First day at the office

After committing my previous day to paper, my prearranged taxi ride arrived around 09:00 and brought me to the place where I'll be spending the next five weeks - the Spang Makandra training grounds.

I arrived in a room full of curious stares of trainees and the unrelenting blinking eye of the wireless webcam which has been sending us pictures at the Us Media office for the last few weeks. I've been staring at these still images during coffee pickups and bathroom breaks, and no doubt my colleagues will be doing the exact same thing now, snickering at how dumb I look waving my arms about.

The trainees are everything Wouter described them to be. Eager, enthusiastic and definitely progressing so well that he actually had to tether them down in order for me to start where I wanted to start. There's some gray areas where they might need some more practice, but no doubt we'll get there.

Lunch does not come with the occupation like at Us Media -people bring their own lunch, or get their own at local food courts. I tagged along with Lou and Wouter to get some Roti (a first for Wouter, who cautiously asked about eating implements at the right and /or wrong moment).

We really tried to synchronize our agendas concerning progress, what to do next week and so forth, but had little time to do so. Not only did we handle questions and problems that trainees were having during their last exercise with Wouter, I also had considerable trouble connecting my laptop to the wireless network using Bootcamp. I expected the reverse, since linksys waps and OSX seem to lack the finesse to play nice. It also didn't help that this was Wouter's last day as the rather cherished trainer, and the day was pretty much cut short by impromptu gift giving, a intermediate showing of a bootleg copy of 300 (with hilarious engrish subtitles, no less) and general confusion about where to go. I dread starting on Monday.