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| Walking to Work - Nature Watch |
It might not sound like it from this blog, but I returned to Switzerland to take up a year’s work contract. This wasn’t what I’d imagined to be part of my dream.
Predictably, and showing that I haven’t really changed much over all these years, the thing I like the least is having to get up at a specified time. I really enjoyed being able to decide when to get up when I was in Egypt. If I wanted to sleep in, I would. There was no need for an alarm, no need to adapt to a new sleeping pattern. I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted.
My walk to work – at least at the moment – is quite pleasant as I walk by a small stream for most of the way. I always look over the wooden bridge and gaze at the water for fish on my way, but only once have I seen any (I had actually given up all hope). I do wonder whether the fish in Sahl Hasheesh miss me. I knew where certain fish would be at a certain time of day and I reckon they must also have expected to see me after a while. I think a couple of them fancied me, actually, as one parrot fish at Palm Beach would follow me about, as would a rather scary triggerfish in El Andalous.
But I digress. It’s strange, really, how all companies are the same. It’s your first day and your IT equipment doesn’t work properly. Nobody’s been briefed about what to do with you when you arrive. Your phone doesn’t work (although I quite like it that way).
I’d already done this job for 6 years before, so I felt I should know what I was doing, but then you run against the brick wall that you are new and you don’t yet know what this company’s procedures are. It’s quite frustrating as you feel you should be able to forge forward, but you’re blocked by your sudden lack of knowledge.
It also takes a while to know where things are in the building and you find yourself getting lost in the early days. Later, of course, you can’t see the difficulty at all. I spent ages trying to find the stationery cupboard only to find it didn’t exist (huh?).
People forget to tell you the simplest of things. I hadn’t realised that when I’m on the phone and it says “Press 1 for English”, there’s another button on the phone that I have to press beforehand or it won’t accept me pressing the number. For a long time, I thought my phone was broken. This impression was encouraged by the fact that the first two times, just by coincidence, when I put the receiver down after another failed call, one of my colleagues’ phones would start ringing. I was convinced that my phone was somehow causing it.
Nobody told me that if I had a meeting in the other building, I would have to register. I stood for ages in the lift, wondering why my badge wouldn’t activate the lift, but it was because my badge was only for my building. Everything takes so much longer when you’re new.
As usual, my phones (landline and iphone) took forever to get working properly. I had to get my landline working in order to be able to schedule teleconferences and WebEx’s, otherwise I had been thinking I wouldn’t bother. Surely one phone is enough for anyone? First of all the landline phone wouldn’t work, then whenever I picked it up, it would ask me to dial my number (huh?). It turned out that the latter was part of the process of getting it to work, only they’d forgotten to tell me what my phone number was. Doh!
My iphone was a traumatic experience. I am not sure what happened, but whatever it was, I ended up having to do a factory reset. Then I had to install an app and that went horribly wrong and I had to uninstall it and also ensure that any hidden files had been deleted. When I finally got it working the phone would beep whenever I got an email; I was convinced I’d set everything to mute. I share an office with two others, so they also got the full benefit of the annoying noises and my squeals of frustration each time it beeped.
I did manage to get it to shut up in the end. My landline also had a day of giving mysterious beeps, although finally I discovered that it was my personal mobile that was doing that. Too many phones in life just make things complicated.
It’s good to get to know new people and everyone has been super. I’ve ingratiated myself with the Friday cakes group and have even obtained higher-level permission to continue to join them when we all move offices, even though it is now to be a department-specific event only (and it’s not my department).
This leads me nicely on to lunch. In my new workplace, people tend to eat at their desks for their midday meal (at least in my building). This was a bit of a wake-up call as I’m used to work providing my lunch for me. Consequently, I’m in the novel situation of having to make my own lunch to bring into work. It takes me back to my school days. It feels quite bizarre, as if I’ve somehow regressed.
Sometimes I forget to bring my lunch in with me, so I just buy a sandwich from the supermarket across the road (I may end up just doing this anyway, if I get lazy). As I exit the building and walk down to the main road, I see a mountain with snow on top of it. We’ve had some very sunny days and it never fails to surprise me – both that a mountain should be visible from this rather industrial location and that it has snow on.
It’s nice to be reminded that I am in Switzerland
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