Thursday, May 18, 2006
Welcome to LAF
As you all know by now, I started working at LAF (which stands for “Large Accounting Firm,” by the way) this week. It’s been one heck of a week. But what amazes me most about the job is how well things work.
You see, I was ruined at my last couple of jobs. When I started working at Abbott, oh so long ago, everything was a pain. I went through orientation the first few days, but when I was finally able to start working, I couldn’t start working. You see, I didn’t have computer access yet. And it took me TWO WEEKS to get it.
This wouldn’t have been such a problem if I were, say, a plumber. But I was a Quality Engineer whose sole purpose was to crunch numbers on a computer. So I basically sat idle for two weeks reading SOPs. (If you don’t know what SOPs are, trust me, you don’t want to.)
But when I got to LAF, I was good to go almost immediately. I didn’t get my computer on my first day, but that’s okay because I was in training. On my second day, they gave me a laptop and then walked me through every program I’d be using. That night, I took my laptop home and was pleasantly surprised to discover that with a push of a button (and a double click), I was hooked up to LAF’s intranet. I was SO confused. Clearly, there had to be more hoops to jump through. Nothing could be THAT easy. But it was.
And the training is so much better too. At Abbott, you either read your training in paper form or via mainframe. Here, everything’s web-based. And interactive. So you’ll have quizzes midway through. The last training session I had featured AV clips sprinkled throughout. It’s almost as if LAF realized just how boring it is to read 30 pages of legalese. What an idea! Make things simple enough for people to understand. Then test them on their comprehension of it. Genius!
And comparing LAF to M&S is a complete joke. You see, M&S was a crappy company. They’re on the verge of going bankrupt. And so it was no surprise to me when I discovered that one of my subscriptions (for a website I needed to do my work) ran out. Not just for me, but for the entire office. From that point forward, we had to ask 1 guy in our St. Louis office to look up stuff for us. It’s almost like they took away ESPN.com and I had to call someone to find out the Cubs score every 10 minutes. Completely inefficient.
The other nice thing about this place is that they seem to understand the importance of “team-building.” The Wife has referred to the lack of “team-building” at her job, especially compared to her last one. Well, LAF is going nuts with it. Tonight, we have a dinner and a show at Second City. Tomorrow, there’s a happy hour to welcome back all the people who travel for a living. (A lot of our workers are only in the office about 10% of the time. I think it’s cool that they have a welcome back party every month. Of course, I can’t go this month, but that’s not a big deal because I don’t know these people anyway.)
Also scheduled for this summer are a boat cruise, a Cubs game, and an overnight retreat to Geneva (all during regular working hours). And because we’ve been successful for the past year, everyone gets an extra 4 summer holidays. How cool is that! I swear, I might never leave this company. (And somebody please remember to send me this entry in 6 months when I’m complaining about working 80 hours a week.)
You see, I was ruined at my last couple of jobs. When I started working at Abbott, oh so long ago, everything was a pain. I went through orientation the first few days, but when I was finally able to start working, I couldn’t start working. You see, I didn’t have computer access yet. And it took me TWO WEEKS to get it.
This wouldn’t have been such a problem if I were, say, a plumber. But I was a Quality Engineer whose sole purpose was to crunch numbers on a computer. So I basically sat idle for two weeks reading SOPs. (If you don’t know what SOPs are, trust me, you don’t want to.)
But when I got to LAF, I was good to go almost immediately. I didn’t get my computer on my first day, but that’s okay because I was in training. On my second day, they gave me a laptop and then walked me through every program I’d be using. That night, I took my laptop home and was pleasantly surprised to discover that with a push of a button (and a double click), I was hooked up to LAF’s intranet. I was SO confused. Clearly, there had to be more hoops to jump through. Nothing could be THAT easy. But it was.
And the training is so much better too. At Abbott, you either read your training in paper form or via mainframe. Here, everything’s web-based. And interactive. So you’ll have quizzes midway through. The last training session I had featured AV clips sprinkled throughout. It’s almost as if LAF realized just how boring it is to read 30 pages of legalese. What an idea! Make things simple enough for people to understand. Then test them on their comprehension of it. Genius!
And comparing LAF to M&S is a complete joke. You see, M&S was a crappy company. They’re on the verge of going bankrupt. And so it was no surprise to me when I discovered that one of my subscriptions (for a website I needed to do my work) ran out. Not just for me, but for the entire office. From that point forward, we had to ask 1 guy in our St. Louis office to look up stuff for us. It’s almost like they took away ESPN.com and I had to call someone to find out the Cubs score every 10 minutes. Completely inefficient.
The other nice thing about this place is that they seem to understand the importance of “team-building.” The Wife has referred to the lack of “team-building” at her job, especially compared to her last one. Well, LAF is going nuts with it. Tonight, we have a dinner and a show at Second City. Tomorrow, there’s a happy hour to welcome back all the people who travel for a living. (A lot of our workers are only in the office about 10% of the time. I think it’s cool that they have a welcome back party every month. Of course, I can’t go this month, but that’s not a big deal because I don’t know these people anyway.)
