So, last week was my first week at "Geekville". It went pretty well. I'm having a reasonably good time, despite the usual first week woes of IT troubles, meeting tons of strangers and trying to remember their names and job functions, and not knowing where to find anything.

One of the funniest things was arriving, opening up my e-mail for the very first time, and discovering that I already had 328 unread messages. "Oh, that is nothing," said the IT guy who came to make sure my office PC was set up. "I had 742 unread messages on my first day." Turns out that my e-mail account had been set up a full week before I actually arrived, and I had been subscribed to a number of mailing lists. Including one that seems to send me an e-mail every time a programmer checks in a code change. I guess I'll never get to say to a programmer, "Hey, you guys never let me know about that change!".

I spent a large portion of my second day setting up a set of e-mail filters and rules, trying to make sure that I don't miss any important e-mails amid the flurry of mailing list traffic. So far, so good.

Oh, and then there are the acronyms. Every place has its own jargon, and that jargon inevitably gets condensed in acronyms. PE, SE, GA, EA. HCL, RTM (alas, it doesn't mean "read the manual"), MUI. OMG, I need a glossary PDQ.

On the upside, my coworkers are very cool people, and they all seem very glad to have me on board. I share an office with a very quiet programmer. There is a Volkswagen hubcap affixed to the wall of my office. I have no idea why. There is a remarkably efficient system for reporting IT and equipment problems, so I haven't had to spend too much time chasing people down in order to get what I need. (I still can't get into the CVS repository, mind you, but I haven't had to *hassle* anyone about it - IT is working on it.)

Geekville seems peculiarly determined that its employees (whom it always refers to as "people", not "employees") should never go hungry or thirsty. I have access to all the bottled water, soda, Gatorade, V-8, coffee, and tea that I can drink, as well as ramen noodles, peanuts, popcorn, chips, candy bars, granola bars, beef jerky, and all the necessary fixings for making peanut butter sandwiches. To compensate somewhat for all that junk food, they also have fresh fruit delivered every morning, and have a catered lunch delivered once a week. I think that this is all supposed to be in compensation for the fact that we do not have a company cafeteria of our own, though the company next door lets us eat at their cafeteria. It's apparently not uncommon for employees to gain 10 pounds in their first month. I'm trying to avoid this fate by sticking for the most part to fresh fruit, fizzy water, and coffee.

The coffee in the breakroom is actually really tasty. (It's Peet's,)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to my second week - I feel like I'm starting to find my feet, so I can start to actually really dig into my assigned projects and start hacking out some docs.

And two new tech writers start tomorrow (including my former acting manager from Hot Stuff), so I'll no longer be the newest newbie.