GET Into the Groove! Boy, I've Got to PROVE--

Finishing out four weeks at the new job, I'm beginning to get a sense of the rhythms and realize urgencies. When you're new in a group, it can be easy to get ahead of your duties (note to employment candidates: it is always better to get ahead of your job when you're new than to let it get ahead of you), but this actually can be a disservice to yourself. Yesterday, I relished tearing into my accounts payable inbox, processing something like fifteen or so invoices for payment. The week's been busy, I've gotten enormous amounts of work done - even with a day off in the middle of it - and on top of priority matters, I've polished off a lot of new employee stuff as well. I finally enrolled in my health benefits etc. yesterday. I completed several training courses online. I gained directory access, and made important progress. One of my coworkers and I set plans to go over her job duties on Monday, pending some vacation time coming for her.

Today, I came in and found myself alone in our quadrant of the floor. Two others did show, but the white noise was the great companion of the day.

It did give me good time for MORE new employee stuff; but had I saved some of that training, rather than worrying about the email nasty-grams "reminding" me gently to get to it, the courses and modules would have taken much less time, and I certainly could have concentrated on them carefully. They would have been good occupation, too, for a quiet day. As it was, I put in a few messages on outstanding materials I seem not to have received; looked at Code of Conduct information, read the employee manual. This is the sort of thing I would have done anyway; I'm a reader of manuals, a follower of directions. I don't even mind these things. For me, reading even copy writing has certain points of interest. And it does beat slogging through twelve hundred lines in Excel, a sort of job I have had in the past and could never stand to acclimate myself to much. I like the quiet. And it's not like my first few days - memorizing that supply catalogue, in order to fend off sleep while I had no computer, and not enough work to keep me occupied (or useful).

It's something of a pleasure, a quiet Friday when you can survey your progress, and realize the rhythms which will work best.