First Day

As first days in a job go, Friday started quite badly, but turned out pretty good in the end.

I had been instructed to arrive at 10am, a full 30 minutes after the start of their day, to allow my contact there time to settle in and figure out what I should be doing. I left home just before 9am, giving myself plenty of time. After a few minutes waiting on the station platform, and announcement came over the PA about "severe delays" on the line because of a signal failure in town. The train arrived shortly thereafter, and seemed to travel quite smoothly, but I hadn't got the direct line for my contact, so I sent a text to the agency asking for the number as a precaution. By the time the response came through, I was moments from Baker Street.

Arriving at the office about ten minutes early, I announced myself at Reception, took a seat, and waited...

...And waited...

And it turned out that my contact was running late. By the time someone had come down to bring me up to the right floor, she was only just getting there herself via the stairs. And, gentle reader, as a temp, one of the last things you want to hear on your first day is that the person you'll be working for/with asked for you to start on a later day, but that someone further up the food chain went ahead and arranged it for that day anyway... At the very least, it suggests you'll have bugger all to do.

Thankfully, such was not the case in this instance. I was given the tail end of one of their supplements - ads already chased in, waiting to be laid out on their pages. The next problem was that the machine I was supposed to be working on hadn't been properly set up yet (it later transpired that it had only just been returned from the home of the full-timer I'm covering), so I had to be taken round to the other side of the office (Editorial). This lasted until I was basically done (as far as I knew), by which point 'my' machine had been set up, so it was back round to the other side of the office to finish off.

The problem with coming in to a project that's done bar the final stage - output - is that you have to presume that all the available artwork is considered OK to go... and, unfortunately, several of the ads failed various flightcheck points. One had to be rebuilt from scratch because it was so terrible. Even so, the part pages were all ready to go before lunch, and the full pages - which, as with my last employer's proprietory system, ideally need to be run through the system - naturally followed quite quickly. All the Editorial pages were already done, so the entire supplement was with the printers not long into the afternoon.

And there was another bit of fun: I was more familiar with the Printers' online file delivery system than the company I'm working for now. I noticed this in my last visit when I pointed out that, if only they changed their system's output settings so the page number was at the front of the final filenames, they could save themselves an awful lot of time. The system is always on the look-out for page numbers at the front and, if it finds them, it will automatically place the files on the corresponding pages if they are uploaded to its pasteboard. I demonstrated with the first five pages... then two batches of ten each... then the final 30 pages in one hit.

One potential problem arose in that, out of 60 pages, five uploaded successfully, but then just disappeared. Considering I've uploaded magazines of 300+ pages by this method, and 'lost' only two or three pages at most, those odds didn't look at all good... but it's something to keep an eye on over the next few weeks...

Nevertheless, with this multi-page upload option demonstrated, one of their IT guys (observing for a whole different reason) said "Right, we'll have to change our settings, that makes things much easier!"

After checking off all the pages (and finding some errors in the Editorial side of things, which we couldn't access to correct for all kinds of network-related reasons that will need to be fixed next week), the rest of the day was spent doing a handover with the other temp who was finishing on Friday. Next week's project is similarly small (the largest magazine I'll be working on looks to be less than 100 pages, and they're all bi-monthly or bi-weekly!) but will have more advertising to work on - both collating complete artwork and setting ads from scratch - including a fairly large recruitment section which, I'm told, will all be last-minute sales.

Nowt new there, then.

Before I left for the day (a good ten minutes early, since my work was done) my contact had to call the agency to confirm who was billing whom for what and, during the conversation, described me as "a calming presence".

I'm not quite sure how to feel about that... People used to cower in terror from me. Either age or unemployment has clearly mellowed me out.

Well, that and the fact that none of these people know the meaning of the word 'busy'.