One week in Amman

It has been a week now since I came to Jordan. Amman is a different kind of city than the ones I have seen before. It is a bit like Cairo but much smaller, less crowded and people actually stop at traffic lights, and it is a bit like Beirut but much less things to do, however it is a pretty decent place and people are very nice,
But they don't seem to go out much. It was Thursday yesterday and when we were driving to one of the clubs here at around 10 pm, the streets were almost empty !!! (But fortunately the club was full ;)). It is also the kind of place where you run into people on outings and in supemarkets as the options are not really that much.

Anyway, I guess this will be very suitable for me considering the amount of time I need to put in the job. I have been working 12-14 hours daily this week to finish the new hire web-based training courses for my role as well as some eLearning material, discover the huge internal CorpNet and familiarize myself with the unbelievable number of abbreviations used everywhere. Week 1 training courses are amazing. They get you completely soaked in the Microsoft culture and tell you everything you might ever need to know from the details of the company business units to the phone numbers of the preferred hotels worldwide !!!

I feel like a kid who was given the keys to a big toy store :)

Doing it @ Microsoft

It is my third day now in Microsoft Amman. As tough as it was to leave Dubai and my friends there as optimistic as I am now to have taken this decision. I arrived to Amman airport on march 8th at around 3:00 pm, reached the office by 4:00 pm to find my manager just returning from a meeting and flying back to Beirut (MS east Mediterranean HQ) in an hour. He still managed to sit with me, brief me up about urgent matters related to my joining and arrange for my flight to Beirut the next day. I then met some of the team members in Amman office, and met the rest on the next day before flying. They are all very nice people. They managed to get me a mobile phone line with international and roaming services before I flew to Beirut which saved my neck twice afterwards. I reached my hotel in Beirut on march 9th by 8:00 pm and was planning to go to Downtown, have dinner and then get a drink at a club or something, but the next thing that actually happened after taking a hot shower at the hotel was waking up early the next day :) I must have been really tired.
The Beirut office is in a nice location in Martyrs Square, so having arrived very early, I took the chance to get a frappuccino in Starbucks (the only place that was open at 7:30 am :)) before I headed to the office. The lady at the reception desk opened the security lock of the glass door for me to enter before I even clicked the bell and after finding out from my accent that I am Egyptian, was trying to talk to me in Egyptian accent all the time :) I then met the HR manager who actually conducted a couple of interviews with me before I joined and she showed me an email that my manager had sent with the activities plan for that day I was going to spend at the Beirut office. I was introduced to the team there, and they were all very nice people as well. I was informed about the forms I need to fill, the paper work I need to submit and was shown the systems I will be using for my work, for my career development and given a briefing about the business cycle of my position. I really wish I could speak about this in more details but I am sure it is confidential, however I just want to say: THESE GUYS HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING AND THERE ARE ALWAYS PEOPLE WORKING TO IMPROVE IT. I also got the feeling of being overwhelmed as I found out about what I need to know, what I will need to learn and how busy everybody is. I am sure it will be challenging but I am loving every single moment of it...