Re-orienting

 Started a new job two weeks ago.

Oh, you maybe need some background?

Transitioned out of my gardening business when I realized that:

1. My energy level wasn't reliable enough, AND

2. If I wanted this to be lucrative, I could do it for sure, but I'd need to hire folks and up my game. But that's not what I wanted. Not this close to retirement.

So I transitioned my few remaining clients to an energetic millennial (our meet-cute was in the garden-center parking lot where she pulled up in a pickup while I was spraying hort oil on hemlock wooly adelgids. Aaron Sorkin, take notice.)

I decided that I'd like to retire in six years if at all possible, and to do that I'd need a job that paid reasonably.  So while working at the garden center, I started looking.

Initially I looked at local organizations that were involved in the community, or nonprofits passionate about rewilding landscapes or creating natural public spaces out of urban hellscapes. I replied to job postings; replied to them again; sent out letters of inquiry. Attended a workshop in Maine to speak personally to the staff there about jobs.

Crickets.

My local recruiter, upon hearing my minimum salary expectations (which, in hindsight, were insultingly low), balked as if I'd asked for a yacht as part of my signing bonus.

"My clients aren't paying that, really."

"Do your clients live in Massachusetts? Do your clients read what housing goes for?"

In the end I aw an opening for a company I'd worked for in Chicago. In Chicago, I worked for one of their clients; here, I'm working for them proper. So it's a new company to me. A colleague who still worked for the company but had transferred to work internally used the referral feature to get me noticed. And there we go.

The draw was that I'd work for the Boston office but from home.  Two weeks in, and I love not commuting. The pay is respectful, the benefits are great, the people are all very nice, and retiring in 6 is a real possibility. I just need to sock the dosh away.

The downside is that it's easy for people to forget that you need to be given work when you're new and nobody can see you, and they are also working from home, and it's a very busy season so everyone is in their own crisis, and you have no idea what's going on as you sit by yourself, alone at home, in your Steelcase task chair (that you chose because it was markedly cheaper than its colleagues because it's a nauseatingly bright orange that, in fact, has not conveyed Fun and Cheery so much as 1973, and not in a good way), with the odd video chat from London. It took almost a full week just to figure out where things are online, and I crammed all the compliance/training videos to stop the reminder emails from the automated system that now tracks every movement of my existence. (Fun fact: I may not accept a boat as a gift from a business partner. Or anybody. And I can forget that munitions deal with a state-owned Iranian oil company.)

Taking initiative, I sat through three hours of a recorded class. As I struggled to follow the presenter, my Communications Major heart screamed silently in impotent rage as I mentally composed my alternate curriculum (Lesson One: How To Explain Things, Particularly By Incorporating The Word "Because"; Lesson Two: How Not To Cram PowerPoint Slides With Ugly, Messy Graphics Nobody Can Follow).

Per a request, I populated  some templates with information. (Lesson Three: How Not to Make PowerPoint Templates So Crowded As To Be Chaotic, And So Fiddly As To Be User-Hostile, No Matter How Clever and Relevant It Makes The Marketing Department Feel)

Also, there's Technology. Lots and lots of Technology.

Back in The Early Days, tech support was a person who worked out of a small server room/office/TARDIS, and all you had to do for help was call their name and they'd fix whatever was wrong.

I'm no slouch. I can follow directions and problem solve with the best of them. Working from home for a massive international company means most things are very self-service and many are third-party. And with me for some reason, every single simple, unremarkable thing I need to set up in order to do my job has been riddled with problems, so much that I'm beginning to wonder whether it's all part of some secret evaluation process to find my breaking point.

First, it took Tech Support an hour to figure out why I couldn't print to my home printer. Then the work cell phone that was sent to me had a rebooting malfunction and had to be re-ordered, and because you can't open the back of the phone in the newer phones to access the battery, I couldn't pull the power and had to resort to leaving the phone unplugged, sound and vibration off, face-down on my desk to have the android equivalent of grand mal seizures until it ran out of juice. 

The shared cloud drive needed to be configured because I couldn't log into it, and the tech who got it running wasn't able to help me understand it because his accent made him unintelligible, and the awkwardness of asking him to repeat himself over and over got the better of me and I just gave up and thanked him for his help. Then the monitor I purchased won't appear as an option on my laptop.

For each of these issues, I email the third-party tech support, and a ticket is generated. I am pretty much in a committed relationship with India at this point, and I suspect there's a big sign on a wall in Chennai warning everyone about the American who insists the issues aren't user-related.

Today it was getting access to an online database I'll be maintaining. I'd assumed it was a login-permissions situation and voila!

 Ohhhhhh, no.

 First, I had to be given documented email approval by two people, then a person on The Database Team That Lives In Space sent me lengthy instructions that contained a link to a cloud app store for our company, where I'd have to select a particular application, then wait for an email notification that it had been downloaded. Once this happened, I had to open it, do some magic, and then reboot.

Rebooting entails closing a half-dozen apps, re-opening the company VPN (complete with verification code to my phone), then signing into the network, then launching the shared drive, email, and chat programs.

This done, I was then told I had to go to a cloud address, select a particular option, and then while in that "desktop environment," launch the program.

"And I have to do this EVERY TIME I want to access this database?" I asked, incredulous, although I didn't use caps because I'm pretending to be a calm, polite, patient person.  Remote work is good for that ruse.

Immediately after I'd gotten through this, another of the Gamesters of Triskelion emailed me with the NEW instructions for the revised database, which were basically, "Click this and it will download. You'll see the app icon, and all you have to do is click on it to open a selection of sites to access. But first you have to reboot."

I walk downstairs, grab a tangerine, breathe, and go back to my home office.  I start to follow these instructions, but they say, wait!  I first must set Internet Explorer as my default browser! And here are instructions for doing this!   I'm confused, because this browser is no longer supported.  While I'm puzzling over this, I realize it's already downloaded just fine and is happy using our company default browser.

I click on the app icon, the list of options appears, I select the correct one...

...and am brought to a database that has no content, and doesn't give my office as an option.

I reply to the email offer to do a call to walk me through it, saying yes please, when can this happen.

I then log off and go to babysit a friend's 4-year old, where we play some competitive Chutes and Ladders, and then I suggest Hair Salon, because it allows me to sit on my butt and relax while eleventy-five hair elastics and clips are artfully arranged in my hair. I play some music to complement the scene, and when the parents come home I warn them that their little girl might Sashay and Shante, and tell them they better WORK.