The Disorienting First Days

The hum is the first thing you notice. Not the apathetic fluorescent lights or the suspiciously sticky desk surface, but the low, monotonous hum of a server room somewhere down the hall. It’s Day 3. Your laptop fan is whirring, but the screen is locked. Your temporary password, a 17-character string of gibberish that was supposed to work for 24 hours, expired 47 hours ago. You’ve sent two emails to IT. You’ve sent a Slack message to your manager, who replied with a single thumbs-up emoji an hour later, an action that clarified nothing.

So you sit there. You are a highly-vetted, newly-acquired asset, a human being who presumably costs the company upwards of $77,777 a year, and your primary function is to generate heat in a corporate-branded fleece you were given in a welcome bag that also contained a stress ball and a pen that doesn’t work.

Your manager, bless their heart, had tried to be helpful on Day 1. They sent you a link to an org chart from 2017 and a shared drive.

Poking around the shared drive is like being told to get a feel for a city by being dropped into