So Friday the 19th was the day I had a full fledged orientation at Boeing. When I say full fledged I mean from 7:30am-5:15pm or for those who are not mathematically adept, that's 8 hours and 45 minutes of orientation. Day started off rather quickly, for I had one of those nights of over excitement leading to the inability to sleep but without the feeling of being tired. There are only two other times in my life I have had this same feeling, the first was the night before I went to Alaska for the first time and our shuttle was coming at 4am for a 7am flight and the other was the day I bought my Nintendo 64 and DK64 with the expansion pack with my own money. While the former is a rather obvious moment, the later happened to be the first >50$ expenditure of my life and at 14 I likened it to the greatest thing ever. So having one of those nights meant I went to bed at like 1am and woke up at 5:30 with the inability to fall back to sleep, therefore by a strange turn of events, I was there an hour early.
Orientation at a major company is well exactly how you would expect, long and tedious. They go through welcoming and a general outline of the company with some history for those genuinely unfamiliar with Boeing, which is basically all the hot finance girls. Then new speakers come in and give talks about the web access systems, which I liken to a glorified sisweb meets online banking structure, and all of this is followed by talks on ethics, and safety before lunch. Now I should mention here, that there was this one annoying kid who kept asking the most infuriating things or coming up with statements that just make you want to shake your head and pull Captain Picard (see below).
Lunch was probably the best part for me as they invite your department managers to come have lunch with you and give you tours. Now I had already meet my department heads last Friday, so my section head, the one in charge of the entire division came down to meet me. That in itself was pretty awesome, but after showing me the cafeterias - yes there are two - she took me around the facilities where I will be working. This included poking my head in the V-22 manufacturing plant and showing me my desk and labs. Unfortunately I don't have security clearance so I can't actually get IN to the labs, but maybe some day I will. So that was a good lunch and hopefully I didn't say anything stupid and instead ingratiated myself to the head boss. Especially since I have a 30-day assessment with her and I don't want to go into it being screwed. Now on top of this, they may be having me skip some of the more basic training and just do the most important stuff while I don't have a computer so I can start being productive earlier, which is both awesome because I'm sick of being useless and scary because I don't want to be in charge of my own project already.
Back in the conference room, I had the chance to talk to the two cute finance girls next to me who I met at the last meeting on Wednesday. Both are pretty nice, but neither are working anywhere near me, so internal Boeing facebook stalking lol. Not really for anybody important reading this, it's just a saying call off the attack dogs. After lunch is when the more active presenters came and basically talked to us about how much we are needed especially with the increase in production and design coming in the future. The last presenter was in HR who basically pointed out that the Nov. 19th orientation class it's itself a new team of workers, and we really all have the same concerns and excitements about our new job so we are not alone. On the other hand, it is strange to hear someone who has been with the company for 26 years call themselves new compared to those who have been in the same desk since the Vietnam war or over 50 years! The one downside of this is that stupid kid kept opening his mouth and being a dick. Now I know that when I am in an English class with morons or a Chem class and I ask weird questions or berate people, people look at me and say "man I wish he would shut the hell up" but at least my stories were somewhat subject related and I had a purpose. This fuzz-bag, well even the former F-15 fighter pilot was shaking his head and pulling one of these:
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| Well maybe this, and if it were me I would arm the Y,L,G, and A Lasers and hell man the damn Photo torpedoes too. |
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| More accurate is this.... yea this. |
The last thing of the day was a mini tour of the campus and we got to go to the 3D simulation lab. Now this place is totally awesome with fully 3D computer systems, motion tracking, and back-lit monitors that let you walk right up to them. Fortunately none of that is proprietary as I have seen it before, especially in movie theaters and commercial applications so I'm not divulging company secrets at all. I do wish they could load in Ender's Game into that thing though as a full 3D terrain, battle and squadron environment would be totally awesome. Unfortunately, solid works can't pipe that much information at one time, and when I asked why sized clusters they were using they looked at me and went wtf is a cluster we just use Linux in general.... I'm guessing there was a lost in translation, but then again, I could be trying to debase the onlookers, or they were actually using windows and I was mistaken, alas we shall never know.
Anyway, at the end of the day there was a raffle, unfortunately no such luck for me, then I had fun in rush hour traffic before coming home and sleeping. I think more food shopping tomorrow to bring the total money spent to just over 5k for this whole trip, yea a lot I know but I guess it's necessary all things considering. Anyway, as of Monday morning, I will finally be an adult in the workplace "living the dream" unfortunately in California that dream is to be in Hawaii wearing shirts, surfing, girls in bikini's, and generally awesome weather not the freaking code, ice wind's of the north east. Curse you north Atlantic winds curse you!
Well that's all for now, maybe I'll try some starcraft again soon and be of use to the clan.
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