My life as a Noogler

noo-gler Pronunciation Key (nō-gler)
n.

A new employee at Google. Often recognized by the dazed and confused look on their faces as they are moving in packs from class to class looking for conference rooms. The desk of a noogler is adorned with pretty helium filled mylar balloons. One remains a noogler until the balloons have completely deflated, a process which usually takes about 3 weeks, at which point one becomes a full-fledged googler.

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[English nō-gler, from new - googler]

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So I started work bright and early Monday morning, and arrived to a calendar already full of classes, and a full schedule of things to do. First thing we did was got our official badge pictures (which sadly ended up looking worse than my Adobe one), and then into the classroom we went to get an overview of what we were going to be doing all week. Google has some very set ways of doing things that are a little different than other companies I've worked at, and they give you a couple of weeks to get up to speed on their techniques. They actually have the equivalent of a U of Google the first two weeks to show/teach Nooglers what will be expected of them, and how things are expected to function.

All in all though, I'm having a great time. Once I found my desk I realized that I had had all my hardware set up for me and ready to go. I was able to immediately launch into my course work and get things done. Sadly the motherboard on my new PowerBook was faulty, so it's already in the shop to be fixed/replaced, but other than that I think things have gone pretty well. The commute doesn't seem to be killing me, and once I actually get a reliable portable, I think I'm going to be quite happy on the train.

Currently I'm a member of the brand new Mac Client team at Google, an engineering group whose goal is to make insanely great Google applications for Mac OS X. This could change, as things are very dynamic here, but it looks like I'll be doing this for the foreseeable future (i.e. next couple of weeks :) ).

Jen, Mollie (Jen's mom) and Keira, came to visit on Friday to check out my new office digs and have lunch. We did a quick tour of the buildings which was good for me as well, as it was my first chance to really wander around and be able to pause and look at things, as opposed to frantically searching for a specific room that I'm supposed to be in in 5 minutes or so...