All right, so my first week at Thinglefin is just about over.  It’s a big transition in quite a few ways, some of which I’m sure aren’t even clear yet.  Perhaps the most obvious is the difference in working environments: I’ve switched from the stereotypical cubicle farm to a home office in my basement.

I haven’t worked at home before, and I’m still getting used to it.  But some advantages are already apparent.  The most obvious one is that the bedroom-to-basement commute via staircase is far, far superior to the Seattle-to-Bellevue commute via I-90 and I-405.  The amount of time I’ve wasted on those stupid, overloaded freeways is depressing to contemplate. 

It’s certainly quieter and easier to focus here.  Most of the time it wasn’t all that noisy at ye old cubicle farm, but there were some bad times, particularly when I was sitting next to the ping-pong table.   No one is going to sneak up and shoot me with a nerf gun.  True, that’s a venerable game industry tradition, but not one that I ever particularly enjoyed.

Gone is the refrigerator stocked with free pop in the kitchen.  I might have missed that more a few years ago, but I mostly drink water these days.  And while I have to stock and clean my own refrigerator, at least the lines of responsibility are clear; it’s unlikely that a sign will appear on the fridge featuring a toxic waste symbol over the text “DO NOT OPEN!!!  (All contents will be thrown away on Friday at 5)”.  Also on the food front, I may miss having pizza or other dinner brought in for free during crunch times.  But I’m expecting my wife will be happy to cook and bring things down to me if and when we have to work long hours I’m looking forward to the opportunity to have dinner waiting for my wife when she gets home from her job.

Communication with team members is a bit more awkward.  We’re using a lot of instant messaging and chat rooms, plus of course email.  It’s not bad, but sometimes you just want to be able to lean over to the person next to you and ask a quick question.  It helps that there are only three people on the team, and we don’t live all that far apart, so we can meet face-to-face if we feel like it.

I had to fix up my home office for heavy-duty use.  Coincidentally Ikea had their “Twice-a-Year Sale” this past weekend, so I went and picked up a new desk and chair.  I don’t think anything that I bought there actually was on sale though - strange how that works.

Setting up a home office also required some long neglected upgrades to my home PC.  When Toby and Jeremy were over a few weeks ago, they had made fun of my machine for taking about two minutes to fully boot up.  I always found this was a good time to center myself and contemplate the web surfing and/or game playing about to take place, but they made me feel bad about it.  So, a new 400 GB SATA hard drive to replace the old 40 GB IDE model.  And it does boot in about 15 seconds now, whether due to the superiority of SATA or simply the fresh install of Windows lacking years of accumulated crapware, who can say…

The other thing that had to go was my 19″ CRT monitor.  When I bought it about ten years ago it was top of the line.  But now it’s a dinosaur, and consumed so much real estate on the desk that I could bump my nose on the screen by leaning forward slightly.  Also, at the previous job I had a dual-monitor setup.  Like cell phones and DVRs, it’s is something that once you’ve gotten used to it, it’s hard to imagine doing without. 

I tried with just a single new LCD screen for the first part of the week, but it felt too constrained, in part because of needing to keep a few chat windows open all the time.  So I broke down and got the second monitor.  On the bright side, I was able to get two new 20″ LCD monitors plus a new video card with dual DVI outputs for about the same price that I paid for the CRTasaurus all those years ago!

I imagine Thinglefin will move to a regular office someday, perhaps even soon.  But until then I’ll enjoy the basement.  And though I’ll never tell, it’s always possible that I’m working (and writing blog posts) in my underwear.