Canberra, Week One

So, it's the end of my first week in Canberra. If I had to pick one word to describe my experiences this week, I'm afraid I would have to go with bor-ing (although I do expect things to improve at some stage).

Monday was my first day at work. Or, more precisely, my first day of a two week orientation program. We had a couple of important type people come and say hello and met our team leaders. I'm one of three new grads in my team, but the other two don't arrive until next week, so I'll be way ahead of them for the first two weeks. There's also a few grads from previous years in the team, so I'll have someone to go running too who'll understand what I'm going through. We'll be doing fraud investigation - or rather, writing the software that does the fraud investigation - so if you've lied to Centrelink, I will catch you.

We also got our security passes and name badges on Monday and I've still got mine (ie I haven't lost either permanently yet). While the security passes were being sorted out, we also had a tour of the Data Centre and BTV. The Data Centre is where all the mainframes and servers and stuff that Centrelink uses are. The lady doing the tour was super excited about it all, but as far as I'm concerned it was just a bunch of different coloured boxes - purple for Sun Microsystems, black for IBM, grey for everything else. BTV is Centrelink's TV studio from which they broadcast via satellite into Centrelink offices around Australia. Mum once starred in one of their productions.

Monday afternoon we met with My Mate Jeff (aka Jeff Whalen, the CEO of Centrelink). He gave us lots of good advice, like "get enough sleep" and "work hard, party hard". He also promised us things he couldn't deliver on, but all in good spirit.

Tuesday we met some of the previous grads and got some more helpful advice, and then had lectures on topics such as Security, Privacy and Fraud and Workforce Planning. One thing I'm beginning to notice about these lectures is that, regardless of the title, they all seem to contain similar information - Centrelink is big, Centrelink is important, the way Centrelink does things is the best way and Centrelink watches everything its employees does, so don't screw up.

For some reason, Tuesday also contained a lecture about our AWAs (Australian Workplace Agreements), which was not very informative because the lady basically just stood up and read it, and also wasn't very helpful as we'd all signed one a month earlier. Too late to read it now.

Tuesday night, Dale and I went out for dinner with Brigid. It turns out there are Chinese food shops in Canberra - we went to a noodle place at Manuka, which would have been quite tasty except that I wasn't feeling very well.

Wednesday was more lectures from people who for some reason believe that a talk on, say, Welfare to Work should begin with a summary of their life so far. The best bit about Wednesday was that my car finally arrived, so Dale was able to go out looking for houses.

Thursday we had more talks, a visit to the library ("This is where the books are, and this is a computer, and here is the library assistant. That's all") and a visit from the Secretary of the Department of Human Services, which we all had to be on our best behaviour for. She was actually reasonably interesting, and the new Accesscard (or Australia Card) program looks fascinating. Apparently 25% of people with concession cards aren't entitled to them. I have two concession cards I'm not entitled to, so I wonder if I got counted twice?

On Friday morning we had one of the IT support people come in and talk about the IT systems, which was kind of amusing (in a really boring fashion) as nearly everyone in the room had a degree in IT (or something similar) and so had a much better idea of what he was talking about than he did. The highlight of Friday was going home early and putting in an application for a house.

And on Saturday we came to realise just how little there is to do in Canberra.