My First Week Working for Big Blue

It’s going to be tough to blog about work, mainly because I’ve signed an NDA about every­thing I’m work­ing on, and frankly, IBM seems to have some­thing to say about much of what the peo­ple who work there (as employ­ees or even con­trac­tors) say or do online. I’ve always tried to be mind­ful that any­thing writ­ten here can be seen in all sorts of places I hadn’t expected (mur­murs can be very loud indeed). So let’s see what I can talk about this first week.

First of all, re. the trips to Burn­aby and back: The first 2 days we drove there (or rather, I drove Pam to her work and then on to my office, which is thank­fully, a very short dis­tance after drop­ping her off). That wasn’t bad, but dri­ving in Van­cou­ver is never what one would call ‘fun’ (despite the Nis­san com­mer­cial — was it Nis­san? — that has a car smoothly cruis­ing at high speed across what is very clearly the Granville Bridge toward the high-rises of Down­town). From the new per­spec­tive of our new (used) car, the roads seem to be per­pet­u­ally con­gested, and the con­struc­tion work on the Canada­Line as well as all of the build­ings being built all over the city make for a chal­leng­ing col­lec­tion of choke-points in traf­fic flow. The oil spill clos­ing the Bar­nett high­way this past week didn’t help mat­ters, even though it was nowhere near our com­mute (but we think the extra traf­fic from there might have made a dif­fer­ence). I’m not sure I’m going to like hav­ing a car here all that much, except when I can get some­where that I couldn’t have got­ten with the bus. Per­haps a trip out to some gor­geous spot in the com­ing week­ends will help in that depart­ment. For the rest of the week, we fol­lowed the plan that we had for good weather vs. bad weather: If the sun’s out, it’s buses and the Sky­train; If it’s cold and/or rain­ing, it’s the car. So, with the typ­i­cal Van­cou­ver July sun­shine, we headed out to the bus stop (me a bit ear­lier than Pam because I had fur­ther to go and intend to get in at or before 9 AM most days). The #84 bus leaves from nearby 4^th Avenue and Fir street at just about 8AM on the nose. It dropped me off right by the new Van­cou­ver Com­mu­nity College(VCC)/Clark sta­tion in about 20 min­utes, and the Sky­train from there to Brent­wood sta­tion was about 15 min­utes. A final bus, the #123 from the Brent­wood sta­tion goes down Will­ing­don Street and takes a left onto Canada Way, and after about a 7 minute ride, reaches a stop fairly close to IBM’s offices. I’m in by 8:50 or so, hav­ing lis­tened to almost an hour of ‘The Assault on Rea­son’ by Al Gore on my iPod. Books on tape or pod­casts will be increas­ingly handy for the com­mute. I saw a lot of peo­ple on the Sky­train read­ing ‘Harry Pot­ter and the Deathly Hallows’.

There, I guess I’ve dis­sected the com­mute in detail. What else can I describe with­out break­ing any laws about secrecy?

I work on the first floor. This has advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages. The main advan­tage is that it’s a very pleas­ant, open envi­ron­ment, and not a cubi­cle farm at all (which is the case with the other 3 floors). Every chair is an Aeron (how 2000!) and other attrac­tive office fur­ni­ture and 3 float­ing flat-screen TVs flank a round meet­ing room, glassed-in con­fer­ence room areas, and a bunch of stretched fab­ric accents at the cor­ners of spaces. The moun­tains in the North are clearly vis­i­ble from the floor-to-ceiling win­dows, and because there are few offices, every­one can see them. It’s beau­ti­ful now to look out, but it might get a lit­tle depress­ing with the full view of the rain in Decem­ber, Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary. The main dis­ad­van­tage is secu­rity, or per­haps I should say SECURITY.

• You may not leave a sin­gle paper with any­thing relat­ing to work on your desk when you are away from it.
• All lap­tops must be bolted with cables to each desk.
• This lap­top must be locked away in a steel cab­i­net before you leave at the end of the day.
• After you turn on your com­puter , you typ­i­cally have 5 pass­words to enter at var­i­ous screens before you can actu­ally do any work.
• Finally, when you leave your desk for a meet­ing and don’t bring your lap­top with you (which is rare), it must be screen-locked and often have the lid down.

There are spot-checks by secu­rity per­son­nel and if you fail 3 of those, you are sum­mar­ily fired, with no hope of a reprieve.

The soft­ware sit­u­a­tion isn’t so hot either. Did I men­tion that they use Lotus Notes for mail? Geez, I never thought I’d see a mail pro­gram that makes Out­look seem…‘elegant?’… They’ve stan­dard­ized all of their UI dia­gram and wire­frame work on Visio, the worst draw­ing pro­gram I’ve ever had to use (and unfor­tu­nately used at 2 of my last 3 jobs).

And as for hard­ware, of course, every­one must use a ThinkPad. My ‘new’ one (which arrived on Fri­day, forc­ing me to use a loaner for most of the week) was a T60. Lenovo has not changed the design much, and this model has a curi­ous bat­tery pack stick­ing out of the back hinge like a big plas­tic ridge. I have to say that I’m not a big fan of ThinkPads. If only they had dif­fer­ent colours, or tried to smooth the edges a bit, because their dull black has a cer­tain drab­ness, espe­cially when you get a whole room­ful of them in meet­ings. It’s con­for­mity result­ing in an almost fune­real dull­ness; per­haps the one remain­ing piece of the ‘old’ IBM culture.

Of course, try­ing to get this ThinkPad to actu­ally work, even though it was brand new, was a chal­lenge. Here we ran into the usual dis­as­trous com­bi­na­tion of Win­dows and Cor­po­rate soft­ware poli­cies. I was not able to get Visio actu­ally installed on the lap­top from the cor­po­rate servers. There is a com­plex license rental that must be invoked and the rental soft­ware, Tivoli License Man­ager refused to load. Hope­fully I’ll be able to get it done next week. Try­ing to con­nect it to a printer also failed the first 2 or 3 times, requir­ing mul­ti­ple installs of the dri­ver soft­ware. I was amused to see that sev­eral obscure soft­ware pack­ages were pre­in­stalled on it, includ­ing Lotus’s Lotus-123, Orga­nizer and Free­lance Graph­ics. I guess it’s nice to know that those relics of the pre-Internet era are still on hard dri­ves some­where. Much of IBM’s desk­top soft­ware (for log­ging time and get­ting access to doc­u­ments, for exam­ple) is so ugly and clumsy that it’s almost laugh­able. I chal­lenge any IBM employee to con­tra­dict me there.

Despite those low-points, I can only say that the project that I’m on is really inter­est­ing, and I actu­ally feel that it’s worth work­ing on for the good of every­one, rather than just get­ting a pay­check. Oh, excuse me: paycheque.

It’s nearly 11PM, so I’m going to turn in early. TGIF.