I survived my first week with only minor flesh wounds. I think I did more eating than working but there were shoes to be dropped and they decided to temper the drops with calories. To refresh your memories, after ten months of being laid-off and over 170 job applications and over 20 interviews, I got a job. The difficulty was or is switching an HRIS mentality over to Marketing but this company wanted my technical skills more than my limited Marketing experience.

So far I've helped out but I still have a tremendous amount to learn in the remaining week before my co-worker goes on vacation and I have to cover for her.

What I'm finding particularly frustrating is the IT. In my old job at a World Class aerospace company I had Admin rights to my machine so I could install the programs I needed to do my job. This was a somewhat uncommon exception to the company rule but the IT people there knew me and trusted me since I was once a sysop.

Not so with the new company. To install a program or an upgrade I have to call the Help desk which has been outsourced out of country. They, in turn, will call the IT people to come down from the floor above me to install my programs, or the Helpdesk will remote install my programs. Either way it's annoying. I'm too hands-on and too experienced for this.

Both companies are so worried about their users installing virus-ridden programs, which is understandable. But both companies also make an even greater mistake. Neither company teaches or preaches the users to back up their data. To me, that's the greater crime. The companies have spam-filters, virus checkers, and active firewalls up the gazoo.

Data backups? Nada. Today, one of the Senior VPs had a hard-drive failure. Think the data was backed up? Nope. Think the Senior VP had a conniption? Yep. Think anyone told the Senior VP "Hey dipshit, did you back up your data?" Nope. Think the Senior VP is going to learn to back up his data? Maybe but only if his secretary does it for him.

Anyway. The first week is over and done. There's plenty to do. Nice folks, nice atmosphere. Unless I win the Lottery, I think I'll go back.