Ground Control to Major Tom

Day 11

Beam me up Scotty. Today was the first day of my new job. Most of you have received an e-mail with my contact information, although I prefer to continue using my Gmail account (separation of synagogue and state if you will). I spent the morning with the department assistant. She's the type woman who if keep her happy, your whole life will be a.ok. If you don't, might as well kiss your ass good-bye. The head of our department took me and another (new colleague) for a two hour lunch in the manager's restaurant on campus (not somewhere that I will be dining on a regular basis). We actually had a three course meal including wine! She laughed when we were offered wine because she can't understand why Americans hesitate to drink wine with lunch. Well you don't have to ask me twice, and she applauded the fact that I caved in much quicker than my colleague.

The late afternoon was spent logging on to my laptop. I had 94 e-mails to start and most of them did not revolve around "what's for lunch at the cantina today". They were actually bonified e-mails with a lot to read. And tomorrow most of my team is headed out to Berlin early to rehearse for the launch meeting over the weekend. And I have a meeting to defend our PR budget to the marketing team already! Oy! I've not even had the plan presented by the PR company yet! C'est la vie or sink or swim. Luckily I'm still fairly buoyant after all these years. But I love, love, love the fact that I have my very own PR agency! I worked hard for it.

Although we're in Dilbert City, it's not that bad. The cubes are HUGE and we have all the necessary equipment we need, although no one seems to know when my Blackberry might arrive. But they will reimburse my pay-as-you go mobile phone until it does. The team bought me a beautiful basket of flowers and I have this huge gorgeous tree-like plant towards the front of my desk. Actually it needs to be pushed out of the way, but it's so heavy it ain't happening anytime soon.

Well tomorrow is another day and I leave for Berlin early on Friday morning. Day one of 10 straight days!