were written in Microsoft Word. Mostly doing formatting tweaks and stuff. The idea was that I could put my Word skills to work while learning the ropes, and it's been working well.

I gotta say, I thought I was pretty hot stuff with Word, but after this job, I ought to qualify for a black belt in Microsoft Word.

The only drag is that I'm using Windows and Office XP rather than my familiar comfortable Macintosh. It was strangely disorienting the first day or two. It's better now, but Word XP has a something like a 40% chance of crashing every time I close a file. This sux. Luckily, it's predictable enough (it only happens when I close a file) that I didn't lose any data from it after the first couple of times. Still, bleah. I'm hoping that maybe installing the service pack upgrade will help.

What's also funny is, you know what I really miss from OS X (besides a version of Word that doesn't crash like hell)? In Mac OS X, every window has these cute little colored blobs at the top left -- red for closing the window, yellow for minimizing to the dock, and green for...I forget, I never click the green blob. When you've modified a file, but haven't saved the changes yet, the red blob gets this cute little dimple in it. I miss that damned dimple. I never realized how useful it was to be able to tell at a glance whether a file had unsaved changes or not.

I really feel like I should be telling you interesting things here, instead of yammering about word processor user interfaces, but I'm tired, and I still have stuff to do before bed. More to follow soon, I hope.