el segundo día de trabajo

This morning, I did not want to get out of bed. It felt so nice and comfy, that even Dustyn stayed in bed after I finally decided I had to get ready. It didn't take me long; so far, I've been pretty good about picking out my attire the night before. I just put the clothes on and make myself look presentable.

I did make it to the trolley today on time, and I made it to work by 8:30, which was exciting. Except, most people didn't really get there until around 9:30 - 10ish. I had the project from Jeff to work on, so I wasn't without work. It was unexpected; I spent some time trying to figure out how to create a "smart wall" in autocad, and when I finally did, my job became 10 times easier. It probably took me 3 hours to finish Jeff's work, but it felt like a long time because of the learning curve of how they use autocad. There are so many shortcuts and life is overall simpler the way they do things. Yippee.

After I finished this project (he had told me that if I was spending about 4 hours on it, that was too much - they're not a big client, which means not a lot of money, so that means, they don't get as much of our time), I asked around and everyone was a lot less stressed today with projects. No one really had anything I could help out with, so after talking with Nicole, I decided to go organize and de-clutter the materials library. Let me insert here that at Studio 8, the girls always forced me into the materials library because quite frankly, it IS a tedious job. You learn a lot, but filing wood samples isn't all that glamorous. Yes, I was there for about 3.5 hours today, but that's because my other option was to search through and familiarize myself with the intranet (our own little Gensler online world). I didn't want to appear as if I was just sitting there searching the web if Jeff came back from his meetings. Organizing and doing physical construction (yep, my organizing involved taking apart pieces of our high density filing system to make it more compact so the larger carpet samples we have fit better) appears to look like you're doing more work than just sitting there. That's what I thought, anyway.

We had this cool thing at lunch today that's called "Lunch with Leadership". Gensler orders lunch for anyone that wants to attend on Tuesdays and we meet together in a conference room or around our tables to have lunch and chat. It doesn't have to be about architecture or design at all. We talked about Tom's birds today (Kiwi and Dori) and Ane's search for a pre-school for her twins. It's sort of a "let's put work aside and talk" kind of thing. I really enjoyed it, but I feel like the dorky kid who tries to make comments sometimes. I'm going to work on the being quiet and only interjecting when I have something important to say thing.

After lunch is when I worked in the materials library (ML). When Jeff did come back from his meetings, it was nearly 5:00. He came to me in the ML and asked what I was doing. Uh-oh. You see, working in the ML is not billable time, which means that Gensler isn't making money. We had a little chat about how when I have completed my work, I should talk to Ralph, Scott, Cory, or himself about something else to do. He wasn't upset with me because quite frankly, he wasn't there and neither was Cory. Claudia the girl I was assigned to work with today wasn't there either. I wasn't aware at all that I should talk to Scott or Ralph. Jeff understood this, but it did make me feel a little stupid. And he said that when I do go ask for work, I should ask for enough work to keep me occupied for a while so I don't have to go back after five minutes because I've completed the task. *This was kind of happening yesterday when I was doing small things for Nicole while waiting for my sessions with other co-workers. Nicole sits right by Jeff's office, so I hope he didn't get the feeling that I was trying to do everything like Speedy Gonzales.

Anyway, Jeff and I talked about the project we're doing together for a while and then we went to a "Wine and Cheese" meeting from 5 - 6 where an employee presents his/her work to whomever decides to show up. It's informational and sometimes it's called a charette and we toss ideas around when someone is stuck in their design. Today's project was a-mazing. It's confidential, so I can't say what it's about, but it's in Abu Dhabi. How cool.

After this little meeting, Jeff and I met again about our project. He looked at the work that I had done this morning and I made a few mistakes - simple things I had no business forgetting to do or look at; I guess after the whole library talk, this one felt a little awkward because he said something along the lines of "we as designers have to be careful to remember to do these things (and he listed off several things) because if the client catches these mistakes, s/he is going to think they can do our job." Good point. He told me that before I hand in changes/corrections/etc. to him, I should have a neighbor to look over my work. Well, two of my neighbors were MIA today, which left the cad tech, Nancy, who is always busy helping us figure out how to handle cad. He asked me to get a few things done and corrected and then send it out to a guy named Shawn. I said, "Sure" and went to my computer.

I got everything corrected, and double checked my work. I printed it, and took it to Nancy, since by this time, it was 6:30 and basically no one else was in the office. She looked over it, and then I went to my computer to make a PDF to send off. Except, when I tried making the PDF, the columns in the plan showed up as lime green, whereas everything else was greyscaled. After my talk(s) with Jeff, there was no way I was going to send this out. I talked to Nancy about it more and she told me not to worry about it (we tried fixing it for about 5-10 minutes and it wasn't helping). I then decided to tell Jeff about the lime green columns. He told me not to be such a perfectionist and to send it out. So I did. I sent it to Shawn and remembered the attachment, but I was supposed to cc Jeff. So, I forwarded the email to Jeff, but the attachment didn't send. I realized it immediately, sent Jeff an email saying what happened, and tried to correct my mistake. Evidently, Jeff didn't get the email with the attachment before he walked over to my desk and said, "Magan"....I looked up, and he said in a quiet voice, "you forgot the attachment." It was soooo awkward explaining what happened. Strike three for the day.

I know - it doesn't seem like I did all that much wrong, but I don't like feeling like I've let someone down. I'm working with the Office Manager of our office and I want to do a good job. I just need to slow down, take a DEEP breath, and do what I know how to do. It was nice though, Jeff noticed that I worked from 8:30 to 7:00 today and said I can either go in late or leave early tomorrow. I'll probably wait until Friday to leave early. I have to get something done for Jeff in the morning and Nicole told me that she has a couple of things for me tomorrow too (and she's only in from 7 - 11 tomorrow).

I still had a fantastic day, but I have to make sure that I remember that I'm still learning too. I should mention that every time Jeff talked to me, he never said, "I'm really upset with you." He would say not to take it personally, just to make a mental note of what he was saying. He wasn't mad at me or even upset. It's hard for me because I just want to have confidence in myself and know how to do everything. I guess I'm a little "hurt" (for lack of a better word) from my last jobs because they had no patience and expected me to be perfect. I got talked about every time I made a mistake. I am used to being the person that was disliked. Automatically, my brain things that Gensler will treat me the same way and make me feel those same bad feelings again. It hurts to think about it. I don't know what I'll do if people start to dislike me here - I don't have my support group here. I don't know how I would have made it through that time without you guys and my frequent cry sessions and hugs. I know it's kind of lame to do this in a blog, but I do want to say thank you. I have some amazing friends, and I love you and miss you guys. Please keep praying that things will go well here.