monday
at the last minute on friday, we asked them what the plan was for the morning. my supervisor wanted us there for 830 and we were to meet in this conference room that we only knew what floor it was on. thankfully, i lucked out and saw someone from orientation and found everyone else. turns out the room was really small for 16 of us...it fit more like 6. closer to 9 was when our supervisor was able to meet with us and start assigning us desks. then he began emailing everyone individually with what training modules we each needed to do. my email didn't come until like 1030. so for most of the morning, i was pretty much derping around, looking at the new initiate..i mean, new hire checklist.
after i got my training path, i began researching a little into wtf it was. i mean, he gave me my course names and codes, so i knew what in general i'm doing...and googling it didn't actually help. anyway, essentially, the training path i am on involves html and javascript for mobile platforms...aka, i'm going to be making apps here soon guys.. and guess who has totally done that before..? pffffff. lol. so we shall see how this goes. i will say though that i lucked out. all of us were assigned training based on our previous education and work experience, so another guy that graduated with me is doing the same as me. ...back to why or how i'm lucky. our training is a total of 64 hours. other people around me have training that is as many as 184 hours. holy crap. i mean, they do encourage us to learn other things if we're not working on a project, so i might delve into their topics at a later point, but mannnn. a whole month just for training.
anyway, i added my courses to my profile and started working on the first one..a little bit. the first module that i'm on has two people with funny accents. the guy in the desk next to mine agrees with me that we think they both learned british english and it's an asian man and an indian woman. their pronunciations are so funny. it's not engrish, but for example referred is "ri-fir-d" and not "re-ferred".
then it was lunchtime. i went home because my new corporate card was sitting on my doorstep. thankfully, i have a ups account so i got an email when it came. and my name matched this time, which is why i didn't get a delivery notification last week.... anyway.. i got back to work, derped around for a bit. i didn't want to start my training right away, so i activated my new credit card, played around with other things on my checklist... and then for pretty much the rest of the day, i worked on training.
tuesday
it was an interesting day. i went in just after 8 and started working on my trainings...except not because the server that was hosting them was down or something. yay 404 error. so, i went and worked on more checklist items. then, at 10 we had a meeting with our supervisors to have a formal introduction with them and had some time to ask them questions we had. during this meeting, we learned that we will soon be moving to a different floor and that'll be where our permanent desks will be. afterward it was so close to lunch time, so i kinda derped for a bit. then i got back to my training--it actually was working again. around noon, i went to lunch with two of the people from orientation, we all brought our lunch, but we went outside to eat. afterward we came back, another orientation person fussed (more like joked) that we haven't gone out to eat with them, so that's the plan for wednesday. afterward, i pretty much finished up the training module....except for the end-of-module assessment. hahaha. i wasn't ready for that yet. then on the way home, there was a torrential downpour with lightning and ridiculous wind and craziness. then my phone made that awful noise (like on tv) because there were flash flood warnings. yay~ and i was driving through it! it was the worst driving experience ever. apparently two people nearly got struck by lightning during this whole ordeal. and downed trees, flooded streets, and power outages! crazy man! also, apparently the power at my apartment went out briefly sometime before i got home, because the microwave and stove clocks were flashing.
wednesday
the morning was relatively uneventful. we moved to a different floor of the building and it took a while for us to figure out where our desks were. all of our orientation class has been split up by function. so there's only four of us together where i'm sitting. we've got a really nice view, we're in the one of the uppermost floors, in a corner area, so we have views of the river on one side, and downtown on the other. pretty neat. once we settled in, i marked a few more things off my checklist, and didn't really do any training until after lunch. we had two webinars, one before and one after lunch. the thing that really infuriates me about those webinars was that our company does the video feed through the web (with a chatroom on the side), but the audio feed is a conference phone call type deal. so stupid. it's not that difficult to just make it all on the web. >.> additionally, we don't have working phones at our desks yet, so we all called-in on our cell phones. also, the webinars were a teeny tiny expansion on things that were covered and demonstrated in orientation week. for lunch, about 15 of us from our orientation group went out to a local mom & pop seafood place. the gumbo i ordered was only ok, but i wasn't super hungry and didn't want to bring back leftovers. after the second webinar, i went back to my training modules. come to find out, only the first one we started on is actually interactive. the other six i have to do are textbooks that are 200 - 500 pages each. O_O
also, crazy phone alert sounds again. thankfully the day's flash flood warnings came after i got home.
thursday
it was another day of fighting with the training website and the module not loading properly or server errors. but i spent most of the day studying for the interactive module (offline via powerpoints i made with screenshots and audio transcriptions) and took the assessment in the afternoon. i got 21/23. oh well, whatever, close enough. haha. at lunch, i sat with one of the same dudes i've been hanging out with the past two weeks, and we checked out the break room right by our desks (he's among the three sitting next to me). instead of people watching, we river-watched. aka, there were a bunch of tugboats pulling cargo along our oh-so-beautiful river. lol, yeah right.
around 2, i got a call from the electric company. the weather knocked out our power and it wasn't going to be restored until midnight. but about half an hour after i got home, it was up and running again. then around 7, i got called that we (my physical apartment address) were still out of power and projected to be fixed at midnight. except i had power, and was surfin the net and cooking... so wtf. then i got another phone call less than half an hour later saying someone's nearby to fix it. then i got called again around 8 saying that we should be good. it was like geez man, so many phone calls and my power already came back...
friday
it was casual friday! w00t for blue jeans! ..except not...casual friday is basically jeans and polos, and anything else outside of our usual business casual attire is unacceptable... anyway, i spent most of the day not really making any progress whatsoever. i completed my weekly report on what i did this week, did a few things on the checklist, and i submitted my resume for review. i didn't mention this on here before, but we are assigned our first project, and after that we have to find them on our own. we have to use a specially formatted resume to apply and be interviewed before being allowed on any more projects. no pressure, right? anyway, there was that, a lot of hanging out with people--my friend finally came back from her project..for the day.......and other people from our orientation class wanted to visit and break up the monotony of their training modules. and at some point, we went to lunch at another local seafood eatery and i got crab & crawfish fettuccine. it was teh yums. then i spent most of the afternoon finishing up taking notes on my first module. i think this weekend, i'll attempt to work on one of my textbooks so i'll feel like i actually accomplished something. because honestly, i have been studying for the whole week--for the most part--and i don't feel like i'm as far along as i should be. at the very least, the guy i graduated with and i--we're kinda on the same page with our training, so it's not too bad.
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