Friday, First Week

So the last day of my first week at my new job began with finishing my desk. That was an hour of various piece parts: screws, nails, special bolts, and glue. Finished, it looks okay. It's not stunning furniture: its there to hold up my computer. With a bit of computer help, I got it and the laptop running together. I've never done that before but its pretty nice having all the desktop space.

Much of my day after that was spent getting connected to the network, the calendar program, the various other tools I need to do things properly. I spent some time researching how our products can't be shipped as what it is or what it can be thanks to corrupt customs agents holding them while they wait for a bribe. I also learned that UPS has lost all its Canadian customers because they charge a $48 customs brokerage fee for each package coming from the USA. Not nice, UPS. NAFTA was supposed to stop that. I suspect I'm going to learn a really large amount here. Most of the scents are new to me and there's about 190 of those. I will be bottling each and every one. And blends too, some of which sell well but can have very rare components which are entirely dependent on the harvest for availability. Ordering them makes delivery much more tricky, and that's my problem, eventually.

We're using a lot of free software and a few serious packages we're paying for, like our inventory system. This is a very modern company, not old fashioned or trapped in lala land.

I was too busy to take photos of the place. The cardboard is out, however, so it is now fit to be photographed. I'll take my good camera on Monday. Yes, its a holiday, no I don't get paid for it, so I offered to come in and work. We're doing inventory training and software training and there are things I need to cram and learn prior to our inventory getting retrieved. Things are going to be very busy, but I will keep posting anyway because this is easy for me.

My work laptop was crammed with malware, despite having a program to detect it. One download of Spybot later and I cleaned that crap out. I also tracked down and removed some malware that autoinstalls into Chrome the first time you boot up. They need better security, but at least it was easy to remove. Lots of complaints about that one. Due to us being an E-tailer, we get weekends off since there's no shipping then, but we need all browsers on our PCs. And they keep nagging to make one preferred. Anyway, I've just eaten dinner and I'm going to veg this evening. The training today was a lot to take in, but it was survey level at this point. We'll have to figure out data mining queries to get our answers, preferably faster. I worry we'll overthink and overcomplicate issues that don't deserve that level of refinement, but I'm going to be learning that as I go. As long as I don't drop a bottle of $2000 oil on the shop floor or ship the wrong product, I'll be okay. Its only been 3 days, after all. Plenty more to learn.