First Week at Danfoss

I'm sure that all of my faithful readers (all six of you, according to Blogger) are curious about my first week at my new job at the HVAC components manufacturer, Danfoss.  It was, well ... a little weird.

On Monday, I couldn't get up when my alarm went off and I fell back asleep.  I did wake up a few hours later though, this time in a panic.  I immediately called the office and said that I slept through my alarm - which is kind of true - and said I would get there as soon as I could.  I quickly got ready and left.  Thanks to it being the day after the Thanksgiving weekend, traffic was light and I got there in about twenty-five minutes.  I was supposed to be there at 8:30, but arrived at 10. Not a good start, but everyone was very understanding.  According to the HR Director, if I had been there on time, I would have just been waiting since she had had computer trouble for about an hour.  While it's never good to be late to work, if I had to do it, the first day is probably the day that will cause the least amount of damage to my standing with the company.  And rest easy: I was on time the rest of the week.

The first couple of days, I mostly read various HVAC pages on Wikipedia.  Danfoss has a site on its intranet called "E-Learning" that's designed to help newbies get up to speed in the HVAC market.  However, that site is down and won't be back up until January, so I spent some time reading up on Wikipedia.  That may sound lame, and it is a little, but I did learn a lot and I have a better understanding than if I hadn't spent my time reading.

What will my duties be?  A little bit of everything.  I was brought on, along with other employees, as part of an initiative called Project Boulder.  Project Boulder's purpose is to help the company go after "Millennials" who are entering the industry.  That means that as a company, Danfoss needs to reevaluate how it conducts business, and then make improvements.  I'll be helping to redesign the product packaging, instructions, advertisements in industry magazines, making how-to videos for installing the products, creating and reformatting catalogs, even writing articles for the previously mentioned industry magazines that push the company's products.  Like I said, a little bit of everything.

One of the other weird things that I learned was that I am the only member of the Marketing Department, aside from the Marketing Manager.  The week before I started, the two other members of the department resigned together (which sound a bit like a suicide pact).  What this means is that my boss is having to do the work of three people right now, which means that I'm not getting a lot of direction from her on how I use my time.  But since I'm working with so many different departments, that's not as big of an issue as it might otherwise be.  In fact, on Thursday, I asked the Product Manager if he had any documents for me to work on.  He gave me a catalog that needed updating, and I spent the next day-and-a-half reformatting the entire thing.  I showed him a quick look at some of the changes I had made and he was really pleased with the improvements.

The worst thing about my job is the commute, but even that's not too bad.  I take a tunnel to work - which does involve a toll - that shaves off at least twenty minutes from my route.  All told, my commute is between forty-five and fifty minutes each way.  Still, as long as the drive is less than an hour, I'm fine.

Overall, this week was a good one.  No, the start was not my best showing, but I think I made up for that pretty quickly.  I have a good feeling about this.