Well fuck me
… that was quick. Drove the 348 miles
from Santa Monica to Fremont a couple days ago.
Was planning on making my new home up in the Silicon Valley – somewhere not
too far from the job that I got in Santa Clara.
I had my concerns – mainly about the cost of living and the fact that I
needed to somehow find an apartment after not having any provable steady income
for the last damn near five years – but I was determined. Sure, I let myself get low-balled on the
salary aspect for this new job (side note here:
NEVER, EVER discount your self-worth … NEVER!) and I knew this was going
to make things, in general, a bit more difficult. Just how much more didn’t really sink in
until I began my stay at the “extended stay” hotel where I am currently sitting
and writing up this blog post. You need
to be getting paid very well around here if you ever want to feel any sense of
security. I so desperately miss the
sense of security that I once had…
Showed up
yesterday to my new job. Arrived at the
building at 10:21am – the recruiter that I was working with to land this job
had informed me earlier that I was “scheduled” to begin work at 10:30am. Nobody was there to meet me. The glass doors to the office were locked and
the reception area was completely empty as far as any human lifeforms were
concerned. There was a note taped to one
door instructing somebody (I forget the name, but it wasn’t me…) to ring the
doorbell if their card didn’t work so that someone could come let them in. Sure enough, I discovered what appeared to be
a doorbell just above one of those magnetic card readers over to the right of
these main doors. I rang it.
Not too long
after, some guy showed up in the reception area. He looked at me standing there with an
expression that demonstrated he was most definitely not expecting to have been
seeing me. He did, however, open the
doors and I introduced myself and said that I was scheduled to be beginning
work there today (well, yesterday, but you get the gist…). I mentioned the name of the recruiter that told
me to be there and was instructed to have a seat whilst he attempted to call
her. Don’t think he ever spoke with
anyone on the phone – if memory serves me correctly … I was in a bit of a state
of bewilderment at what was happening and hadn’t really had any decent sleep
for the last couple of nights prior to this – however he then escorted me into
the main office area and asked me what kind of work I did. Told him I was there to do Digital Place and
Route, Physical Design work and I believe I mentioned the names of the
engineers that I interviewed with – well, an engineer and a VP of Engineering
that I interviewed with. Figured this
would help as this guy was also claiming to be a VP of Engineering – not the
same one I interviewed with, however. He
then began leading me toward the cube-farm area of the physical design
engineers and told me to take a seat in any cube. He would try to get ahold of the recruiter I
mentioned and send her over.
So, here’s
where I really started questioning exactly what I’ve gone and gotten myself
into. We walked through the office –
aisle after aisle and row after row of empty cubicles containing a vast
assortment of random shelving structural pieces, “parts” of computers (mainly
monitors, cables and keyboards that all appeared to not have been used in
years) and extremely worn office furniture – leather on chairs that, for large
swaths, was no longer leather. I walked
through this junk yard and settled down on one of the better-looking chairs in
one of the many, many available empty cubicles. It was then that this other VP of Engineering
gave me the general direction to where I could find coffee or tea while I waited
and pretty much disappeared. I found my
way to the break room, got myself some tea (would have been coffee, but none
was made and I wasn’t about to be so presumptuous as to brew an entire urn of
coffee just for me…) and headed back to the cube I claimed to wait. Wasn’t sure exactly what I was waiting for,
but my selection of “things to do” seemed to be limited to one – wait…
There was a
guy sitting in the cube across from the one I selected. He appeared to be busy with something on his
laptop computer. He was obviously not the
least bit interested in why I was there and did a great job of just ignoring me
completely. Not sure what he was doing –
none of my business, I suppose – although I decided to do the “neighborly thing”
and introduce myself. I got his name. Don’t remember what it was. It was, as they almost always are in my
industry, very very Indian in nature – not that there’s anything wrong with
that; I just have a lot of difficulty remembering names in general … Indian names,
no chance. Found out that he, too, was
there to do Digital PnR work and that was that.
He went back to what he was doing on his laptop and we never spoke
again. I went back to my doing nothing
but waiting … slowly growing more and more concerned about the situation…
I believe I
spent approximately a half hour sitting there sipping on my tea, waiting for
what’s to come next and sending out an update to my friends on Facebook as sort
of a desperate cry for help before I overheard my name being mentioned in a
conversation occurring a few cube rows away.
I decided to head in that direction to see if maybe somebody involved in
it might have a clue as to why I was there.
The recruiter I was expecting to meet was part of this conversation as
well as a couple other guys. One presented
me with a laptop and we all headed back to the cube I was now living in. They asked me if I had been able to access my
work email account and I informed them that I had. They then dropped a couple IP addresses which
I took note of (having absolutely no idea why I was being told these) and
mentioned something about sending an email to a specific address that I also
took note of. It was all very cryptic
and absolutely nothing was making any sense to me. What were they expecting me to do? I wasn’t given any direction whatsoever. I was then asked if I had read “the” email. What email?
