"Payin' the billz...
Sept. 11, 2001
with my mad programmin' skillz." I started my new job today at Press, Ganey and Associates. After filling out a mound of paperwork with arcane numerical codes printed on the top, I received a number of new employee goodies: a coaster with the PG mission statement, a Christmas ornament from last year's Christmas party, a "PG Pride is not an abstract concept" button, and a mug, since PG does not support the use of disposable drinking materials.
After this, I got the grand tour of the facilities. Most interesting was a room with a sign above it advertising it as the "Torture Chamber." They say that this area of the office was decorated as a haunted pirate ship for the United Way benefit. I'm not so sure.
After the tour, I finally got to go over and see my cubicle. Unfortunately, my computer had not yet arrived, so I was stuck with this ancient P2 233. Forte runs incredibly slow on it. They started me right off on making some custom dialog boxes. Spent the rest of the day doing that, and learning the nuances of SourceSafe and SmartFTP.
Throughout the day, a steady stream of people stopped by to welcome me to the company, including the CEO, Dr. Hall. Some funny things I found out: people at this company are crazy about email. They use email for everything, and are only just now learning not to hit "reply to all" when saying "Congratulations" to the parent latest baby. The system's administrator had to put a 500 MB limit on email boxes (per person!) because some people were keeping every email they received. One user had 83,000 emails totalling 2.3 GBs!
Anyway, that was my first day.