Wednesday, June 25, 2008
19:41 by FoxTwo Today was sort of a whirlwind. I arrived on the dot, right at the start of the business day. The Human Resource Officer had not arrived yet, so the receptionist suggested I wait in the lobby for her arrival.
About 10 minutes later, a lady brought a huge burly gentleman out to greet me. I was told this is the head honcho, the big cheeze. He's da man! So after a quick round of handshakes, I was brought in to see the rest of the crew. More handshakes, and quick introductions. Then it was down to business.
Within 10 mins, one of the guys said - "Good timing, we got a meeting to get to!" and whisked me away offsite to a high-level pow-wow session with some business partners and vendors, to "give me an overview" of the upcoming project.
It was only 8.45am or so, and I haven't even been processed by the HR yet!
We came back to the office near to lunchtime. Finally I got processed by the HR and was "given back" to the IT department. Since nothing much was going on, my "guardian" (which is a tall American guy) and I proceeded to lunch, and thereafter went shopping for a phone, seeing as he just got into Singapore a couple of days ago and he needed a local number to be contactable.
In the afternoon, a big pile of project documents was placed on my desk and "it would be good" if I went through it so that I have an idea of the scope of the project as well as the work involved. When I say a big pile, I mean big. Easily the size of 3 reams of A4 paper stacked. Needless to say, it wasn't light reading.
What I can say is - the "foreign talents" here in the new place are truly talented. They know exactly what's going on, and what they need to do to "make it work". They don't "throw smoke" and if they don't know something, they will admit they do not know and they'll find out and get back to me. Talking to them is definitely nowhere near frustrating like it was in my previous workplace. The majority of them are from Europe and USA, but we have a couple there that are from China and India.
Towards the end of the day, my laptop arrived. Brand spanking new too, not an old, re-formatted, used one like what most other companies would do.
This was actually one of my better "first day" experiences with a new job and company. It wasn't too boring, aside from the big stack of documents that I had to read through. By the end of the day, I had gone through half anyway, so I guess by tomorrow I'd have a birds-eye-view of the whole thing, and thus, what my role is in the whole thing.
19:41 by FoxTwo Today was sort of a whirlwind. I arrived on the dot, right at the start of the business day. The Human Resource Officer had not arrived yet, so the receptionist suggested I wait in the lobby for her arrival.
About 10 minutes later, a lady brought a huge burly gentleman out to greet me. I was told this is the head honcho, the big cheeze. He's da man! So after a quick round of handshakes, I was brought in to see the rest of the crew. More handshakes, and quick introductions. Then it was down to business.
Within 10 mins, one of the guys said - "Good timing, we got a meeting to get to!" and whisked me away offsite to a high-level pow-wow session with some business partners and vendors, to "give me an overview" of the upcoming project.
It was only 8.45am or so, and I haven't even been processed by the HR yet!
We came back to the office near to lunchtime. Finally I got processed by the HR and was "given back" to the IT department. Since nothing much was going on, my "guardian" (which is a tall American guy) and I proceeded to lunch, and thereafter went shopping for a phone, seeing as he just got into Singapore a couple of days ago and he needed a local number to be contactable.
In the afternoon, a big pile of project documents was placed on my desk and "it would be good" if I went through it so that I have an idea of the scope of the project as well as the work involved. When I say a big pile, I mean big. Easily the size of 3 reams of A4 paper stacked. Needless to say, it wasn't light reading.
What I can say is - the "foreign talents" here in the new place are truly talented. They know exactly what's going on, and what they need to do to "make it work". They don't "throw smoke" and if they don't know something, they will admit they do not know and they'll find out and get back to me. Talking to them is definitely nowhere near frustrating like it was in my previous workplace. The majority of them are from Europe and USA, but we have a couple there that are from China and India.
Towards the end of the day, my laptop arrived. Brand spanking new too, not an old, re-formatted, used one like what most other companies would do.
This was actually one of my better "first day" experiences with a new job and company. It wasn't too boring, aside from the big stack of documents that I had to read through. By the end of the day, I had gone through half anyway, so I guess by tomorrow I'd have a birds-eye-view of the whole thing, and thus, what my role is in the whole thing.
