The Hardest Day on a New Job

There's a joke that you hear in every work place when a new person shows up for their second day of work. Someone says something like "Came back for your second day, huh? Didn't we scare you away? HA HA."

I think the hardest day on a new job is the first day of your second week. Everyone gets a free pass during their first week (unless you're working on an assembly line or you're a brain surgeon). During the first week you hardly know anything or anyone and everyone else is understanding. They say nice things like "Don't worry about it, it's your first week. You'll learn it/figure it out/pick it up." You feel dumb during that week and not very helpful but it's okay.

During the second week, everyone wants to help you get started on doing something. Everyone wants to start moving that extra work that they've been doing to you. That's why they hired you, right?

Today I started my second week knowing that I would have to begin doing what they hired me to do. Tomorrow I'll run a meeting with numerous people who probably won't be very excited about the work I'm going to ask them to do. I also have to start the same quality process for another project that sounds much more complex. Meanwhile, I still haven't even seen the company's product or had anyone explain any of the product features I'm migrating. I still don't know much about the two dozen development groups and I've forgotten people's names as fast as I've heard them.

Am I scared? depressed? losing sleep? Nope. There a few things about my new job that make me feel fairly relaxed. One, the time frames I'm working in are so long that when there's a problem, you have days to decide what to do. Two, people are very nice and take their work seriously so even though everyone knows I can't make them do anything, I know they'll help me out as much as they can. Three, I know if I make a good effort and things don't go well for other reasons, no one will blame me.

Hey, the job will be hard at times but I know I can do it and I know it's worlds better than what I just left (I'm talking about Widgets the company, not the people). The job may not be really exciting or fulfilling, but like any job (or anything else in life I suppose), it's only for a while.