Me and my kois

So, like most people, I complain about my job on on and off. To be fair though, it usually is never about the people I work with or who work for me, even when it is, upper echelon not included. Quite frankly, the reason I've lasted so long at where I work--which is the only place I've worked since I graduated college--is because I've had the good luck to work with at least a few very decent people every year. I even had pretty decent luck as far as managers go, with some being better than others, and two who were, quite frankly, superb (one of them ended up being a really good friend).

Hands down, though, the best year at work in terms of, well, everything, was when I moved back to NJ and got a position as a software architect in one of the divisions that the company long since has sold. The guy who hired me was actually the person who interviewed me straight out of college and recommended me for the second round of interviews with, as I came to find out later, a personal note hire me on the spot. At the time, his team had no openings, so he couldn't hire me himself; when I called on a Thursday night and left him a message a couple of years later that I wanted to move back to the southern NJ area and did he know of any openings in either the NJ or PA office, he called me back first thing Friday morning and told me not to talk to anyone but to come down and talk to him. Which I did, and the first words out of his mouth, after the usual exchange of greetings, was,"Here's where you'll be sitting." Turned out, he finally had an opening.

The group I was hired into was a specialty IT group--separate from the core IT division--for this particular branch of the business. Money was flush that year, and business had been good, which meant we got the latest and greatest hardware and software to play with. We sat, by the way, in a an area that was famously known in the building as 'The Geek Pond'; a big, rectangular setup, with opens cubes along the perimeter and a long conference table in the middle, dividing the rectangle into two easily accessible squares. In one square were the full times: me and D and X and E, all three of us 25 years old , and L and L, who were in the late 40s and late 30s respectively--the former a now happily married, former Mac Daddy and the latter a happily divorced, very much active Mac Daddy, and both incidentally with kids heading off to college. In the other square was the other D, just turned 30, who managed the 5 college kids who were doing their one semester co-op with us. There's no denying that we were a cocky bunch who knew we were the best at what we did, and that in a company where the typical average age for a team was somewhere between 40-50, we were a cocky young bunch.

I'm kind of sad that I've pretty much lost touch with most of the people from that team, although I do keep up with a couple indirectly through mutual acquaintances, and a couple of others have found me on Facebook or LinkedIn. Nevertheless, I'll always remember our Friday afternoons, when every other team on the floor had left at the stroke of 5 and we'd still all be revving up for the weekend, blasting music and foisting our musical choices on each other, an hour or more later. I pretty sure that for as long as I live, these four songs--the four we seemed to consistently agree on--will remind me of us hanging around gossiping, shoes off and legs up on our desks, talking about anything that we felt like, feeling so secure that there were years and years ahead of us to do, be, see, get everything that we wanted.

All Over You - Live



Hemorrhage - Fuel



Machinehead - Bush



Good - Better Than Ezra



Oh, and there was this one, which the guys always called "the girls' song" (apart from me, there were two other women, both co-ops)...except it was funny how they never really complained loud enough to not have it play. The way the conversation went a couple of times, as this was playing, I suspect it was because more than one of us felt affinity for this for something other than just the tune...

The Freshman - The Verve Pipe