The first week in a new job is a traumatising thing. Even though this is effectively my fifth job out of university, I still get butterflies that remind me a lot of starting a new school.

Will I like my new classmates? Will I like my new teacher? Will either my classmates or my teacher like me?

Will I be too smart or too stupid to fit in? Will the older boys steal my lunch or call me names?

Will I be able to find my desk again after lunch?

Looking back over the various jobs I started, there were certainly some challenging moments.

I can still vividly remember my second day at the recruitment company. I had just moved to Prague and was spending every night out partying with visiting friends. The resulting exhaustion was second only to the aftermath of my best AIESEC conference (record being 14 hours sleep in 6 nights). Several times that afternoon I dozed off and snapped back awake as my head was about to hit the desk. Five years later and I can still see it so clearly. I guess terror has a way of imprinting such scenes into your memory.

The sleep lesson was learnt for my subsequent job at the mobile operator, but that didn't prevent me from forgetting to log off my PC before leaving for the weekend. Upon my return on Monday, lo, I found a PC infested with porn spyware, toolbars, popup generators, the works. After reviewing the browser history, it was evident that someone had been surfing the seedier side of the information highway in the early early hours of Saturday morning. Most probably a cleaner had noticed the unlocked PC, and decided to catch up on a bit of email and porn, and in the process thoroughly infected my windows profile with not entirely unwelcome smut. This was, unfortunately, nothing I could resolve myself. Instead, I was forced to have a conversation with my new manager something along the lines of "Well, this is going to sound bad, but it seems that someone has been surfing a lot of porn on my computer..."

And if you want to consider temp jobs I've had, then I would also give honourable mention to my stint as admin assistant to the Marketing department at my university during summer. First or second week, I had the job of setting up a mailing list for staff of the larger business faculty (100 or so academics?). Setup went fine, but an immediate problem was revealed in that responding to someone's list message would effectively respond to the entire list. A friend of mine didn't catch this subtle point, and in responding to a proferred classified advert, managed to reply to the other 98 or so unrelated academics. I gallantly sought to bring her attention to this oversight so that she might not embarrass herself again. Hey Sarah, did you know that if you reply to a list email then everyone on the list will get it? I wasn't sure if you realised, so just thought I should check... all you need to do is check the TO: line... you know how people really hate getting that sort of mail :] dave. And here, of course, I forget to check the TO: line, and sent that email out to 97 or so unrelated (and now slightly more agitated) academics.

And how's the new job then? Nothing so bad has happened to me yet. The people have been really nice and I haven't done anything too embarassing so far. The worst thing on the radar is likely to be some sadistic initiation ritual known as The Krispy Kreme Challenge. If this is the last Pyramid Blog post you ever read, you can probably assume that I recently/tragically discovered that I was a diabetic.