4 Days

I'm the New Guy.

You can tell by the way I keep walking right by the elevator, asking how to find the snack machine and getting lost on the way to lunch. I got my keys to the washroom on Wednesday - my third day. Before that, I had to sneak around the back way and get funny looks from the banker-type people with whom we share office space just to take a ... (I resisted making a Nintendo joke. But yes, it was hard). There are no pictures on the wall of my cube, the space around my desk is painfully litter-free and the box of toys I brought from home has barely been played with, much less looked at.

In short, in spite of the fact that I've been gifted with the opportunity to work at perhaps the coolest gaming mag on the intarweb, no amount of cool can overcome the inevitable awkwardness of being new.

But here's the thing: aside from the terrible embarassment of having to ask (for the third time) how one would find a grocery store, I've yet to really feel like the new guy.

There's something about gamers. Or, perhaps just these gamers. We share the same interests, dream the same dreams and work towards the same goals. I may be from a strange place, have kooky ideas and deep, dark secrets, but at The Escapist, an office full of gamers, I've been treated like family. Since Day One.

It is impossible to overstate the absolute joy to be had by walking into a room for the first time and feeling as if one belonged there. I think that as gamers and thinking individuals, a lot of us spend our lives searching for that feeling. I have it now. I look forward to sharing it with you through my work in the weeks ahead.