So, finally, my first day at Amazon. Four hours of orientation this morning, then being shown my office (no bookshelves! must fix that), then lunch with my manager, then wrestling my computers (WinTel laptop and Linux desktop) into submission, then diving out for an hour to sign the lease on my apartment and open a new bank account, then back to the office to see if the Exchange server has decided to behave itself, then provisioning my VPN device… all of this interspersed with greetings and introductions from dozens of people, most of whom I will come to know really well in the next few weeks, but right now my caches are spilling data as fast as it comes in, so I’m damned if I can remember any names, and suddenly it’s 6 o’clock, and I have to head across the street to get a shuttle bus back to the PacMed building where I parked my car.
Whew!
I knew I was in terminal overload when I returned to my desk after I’d signed the lease and opened a bank account, and suddenly realized that I didn’t have the apartment paperwork. It was still at the bank. Panic. Rush back to retrieve it. Resume breathing.
Speaking of banks, my account back in Massachusetts is with Bank of America. (Used to be BayBank, than BankBoston, then Fleet….) And my new account in Seattle is also with BofA. But in MA your ATM card can have a 5 digit pin, while here in WA the pin can only be 4 digits long. Go figure….
And to all my friends and family who asked about the employee discount at Amazon.com…. There is one. But it’s modest, and I can’t share it. Sorry. (Mind you, as a new WA resident I’ll have to pay sales tax on my Amazon.com purchases. So the discount will come in handy.)
But, you ask (well, some of you), what’s it like? What’s the gestalt of the place? Obviously it’s too soon to say, but one thing is very familiar after years at Sun. The people here are smart. Very smart. And they seem to be predisposed to action, which feels different from some parts of Sun recently.
This is going to be fun. More anon.