Brian's World

Cubicle Life

Today I started at Mass Mutual, 8:30 am. I arrived at the visitors entrance and went through the whole “who are you” ordeal because I don’t have an ID or parking thingy yet. Hopefully tomorrow I can get one?

I have my very own cubicle, its a quaint little thing. The chair and keyboard holder are very complicated, I have yet to master them. I haven’t really played with any drawers, and the only thing that distinguishes it from a random empty cubicle is a few papers and a sticky note. (My name sticker thing hasn’t been printed I assume). I have a Lenevo Workstation, my monitor has a white scratch on the upper left of it. My phone works, but one of my power outlets doesn’t. How does cubicle power work anyways? Extension cords or something? Oh yea, I also have a filing cabinet on wheels with a padded top. I think its the guest seat.. lol

My bosses were very busy most of the day, so among other things I spent my time learning how the CAS system works, a brief introduction how INFORM does its thing. INFORM, for those of you who don’t know.. runs on the HP e3000 platform, developed in 1982. Very old stuff. The support for the machines expires in 2008 so they need to move stuff off them into an DB2 (modern) database. So for half of the work I’m connected via a telnet to a very old system, the second half.. I don’t know whats going on there.

Unfortunately my thoughts on scripting the job is difficult, there are only so many things you can script in 1982. Alas life goes on. I needed to go to the bathroom around lunch time.. so I wandered off hunting for the loo, I found it no problem, near the elevators.. so I went in, used the foot pedal when I was done. Now getting back was a totally different story, I knew I was near “Staircase R” (thats a lotta staircases) but I couldn’t find it. I could find Staircase P, Staircase Q.. but no R. Eventually I found it, walked around, until I saw the brightly colored papers where I turned left, and proceded to find my cube. (They’re called cubes I think)

Tomorrow I head back, probably at 8:30 to get started with some very simple MS Access work, Joining 3 tables. Not bad at all. At least there’s work. Soon we’ll start the INFORM work, soon as the other half of the team starts next Monday.. lol

Au Revoir