Talk about a "running start..."

On November 27, 2006, I began work as a User Interface Designer at PayPal. And so it began...
The last company I worked for, or at least the division I worked in (formerly a sovereign entity) occupied about 3/4ths of a floor of of a single 4-story building. They had one major product, with four main pieces to the part we sold to customers, plus two major back-end components. After I started there, it took me about two weeks to get up to speed with general knowledge about the moderately intricate product suite, how the major pieces worked independently and together, how work got done at the company (people & processes), etc. During those two weeks I was consulted on a few things, but I didn't have any real projects assigned to me. I was given plenty of time to read documentation, attend random meetings to start getting used to the flow of life at the company, etc. It was all good.

Fast forward to the company I'm with today. The highest building number I've been in is #15, and that's just out of two campuses in the city of its headquarters. One afternoon, my hiring manager invited me to a kickoff meeting for a brand new project that was actually a piece of what had originally been planned to be a large effort with several components. This particular component was supposed to be pretty managable in size. None of the other people in the meeting had I met before, so I was looking forward to checking out personalities & work styles and learning how new product features really begin at this company. Cool, right?

Halfway through the meeting, my manager had to leave. Just like that, he got up, excused himself, and left the conference room. At the moment the door closed behind him, in this room full of strangers, I had become the design lead for this project, which it turns out is rated "XL" on a size scale of S to XXL. Oh, and it was already at least a week behind schedule. I didn't even have a computer yet; it was my second day of employment.

In that first week, I attended precisely 17 meetings (on 3 different floors of our building), did two drafts of a design for a brand new feature, and led the design of a modified user workflow to support this new module. On my third day, I got lost twice looking for one conference room that ended up being about 20 paces from my desk; oh, and that afternoon my computer (laptop w/ docking station) arrived. On my fourth day, I filed an IT support ticket to get a key for the docking station lock so I could actually use it as a laptop.

Talk about a running start...