I was so excited to start my new job that I left 30 minutes early for work. Unfortunately, the taxi driver I used went through the center of town instead of the ring road, so there was a lot of traffic and I didn't make it into the office until 9am, 30 minutes late. Turns out, this was no big deal since most of the office still hadn't arrived either.
I went to the women's section first to drop off my bag and found that they had already given me a laptop. May had said it might take a couple of days, so this was a good sign. I went to find Nick and see what he wanted me to do. We sat down and he described for me the projects that were coming up. He and May were both leaving next week for Christmas holidays, so I had a lot to catch up with quickly. We basically had 4 major projects to do in the next two or three months. The first was an annual report for a mining company. This was basically 75 pages of corporate speak and financial charts. Real exciting stuff. The second was more exciting, we were doing the PR for an upcoming global conference on something related to economics and technology. The acronym was GCF, but I never quiet caught what they stood for, and Nick had forgotten himself. We also had an issue of the Saudi Voyager to put out, and a report on Saudiazation strategies that MacDonald's was publishing. So, all very exciting.
For now, I was given the opening of the annual report to edit, and then after that, I was going to help Safia, our other English Department person write profiles of all the key note speakers for the GCF. So I went back to the women's office and opened up my new computer. It was really brand new, and it had Windows whatever installed, you know, the new one that is great if you have a tablet or a touch screen but completely useless and confusing if you don't. I spent about 10 minutes just trying to figure out how to open a word document. I've come to the conclusion that maybe it doesn't even have windows. I gave up and used Google docs instead.
I started in on the profiles, which basically involved internet stalking the different presenters to find out about their credentials and job history and maybe an interesting tidbit or two. This wasn't so hard with the foreign speakers, but the Saudi speakers were mostly in their late 60s and didn't have much of an internet presence. It was actually pretty interesting to learn about all the different speakers, but it was also kind of depressing. All these people have done so much with their lives and many of them at young ages. I was starting to wonder about what exactly I was doing with my life when Nick called me and told me to get ready, he was going to take me to a meeting with the mining company. I asked if I needed to bring anything, and he said no, so I grabbed just a pencil and some paper and went to meet him in the lobby.
We took a taxi to the Mining company office in Riyadh, and when we approached the security at the reception I started to get a little worried. I had been carrying my iqama with me in my abaya pocket, but this morning, I had put it in my bag because I thought I might be taking my abaya off in the women's office and I didn't want it to fall out when I pulled it over my head. I had forgotten that I did that, and didn't remember until they asked for my iqama at the security desk. I hadn't brought anything with me. It was really embarrassing. May, another co-worker who had arrived separately had to go upstairs and find the email where I had sent her the scans of my iqama, find a color printer, print them out and bring them to the security guard. Luckily he agreed to let me in.
The meeting was to show the right hand man of the President of the Communications Department the design and layout for this year's annual report. I was seeing if for the first time, too. The mining company had wanted to go "more modern" this year than last, and the design featured diagonal cropping of photos and some really bright childlike colors for the section divider. The right hand man wasn't so sure. There were certain company branding colors that were allowed, and if it wasn't those two colors (yellow and a dark greenish teal) then he wasn't sure we could use them. I suggested we still use multiple colors, but maybe choose less vibrant, more earthy tones to reflect the "mining" aspect. Everyone liked my idea and I felt pretty proud that I had managed to make a valuable contribution on my first day.
By the time we got back to the office, it was l late and I was exhausted. No more sitting around with nothing to do, I could tell this job was going to keep me busy and engaged. For the first time since making the decision to take the job, I was 100% sure I had done the right thing.
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