One week on the new job now and things are settling nicely. My time has mostly been spent reading through the thick pile of documentation we were given last Wednesday, and trying to learn my way around the system as quickly as possible, intermixed with a few small assignments (mostly editing) and a manual on how to run a lemonade stand (or in other words, Jennifer's quick and dirty intro into the murky world of business finance). Yesterday I got my first 'large' assignment when my manager rushed over with a printout of the entire directory of pages in the company website. They needed editing - and they needed it done yesterday. She wasn't sure if I'd be able to get it done before I start training next week, but whatever I could do…

Reading insanely fast has its definite advantages. By the end of tomorrow I'll not only have gone through every page in the system, but done the direct edits into the HTML code and written up a helpful spreadsheet of suggestions for ways to improve them even further.

Prior to the mass-editing assignment, however, I was given a research project to do. I cannot help but see the amusement factor here. Nearly five years ago I dropped out of graduate school where I was neck-deep in scientific research, and left a position where I was a Managing Editor of a research journal. It's been second nature to me since my first day as an editor, way back when, to automatically scan anything I read for grammatical and spelling errors. (In other words, I may not necessarily write perfectly, but by golly I always know what I'm doing wrong!). So now here I am, having gone full circle. The research may be on computer programming instead of research, the editing may be in HTML instead of scientific studies, and instead of writing articles on fetal nutrition I'll be creating technical documents, but somehow this seems so right. After so long, I finally have my missing link.