It's my first week.

I suppose it makes sense to have a different blog in your 30s than you had in your 20s. As much as it pains to say, I think Live Journal is pretty much dead. I haven't actually checked, so it's possible that it's just as easy to cross-post to Facebook from Live Journal as it is from Blogspot, but I'm making the switch anyway. I only chose Live Journal to begin with because Google didn't own a blogging site yet. There are very few things I believe in, but if Google ever starts a religion, I'll beta-test it, and I'll send you an invite if you comment on this post.

I suppose this means I'll have to switch from Flickr to Picassa at some point.

In any case, I started a new job this week. This is the job that will be moving me back out of the suburbs, so it's more noteworthy than the last one, which was the only job that's gone unblogged about in close to ten years.

So, anyway, I'm going to make an effort to say the name of the company I work for as little as possible, since two different jobs have found my blog in the past now. The important part is that I'm doing customer service for an insurance company in Minnetonka. I just completed day two of a 16-week training course. The first day went pretty much as I expected, starting with security photos, then moving on to a sprawling executive conference room for a two-minute commercial for the company featuring inspirational music over interspersed shots of children throwing toy airplanes in a wheat field in slow motion and black and white title cards displaying phrases like "new technologies" and "promoting consumerism."

That sounds cynical. Really, I'll watch anything if you play it on a screen made from nine 54-inch plasma TVs.

Compared to the low-slung, square, gray office park shitboxes full of drop-ceilings and bail bondsmen where I've been working in the past eighteen months or so, the building at least, is pretty sweet. There's an on-site cafeteria, 24-hour fitness center, urgent-care clinic and skeet range. The bathroom where I take my lunchtime deuce has 12-foot ceilings and granite wall-tile. I have yet to see a fluorescent light. Thursday mornings, they make peanut-butter pancakes and teams of kittens pull them to your cubicle in tiny wagons.

Some of those things aren't true.

In any case, here's a list of things grownups and Kristina will find interesting:

• I get 26 days of PTO per year.
• My medical and dental benefits (both the more expensive "low-deductible" plans) only cost me $6/week.
• I've already put $6 into my 401k.
• In December, I'll be eligible for the employee stock purchase program, with a 6-month purchase period, something called a "look-back" provision, and 15% discount from market price.
• Pending good productivity after training, I'll be allowed to work from home starting around February of next year.

Training is slow. I think I have more computer and call center experience than most of my fellow trainees, if less insurance experience, but it still didn't seem necessary to spent the entire morning teaching us how to use the search function of one program. I maintained a bland expression while biting back mutters of "don't tell ME about Boolean operators."

Training goes 8am to 4:30pm. Around 3:30, the trainer broke the class into three teams for a game quizzing us on the day's material. I was grouped with three humorless Barbs who didn't understand why I thought Team 4 was a good name for our team.

It's also worth mentioning that I'm the second youngest person in a class of over a dozen. This is mostly a meaningless oddity, except that they're hiring people with 30-years of work history for an entry-level job at a company whose stock price has dropped 50% in the time since I last had a 40-hour-a-week job. I'm not saying this to speak ill of the company, just to illustrate to those of you who kept your jobs, just how bad the job market had gotten.

I literally was applying for jobs with the time I used to spend blogging. But today, I've deleted two e-mails from Careerbuilder and one from a temp agency.

So here I am.