The first things you get to when you drive up to the LM main plant are the guard shacks. If you've got a badge, all you do is hold it up, and the guard sees you and motions you through onto the property. I didn't have a badge, so I had to stop and explain what I was doing there. The explanation was routine, but I always hated stopping for stuff like that because at 7:45 in the morning, it tended to create a traffic jam behind you. Today it wasn't too bad, and the guard pointed me up to the main building.
Along the drive up to the main building, I remember seeing along the side of the road half a dozen large hangars, and as many smaller hangars. I thought to myself, this isn't a game anymore; I'll be working on real jets. That thought was a bit sobering and distracting, but I put it out of my head and concentrated on not screwing up and getting into trouble on the first day.
I had to pass another guard shack going into the visitor parking lot, and once I was there, I went in to the wrong entrance. The entrance I went into was the main entrance, but the one I wanted was further north along the building and not nearly as well marked. Oh well, my first screw up of the day was past, and hopefully I wouldn't make any more.
At the second entrance, all of us new employees had to pass yet another guard post, but this time we had to get formal badges. Our names were recorded and checked off, and the guard gave us a credit card-sized badge with a big T on the front. I and a few other new hires were herded across the hallway into the new hire intake office, which we soon learned was called the "Onboarding Center." What a fancy name for a relatively simple concept I thought.
As 8:00 crept closer, more people filed in, and soon the room we were in was full. The room we were in held at least a hundred people comfortably seated at long tables that ran the length of the room and faced two very large presentation screens. These screens were to have something on them as the day progressed that I kept in mind for years as I went through the company.
8:00 came and went, and a few minutes after, the first presenter got up and started the normal welcoming routines. I paid enough attention to make sure that I wouldn't get in trouble, but most of it was the standard, predictable corporate claptrap that all new hires have to sit through. It was all basic stuff like: when do you get badged, where do you go for lunch, what is a normal workday, what to expect for the rest of the Onboarding process, what LM is such a great company to work for, and how pleased the company is to have a bunch of great new employees like us.
A couple of hours later, we were led in groups down to the badging office, and we were all lined up against a plain background, told to look in a little lense, and have our picture taken. We didn't get our badges until later, but at least that hurdle had been passed. We went again into the big room (which coincidentally was named the Galaxy Room after the largest aircraft that we made for the company, and which was the largest in the Onboarding facility) once again, and shortly thereafter we were split into smaller groups and told that we needed to be put through some preliminary training compliance courses.
My little group had about fifteen or so people in it, and we were led into a smaller room that had about twenty laptops in it. The instructor handed out a sheet of paper that had instructions on how to log into the LM computer system. Amazingly, my info worked the first time. While I waited for the rest of the room to get logged in, I did a little exploring, and found that getting to the Internet was no problem, so I surfed around a bit until we were ready for the training to begin.
The first course we went through was how to put in time into our labor recording system. The process was simple, and it didn't take long at all for me to learn. After that we had some other general compliance courses that I can't remember (and have retaken uncounted times as part of annual "reuppance"), and after the last one we were told to find our way back to the Galaxy Room.
It was right before lunch when those instructions were given, and I made my way back into the big room, found my seat and new employee packet, and sat down to wait for the next portion. Someone had turned on the projectors in the room, and CNN was being shown on the two big presentation screens.
I was sorting through my new hire packet, finding some of the documents and papers that hadn't been covered when something caught my attention on the presentation screens. The CNN commentator was talking about a shooting in a manufacturing plant somewhere in Mississippi. I put my packet down and started listening. The details were sketchy, and I started thinking to myself, wouldn't it be weird if that plant turned out to be a LM plant?
A few minutes later, there it was on national news: a disgruntled employee had entered the Lockheed Martin plant in Meridian Mississippi, killed a few people, and then killed himself in the bargain. Now how do you react to a thing like that under the circumstances? It's my first day at a new company, one that is well established and has been around for quite some time, I've just been through a battery of compliance courses, and we're told after we finish to congregate in the main meeting room.
My first reaction was something like: no, this has got to be fake. I looked around the room for other reactions, and as far as the rest of the new employees looked, nobody really paid it much attention. I leaned over to the girl next to me and said, "Now how does that make you feel? We just started working for a company that has a violence issue!"
She looked at me like I wasn't serious and, but a split second later the commentary from the news penetrated her thoughts, and she said, "Well that's not here! Let's hope it's just an isolated thing."
I slipped into a little reverie and pondered this happening. After some minutes, my analytical side kicked out an answer: It's got to be a psychological test! This is the next part of the training; they want to see how we'll react to something unexpected and negative. With that conclusion safely but erroneously fixed in my mind, I sat back and didn't pay any attention to it.
But from then on the atmosphere of the day changed a bit. When lunch arrived a few minutes later, so did a gaggle of other, senior people, and the Onboarding people told us we were to have lunch with our "core managers." My core manager didn't come; instead he sent one of his deputies, and we had an amiable conversation about civilian-sponsored space travel and the X-prize. This was the first time I had ever heard of it or the guys that would eventually win it. But at no time did either of us mention the Meridian incident.
Once we were firmly in the afternoon session, I began to alter my conclusion on Meridian. Nobody was treating it like an exercise: nobody was making observations or recording anything (that I could see), and all the presenters in the afternoon session were a bit defensive about the company-they made a lot of off-hand references to the shootings, but always said that LM was a great place to work and had great people to work with. At the end of the day I concluded that maybe Meridian actually had happened.
When I got back to my apartment that afternoon, the first thing I did was pull up CNN and a few other news outlets on my computer. On every news outlets' front page was the Meridian shooting. It finally became real in my mind, but I compartmentalized it and rationalized it away. "Of course these things happen." I said to myself. "I have to anticipate things happening like this now that I work for a company this big." Even so, to this day, when something goes wrong at good ol' LM, this is the first thing I think about.