The euphoria of my first week has been and gone and now I'm at the end of week 2. To say it has been a very frustrating week is certainly an understatement. There have been days when I have thought that I was really getting the hang of things and then there were days when I thought to myself that I was totally out of my depth.
So, what I have learnt this week in my transition to my new civilian life? Quite possibly the biggest (and most frustrating) thing I have learnt is how much hard work it is trying to get to talk to the person that you actually want to talk to!!
A very quick summary of the week is as follows: Monday started as the week before had ended, line managers meeting but this time instead of daily targets we were given a weekly target which included a definite 'must' achieve task.
Looking at my 'To do list' I didn't feel overwhelmed; it was the same as I had before just larger numbers. No big deal, surely! Monday in my opinion was a complete disaster. At the end of play I was left feeling totally frustrated as I hadn't achieved anywhere near as much as I wanted to. What was I doing wrong? Why was it taking me so long to complete each task? Had the bubble burst so soon?
Tuesday morning and the line manager showed us a very simple 'trick of the trade'. On using his advice I probably achieved more by NAAFI break than I had in the whole of the previous day. By knock off, I was feeling pretty good about what had been achieved and had hopefully made some good inroads towards the critical task which we were given the day before.
Wednesday was a pretty mixed day, some very positive outcomes and some not so. On the upside, the IT guru had visited and I now had a working pc, no more hot desking. On the downside, I had crashed and burned on the critical task. Back to the drawing board on that one!
Thursday and Friday were pretty similar with regards to what I achieved. One or two very positives inroads, one or two not so. So the working week had finished and I had not accomplished the 'must achieve' task. I came pretty close but that just isn't good enough.
A little bit of soul searching would be required on this one, so I went back to the good old saying of
"it's not what you know, but who you know" or as it's now called "Networking".
I had not heard of Linkedin before starting this placement and am now just starting to understand it but am not in a position at present to use it as a Networking tool, however, I am a bit of a Twitter addict and on Saturday morning decided to use this tool and received a very positive response from one of my followers. Long story short, the 'must achieve' task is now looking pretty (no, make that very) positive. At least I can go in Monday morning feeling better than when I left Friday evening.