Week two of my new job has begun, and things are feeling a bit more comfortable. I did some significant shopping for work-appropriate gear, which helps tremendously, and I am starting to get a sense of who talks to whom, who works for whom, what meetings are when, what’s expected of me, and just how things work in general. Today, however, I had an Oprah-esque “AHA” moment.

You see, up until now, I have been tremendously overwhelmed by the sheer volume of research that comes out of this department. I kept trusting that I would catch up within a month or two, but I was really impressed by this stuff. They send out 30-page, insightful, thorough PowerPoint presentations every week for every channel (a.k.a. cable network) in the portfolio. Geeze! Anyway, I just said to Andy on Friday that I was feeling relatively certain that I would discover the easy way to do these reports - that there would be some sort of formulaic platform or template. Turns out, I was most definitely right.

Today Nik asked me when I would be looking to take over the weekly meetings for bla bla bla. I said definitely not this week, maybe next week, probably the week after that. Then I asked for some more information about what exactly is to be presented at said meeting. He said, “Oh it’s dead easy, . . .” WELL, the . . . bit included the following information: the weekly report is OUTSOURCED to another research company. That’s right - the weekly report for the weekly meeting for . . . is copy and pasted from the other company’s weekly report. Entire SLIDES - not even just charts or just data - the whole thing. Well DUDE - I can DO that!! AND, I can do that QUICKLY!!

Needless to say, I feel MUCH better. I was feeling a bit more on top of things already today, and now I’m feeling like after two months or so (possible sooner, but it’s good to leave a cushion), I’ll be right on top of everything. GooooOOOOOOO T-BONE!