Also scheduled for this summer are a boat cruise, a Cubs game, and an overnight retreat to Geneva (all during regular working hours). And because we’ve been successful for the past year, everyone gets an extra 4 summer holidays. How cool is that! I swear, I might never leave this company. (And somebody please remember to send me this entry in 6 months when I’m complaining about working 80 hours a week.)
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
I am a Survivor!
I had training this week. Three days of it. My mind is still spinning. It's just so terribly mind-numbing. The problem is that I have to sit there and listen to someone drone on for hours on end. (Now I know how it must feel for anyone that drinks with me.) The urge to punch the speaker in the face is overwhelming (and I thank all my co-drinkers for resisting said urge).
Today's training was me, another new hire (Vince) and the speaker. After 90 minutes (and a coffee), I was completely wiped out. When the speaker asked if we needed a break, I just bolted out of the room. 2 seconds later, we were talking about the NBA playoffs and I immediately perked up. I haven't even been following the NBA playoffs. But I actually got the opportunity to have an interactive conversation. It was great. The coffee I had after that was complete overkill.
(By the way, LAF has the coolest damn coffee makers I've ever seen. Basically, you have these "pods" of coffee. They look like oversized creamers. You put them in the machine. You press the button. BAM! You got coffee. And the coffee maker throws out the pod all by itself. And it's tasty (French Vanilla). Not to mention free. I have a feeling I'm going to be completely hooked on coffee by, um, Friday.)
Anyway, since I managed to survive 3 days of training, I thought I'd talk about something else I survived: this season of Survivor. This was a rather unenjoyable season of Survivor, which is one of my favorite shows. The problem was that they kept around the wrong people all season. "Wrong" being defined by "not people I would have kept around." To make matters worse, the $1,000,000 winner (spoiler alert), Aras, was probably my least favorite guy on the show. Of course, that's happened virtually every season. I'm still bitter about Colby losing in the second season. I had a total man-crush on him.
This season seemed especially annoying to me because few people switched alliances. These people get themselves into alliances on the first day of the show and then they refuse to break them. This season, there were 4 people who HATED each other, but they stayed in their alliance. My rule of thumb is to vote out the annoying people first. (That's why I'd be the first guy voted out. I can just imagine the comments as they're voting me out. "I don't get his sense of humor at all." "He kept making fun of me and laughing. What's his problem?" "God, that guy ripped the most disgusting fart I've ever smelled." "How did he manage to smuggle a bottle of Jack Daniels onto the show?")
I think the creepiest thing about this season was Shane. This guy had one of the weirdest parental relationship I've seen since Mommie Dearest. Shane is in his mid-30's and has a 13-year-old son. But Shane claims that his son is his best friend. And he was crying the whole show about how he missed him. Later on, he actually got to spend time with his son thanks to a reward challenge. I thought for sure they were going to start making out. It was just creepy. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure Luke will be MY best friend, but that'll be a result of a process of elimination. Since my current friends will have ex-communicated me, Luke will be my only option. In fact, I'll probably end up getting a doctorate wherever he goes to college. That way he can introduce me to all his freshmen special lady friends. And they can get restraining orders on me.
Okay, I'm just rambling. I can't believe how tired I am from all the training this week. But since I don't have any training tomorrow, I'm hoping I can post at least ONE entry during the day. We shall see.
Today's training was me, another new hire (Vince) and the speaker. After 90 minutes (and a coffee), I was completely wiped out. When the speaker asked if we needed a break, I just bolted out of the room. 2 seconds later, we were talking about the NBA playoffs and I immediately perked up. I haven't even been following the NBA playoffs. But I actually got the opportunity to have an interactive conversation. It was great. The coffee I had after that was complete overkill.
(By the way, LAF has the coolest damn coffee makers I've ever seen. Basically, you have these "pods" of coffee. They look like oversized creamers. You put them in the machine. You press the button. BAM! You got coffee. And the coffee maker throws out the pod all by itself. And it's tasty (French Vanilla). Not to mention free. I have a feeling I'm going to be completely hooked on coffee by, um, Friday.)
Anyway, since I managed to survive 3 days of training, I thought I'd talk about something else I survived: this season of Survivor. This was a rather unenjoyable season of Survivor, which is one of my favorite shows. The problem was that they kept around the wrong people all season. "Wrong" being defined by "not people I would have kept around." To make matters worse, the $1,000,000 winner (spoiler alert), Aras, was probably my least favorite guy on the show. Of course, that's happened virtually every season. I'm still bitter about Colby losing in the second season. I had a total man-crush on him.
This season seemed especially annoying to me because few people switched alliances. These people get themselves into alliances on the first day of the show and then they refuse to break them. This season, there were 4 people who HATED each other, but they stayed in their alliance. My rule of thumb is to vote out the annoying people first. (That's why I'd be the first guy voted out. I can just imagine the comments as they're voting me out. "I don't get his sense of humor at all." "He kept making fun of me and laughing. What's his problem?" "God, that guy ripped the most disgusting fart I've ever smelled." "How did he manage to smuggle a bottle of Jack Daniels onto the show?")
