First Day at the Office

Daniela has lived in London for exactly two weeks. She is an engineer from Valencia, in Venezuela, and last month she got a job at a company that designs bridges. This morning she started work. It is now nine o'clock in the evening, she is sitting on her sofa with a cup of tea, and she is writing to her mother about the strangest day of her life.

"Mami, I have never made so many mistakes in one day," she writes. It started at eight thirty. The office is on the twelfth floor of a tall glass building, and there are two groups of lifts. Daniela got into the first one she saw and pressed twelve, but the button didn't light up, so she pressed it again. The doors opened on the fifth floor, in a dentist's waiting room. The lifts on the left only stop at the lower floors. She had to go all the way down and start again.

When she finally arrived, the receptionist sent her to "the meeting in Room B." Daniela sat down at a long table with eight people and listened carefully for twenty minutes. They talked about holidays, budgets and a summer party. Then a woman asked her, "Sorry, which department are you from?" It was the wrong meeting. The engineers were in Room D, and they had already finished.

Her new manager, a calm Scottish man, laughed and said it happened to everyone. He introduced her to the team: Priya, Tom, Graham and a quiet man called Oliver. Daniela repeated every name in her head. Ten minutes later, she asked Oliver for help with her computer and called him Graham. Twice. "Don't worry," he said. "Graham is much better looking than me, so I'll take it as a compliment."

At lunchtime, she went to the kitchen to make coffee and used a mug from the shelf. Priya told her, very kindly, that it was Graham's special mug and that nobody ever touched it. Daniela washed it so fast that she nearly broke it.

But the afternoon was better. The team was working on a pedestrian bridge, and they had been having problems with the calculations for weeks. Daniela looked at the drawings and found the error in less than an hour. Nobody said much, but at five o'clock Priya and Oliver invited her to the pub around the corner.

"So, Mami," she writes, "I've used the wrong lift, I've been to the wrong meeting, I've called a colleague by the wrong name and I've stolen the most important mug in the office. But I've also found a mistake in a bridge, and I've made two friends. I think it was a good first day." She sends the message, finishes her tea and sets two alarms for the morning.