First day at school
Well work, but there is a langauge to learn
Writing this on my iPaq on the train on my way into a new job. I think this is the right train, the doubt being purely that it turned up earlier than I expected. Which may simply translate into the previous train being later than expected.
The job is in a town about 20 minutes north of Madrid, in a place called Tres Cantos. The company is Deimos Space, and excitingly that's their field. It won't exactly be rocket science but I'll be working on European Space Agency projects - helping them look after all their satellites. The interview and company info was full of mention of Mission Control and Telemetry and Constellations (collections of satellites, apparently, like the Magellan ones for GPS).
I fell for the Space! angle and so out of the two on the table I accepted their offer last Tuesday. It's all happened very quickly - they called me the previous Friday (Start - 10 days) after my other job offer had been promised but not finalised and I sent a CV which they frantically pored over and then organised an interview for Monday (S - 7days). This was a fairly gruelling affair lasting nearly 3 hours but full of the sort of questions which I could answer intelligently and even show off a bit at times. Fortunately the interview (and most of the reports and specs I'll be producing) was in English.
A few hours later they called me with an offer and the following day I said yes. The 3 remaining days of last week were expected to be full of admin, but we got both social security numbers and a bank account on wednesday morning, and that just left one form Leathellin needed. All of which is just as well, as I got a cold and snuffled my way through S - 5days to now.
The train plays a very odd mix music as it whisks along - sometimes sounds like big band music , sometimes the backing music to chinese films, sometimes a string quartet but it's too faint to make out between stations. The mountains just hoved into view and I'm nearly there. Wish me luck (if reading this psychically at S - 10mins)
Well, it obviously worked - I type waiting for my return train at S +10hours. I think I've fallen mostly on my feet. The people are indeed friendly and the work well within what I can do but will stretch me enough what with speaking Spanish, using Linux everyday again and pushing me to be a bit more hands-on. The company's having the usual problem of rapid growth so I'm stuck in a rather corridor-like office with a bunch of other newbies and org-chart misfits, but a very nice bunch they are so far. A couple of coders and a scientist (identifiable from his US accent). He was introduced to me as an astrophysician, which he sadly corrected to astrophysicist. They invited me to their mid-morning break in the dedicated room with coffee and biscuits and a fridge of cold cans - having had such things at a company before it's always wrankled not to have them since. Although thinking about it I had to pay for tea tickets at my first job, but they were 5p a time from the slightly (OK, very) batty tea lady who came round twice a day.
The hardest part of the day was actually lunchtime. I accompanied my boss to lunch as planned. He's very gregarious as well as being about the scruffiest dressed person I've seen there - today's sartorial effort was a daffy duck T-shirt. And his English is pretty good too, but as he explained his lunch buddies aren't so linguistic and they all talk much quicker and less clearly when out at lunch. The outcome was me struggling to make out individual words and not really making any progress towards sentences. Ah well, it is all good practice. I did learn one idiom that transmits culturally - lots of colleagues have recently sprogged apparently so one guy described Deimos as a conejador (or something similar)... A rabbit farm.
No computer yet (they need to make one which can also run windows so I can have access to nasty, nasty Word to write all the docs for the customer) so a day of reading and making notes. I shall be comparing them with my bosses thoughts tomorrow. Largely it's the same old (reasonably interesting) drill of working out how to help someone model their part of the world. I need to get from vague requirements to share all the data between their systems better to designing a process and ultimately some software tools, and then help build them. So far, so normal - I plodded through hundreds of pages of specs, proposals, requirements, architectures, specifications and waffle. But every now and then there'd be the word 'spacecraft' or similar.
I did have a minor problem locating the loos, but they turned out just to be hidden behind a fire exit. The offices are rather identikit and so there were also a couple of times where I nearly barged into someone's office rather than getting a drink. And I am still snuffly. But I think 9 hour days (with a mandatory hour for lunch in the middle and an hour and a bit commute each end) will be OK really. And they have a nice compensating mechanism of giving us extra days off.
Leathellin also started work today and seems not to have died.