work

[sorrowmonkey]

So, I got up at 5:00 AM this morning. I left the house at 6:00 AM, and the line for the ticket machine was about 15 minutes long. So, I managed to make the 6:40 AM train to Grand Central, which gets in about 8:18. I had no trouble getting on the subway, along the train was packed. It's about four blocks from the Wall St station (for the 4-5-6 line) to my new workplace. The new place is literally across the street from the A-C-E station, but, ah well.

So I went in at about 8:45 AM, and had to submit to both a visual inspection of my bag, and an x-ray of same. Never mind that I could have carried the legions of hell under my huge coat, and I never even went near a metal detector. So after the extensive investigation of my bag, they called upstairs and left a voice-mail. I then proceeded to stand in the lobby for 45 minutes.

At almost exactly 9:30 AM, the security guard called me over and sent me upstairs. I then spent eight hours with a guy leaning over me, trying to learn how to do my job while constantly heckling every typo and mistake I made. So their database is sufficiently hosed as to be nearly beyond help. What was explained to be as 10-15 tables is actually about 60 tables. And while most of the tables are 1-5 million rows, the database is a whopping 60GB monster.

So, they have this super-important-jumbo-monster-doom-MARKETING report that takes 45 minutes to run. Come to find out, it takes every table in the whole database to generate the query for it. I suggest a summary table, and they insist that the table is too large to build a summary: it would take up too much space and be too slow. We'll just set that aside.

I had been told that these guys work from 9-5. I was hoping to stretch the evening, since I hope to leave early next week when school starts. Nonetheless, the guys start coming by my desk every give minutes starting about 4:50 dropping hints that it's time to leave. I finally left about 5:30, just as they were getting ready to chase me out.

Subway home was relatively painless, as was the train. Just fucking long. I ended up getting home at about 8:00 PM, so I had two bowls of delicious soup and some spice cake a la mode (thanks jeep_squire). Pretty soon, it is time to take down the garbage and head to bed. I think I'll sleep in until 5:30 AM tomorrow.

So, various other tidbits fell out of the chronological story: there are no ethernet jacks for my laptop. I checked my email and found out that the other ISA guy that was supposed to show me around sent me an email 90 minutes after originally scheduled to tell me that he couldn't make it. Nice work guys. Oh, and I can't get a permanent badge yet, because the contract hasn't been signed.

Comments

Contract not signed?

[ferriludant.livejournal.com]

Working "at risk" is (imnsho) bad. Are you independent, or is someone else carrying your risk?

Sometime when we're not in the public domain, it'd be interesting to know where this gig is: from the location and security, it sounds like finance, but that 9-5 thing sure doesn't.

Re: Contract not signed?

[nrawling.livejournal.com]

No kidding. Luckily, my firm bears all of the risk. Apparently the paperwork got signed this morning, but it is still mega-bad in my mind.

For the record, it is finance/insurance.

Re: Contract not signed?

[ferriludant.livejournal.com]

Ah, should have guessed. Okay, thanks for satisfying my curiosity, and I'm glad your contract has been signed.