A year ago, I had my first day at Automattic. Mind you, it wasn’t my first day as a full-time employee, but it was the first day of my Happiness Engineer trial. A few weeks before, I’d sent in my resume at the urging of a friend, and the intervening days had been filled with checking my email obsessively, hours-long Skype interviews, and hopes that I’d move on to the next step. And here we were, the first day of my trial.
Now, two years after that life-changing first day, I’m actually running trials. Earlier this year, I started working on the Happiness Hiring team, and now I do that half of my time, and spend the other half of my days helping users. I really love it. I interview prospective Happiness Engineers, and guide them on the path to hopefully getting hired, but I also still get to interact with our users. I really love all of it.
This was a great “second year” with Automattic. I traveled to Utah, Spain, uh, Dayton, and New York City. Next month, I’ll be back in Park City, and who knows after that?
On to year three!*
*I mean, technically, no, I’m still a couple of months away from my official Automattic anniversary, when I started full-time, but let me have this, okay?
BlogHer was the reason I went to New York, but I want to make sure I don’t forget all of the other details of my trip…
Ate at some amazing restaurants. The Spotted Pig had the most incredible corn soup. At Kesté, we ate maybe the best pizza I’ve ever had. I had Korean food for the first time ever. We had Thai. I can’t even remember what all I ate, but it was all delicious. Oh yeah, I finally had a Shake Shack burger! Totally worth the wait. Especially the bun.
I walked a ton. Finally made it all the way to the top of Central Park. Went running with a coworker in Central Park as well. Saw coordinating black and white dogs.
Speaking of black and white dogs, got to hang out with my coworker and her dog, Francis, in Hoboken.
Went to a work reception thing after BlogHer, got to hang out with more coworkers.
Had some time to kill before my flight, so I went and saw Trainwreck. (Hilarious!)
Oh, more food: had brunch with some non-work friends that I never get to see. Ate potato waffles topped with poached eggs and some green sauce. So so so good. Got loved up by this sweet baby:
On the way home, got upgraded to first class, and almost sat next to Elizabeth Moss on the plane. (Some guy took her seat accidentally but she let him keep it. Curses! Just as well, since I’d just spilled red wine in my lap.)
You know I love my job. I sit at my desk at home and help WordPress.com users. I love doing that. I get to sit in my pajamas and not wear makeup and type out my answers over live chat or answering support tickets. It’s great.
But you know what’s even better?
My lovely coworker Denise
Standing at a booth for two and a half days and helping WordPress users. I’m exhausted. My legs hurt. But it doesn’t matter because I got to see the faces of the people I helped. They literally hugged me when we got a problem solved. People walked up to the booth just to say, “I love WordPress so much!” or “I don’t need help, I just want you to know how much I love you.”
The boys are so, so messy at eating. The floor under the kitchen table is constantly covered in a layer of crumbs. Instead of getting a dog, I picked up this stick vac. I’m not about to spend hundreds of dollars on a Dyson, but this one is great! It’s cordless (first priority), has attachments for getting nooks and crannies (and stairs, which also constantly need vacuuming) and you can pull out the handheld part.
Sadly, not my kitchen nor my hair.
Next up: these sandals. George and I are going to be doing a lot of walking and hiking when we go to England and I wanted something that would be comfy, but that I’d wear again. Now, my toes will probably freeze, but oh well. You can’t win ’em all. I took them on a 3.5 mile walk this morning and no blisters or anything.
I can’t believe I bought Tevas.
The Lose It app. I did WW for a while, and I got sick of paying so much for it when it wasn’t doing me much good (I’ll blame them, shall I?) I thought it would be a nice change of pace to just count calories. It’s interesting to see what percentage of my calories end up being carbs/fat/protein. Let’s just say I am working on lowering the carb percentage by a bit and raising the protein. Bring on the almonds!
It also syncs with Runkeeper, which I use to keep track of exercise, and my fitbit. Fun!
What I really like about it is that you can scan foods and it actually has them in their database. Even totally random stuff from Costco like…
These delicious wontons. Buy them now. So yum. I just heat them up in chicken broth or throw them in the microwave. I’m sure they’re even tastier fried, but I haven’t tried that yet.
We moved my office to a different room yesterday. Check it out, along with a bunch of my coworkers’ offices! You’ll really want to work with us after checking them out.
I am sitting on an airplane. In the air! Hurtling through the skies! Posting this! I know, it’s not THAT exciting, but this is the first time I’ve experienced functional wi-fi on an airplane. I should be working on tomorrow’s presentation, but Keynote doesn’t require wi-fi, and I don’t want to waste it.
Plus, tomorrow’s presentation is about blogging, so it only makes sense that I blog now. So it’s kind of related.
Last night, a few of my friends came over and watched me awkwardly give my presentation, and gave me some great feedback. So hopefully it will go well.
Okay, so I left off at Wednesday night’s wine explosion…
Thursday was another work day. The main point of this meetup was to set a road map for our team for the next six months. The team I’m on (Hermes) focuses on live chat support for WordPress.com users and support for all users of the WordPress mobile app. Our team (Hermes) was formed in August, and has grown by several members since then, so it was also a bonding experience.
Simon led a bunch of activities that helped us narrow down our goals. At first, I was skeptical – how was writing on post it notes with sharpies (as fun as that is) going to help us form concrete goals? But you know what, it did. Pretty cool.
Don’t we look so profound and thoughtful and stuff? Yeah. We are.
That evening, we split into smaller groups (there were 15 of us all together, not including a few spouses that joined us) for dinner. Yet again, we had a delicious meal. Shocking!
