Playing Grown Up, Take 2

Today I started my next big-girl job. 

Can I be a kid again?

I kind of feel like the kids in The Golden Compass with the gold dust being stolen from them their souls.  That's what happened in that book, right?  I read it when I was still innocent and couldn't comprehend my soul being slowly sucked out of me by The Man.

Okay, so my new job isn't that terrible from what I know so far.  Big change just always makes me nervous about making the right decisions with my life, balancing responsibility with happiness.

There is a lot of free food.  They even have real dairy creamer!  None of that dehydrated powdered creamer shit my old job had.  I got downgraded from sharing an office with an uptight Nazi-bitch to my own cubicle.  I also got a computer downgrade -- desktop tower with fatty monitor bigger than the one I have at home, to a Dell laptop.  I did go from Windows XP to Windows 7, however, which is important to a CS nerd like me.  The girls I've met so far are pretty friendly, though none of them are engineers.  Hopefully I'll have an opportunity to bond with them anyway.  This new place has lots of company-paid lunches (between one and three times a month), which should be a good way to befriend people.  I just hope it's a crowd I can make friends with -- mostly PHDs, mostly male, and mostly foreign.  Here's hoping!

I also had the overwhelming feeling that I am underqualified for this job, but I am trying to tell myself that I felt that way about my first big-girl job, too.  Hopefully once I have real programming tasks to work on, I'll pull through and gain some confidence.  I wanted to learn something new at this one anyway, right? 

Worse case, this is just my next job.  More experience.  More money in the bank. 

Fun tidbits of the day:
* my office is on the top floor of a tall building in the Howard Hughes Center across from the Promenade, which means lots of food choices for lunch and shopping after work
* Rubio's has Vanilla Coke!  That makes me miss Chano's and it's Cherry Coke.  Maybe after a night of drinking Downtown?
* I paid for parking with a check.  How can a strip mall parking garage not accept credit cards??
* I managed to drive to and from work at times when the 405 was NOT at a standstill!  Unfortunately, many drivers have PTS and see traffic ghosts and slow down despite all the ample freeway space. 
* I cannot wait until the leasing office gets its act together so I can have a gated parking spot, because I cannot take too many more experiences parallel parking in really tiny spots on a hill while cars honk furiously at me because they are angry to be living terrible lives in LA

Here's to tomorrow.  And the day after that.