Month: November 2009

On Wednesday, November 4th 2009 Merck & Schering-Plough merged.  While I was supposed to have that full week off, I came in for Day 1 integration support.  I was expected to work from 11:30 AM – 8 PM, however I wanted to attend the Day 1 global webcast as well as be able to find a parking space, which can be a challenge at 11:30 AM at Whitehouse Station.  I decided to come in a little before 7 AM.  The global webcast went quite smoothly with the exception of the audio from Brazil.  Each Merck site had an EC (Executive Committee) member.  Whitehouse Station had Bruce Kuhlik who is Merck’s chief legal counsel.  I started my Integration shift at 1:30 and thanks to good timing, got to be in a group picture with Chris Scalet, Merck’s Chief Information Officer.  I managed to call a customer back at 2:00 and quickly take care of her Flash issue.  I was told that integration support was going to be dull.  I don’t know who this Murphy guy was, but I seem to be an unwilling, yet strict adherent to his law.  There was a major issue was with the new “Merck Today” social network site that we are using for integration related news as well as to allow legacy Merck & Schering-Plough employees to introduce themselves to each other (people couldn’t sign on).  At 2:00 the site was brought back up for testing by IT (Information Technology) and despite continued issues, an email went out to the legacy Merck population at 3 stating it was available.  Cases started to come in.  I had to quickly scramble to not only get a group created in our help desk system but get accounts created as well.  While I was doing this, Mr. Scalet also needed a count of the number of cases we received since the 2:00 “soft launch.”  Getting reports from our help desk system is never an easy process, but let’s just say there was an hour or two that were quite hectic for me.