Today was my first day of work at Niksun.  So far I am having a great experience.  Everything was mostly set up for me when I got in this morning.  There was a mistake in my last name on my user accounts which was fixed well before noon and I even got a laptop which was all set up for me before noon.  I guess there really is an adjustment going from a large corporation of 30,000+ employees to a medium-sized company.  This is a much better adjustment to make than the other way.  I remember when I started at the NYSE, it took 3 months, several signatures and a dozen phone calls to aquire a company laptop and I didn’t even get a functional desktop till my second day of work.  I think the size of Niksun ~300 people, makes for a very comfortable work environment and experience.

I’m definitely looking forward to going back in tomorrow.  I got a better feel for what the job entails and I am very excited to get my hands dirty in it.  Right now I am stuck with an older Win2k system and WinXP on my work laptop.  I have to squeeze and nice Debian or Ubuntu install in there somewhere.  Working in Windows leaves me feeling like I have my hands tied behind my back.

The commute was rougher during rush hour and I did a good job of screwing up my drive in by missing the exit.  Luckily I know that area well enough to slightly change my route in and I made it there in under an hour.  A co-worker mentioned an alternative route, I’ll test it on my way home tomorrow since I’ll most likely get lost again. The ride back wasn’t too bad except Route 1 is awful.  I’m heading against traffic but it’s not the number of cars that is the problem, it’s the inane number of traffic lights!  It took me a good 50 minutes to get home, but I diverted off the highway for the last stretch to save time, which I think took longer.  So going that way I think I can do the trip in 45 minutes.  My co-worker, whom lives about the same distance as I says he can do it in just over 30 minutes.  So we’ll see how much time that route frees up.

The one thing I didn’t anticipate today was how I was feeling.  After being home for 3 months I spent every morning getting Connor up, feeding him breakfast and playing with him.  Laurie returned to part-time substitute teaching and on days she didn’t go in I let her sleep in.  But after spending all this time with them I never anticipated just how much I would miss them when I started work again.  I was nervous starting a new job this morning and then I felt so sad being away from Connor and Laurie.  It was a rough morning, but once I started to settle in at work and everyone there is extremely friendly, it made things much easier.  So I’m sure each day will get easier.  It did feel so good to see Connor’s big smile and have him run towards me when I got home tonight.

And here the obligatory cute brag-about-my-son picture I took not long ago in the driveway: