Day 2 as new boy

Starting a new job and joining a new organisation at the same time is a double whammy of disorientation. Not only are you faced with not really knowing quite what it is that you should be doing yet, but also you have a sudden realization of quite how many people and things you knew in the old place. Joining a company of more than 90,000 employees (probably four times the size of any firm I have worked for before) ramps up that befuddledness to new heights.
I'm holding on to the fact that, in a previous existence, I had to join new organisations once or twice a week. Running management training courses one day in an NHS Trust, and the next in a major insurance company (or whatever it was that the diary of fate threw up) made me realise that whilst most organisations are the same in that they all think that they are terribly different, they are also all pretty much common in that they are in existence to deliver some sort of product or service to a group of clients or customers, and that the boundaries between organisational sub divisions is usually where that firm's friction is generated. The thing that is truly differentiates organisations is the language that they use to describe what and how they do all of the things that they do, and that language is unique both to the organisation, and also (often) to subsets within an organisation.
There's a lot of new language to learn for me at Microsoft. And a lot of abbreviations too. (Pedantic aside: few organisations are obsessed with acronyms; most are with abbreviations. An acronym is an abbreviation that is pronounced as a word… so, RADAR is an acronym, BBC is not. I'll take off my word nerd hat now).
The people who I have met that are in the DPE team (that's “Developer and Platform Evangelism”) are great. And the conversations are sparking already too: I've had chats about the impact that Cloud is having on the IT industry (a pet topic), the vagaries of Agency life, an entirely new set of rules for user interface design that things like the Kinect game controller are going to likely to require, how the Art Colleges might be a new sort of focus for our academic team (who I guess have generally focused on Computer Science courses), and why cake is great.
I'm trying to allow myself a bit of time and space to soak up some of the feel of the place through informal chats and osmosis. I also know that that opportunity is going to be short-lived as the empty diary starts to get filled up with work. There is always a temptation to launch into things too early when one is confronted with the complexities of a new role. Hopefully I'll be able to get the balance right.