Working at a large company can be comforting. If you wanted to, you can get lost amidst the shuffle of paper, value chains and memos. I'm supposed to be responsible for a host of products, and while I'm pretty capable at working out the broad strategies, it's a little harder on the ground, like how the individual paint daubs in a Monet don't really make sense up close.
This past week my daubs of paint was figuring out the jargon and multiple (and often conflicting) reporting systems. I need to get all the information before attempting to make sense of them. There are a lot of questions, but without a formal training program – I suppose I'm senior enough now to not go through one, I'm on my own. I've asked Quincy a bunch of questions already, but having been on the other side of this equation, I know that there's a delicate balance for a newbie in figuring things out for yourself and asking the right questions so you're not the pig in the pipe – i.e. the bottleneck that reinvents the wheel.
At times on the road, I felt like a tiny speck in the machinations of all the life that was around. It was very easy to recognize all the strands of lives passing you by when you're confronted by the flush of activity. In the corporate world, I feel like a tiny speck too – except it doesn't involve the same kind of exuberance.
I spent my lunch hour working through the vacation policy here. It involves some alchemy of accrued hours, floating days, sick days and official holidays. For the upcoming holiday season – between Christmas and New Years – everyone is 'encouraged' to take off, since the company powers down during that time anyways. For someone like me, who is sticking around, that sucks, because I'm forced to use my vacation days at the expense of travel plans in 2008. It's a weird system.
Through the perfect storm of being a new hire, and the strange reporting discrepancy between calendar year and working year, I'll have to borrow my vacation days from next year to take time off when I really don't want to take time off – leaving me with a total of 6 days to take off next year. It's a far cry from picking up a backpack and going whenever I wanted to.