It’s about 11:30 and I’ve had 2 crazy days, both with work followed by events in the evening (Gamelan rehearsal last night, Holiday Party for our Condo tonight). Hence the lack of time to update this blog.
So, as to the long and short of it, work is OK. Relatively easy to get to, a very small company (really only about 2 dozen people), and this is a very strange (make that quiet) time of year. Still, there are things for me to do. Immediate goals are to improve the company web site, as part of a major marketing push. If I am to have a future with them, they will need to have lots of work coming in. To do that, they will need to market to decision makers, and point them to a web site that they are not embarrassed about. The current one has been argued about for about 2–3 years. If I can do any immediate good, it will be to have my team (3 people, including yours truly) get an improved site up by Christmas. That gives us less than 2 weeks, but I believe we’ll make it. My current tasks mainly are to write copy for the site, as well as write up case studies of all the projects they’ve done so far. This will require interviews, as well as screenshots of most of those products
The only downside to this new job is that the boss came out with his true feelings regarding the Mac. Not only am I forbidden to use one in the office (despite the fact that there is an eMac sitting as the second computer to a programmer there who never turns it on), but he really hates them and would like to see even that one dispensed with. Apparently once in a great while they have to support a Mac for a project. Most of the time, he’d prefer to just write them off. I wish I could change his attitude, but I fear that may be a lost cause for a long time. For now, work equipment is an awful old Dell and a combo printer/fax/scanner on the office LAN that prints faint black and white prints, contrasted with what I have at home, which is far better (ironic, isn’t it?). Oh well, on the bright side, this will insure the separation of work and home life. Not very much of a chance of taking graphics-related work home, especially if there are Visio files (and I don’t have the Professional version of Omnigraffle to edit those) for flow charts and the like. I was reminded today how much I hate Visio. It is still the worst piece of crap for software I’ve ever seen. Someone should tell Microsoft that the Align command stopped being a dialog box about 10 years ago! At least you can use arrow keys to nudge a graphic up, down or side to side. It only took them 5 years to put that in…
I’ll put more in about work as the days go by, but the first impressions are not bad. It’s a small, small place, and a little scary for that reason (better get along with the people in those 1 1/2 rooms, because there’s no one else!) I’ll also describe the building in more detail as well, as it is a character in the drama as well. Funny, I remember saying that about the town of Bedford Falls in It’s a Wonderful Life, which was on the other day (of course).
