The reason behind my first-day-freakout was that the first task dropped on me my by new boss was to develop a plan for a pan-european publicity campaign worth hundreds of thousands of Euros for a new audio product launch. I would have expected this kind of thing to involve brainstorming sessions, a few days of research and some sort of planning meeting - but the new boss seemed to think that I'd be able to cobble the plan together in an afternoon, entirely by myself, on my first day.
My natural reaction was, of course, to soil myself. There appeared to be a significant gap between his expectations of my professional abilities and the making-it-up-as-I-go-along reality, I just didn't know how to produce the plan in the kind of detail he was asking for without doing at least a couple of days of research. It could only be a matter of time before I was outed as a complete fraud and sent packing - I didn't sleep a wink on my first night, absolutely convinced that I'd bitten off more than I could chew and I wasn't going to make it past my first month, or even week.
So I winged it - played for a little extra time, asked a few stupid questions, and cobbled a plan together which I was certain my boss would mail to London Zoo along with a note requesting that it be used to wipe the elephants' arses. Boss didn't actually get round to looking at the plan until Friday, but instead of scrutinizing it thoroughly and pulling it apart piece by piece, he just gave it a quick scan, made a few minor changes and said it looked fine.
I made the classic mistake of assuming that, because I'm working with a massive multi-national corporation and handling quite substantial budgets, there are rules, procedures and sophisticated strategies for doing everything, when the truth is that everybody else is just winging it too.
Now that I'm settling back into some sort of routine after Japan, Scotland, the new job and everything else, I should have the time to start posting a bit more regularly again. But for now, the weather's glorious and the park's full of slags in hotpants. Laters.