First week at work!

 So normal life is finally starting. Last Tuesday I started at my job as Data Engineer at Omya. I have been dreading writing this blog because everything until now has been sunshine and roses and this definitly was not, but it is also not bad. Most importantly, it has not negative effective on my mood at all. I guess I wanted to provide that little bit of context because I am scared that when I write about my job it might seem that I am sad and having a horrible time, which is really not the case. The section became quite long, feel free to skip the paragraph below to the next one where I tell about what I did outside of work.

The situation at work was surprising to say the least. On Wednesday I had a general onboarding day. I started the same day as another guy and we were given some presentation and a tour around the very cool office. Part of that onboarding, I was supposed to have lunch with my team. My boss, apparently the only person from my team present that day, was caught up in meetings and would not be able to have lunch with me. So I had lunch with some other people sitting in our corner of the office. At 4 I was done with the onboarding and joined my boss and we ended up in back to back meetings until 6pm. My boss´s idea is to directly throw me in the meetings (in english) and that I would learn more about the project in that way. All is well until now. The problem came the coming days where I realized that there is no room to ask questions about the meetings I attend as me and the two other people in my team are litteraly in meetings back to back. How is this possible? There is a team of 25 people working on the project as well. They don't work in Spain and their camera's are always off. Each of these 25 people are responsible for a portion of the project and our team's job that week was to micro-manage their efforts. This is likely a cause of certain deliverable not being of the desired quality. However, the more likely cause of the results not being as expected is that the need is not properly expressed. I have found myself in numerous meetins where I was listening to what my boss said and was like, if I was on the other side I would also not understand what I would need to do. On top of that there is no sort of planning being kept of when certain parts need to be done. So it is a bit chaotic to my taste. Also on my third day I worked from 8-8 (in meetings except for the half hour lunch), so that was also not great. Thank you for reading through all that.

So after work I spent a lot of time with my roommates and their friends, we had dinners, lunches and breakfast together (with spanish karaoke) went to an event, all the good stuff. I now have a subscription to use the public bikes here in Barcelona, which I have been using a lot to get around. It is a much nicer way to get to know the city. On Friday, I went out for drinks with a friend, who introduced my to his friends, from where we joined someone else's friends, where someone else again brought us to a club. So meeting a lot of people and having a great time. As this turn of events was not entirely the plan, I received texts from both my roommates to check whether I was ok and why I had not come home yet. Which I find super sweet <3. They really have formed my safe base is Barcelona and I feel super happy to have joined this house. Here a picture of us at the event: