It's funny how the first post of 2013 is going to be related to work. Haha.
I wouldn't say time flies (time is always moving at a constant speed), but I have been working for 7 months already. Out of 147 working days, I have turned up for work for 136 days, spent 3 days in Bintan for a teambuilding session, and taken 7 days of leave and 1 day of MC. The average time spent working per day stands at 9 hours 15 minutes, and the average time I left the office is 1913h. As usual, point estimates don't always reveal the entire story due to the existence of variance.
I remembered that during my first one to two months of joining the department, I was assigned to work with different colleagues under a wide range of projects to allow me to gain exposure and pick up things, be it technical expertise or general knowledge. Occasionally, I was thrown into deep waters (not literally of course), but help was still readily available when I sounded out. It was still busy but come to think of it, I think that was really my honeymoon period.
When I got my official clearance after three months or so, I got to see a brand new world of things. Things that any layman will go 'wah' if you are always interested how we managed our portfolio. But the 'wah' effect didn't last long because it simply meant that I had to take over some work from my teammates and I had more responsibilities. The projects that I were involved in the start took a back seat as most of my time were spent doing my core responsibilities, be it day-to-day operations, fortnightly reports, monthly reports, and the quarterly reports came later.
This went on for about two months and throughout this period, I got more efficient in getting the reports done. I remember my first fortnightly report took like 2-3 days to get it done, but I can comfortably churn it out in 2-3 hours now. Monthly reports went something like 2 weeks to 3-5 days depending on the complexity.
Towards my sixth month, my supervisor roped me in to be involved in some of the projects on his side. The main difference was that I was supposed to spearhead some of the projects and take control of how I wanted things to be done (subject to bosses' approval of course), and be part of the decision-making team for our daily processes, and this allowed me entry to high level meetings with some of the management personnel. The meetings were definitely an eye-opener, for obvious reasons due to the nature of my job.
Of course, there were other ad-hoc stuff and miscelleaneous tasks, such organization of the 2-day staff retreat for our department, getting X'mas breakfast for the division, co-organizing the Secret Santa for the department, and organizing the year-end lunch for the division, etc. Glad everything went well, and all my colleagues are very co-operative.
Speaking of my colleagues, I have grown to enjoy their company more and more these few months. Amidst the working (and sometimes stressful) environment, they are still a fun-loving bunch. I tend to think we laugh a lot as a whole as compared to the rest of the departments in the company. Last, but not the least, I think they have been extremely, extremely helpful and understanding to this little 小弟弟 (the older ones call me by that sometimes). Hahaha.