Chapter 6, Page 1

It was a cold, windy winter day in Rochester. The kind of day I wish I had the voice of Harry Kalas.

Today marked the beginning of the next chapter in my life. I started my first day with the new employer. Having spent the last 10 years at a very small company, I'd never really experienced the first day of orientation like this. You see, if you employ ~30,000 people, more than one person starts their new job each week. If your current count of employees starts with a tilde (~ : in mathematics means approximately) , that means you have more than 10 employees.

Orientation is kind of a weird thing. There are about 75-100 people here and for all us, this our first day. Everyone that isn't a PhD or MD goes through this process. At my table are two nurses (interestingly both males from the same college in Illinois), a physical therapist, a pharmacist and myself (never took a college biology class - prefers the real sciences ;-).

The attempt to get everyone to mingle. This is kind of odd to a comp sci major. We do end up chatting amongst ourselves to help ease the tension, but its obvious that other people are much more into this mingling business than others.

We start by learning about the [Employer Name]'s Way of Patient Care and learning about the founding of this fine institution. I found all of this very inspiring. They help to drive home the idea that all of us in the organization contribute to the overall care of every patient. Even us geeks.

The rest of the day, we start learning about the horror of parking problems (remember ~30,000 employees -> 9,000 parking spots). I've taken college math classes, this ain't good. I have about 12 years before I'm parking elidgable.

We took a bus tour of most of the downtown campus. This was sort of cool. I got to hear some of the history of the buildings, but having lived in this town for 5 years, I did see to know the names of the buildings better than the tour guide.

We had a fantastic lunch of lasagna and well, I'm picky, I had the lasagna and the breadstick and some carrots. The rest looked new. I don't eat new.

The afternoon was all about the benifits. I learned a bit here. Some of was rehashed for me since the Mrs has be providing the benifits for the last 5 years, I'd pretty well figured out a lot of them. It was nice to finally here from someone other than Mrs though. She had a couple of things wrong, but for the most part...she's got them down.

Tomorrow will be the first day I'm required to find my own parking. This is gonna suck. I really have no idea what I'll be doing. Maybe I'll just quit and turn professional in my poker career.