I think the creepiest thing about this season was Shane. This guy had one of the weirdest parental relationship I've seen since Mommie Dearest. Shane is in his mid-30's and has a 13-year-old son. But Shane claims that his son is his best friend. And he was crying the whole show about how he missed him. Later on, he actually got to spend time with his son thanks to a reward challenge. I thought for sure they were going to start making out. It was just creepy. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure Luke will be MY best friend, but that'll be a result of a process of elimination. Since my current friends will have ex-communicated me, Luke will be my only option. In fact, I'll probably end up getting a doctorate wherever he goes to college. That way he can introduce me to all his freshmen special lady friends. And they can get restraining orders on me.
Okay, I'm just rambling. I can't believe how tired I am from all the training this week. But since I don't have any training tomorrow, I'm hoping I can post at least ONE entry during the day. We shall see.
Monday, May 15, 2006
The First Day of the Rest of My Life
Today, I officially started working again. I had my orientation at LAF. It wasn't terribly exciting, as is the case of most orientations. I learned that being unethical is apparently frowned upon at accounting firms now. Something about Enron. Does anybody know what that is? I'd never heard about this Enron thing before. Jeez, you think it might be on the news once or twice. I can't tell you how tempted I was to raise my hand in training today and say, "What's Enron?" I think I would have been shot on the spot.
I learned a couple things today. One is that my cube is really small. It seems that cubes keep getting smaller. I don't like that trend. Eventually, I think we're going to have 1 square foot of workspace, and we're going to have to stand all day. Actually, one thing that LAF does amuses me. They "hotel" their cubicles. No, they don't rent them out to $10 whores. (At least, not that I know of. Perhaps that's covered in tomorrow's orientation class on "Really, REALLY cool benefits." Since a lot of the CPA's are out auditing clients, LAF figured there was no sense wasting valuable Loop office space with empty cubes. So, they reduced the number of cubes by about 75%. Whenever one of the auditors is in the office, they "register" at the "hotel" and get assigned a cube. How quaint. I'm thinking of turning my cube into a bed and breakfast.
Another cool thing about my job is that I get a laptop. (Actually, everybody gets a laptop. It's part of the whole "hoteling" process. If I'm not going to be at work, somebody gets to use my desk. But not my computer. Which is nice, because that's where I like to store my kiddie porn. Oops. Disregard that comment. My delete key is broken again.) The nice thing about the laptop is that now I can actually do some work while I'm on the train. I figure I'll be on the train about 30-45 minutes a day, depending on whether I get an express train. Truth be told, I probably won't do much work on the train. But I might just be inspired to write a blog entry or two. And then I can do some work at home and still hit my billable target. Yay!
I don't get my computer until tomorrow, so I got to leave work early today. That was a pleasant surprise. I don't expect to be getting another one of those for quite some time. Anyway, I still owe a couple of posts on some recent TV shows. But I don't have the time right now. Perhaps tomorrow. Although I was told that there's going to be a happy hour tomorrow afternoon to welcome me to my group. I think I'm going to really like working here.
I learned a couple things today. One is that my cube is really small. It seems that cubes keep getting smaller. I don't like that trend. Eventually, I think we're going to have 1 square foot of workspace, and we're going to have to stand all day. Actually, one thing that LAF does amuses me. They "hotel" their cubicles. No, they don't rent them out to $10 whores. (At least, not that I know of. Perhaps that's covered in tomorrow's orientation class on "Really, REALLY cool benefits." Since a lot of the CPA's are out auditing clients, LAF figured there was no sense wasting valuable Loop office space with empty cubes. So, they reduced the number of cubes by about 75%. Whenever one of the auditors is in the office, they "register" at the "hotel" and get assigned a cube. How quaint. I'm thinking of turning my cube into a bed and breakfast.
Another cool thing about my job is that I get a laptop. (Actually, everybody gets a laptop. It's part of the whole "hoteling" process. If I'm not going to be at work, somebody gets to use my desk. But not my computer. Which is nice, because that's where I like to store my kiddie porn. Oops. Disregard that comment. My delete key is broken again.) The nice thing about the laptop is that now I can actually do some work while I'm on the train. I figure I'll be on the train about 30-45 minutes a day, depending on whether I get an express train. Truth be told, I probably won't do much work on the train. But I might just be inspired to write a blog entry or two. And then I can do some work at home and still hit my billable target. Yay!
I don't get my computer until tomorrow, so I got to leave work early today. That was a pleasant surprise. I don't expect to be getting another one of those for quite some time. Anyway, I still owe a couple of posts on some recent TV shows. But I don't have the time right now. Perhaps tomorrow. Although I was told that there's going to be a happy hour tomorrow afternoon to welcome me to my group. I think I'm going to really like working here.
