10.21.06
New Era
Woke up around five this morning. Couldn’t get back to sleep. Everything in my life is changing right now; my mind is racing and I’m full of nervous energy. But it’s good.
Thursday was my first day at Apple as an IS&T Helpline Analyst. Mostly I just shadowed a couple other techs all day, listening in on their calls and taking notes on the resources they used to solve problems. The calls were generally pretty simple: VPN issues, expired or forgotten passwords, slow network connections, requests for equipment and services, etc. There were a couple of Excel problems and a few oddities here and there (like a MacBook that for some reason always boots in verbose mode), but nothing too scary. Overall, I feel very much in my element.
On Friday I was given the entire morning to set up my workspace. I have two computers, an eMac and a PowerMac, which I was allowed to format and reinstall as I saw fit. I control both systems from a single keyboard and mouse using Teleport, and I also installed Quicksilver and Typeit4me to help me out. It’s all pretty darn slick. Friday afternoon was more shadow time. This Monday I’ll learn how to create accounts and change information in one of the employee databases, which is pretty much all I’ll do until Wednesday, when another temp starts and the two of us enter training on Espresso, the trouble ticket software we’ll use every day at Apple.
Another thing happened last Thursday: I got my acceptance letter from the University of London External Programme. I’m heading out to the Post Office in a few minutes to mail in my registration fee.
Everything just fell into place all at once, and it feels kind of eerie. Not that I can relax just yet; my job at Apple isn’t guaranteed past the end of the year, so I have to work hard to impress my supervisors in the hope of landing one of the limited positions they’ll have available, and I’m starting at UoL later than I’d intended, so I have to study pretty hard for the next few months to prepare for the four exams I plan to sit in May. If you don’t hear much from me in the near future, or if it takes longer than usual to get a response from me by phone or email, that’ll be why. But it feels like October 19, 2006 was the first day of the rest of my life, and I’m pretty happy about the way things look from here.
