Monday, June 05, 2006

First day at work

So today was my first day at Company X. To start with, I didn't even had a good night's sleep, thanks to some blood-sucking critters that have somehow developed the ability to fly higher and higher, probably due to mutation. Damn mosquitos.

Not wanting to be late on my first day, I woke up way early, even bordering the impossible. Actually I had no choice but to stay awake, my limbs itching with bites all over. Luckily the traffic was ok today since it was the school holidays and parents were relieved of fetching their pesky, spoilt kids to school.

There were 10 of us new hires at the company today. By the time we had our photographs taken for the badge, I had already got to know most of them. One was even a member of MyTeam, and a couple other defactors from a well-known company in Penang. Most of them were from the Klang Valley, so I reasoned that nobody would want to work here if they weren't local...with me being the exception of course.

We had our morning tea break...and in no time were brought to our respective departments. Mine was situated in a "clean area", meaning it was totally free of dust, particles, bacteria, viruses...you get the idea. Because of this special condition, we were required to wear these cute little thingies called shoe covers, somewhat resembling those covering a babies feet, except we had our shoes on. Imagine a full-grown adult in formal attire and at the same time donning red coloured mittens, and you know what I mean by cute. I assumed their purpose is to protect our shoes from getting dirty, but hey, I might be wrong.

One more thing about these mittens, I mean shoe covers, were that I couldn't get the right size. At first I didn't even know there were sizes. The first few pairs that I put on must've been meant for kids, aged 12 years and below. Practically tore the plastic covers to shreds trying to pull them on. And they made this funny plasticky sound when you walked...couldn't helped but felt that the entire office was eyeing me when I walked past. Really can't wait for the clean shoes to come.

My cubicle was located at some god-forsaken corner located near the end of the department room. I was virtually cut off from my supervisor and group members. The only benefit was that I could probably do things my boss wouldn't want me to and he'd never find out. PLUS I got a partial view of the sky, and could tell whether the Federal Highway was fucked up or not. Yes, I might be the next contributor to those traffic announcements one of these days.

"Traffic phone ranger Derek called to say that traffic is at a crawl on the Federal Highway, and based on his observations from his cubicle, he calculates that the jam will probably continue until 8.13pm, with 26 accidents happening in between..."

Yeah right.

Lunch at the cafeteria wasn't a good experience. But lucky for me and another friend, another engineer paid for our meals using the prepaid card (which is the ONLY transaction medium allowed), or we wouldn't have eaten at all. The food was rather tasteless, but was edible at the least. Some senior engineers told that it was already a big improvement from the past. I could imagine the malnourished faces of past employees wandering the corridors...SO glad I didn't graduate earlier.

To set up my workstation, I had to lug the CPU to the IT department, which was like 10 kilometres away. More like 500m but that's how you'd feel when you're walking with a ton of bricks in your lap. Another trip there to collect it nearly made my sole come off. Shoes probably don't have a long lifespan in this company, next time I might opt for hiking shoes instead. And I was just walking in ONE SINGLE BLOCK of the buildings. This place is HUGE I tell you.

Now for some technical description about my job. The group I'm in actually supports the design and development of the company's 16-bit microcontrollers, which I was told, is one of the market leaders in the automotive industry. Most car brands are likely to contain chips manufactured by the company, with the exception of Proton. Next time you plan to buy a Beamer, do have in mind that I probably had a hand in making it before you write that check.

So I spent the rest of the afternoon reading some device user guides plus some presentation slides on the product that I was assigned to, which nearly caused me to doze off in front of my supervisor. He seemed like a nice guy, but I'll reserve further comments about it until I get some real experience working under him.

Dead tired when I reached home, and yet I'm writing all this. A rather uneventful day for a newbie, but I don't have anything to complain about. REALLY. Tomorrow I'll get to park inside the building, w00t!

thought completed at 7:09 PM | 7 comments

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