I guess it's pretty clear that I'm just getting settled into my new job, since I've actually had time to post to my blog two days in a row!  Late yesterday, my stuff got moved over from Bldg 17, so my office-mate/job-share partner and I tried to figure out how to get all this stuff to fit comfortably in our shared office.  This is the first time I've had to share an office at Microsoft, so it's a little weird.  By nature I'm a quiet, private person, and get distracted with a lot of background noise.

Fortunately, my officemate Rinki isn't very loud, and I need to ask her a lot of questions while I'm ramping up, so this works out well.  The other bonus is that 2 days a week she has the office to herself since I don't work on Thursdays and Fridays.  And she leaves early each day, so after 2:30 on my work days, the office is all mine.  So really, this sharing thing isn't bad at all, and I do realize I'm still incredibly lucky to have a workspace with an actual door that closes.  As a consultant, I always got squeezed into cubes, random conference rooms, or whatever available open space was available, so I'm definitely not complaining too much now. 

My manager sent out the introductory e-mail about me today so various people have been dropping by the office and introducing themselves, which is nice.  And I've had lunch both days with Rinki and others on the team so I'm not too lonely.

When I went back to Bldg 17 to make sure everything was in order for the office move, I felt a little bit sad.  After all, I knew everyone there, knew exactly what I was supposed to do, how the team worked, etc.  Starting out in a new job is always tough - the ambiguity and feeling of complete confusion in the beginning is so hard to deal with!  A wise friend once told me that you have to give it 3 months before you can really evaluate how things are going.  To be more precise, her statement was "Any new job sucks for the first three months", just because there's so much to learn.

Today I completed the first module of a multi-media SMS 2003 training course, got my office sort of set up, am working my way through another overview doc, and am currently copying a Virtual Server image of SMS to my machine so I can play around with it.  It's slow going, but I can only go up from here, right?