Spoons.

Three days in, and I'm not fired yet! Ha ha! I have fooled them!

After one day of utter bewilderment (Monday), followed by another day of slightly-less utter bewilderment (Tuesday), today felt like almost kinda/sorta a real day of work. Not that I did anything per se. But on the other hand, I didn't do nothing, either. That is to say, while I couldn't stand in front of a court of law and cite a specific bullet-pointed list of acccomplishments, I did in fact shake off at least part of my newbie haze and dig into some of the things around me. I attended a few meetings, and if my contributions weren't exactly brilliant or earth shattering, I think, at least, they weren't totally nonsensical and embarrassing. For example, when someone asked for an opinion of a certain Flash game we were looking at, I did not reply something like, "I like to wear ladies' girdles!"

As a place to work, EA continues to be pretty amazing. Especially coming from a place that had so little money, they actually sent out an email at one point telling us they were no longer providing plastic forks and spoons for us, so would we please bring our own. Here there are a lot of spoons. I could probably take three or four at once if I wanted to, and no one would blink. In fact, I do kind of still have a Depression-era hoarding instinct going on here, due to the trauma of the previous job. Like, when we used to go out to eat, if we saw a bin with plastic spoons, one of us would whisper urgently "THEY HAVE SPOONS HERE---GRAB SOME", and we'd furtively sneak as many out as we could. Anyone who has parents or grandparents who lived through economic hardship knows that people don't get over such hardship right away.

All of which is to explain why I ended up sitting in the cold, sterile EA Security room late this afternoon, with white plastic spoons bulging out of all my pockets, under each arm, and full to the brim in my backpack. Apparently I had been spotted by some nosey do-gooder, and a phone call was made. When I tried to explain myself, I muttered, between tears, something about liking soup, and what if there's an earthquake, and I'm sorry, and I thought I heard someone speaking German. Or maybe none of that happened at all. It's really hard to say. It's still so surreal that I'm even here, working on games, not writing about games, that my whole sense of reality has been twisted out of shape.

But if that's so, then what is this Hefty bag full of forks doing in my cube?

My first week continues apace.