Monday, April 7, 2008

First day at work...

I am now safely back home in my den after an exhausting first day at work as a more ordinary non-consultant salaryman. It is actually not a completely unknown company since I'm actually returning back to a company I used to work for a couple of years ago but stepped out to become a high powered management consultant and recently received a very attractive offer I decided to take.
In one way it feels really good since I know most people's faces and who they are and am on good standing with most of them and the people that has joined in after my departure has to show me a proper amount of respect since I come in at a pretty high level and has longer experience in the industry than them, as well as a solid network internally on both a national and international level. On the other hand it feels pretty strange, since so many things are in the same state as when I left, even the coffee vending machine is the same and carries the same brands as whey I worked there earlier.

My new boss, who I will call Mr. Shachou for the purposes of this blog is an interesting person who is not inheretly a bad person, but has a tendency to get in a "I-am-so-great" mode of bragging that can get pretty tiresome.

One of the things that I noticed pretty immediately is that the internal politics inside the company has intensified, before it used to be pretty simple with the old sales department consisting of older men with long experience in the industry against Mr. Shachou, but now with a number of newer managers recently hired the number of factions inside the company seems to have increased considerably. Sitting at my desk for less than 5 hours, several people inside the company that I've known since earlier tried to get my opinion of various people "What do you think of Mr. X?", "Isn't Mr. Y pretty awful?" etc. which can be pretty tiresome trying to dodge since I don't want to give any opinion on people I've talked to for less than a minute and has no idea what they are doing...

The internal politics will be very interesting as I move deeper into the swamp that is my old-new company...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

How many of your "New" coworkers are aware of this blog?

La Niña said...

How does one dodge questions like that anyway?

Sometimes office politics makes me want to quit working all together. But then I know I'd be a bum and starve. So I just psyche myself up and go to the office again for another day of trying to stay away from people, to a point that they think I'm aloof and/or a snob.

Mr. Salaryman said...

In my new great company the English level is pretty poor so basically noone would be able to read it anyway, two people know of it, but I don't think they check it out often since it takes some effort for them to read English.

And yeah, Nina, it can be pretty messy, I usually try to stay out of that kinda stuff and have been pretty successful so far, I guess the exception is when I encounter incompetent and rude people in the company - they deserve to be called

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