day 2: new start… new me!

Right well today has been exhausting already but I am feeling good, if still terribly confused. It became clear just how dynamic and fluid this job is really going to be this morning. Yesterday was mostly meetings, trying to take in a lot of information and get as up-to-speed as reasonably imaginable in a seven-hour period.

This morning started with the daily media scan and then Head of Division (henceforth called HoD) called an impromptu brainstorming session. We’re getting to the planning stages of one of the big campaigns, but there is one element that HoD described as like “staring at a big old black hole” and he wanted this cracked within an hour and a half before he would let the rest of the campaign (and bugger me, it is enormous) take even the smallest step further.

What followed was a crazy creative session – yes, like in What Women Want – with ideas bouncing off the walls and being jumped on by other team members and developed in all sorts of directions. Then we were sent off with one subcategory each to do further research and to print random ideas like mad to kick off another more-honed session just 45 minutes later. From this, we narrowed to 4 top ideas, each doled out to one person to develop as a concept to present to the entire department. All I can say is it stretched me and I had to overcome fear of public speaking and be a little off the wall in one go in front of every one of my new team mates. There are buzzwords galore in my head to describe the morning: innovative, outside-the-box, energised, fresh…

This afternoon I have set side for the other campaign that I am on, as there is some real legwork that needs doing and my calendar is (at the moment) clear so I want to get my head down and my teeth into some of that stuff.

A few (unimportant but nice) quirks have also materialised. We get free breakfast every morning as a leading brand is one of our clients so that saves me a bit shy of £200 a year, based on 80p a day spent on toast with Mr TT. It also means that I don’t have to feel the agony of disloyalty in buying breakfast from a new café as obviously I won’t travel to SJP tube just for my morning feast, no matter how fond of The Café Characters I am.

We also get a whole load of free fruit. There’s more fruit than you can shake a stick at! The company runs some healthy eating campaigns and this is all part of that – they reason that they ought to be making it easy for us accounties to eat more fruit and vegetables, which is great for the wallet, and also my health as one of the main reasons I don’t eat fruit is that I just can’t be bothered to buy it. Today I have already had a banana on my breakfast and a kiwi with lunch. I am being really daring and having a pear later! Go me!

And we get as much free tea and coffee as we can drink. None of this grit-like rubbish from push in coffee machines either. The tea is real tea bags, real milk, a selection of sugars (brown, white, sweetener); there is peppermint tea, green tea, camomile tea, fruit tea, tea I have never heard of… And the coffee is proper filter coffee (thanks again to another client) like the stuff that Former Workplace used to only wheel out once in a while for big meetings with external members and which we could only drool over and gaze at longingly from our desks.

We are also allowed on Facebook and to use the internet and email for personal use. For some reason (maybe down to being embroiled in a big creative meeting), I have not had the urge to check Facebook more than once this morning and just now as I gobbled my sandwich. Perhaps this is a form of reverse psychology??

And it took me 25 minutes DOOR TO DOOR this morning! Good job as no doubt the workload and pressure will increase soon and I will be grateful for all that extra time!

So, these are little things, but the little things sometimes matter as much as the big things. My desk feels like my space now, with my little red desk tidy from First Proper Job and my union mug, my Ed Monkton postcards, and my mini hippo stuck on top of my monitor. Polly’s cheezburger efforts are my wallpaper. I am starting to feel like I belong.

And that is that. Naturally it is early days, but first impressions (certainly on my side) are good.

I need to come back at some point and write a post about The Mechanic and Mr Divorced, but it’s all really complicated (as Perps can already confirm) and I am putting off thinking about it for now. That said, I would really appreciate your input when I eventually get it all down “on paper”.