First Day of Work

I got up around 6:30am today and was out of the flat by 7:10am. Took the tube to work and I got to work around 7:50am, just 10 minutes before the induction. After the induction, some of us were just hanging around, waiting for our managers to pick us up.


View from the conference room.

The podium...yeah I was bored...haha

Erica O and I sporting our information packets.

Today is only the first day, but I can feel that there is a big difference in an US workplace and an UK workplace. First of all, in the North America, we use Letter Size paper, but almost everywhere else in the world uses A4. It looked weird when I was typing something in MS Word, as if it was not aligned. I was introduced to some of the people in my team but I can hardly remember anyone's name! In the US, people often give themselves a western/English name so people can remember their names...even if they were not given one by their parents...John, Aaron, Nick, Jessica, Jennifer, James,....just to name a few common fobby names, but all the people I met today, only a few had an English name and the pronunciation was not easy for the non-English ones. Office and email etiquette is very different here than the US too. In US, most of our email communications, even with the big boys, are very casual, and we don't say "thanks" that much if we know that person well enough or they usually don't really expect a "thanks" in return (Well, I was an auditor, I often have to beg my clients to give me their crap so I used "Thanks" pretty often too). In the UK, every email starts with "Please" and ends with "Many Thanks!!" and "Warmest Regards" at the end of the message. Lastly, what I have observed is that people don't interact much with other departments that much...even though we share the same coffee machines, copy machines, and supplies room. Maybe I used to work in a small company so we were all cool with each other...but even when I worked at ABC, people start random convos w/ me or others at the line to the elevators, inside the elevators, or while doing the makeup in the restroom. People here just stand and look at the digital board to see the countdown to Ground Level. Well, maybe it's also the politics and conflict of interest as well. That's my first impression and observation.