SCHEDULE

I commute from Puyallup to Magnolia every day. It’s not as bad a commute as it sounds, but it does take quite awhile. I’ll post more about my experiences with Seattle public transportation later, but for now, I’ll talk about the schedule. I get up at 5:30am, exercise, and I’m walking out the door by 6:20 to catch the 6:40 Sounder to downtown Seattle. When I arrive, I walk a couple blocks to catch a bus from downtown to Magnolia. Usually I only have to wait about 10 minutes, and it’s about 30 minutes, so I get to work right around 8am. (1.5 hour commute)

They’re pretty easy-going about the schedule, with people rolling in anywhere from 8 to 9am, but I have to start work a little earlier, because I have to leave the office at 4:45pm to catch my 4:55 bus. Due to some craziness in the bus schedule, it takes a half-hour longer to go home, because I have to transfer in downtown from one bus to another to get back to the Sounder station in time to catch the last train at 5:40pm. The train drops me off around 6:15, which means that I’m usually home by 6:30pm. (2 hour commute)

Now, I’m sure that doesn’t sound that bad to some of you, like my Dad, who have been getting up at 5 or 6am for years. But you have to remember that my previous “commute” consisted of waking up at 8:30am, walking into my office, and starting work at 9am. A 12-hour day is quite a change for me.

This will get much better when we move to the new offices in downtown Seattle in about a month. Then I’ll be able to get up a half-hour later and catch the last Sounder at 7am, and only have a quick 10-minute bus ride to and from the Sounder in downtown. Plus, we’ll be in a much nicer location, with access to more stuff.

OFFICE

(If I understand the situation correctly) The web design team at some point became too large to stay at the downtown office, which is mostly occupied by the magazine and real estate staff. There was some spare office space at the Magnolia office, which is where the construction company (another company with the same owner) is located. At this point, though, the web design team has again outgrown its space, and has bled out into the hallways and shared office space, so they’re looking for a new location again.

As luck would have it, the downtown office is on the second floor of the building (which they own). The first floor was being used by an art supply company, but they’ve moved, so the company has decided to remodel and move the web design team into the first floor. Word is we’ll be sharing the space with another division that sells condos, but the bulk of the space will be for us.

The Magnolia office isn’t a bad space at all (as tech-oriented offices go). There are windows, and the room that most of the team is in has doors, so they can close the doors and not have to worry about music interfering with the construction company or stuff like that. My computer is in a chunk of hallways with some desks that I share with another designer and an intern. I don’t mind it at all, but it will be nice to get downtown, because right now I feel isolated from the rest of the team, and I haven’t gotten to know any of them as well as I would like.

Plus, the new office is only about a block away from Pike Place Market, which means easy access to lots of cool shops and food, not to mention Piroshki Piroshki, who sell delicious pastries. I’m probably going to get fat eating there all the time.

COWORKERS

Talking about work on your weblog is a tricky thing. I don’t want to get Dooced, so I won’t really be talking about my coworkers or any details about projects we’re working on. Suffice to say that my coworkers all seem cool, and are a suprisingly diverse bunch. I guess it’s because I’ve worked in the tech industry for so long, and it’s overwhelmingly dominated by young white males, so I always forget that even though design jobs are heavily computer based nowadays, it attracts a much wider variety of people. Our team has a good mix of men and women, and also ethnicities. I guess that they recently had an “ethnic-foods-pot-luck”, where everyone was supposed to bring food from their ethnicity. I’m not sure what I would have taken if I had been working here then. Is there any traditionally Dutch food? There must be, but I can’t think of it. I probably would have focussed on my Irish heritage instead and brought corned beef and whiskey.

TASKS

It’s hard to talk about my responsibilities this early on, since I haven’t been exposed to everything, and they’re still figuring out my abilities, and where I will fit best in the production process. So far, I spent all last week doing work in photoshop mockups, and this week they’re having me start work on producing actual HTML and Dreamweaver templates.

COMPUTER

When I first started, they had me working on an older laptop in the office, while they ordered my new one. Everyone has a pretty nice Dell laptop with a second monitor hooked up to it, so you can work on code in one monitor, and preview in browser in the other. My laptop showed up really quickly (within two days of starting), and it’s very nice, although it’s a bit strange to be on the other side of the Luser/Admin wall. This is the first place in years where I haven’t had admin access to my computer. I guess the tech guy is a bit choosy about what to allow (I heard he doesn’t even like people running WinAmp. Still, I was able to get Firefox installed, and I can still play MP3s while I work, and that’s all that really matters.

As for software, it’s a windows shop, which is also a little odd, in the design world. I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a mac guy yet, but I’ve been working on mac for the last year, and I’ve adjusted to the text editors and ftp tools I have through mac, so it’s been a hard switch back to windows, where the programs are all ugly and don’t work quite as well. On the other hand, it’s nice to have copies of all the Adobe and Macromedia programs available to me again, and it’s also good to know that if (when) my computer runs into problems, it’s not my responsibility to fix it.

LUNCH

So far, I’ve been eating out almost every day, but it dawned on me yesterday that I have access to a mini-fridge and kitchen area, so I could actually keep sandwich fixings there at work, which means I don’t have to deal with making a sandwich before I leave for work in the morning and keeping it from getting squished or soggy during the intervening 6 hours. I won’t eat sandwiches every day, but if I have a cheap lunch options available to me, it will help me keep from blowing all my new paychecks on lunch.