new hire dinner

We had dinner with a class of new hires tonight. Apparently it's all the rage for the company to have the class I'm in the same weeks in Houston as these new hire orientation classes. The class I'm in now is held in about 15 different cities all over the world and people pretty much attend the one closest to them. The new hire orientation class isn't held in quite as many places, only four I believe. I think it's just held in Houston, Paris, Dubai, and Kuala Lumpur and, as always, location is dependent on where you'll be working. Apparently they feel it’s a good chance for the new hires to meet actual employees (defined by people who aren't total personnel and recruiting cheerleaders) and of course we semi-seasoned employees have nothing but glowing remarks about everyone's future.

To give the evening some semblance of structure, we were seated by segment. The curio of my class is that there were only three (out of nineteen) of us in Well Services though this is one of the larger segments in terms of employees as well as the number of people at our table. (Actually, the real curio was that there wasn't a single Wireline person in my class despite that segment being just as large.) Since the new hire class arrived first, they all clumped together so my two compatriots and I sat at the end of the table and talked with the one newbie we were sitting next to, though at least she was interested in hearing what we had to say. So much for sprinkling our pearls of wisdom amongst the new hires. I couldn't help but size them up and listen to their conversations and wonder, just a little bit cynically, how many of them would quit or be fired by this time next year. I was also consumed by my inability to figure out who the new hire we sat next to reminded me of. She was familiar, but I couldn't place it. I'm beginning to think it was a generic composite sort of thing.