It starts.

Today was the first day of the rest of my life. Luckily it was a good one.

I started my new job today. Like a for real job. Like a full-time, salaried, non-internship, indefinite length of employment job. I've had mixed emotions about entering this phase of my life and, well, actually I still do; but my first day could not have been better.

[For a multitude of reasons, I'm not sure whether I want to reveal the identity of my employer on this blog, but suffice it to say that it is a producer of small electronic devices for the consumer market, and I will henceforth refer to the company as "Inc".]

I've twice been a summer intern at Inc and enjoyed it both times, so I had no great fears about going back. (Lots of fears about full-time jobs in general, but none about working at Inc.) Going back was the most comfortable first day experience possible. I already knew everyone, I knew where everything was, I knew how things worked, I knew how awkward and engineerish the electrical and software new hires would be. It was like putting on a pair of well broken-in shoes, but the ease of re-entry was only the beginning.

I am a mechanical engineer at Inc. There are about forty of us, and we are divided into several teams according to the types of devices we work on. My first summer there, I was on the Marine team. I designed devices for boats. It was pretty cool. The second summer, I was on the Automotive OEM team. I designed dashboard mounts for our devices. It was less cool, but still okay. My dream team has always been the Fitness/Outdoor team. I've always wanted to design devices for hiking, biking, running, hunting... devices for playing, basically. Big kid toys. I told this to my supervisor in last summer's exit interview. He told me that if I returned, I would probably be back on OEM for a while, but that I could probably move to Fitness eventually, maybe after a few months or a year.

So as I was finishing my paperwork in HR today, I was greeted by a friend of mine from the Marine team, with whom I had worked closely during my first internship. I assumed he was just there to escort me up to my office on the fifth floor, since my security badge was not yet done printing. When he told me that he had been promoted to Fitness and Outdoor team leader and that I would be working on his team, I almost exploded with surprise and joy! But I think what the rest of the world saw was me saying "Cool!" with the full measure of classic Greusel male forced enthusiasm. [That's another blog topic in itself. Remind me later.]

That was the best moment of the day by far, but there were other good things too: I was genuinely happy to see all my mechanical engineering buddies again. My new officemate, who I never really worked with or got to know before, is very cool. And there were lots of other neat little things that are meaningless to anyone who isn't a mechanical engineer at Inc.

So, as I said before: Despite having deep reservations about any line of work with only two weeks of vacation a year, I could not be more excited about my new job.