Sometimes you jump off the diving board, and sometimes they yank the diving board out from under you.

Wow, just wow.  I am three days into my new job and it is exciting, scary and humbling all at the same time.  I now realize that my new boss was really paying attention to what I was saying during the interview process.  Describing yourself as a self-starter and able to create and design processes is most likely to result in a response of "When you show up for work the first day, we won't bother to unlock the front door for you because we know you will figure out how to get inside."

Don't get me wrong, I am loving my job so far and I am definitely not bored, but much of my orientation has involved sitting with a handful of people and getting a very brief view of systems with the hopes that my eyes can follow the lightning-fast cursor on the monitor and assuming I know what things people are clicking on.  And when I want to know where to find a certain document, spreadsheet or other piece of information, it is usually followed by pointing to the computer and saying "It's on the shared drive" or "It's on the website or intranet."  At least it was narrowed down to the intranet and computers on our company network and not the entire interwebs, that is helpful.

But this is all good stuff because I am becoming the office cubicle version of Bear Grylls.  In an office where most people don't drink coffee, I can make a cup out of used Xerox toner cartridges and use a bottle of circa 1987 White-Out as half and half.  Then while looking for those all-elusive policy documents on the shared drive, I will do my best not to delete years worth of financial spreadsheets and data and I may just make myself a privacy curtain for my cubicle doorway out of paper clip chains. I've noticed my new co-workers kind of look at me with curiosity as if I were just pictured on the 10 o'clock news and described as "the quiet neighbor that kept mostly to himself" and then was discovered with ten human skulls in my freezer.  They haven't really seen my true personality yet and when that happens, I foresee some type of crisis counselor spending a week in the office trying to calm people down.

This is going to be quite and adventure, well, as much of an adventure as a career in insurance is possible.  I will crawl out from under the sink in the bathroom, take baby steps back to my desk and re-do the TPS reports while I wait longingly for all that quality time I will have to myself on the drive home in the afternoon.