Back with the UN

I have had the most exciting first several working days in the HQ here. Before the excitement worn off, Imust jot down this experience to future reference on people’s good will.

I had my doubts before coming here. There are rumors about how difficult the job in the HQ could be… The truth is yet to be found, while I completely not prepared for the warmness and friendly treatment I have received in the first week here.

Don’t get me wrong. My office is no kindergarden – though there is a guy who offered unlimited supply of gummybears and I had some after he fixed my email problem. What intrigued me most is the wonderful diversity of UN staff and the working atmosphere here.

Again nobody raised a single eyebrow to my arrival, most of the staff work here are foreigners too. My boss sent out an email introducing me to all office staff on my first day, so it felt like everybody has already known me when I was walking around the office. Some people came up introducing themselves, and some others talked about their own experience of arrival and offered tips for newcomers. If New York is an international city with people in different color and ethics, the UN office is more than twice as diversified as the New York city. I felt so at home here as I have no problem to blend into this international crowd.

The most exciting time is to pick tools – namely laptop, desktop and PDA. I was offered with all options available on market – a lot of cool stuff! Tony made some recommendations based on the website listing, then he took me went around the office asking for people’s opinion about their machines (obviously geeks are serious about picking their computer models, hence people use all sorts of machine here). We even stopped the department head to ask for having a look at his PDA, and he did give it to me and shared his user experience! After all, this is an IT department, and I guess technical people don’t have much bureaucracy built in their bones.

I could go on talking about the technical lectures I received these days and how grateful I am to the selflessness sharing from my colleagues… but that’s beyond the limit of this public blog. I come to New York for this job, and so far I thought this is the best decision I made in years – I must write this down so I could look back at it in 1 year’s time. : )

Love to the UN office and my kind colleagues.