Friday, April 19 Second Day

 Woke up around 7:10am. B left by 7:40am; I hung out at the house for a while.

I ate an egg, bread and cheese; coffee. I left the house by 9; I went to pick up my other pass, the red MTA employee pass for the subway. On the train, I read about Latin American dictators in the 60-70s: all justifying repressions for “national security” against “red threat”. In Brazil, the military just took power, but without any particular dick ruling; they called it “authoritarian bureaucracy”. In Chile, Pinochet was more of a traditional dictator kind.

In downtown Brooklyn it was sunny and warm; the bagel track guy was playfully inviting for bagel or muffing or coffee. I didn’t have cash to pay. At the office, the lady in front of me was retaking a picture for her updated pass, chatting with the assistant. Then they took my photo: not too bad, or maybe I’m less critical than I used to be. We walked down with the lady downstairs, she was friendly and chatting with me. The MTA family. Now I can come by the train driver, show my badge, chat about shit.

I got to the office by 10:45am with my new free subway pass. I disabled the watch transit payment, so I don’t forget to pay with the pass. Abhi was at his desk, next to mine. We chatted for a bit.

Then mostly fighting the system. First with Will, then Glenn, and so on. Will worked from home. I got into most of the systems, but not my email. Some systems show my first name is misspelled. I called IT, PeopleSoft, Glenn, Mike, and another IT guy, and Igor from the IT. The decision is to wait till Monday. With my name misspelled, now I’m stressing the system.

For lunch no one invited me, and I decided not to show my incentive for now. I ended up going alone to the poke place downstairs: the office crowd around looked interesting – are they bankers? Hedge fund traders? Wall Street sharks? Or perhaps city employees? I should try to fool around with this crowd.

After lunch, Abhi introduced me to David. He’s been here for 15 years. Seems like a fun guy. He’s doing data ingestion, so seems I’ll work closely with him on my graph search. He’s going on vacation for 15 days. Does he have 25 days after so many years? Not so clear, turns out. They hired me on certain terms; David was hired on others. Seems he's from the union. So far I see people are divided here between union and not union. There are many unions too: TCU, TWU, something else. Mostly it comes up in context that union employees can’t do this, can’t do that. Abhi says “they have other benefits”. What are those? I’m not in the union. Turns out my hire is part of a new push trying to hire engineers avoiding the union and offering competitive salaries. We’ll see how it goes.

The IT guy brought me another laptop with Windows on it. Turned out, that my Mac given by Will is in the grey area; the IT won’t let us have root on their machines, so we got another laptop on a side. Abhi said they refuse to understand developers need the root; but we’ll likely need to move to IT machines without root sooner or later. I’m skeptical about it. There will be another laptop as well, the third one. “Everything is political in such organizations,” – Abhi says, – “there is a lot of power in security management." 

We chatted with Abhi for a while. He told me about this action thriller about NYC subway hijacking called “The Taking of Pelham 123”. I should check it out. The phones on our desks are actually not voice IP, and not from the telecoms: MTA has a system of backup lines in the tunnels, and it’s all based on old wires. When 9/11 happened, the telecom lines were disrupted and police used the MTA lines for communication. Since then, they invested in those MTA wired phones as a backup. So the big transportation company is also a sizable telecom for emergencies. 

But I should shut up about it. I’m yet to read that social media policy. We’re a public benefit org, but turns out there are still secrets. Security concerns. Public scrutiny. 

I kept fighting my email, my Windows laptop not logging in, and access to Jira and Confluence. To no avail. Igor from IT said better wait till Monday. I wrote this page and left by 6:30pm. It was dead quiet after 6.