moved... sort of

Up to now, I've been working in the Daechi/Mido branch of my company. The main branch of my company, to which R&D is moving, sits just up the street in an old building that recently had almost half of its fourth floor cleared out completely. When I first went over to check out the site, weeks ago, the space was nothing but bare concrete, dangling wires, and limp ventilation pipes. Not even a month later, the space has been miraculously (but also hastily) transformed into a suite of offices, most of which are glass-walled. The makeshift construction-workers' door that had greeted me in June has now been replaced by a sleek, electronic sliding-glass door. Our offices all have doors with electronic keypads, and despite the building's overall decrepitude, our interior space looks quite shiny and new. It also looks a hell of a lot like an aquarium, a fact that many of us remarked upon—not all positively.

I had the chance to meet most of our new coworkers; two were missing today. The ones I met seemed like good folks, all in all. We sat down for coffee at one point, and I got to know a couple of the newbies better than the rest. One gent turns out to have biked the very same Gukto Jongju that I walked; we expressed our mutual respect. All of the newbies are nervous about taking my language obstacle course; I've apologized profusely to them (well, to the ones I've met, anyway), and I've joked that one or more smartasses will probably grumble in disagreement about some of the questions. I think they'll be taking the test tomorrow, which means I'll be grading a batch of tests for a good part of the day.

I left work early today to meet up with my buddy Tom and his friend Patrick, so I ended up saying goodbye to my new coworkers a little before 5PM. Dinner with Tom meant galmaegi, of course. Conversation was hilarious, especially since Tom and Patrick needle each other like an old married couple. While I sat with the guys, I thought about tomorrow. My work station is more-or-less set up, and I heard that the LAN/internet connection was put into place after I had left. But there's more to do, in terms of setup, and I hear we're getting new bookshelves to replace the ones we currently have (which we've already filled with books and other knickknacks). So tomorrow ought to be interesting.

As the boss himself said, things won't begin to smooth out until a couple weeks have passed; there will be some rough patches during this shakedown period. I've already heard complaints from the newbies* about their office chairs, about bookshelf space, and about desk sizes (many of us, especially those of us doing design work, use two monitors side by side). We have other issues to resolve as well, such as whether we're going to consolidate our Dropbox storage space. We three "originals" from R&D also need to sit together and discuss the flow chart of power: am I to become a supervisor or not? I'm hoping not, but that's up in the air.

Exciting times ahead.

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*I use the term "newbie" advisedly: some of these people have been at the company longer than I have, but they're all new to the R&D department.