The only email I had received prior to starting work was informing me of
my work email account. I received no
email at my new account as of then.
This was
going nowhere. Figured the best thing I
could do at this point was to switch on the laptop they gave me (a piece of
shit 2012 model with a Windows 7 and an Intel CORE i5 sticker on the palm rest)
and basically show them the email I received.
This I did. Apparently “the”
email was never sent. Hell, I still do
not know what “the” email was … perhaps I read it later that day – I really don’t
know. It was then that one of the guys
(the engineer I had interviewed with about a week earlier) mentioned something
about me setting up my VNC and reading emails to get up to speed on where the
project was and they all left. Okay …
what now…?
Figured I
might as well begin by configuring this laptop to my likings. Creating bookmarks for my work email account,
maybe doing some interface customization … you know, the standard shit you do
when you receive a new computer. I
started doing that. That’s when I
discovered just how out-of-date this machine actually was. It was originally running Windows 7 as
clearly shown by the sticker on the palm rest, however it had been upgraded to
Windows 10 at some point. It was actually
in mid-update mode as the “Shut down” and “Restart” selections had the familiar
“Update and” text appended to both. (Oh
yeah, and as a side note, I mentioned to the guy that appeared to be the IT-guy
that I was trying to update this machine and got the gut-wrenching response
about him basically not liking updates.
It always bothers me when IT departments ignore updates to computer
equipment … just seems lazy. These
updates are usually released for valid reasons.
Granted they sometimes cause issues to current procedures in IT, however
that doesn’t mean they should just be ignored.
But I digress…) I selected the “Update
and Restart” followed by checking for the existence of any more updates to the
operating system (it was now fully updated) and then ran DELL’s “Support Assist”
tool to see if I could fix the driver issue that was being reported and
discovered that this machine was actually two firmware versions behind in its
BIOS.
I was able
to flash one update to the firmware successfully although the driver issue was
not resolved. Couldn’t update the BIOS
to the later firmware version, though.
Something about the computer not having the correct specs – whatever, I
left it where it was. I do believe that
this was exactly why the machine was reporting the driver issue but didn’t want
to waste too much time on my first day at the new job basically doing what
should have been done by their IT department years ago. No, I needed to start figuring out how to do
some real work. Nobody seemed to want to
tell me anything, though. I did receive a
few emails related to PuTTY and VNC settings which were not much help other
than giving me an initial password and saying I needed to change it. I did accomplish this and figured out how to
login to a server (exactly what server it was is anyone’s guess) and start a
VNC session that I was able to view on my laptop. Yippee … who cares? Nobody was giving me anything to do…
That was
basically the way my entire day went. I
was giving myself bullshit, busy-work tasks to complete to be prepared for when
I might need to actual do such tasks and basically trying to make heads or
tails out of the several group emails that I obtained access to at some point
in the day. In time, it became clear to
me what this project actually was. It’s
an older project that they’re trying to resurrect. That’s never good. Projects die for a reason – often times
several reasons. Why did this project
die? Why are they trying to restart
it? Why does this office look like a freaking
junk yard? Why did they give me a six-year-old
computer to use? Why didn’t they even
supply me with a mouse? Why, on Earth,
are they using Office 365 through web browsers rather than installing the “Office
apps” on the laptops like all other professional businesses do? What the hell is going on here?!?!?
The final
straw came for me when I decided to ask the engineer I interviewed with where I
might be able to get a mouse to use. His
response was to basically look for one in all the junk lying around and started
going through random drawers in various cubicles looking for a mouse that might
be there. Seriously??? This is a professional business??? I think not.
He then mentioned that I could ask that IT guy and we both headed over to
do this. His response, after looking
through the junk on his desk and not finding one – he could put a req. in for a
mouse although all purchase requests needed to be okayed and signed off for by
this company’s CEO. Holy fucking
shit! Really?!? The CEO needs to sign-off on the purchase of
a mouse for an engineer? This company IS
screwed. That’s when I quit.
No … they
weren’t paying me nearly enough to get on that sinking ship. Pathetically enough, I now get to fall back
to my original, pre-Santa Clara plan. I’m
moving back in with my parents … at least for a little while. Exactly how I’m getting home is still an open
issue. Nothing in my world plays out as
expected. I am planning to check out of
this hotel much earlier than I booked it for – most likely tomorrow. Luckily the manager here is taking pity on me
and only charging me for one week (for the three nights I was here) as opposed
to the 30-days that is the usual charge for early check-out on a booking scheduled
for longer than a month – I had this room booked through the 20th of
October (some 32 days from today). It’s
still not cheap and basically just more to add to what this fiasco ended up
costing me. Any way you look at it, this
latest adventure is nothing more than another huge mistake. I sure hope my luck is better for this long
drive I have coming up…
bis später,
