Hi ho, hi ho, ...
Started my new job this week. It's a doozy. My first day began in the standard "fill out paperwork" fashion. Then came the grand tour. Then "your first assignment:" read about the first product we're working on. Then I listened in on a conference call. Then I spent the rest of the day wrestling with what amounted to an IT problem. We're giving little gifts away to some contractors next week, but we wanted to pre-load some stuff on them. Unfortunately the software that comes with them is beyond crappy.
It was the second time I'd run across the concept of *truly* being required to load the driver software before *ever* connecting the device to the machine. The first is Hewlett-Packard printers (wtf, HP?). But that wasn't it. This software worked on some mystical prerequisites. You had to hold your hand just so, and it needed to be Tuesday (too bad it was Thursday), and the planets had to be in a specific configuration. So it only worked on one of the devices.
Then came the Google-Fu, except the devices had extremely generic names. No special spelling, no company name, nothing. But, they did have one thing. Engrish in the error boxes! I typed in the exact Engrish, found a forum where people were complaining about the same thing. One poster had even found an updated version of the software and provided a link. It worked great. Problem solved, I spent the rest of my day loading those puppies up and loading the software on some left-over swag memory sticks we had. I didn't get them all done that day, but I did the next morning.
Toward the end of the day I also began doing some data entry to keep track of some of the medical devices we're involved in testing. I continued and finished that on Friday morning. Then I went to a meeting with a client where we talked (I mostly listened) about a nifty device they're working on. Apparently we meet with these people a lot, so it's good that they're smart and this meeting didn't get bogged down in something silly (good omen).
I'm excited to be working again. I'm excited to be involved in work that will help save, extend, and/or improve the quality of lives. I guess it's not really possible to say after just two days that this is the perfect job or anything like that, and there are some quirks, but I'm working again! Now, to get working on this pile of debt...
It was the second time I'd run across the concept of *truly* being required to load the driver software before *ever* connecting the device to the machine. The first is Hewlett-Packard printers (wtf, HP?). But that wasn't it. This software worked on some mystical prerequisites. You had to hold your hand just so, and it needed to be Tuesday (too bad it was Thursday), and the planets had to be in a specific configuration. So it only worked on one of the devices.
Then came the Google-Fu, except the devices had extremely generic names. No special spelling, no company name, nothing. But, they did have one thing. Engrish in the error boxes! I typed in the exact Engrish, found a forum where people were complaining about the same thing. One poster had even found an updated version of the software and provided a link. It worked great. Problem solved, I spent the rest of my day loading those puppies up and loading the software on some left-over swag memory sticks we had. I didn't get them all done that day, but I did the next morning.
Toward the end of the day I also began doing some data entry to keep track of some of the medical devices we're involved in testing. I continued and finished that on Friday morning. Then I went to a meeting with a client where we talked (I mostly listened) about a nifty device they're working on. Apparently we meet with these people a lot, so it's good that they're smart and this meeting didn't get bogged down in something silly (good omen).
I'm excited to be working again. I'm excited to be involved in work that will help save, extend, and/or improve the quality of lives. I guess it's not really possible to say after just two days that this is the perfect job or anything like that, and there are some quirks, but I'm working again! Now, to get working on this pile of debt...