At 8:15 this morning I was sitting in the lobby of Laws R Us waiting for my tour guide...no, orientation leader. A small crowd of us were taken to the fourth floor and a nice training room where I was alternately intrigued and bored for seven hours.

Two pieces of fresh fruit twice a week for everyone? Sixteen hours off a year for volunteer work in the community? A thirty minute recorded Powerpoint presentation on how to use the benefits web site where the volume went up and down on an irregular basis? I was overwhelmed and fried by 3:30. Also, there were no doughnuts or fruit and, ugh, the same Caribou coffee I drank for the last five years and am thoroughly sick of.

The facility tour part of orientation was fun. We went up and down stairs and through a few buildings and looked at the roofs of some more. I have a good sense of direction but I really had no idea where we were. I asked about an online map during orientation but apparently there isn't one. My method will be to just start walking and hope I see the right numbers on the cubicles before I get to the end of the building.

The parking discussion was really interesting. If you come in after 8, you have to part in the farther parking lots. If you come in at 10:30 for some reason, you have to go the farthest parking lot, somewhere near Lakeville, to get a space. Luckily, during the winter there's a shuttle bus to pick people up and drop them off in the lots. I don't know how I'm ever going to remember where the car is if I don't have a stable parking spot. Every day will be like the time I wandered around the Disneyworld parking lot for (what seemed like) an hour at closing time trying to fine my car.

I have worked in a large company and I'm pretty cynical but this place actually seems to have kept the employees in mind when they designed the building and benefits and developed the culture. Are they really that incredibly devoted to training and personal development? Can I really call a meeting in the huge inhouse coffee shop? We'll see.

There are some downsides to size, of course. The cafeteria has so many food stations with long lines that I grabbed the most convenient thing I could find instead of being swept out the door before I could get anything. One of the other newbies wound up eating something she didn't want because she waited for ten minutes in the Deli line and didn't want to start over when she got to the front and discovered she was actually in the salad line. At the end of the day I confidently started walking down a hallway toward, I was sure, the north exit when my orientation leader saw me and asked why I was going that way. "Uh, I was going to the door??" No, it was the other way. Will I find my cubicle again tomorrow?

It is a cubicle, kind of smallish with shortish walls and a table I can pull out for a work space or to have meetings with people sitting in the aisle. I took two minutes to explore the cube and the pile of supplies the executive secretary kindly collected for me. In fact at 4:30 just about everyone was gone or going, which I took as a good sign.

I have a nice little (geek alert) Dell Latitude D610 laptop and decent size flat screen monitor. No one gave me my password so I can't use it so that's a problem but it's my first day. My manager thought I should always take it home, at least until I got a locking cable in my cube.

I've already been announced as the quality lead on a new project and there are two or three projects I'm supposed to pick up but I'm not too worried. My manager grinned and wondered if there was a way to get the stress level as high as my last job. I told him I didn't think he could.

Tomorrow it really begins....

I had some emails from WYWW. The stress crackles through the letters. Some other Widget expats have heard the news about my departure and are also getting in touch with me, asking what particular thing drove me out or was it just everything. The answer is yes.