First day!

So, today was the day! The reason we upped and moved to Seattle... first day with Microsoft was finally here. We'd always entertained the (ever-less likely) possibility that this was all an elaborate hoax, and today was the day to prove it otherwise...

After the traditional kiribath breakfast to celebrate the first day of a new job, I drove to the Microsoft campus in Redmond for New Employee Orientation. Sounds simple right... well - I thought it would be a good idea to practice the drive to the campus beforehand, given that it was a new city, driving on the other side of the road, all of those complications. On the first practice run... got lost. On the second practice run the next day... got lost. Eventually I made it there on the practice run, which meant today's little excursion went off without a hitch. First hurdle negotiated, eventually!

Next up - finding the NEO building. They have an entire building dedicated to NEO, and I was about to find out why. Upon walking through the front door, I was directed by reception to another person, who sent me through a funky product room (which had all sorts of cool toys... I may be a Microsoft employee now, but they still looked pretty awesome!) to find my name-tag, was handed off to yet another person who gave me a temporary access badge, who handed me off to another group of people who made me fill in online forms and confirm my legal alien status, who then offloaded me to a group who took those hideous, everlasting ID badge photos and made me fill in yet more online forms... by the end of the whole process I felt like a baton being systematically offloaded by a well-practised relay team. After that, the metaphorical baton was thrown into the NEO conference room, which had well over 100 people onboarding for their first (and in some cases, returning first) day with Microsoft. With that many people, having a separate building for new employees makes a lot of sense... and they do this every Monday!

Following that was the commencement of official proceedings, and an information overload from one of the HR managers at Microsoft. Lots of great information, and very well structured and presented - they obviously put a lot of time and effort into onboarding fresh employees into the company. A lot of the people in the room had been relocated, both from within the US as well as internationally, there were very few Seattle locals in the room.

After absorbing bucket-loads of information, and meeting some of my fellow newbies, off to the Microsoft Commons for lunch. This area was developed in response to employee requests and requirements, and is a pretty awesome place for lunch, and catching up with people - all restaurants are branches of Seattle local restaurants, and there's even a replica of Pike Place Markets tucked in there. On top of that, there's also a bevy of local stores, banks and services, including all major mobile network providers - thank you AT&T for our new numbers :) with ample seating inside and out, and a great selection of food, the Commons is a fantastic place for lunch. Pity I'm not working at that campus on a day-to-day basis...

The rest of the day was spent talking about benefits (yay!) and other administrative niggles, before we were released from NEO, complete with Microsoft badges identifying us as fully-fledged employees. Drunk on our new employment statuses, we all did the sensible thing and went home early.

I was tempted to take photos along the way to try and visually document the process, but given the number of iPhone jokes the presenters were cracking, I thought it may not be quite the best strategy for my first day. Still, a lot of people there had their iPhones out in plain sight, so I'm safe for now, but I may need to switch to a Windows phone at some point...

Next steps - turn up for a real day at work tomorrow, find my computer (wonder if it'll have Windows 8), and figure out whether I'm going to try joining the Microsoft cricket team. They could be good, in which case I shouldn't bother, or they might not be - in which case I'll fit right in!