The giant apartment we met in had a chapel.And a a really old foosball table.
We spent most of the day finishing up the road map, had a lovely lunch, and then later, Beckett and I snuck off so we could go see Las Ramblas and get some pre-dinner tapas.
Las Ramblas
Just a little snacky.
Beckett bought me a birthday crown!
We took a team photo before going to eat that night. Everyone on the team was there except our newest member, Mahangu. We got him into the photo, though.
Dinner was amazing, as usual. My coworker Jason spent a lot of time finding a great restaurant that we could all go to together (with 19 of us, it wasn’t easy) but he found a great one in Restaurant Cafeteria 336. We started off with bubbly, and then they just brought out a million small plates, each one more delicious than the next. (My favorite was a concoction of potatoes, tuna, and poached eggs.) I ordered a steak for my main course, and then we had creme brulee for dessert (they call it Creme Catalan, but it’s the same thing.) And of course, the wine was flowing freely.
Dinner menu
Prasath couldn’t handle my birthday fun!
Afterwards, we went back to the apartment (codenamed Han because Harrison Ford had stayed there once, according to the AirBNB listing – I stayed in Lando, and the other place was Chewie) and played Cards Against Humanity while trying to drink all of the wine in Spain. Always fun!
So that marked the end of my birthday, which was fabulous. (Of course, I just mean my birthDAY, not the celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of my birth, which will continue for several weeks to come.)
Since we had stayed up very late Friday night, and Saturday was set aside as a day to explore, I slept until nearly noon. Maaan, that felt good. Since I took a ton of pictures on Saturday, I’ll save those for another post…
I have a lot to recap about Barcelona, so I’m going to break it up a bit.
So of course I was supposed to arrive the afternoon of Monday the 5th, but as we all know, that didn’t happen. I finally arrived Tuesday afternoon, tired but excited.
See how excited I am?
Got to the apartment where everyone was congregating, said my hellos, etc, etc. Not one to waste a moment, fellow Automattician Beckett said, “who wants to go on a gondola ride?” It got dark pretty early there, and I knew if I sat for too long, I’d just fall asleep, so off we went.
The views when we got to the stop were stunning. But we had to take a lot of stairs to get to the top. I mean, a lot. You’d get to the top of a crazy long staircase, only to be confronted with about seventy jillion more steps. My advice – take the bus to the gondola station.
It was getting very close to closing time when we got to the top, so we didn’t get to go in that castle, but maybe next time.
After our gondola adventure, we met up with everyone else for dinner, which was, like pretty much everything we ate here, amazing.
Wednesday was a work day, but the afternoon was devoted to a tour of Sagrada Família. I missed the tour but got some photos of the outside.
Work:
Play:
That evening, we went to dinner at a tapas restaurant where they just kept bringing out food. It was all so, so delicious, and very reasonably priced. At the end, they brought out a porró, which is a wine decanter that you use to pour wine directly into your mouth. Or…not.
Aaaand, I spent the rest of that evening doing laundry.
TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY!!!! (Did I not tell everyone on Earth yet?!? Just making sure.)
I may have mentioned that I’m in Barcelona, so my coworker Deborah and I went on a run early this morning. I like to run on my birthday, it makes me feel virtuous. Like, a good way to start the next year of my life.
We left the apartment at 7:45, and we made it to the Mediterranean right as the sun was rising. (It rises really late here!) It was just stunning.
Traveling a long way is kind of surreal, isn’t it? Seems weird that just this morning, I saw the boys off to school, and now I’m in Zurich. Granted, it’s been the longest day of my life (well, close to it) but I haven’t slept since then, so it counts.
So, I won’t bore you with a play by play of my travel thusfar, but just wanted to remember some things.
Don’t know why I took this picture of New Orleans.
I got upgraded for my troubles yesterday!
New Yawk City!
More NYC!
The skyline from Newark.
Once I got to Newark, I had a bunch of time to kill, so I mostly wandered around, trying to get 10,000 steps in while also looking for a charging station. I tell ya, if Newark had fewer payphones and more charging stations, we’d all be better off.
Fortunately, my plane took off without incident and the flight was mostly good. (Well, the landing was the scariest in ever because it was super foggy, the runway was white, and we were in the mountains, so I thought we were still way up in the air when BOOM we landed. It was kind of terrifying.)
I was seated in Economy Plus again (so much legroom!) and despite the fact that I had all of the possible accoutrements to make sleeping possible (fancy pillow, eye mask, headphones, white noise on phone, cozy socks, non-restrictive, comfy clothing, blanket, melatonin) I just couldn’t fall asleep.
So that’s the last time I’m going to try it. Every time I have ever flown to Europe I’ve tried to fall asleep on the flight over (or back) and I have never, ever been able to. Nothing works. So I’m going to stop trying.
Consequently, my eyeballs are very heavy and I am somewhat punchy from exhaustion (I also tried going to bed late Sunday night and waking up early Monday to wear myself out, and those laps of Newark’s terminals were also with that in mind) but at least it’ll be 2 in the afternoon when I get to Barcelona and I’ll be excited to see everyone so hopefully that will help keep me awake until bedtime.
Okay, just a few more pictures…
Awesome Indian meal on the flight. Yum!
Almost there!
Switzerland!
I really need to buy watches and chocolate and holey cheese while I’m here.
It’s still Christmas here.
That’s what we landed in.
The Starbucks mug that I don’t really deserve.
Spooky kids’ area. I should have taken a video, probably, so you could have seen the slowly spinning carousel.
pyjammy dot blog 