Day Five was a short day because I had to leave to catch my flight back home around 3 in the afternoon.
Last night, I watched a couple more training videos in my hotel room. This morning, I watched one more and was all caught up on what I was supposed to watch this week. I talked to one of the business ananlysts with some questions I had come up with from watching the videos. I got all my questions answered.
I spent some time with my team leader going over some more development practices. I’m glad he’s patient with me. :)
Last night, I looked up a few coworkers on Facebook and added them as friends. One of them, a functional architect, accepted my friend invite almost immediately. She admitted to me today that she looks up every new hire on Facebook. It was a little shocking to discover I had been “stalked” before I had “stalked.”
Today, I went to lunch with two of the functional architects, one being my new Facebook friend, to a little “hole in the wall Indian place.” The food was super-tasty.
Now I’m on my way home. It’s been a great week.
Now, our development manager talked to me about my blog posts. He’d heard from the functional architect I went to lunch today that I had written about my previous lunches on my blog and that gave her a good idea of where we were going to go to lunch today.
He expressed concern that I had information about the company in my posts. He acknowledged that I hadn’t published any secrets but that I had discussed names and what could be construed as business practices.
I was devastated. For all my efforts to be a good new employee, I had “caused concern” with what I was doing outside of business hours. My lack, perhaps, of tact, respect for the company, consideration of possible consequences of revealing what I did reveal, was causing friction with at least one person of decision-making capital at the company.
Crap!
I went back and edited each of my blog posts for the week, removing any names, any names of any software, hardware, or services that I may have mentioned by name. The only thing I thing I left was my Apple MacBook Pro. I hope that’s not a problem.
In retrospect, I made a serious miscalculation, which isn’t surprising considering I seem to have a history of miscalculating things of a social nature. Chalk it up, maybe, to my maybe being afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome.
Now that I’ve thought about it, I can see that if I had been an employee with the company for some time, to the point everyone, especially those in decision-making positions, knew who I was, what kind of person I was… Basically, if they knew me well enough to trust me, it probably wouldn’t have been a problem, or as much of a problem. But with me being the new kid on the block, coming in and blogging names and crap, even if I was being careful not to divulge anything that might be a company secret, I understand now why they’d be nervous.
These corporate social dynamics are a real challenge for me. It’s almost like I never know when I’m being appropriate and when I’m not. I guess I should be more careful and just ask more questions about everything.
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