The thing about new jobs is this: for the first couple of weeks you sort of just breeze by. You don’t know exactly what you’re doing or when it should be done so you spend a lot of time just hanging out. The longer you’re there, of course, the more you learn the rules of the company and the logisitics of doing your job. I’d say, depending on how difficult the job is, you’re pretty much set by the second month. You know what you’re supposed to be doing and when it’s supposed to be done; you know answers to questions being directed towards you and the questions you asked in the beginning, when you didn’t know better, seem so stupid.
Well, I’m in my second month, quickly creeping up to the third, and I still feel like I’m in my second week. A lot of my job consists of ordering supplies for the business we do here. Which is all well and good, when I’m ordering office supplies and things that are stored right next to my desk and are purchased in such small quantities that I know when they’re going to have to be refilled.
But for the big things, I have no clue when to reorder. Right before I started my boss put in a huge order for so many of those big ticket orders so for the past two and a half months I’ve been coasting by. And, because I still don’t know what our orders look like on any given day (and don’t have a last-year-at-this-time comparison), I think only in terms of, Oh, it looks like I’ll need to order some of that soon. In reality, though, the people who actually use what I’m ordering are thinking, I really hope more of that arrives today. Meanwhile, I’m sitting at my desk, oblivious to the whole situation.
Part of it is the fact that I still don’t have a clear grasp of what I’m doing. Not because I don’t know, in bullet points, what my job is but because I’ve never done it before. All those bullet points are in abstract and none of it will make sense until I get down to it, which will be a slow process as those large towers of product slowly dwindle and I need ot reorder. But another part of it is because the organization is such that only the person who set it up would understand what’s going on. Everything is scattered to the four corners of the warehouse and no one knows definitively where anything is. Part of my job, of course, is to organize that. But that’s a catch-22 because some other group has to get organized for me to get orgainzed and they can’t move anything until I move something. For now at least. It should slow down in the next couple of days and I’ll have time to organize and hopefully wrap my mind around how I picture this working.
Perhaps by my fourth month I’ll feel like I know what’s going on.
