Meetings/The Basement

Well I spent a solid hour each day last week setting up meetings for the S**** project. I can use any meeting room on any of the six floors of the building or the room permanently reserved for that project. Since I have no idea what the rooms are like and the pictures in the reservation system are sometimes not that helpful, I started visiting the rooms to see what they're like. I was in the premanently reserved room on my first day (see blog entry on What Am I Supposed to Do?) and I didn't remember what it was like so I decided to wander down there and take a look before I used the room again.

I took the closest elevator down since the stairs near me didn't go to the Lower Level. When I walked out of the elevaor, I turned to my right and saw an underground parking lot. There were Beamers and Lexi and open spaces....open spaces! Who gets to park here? Where's the secret entrance? I wanted to investigate the parking lot more but figured there might be a guard watching the cars with orders to shoot on site. (I'll investigate more later.)

I turned the other way and found myself in an area with high ceilings and brightly-colored carpeting and walls. This was apparently the "creative" hallway and I found myself going past the Design area (just signage I think) and the company photography studios. At the end of the creative hallway, I came to a fork where I went south and wandered past some nice meeting rooms, then past some drab open spaces with chairs set up for employee group meetings like Weight Watchers. (I knew it was Weight Watchers because there was a big sign.) I continued on to the area where our group's reserved meeting room was. Now that I took a good look at it, the room looked pretty small for a group of twelve with not very comfortable chairs. Oh well, back to the reservation system.

Contractors

The building is full of contractors working on various projects including the ones I'm working on. Some of them are high level project managers but I think most are programmers of various sorts. There aren't enough cubes for everyone so the contractors are either sitting two to four to a cube or they have desks in the hallways that are a bit larger than their computer. I almost feel guilty about my luxurious (small) cubicle with extra chair.

Misc.

In a couple of weeks they will apparently bring in a bunch of trucks with enough frozen turkeys for everyone in the company. You can also donate your turkey to Second Harvest, which I think I'll do.

I had a really fun introduction to the way legal cases are received in the building and then processed to add analysis and linking. It was like the "How a Bill Becomes Law" song. I was taken to each step and told what the people (paralegals, attorneys) were doing. Everything made a lot more sense after that. Okay, a few things made more sense.

I think I'll blog for another week and decide then about stopping.