Things don’t always start smoothly.

Yesterday I arrived at UC Davis, fresh-faced and ready to start my new "hippie job" (as one of my friends put it). The first matter at hand (after growing my neckbeard and tie-dying a dozen t-shirts, of course) was my formal ingestion by the University’s machinery, signing a slew of equally boring forms for various esoteric and bureaucratic purposes. The pencil-pushing was followed by a visit to the all-powerful Transportation and Parking Services office to buy a parking pass.

When I finally arrived at the office, it was in a state of moderate pandemonium wrought by the aftermath of changes made to University mailservers over the weekend. The entire staff was getting pummeled with calls when the FNG showed up in the middle of the mess. So what happens to the FNG when he makes his entrance during a crisis?

You stick him in a corner, pray he doesn’t somehow fuck things up even worse, and ignore him until it all blows over. And that’s how I spent the rest of the morning, sitting in a corner counting ceiling tiles. At one point I was so bored I started reading an obsolete BBEdit manual just to try and kill the time. (It didn’t work very well.)

Things finally settled down enough for me to be shown to a desk cleverly hidden under an inch of dust, where I was given a dead 14" monitor and a computer that ultimately needed a clean OS install before it would boot reliably. But such has it ever been; the FNG always gets the scraps and has to be thankful for them. I expected that.

What I hadn’t anticipated was being left to my own devices since then. Maybe it’s one of those informal psych tests; dump the new guy unceremoniously in front of a desk and see what he does. Will he start asking for things to do? Pore over whatever documentation is at hand? Fuck around with friends on IM? Just sit there and look sad?

Or maybe—in a worst-case scenario—the little fucker will start blogging about his first day on the job.