Glory Days

I had lunch today with the folks I worked with over 8 years ago. It was my favorite job at my favorite place with my favorite people. It was very cool to see them all again. The best boss ever is now COO of the company owned by his former bosses son. He even brought former bosses son now boss along because he had worked summers on the the contract before I started there. Even nicer the boss-guy bought lunch. For 15 people. Nice gesture for someone I'd met maybe once before.

It's been 8 years since I saw most of these people. My son was 3 days old when I brought him in to the office for people to see and so I could pack up my desk because the contract was ending. As I drove up to the restaurant I was behind a carload of folks coming down from Goddard where we worked and several of them still do for other contractors. I recognized one comrade just by the back of his head. He's greyer and has a franken-finger (reattached by surgeons) but looks just the same. By and large nearly everyone looked very much like they did. Everyone was talking about their current jobs (mostly still at contracting firms) and about their kids.

Everyone asked me about my former closest commrade and I'm ashamed to say it's been nearly a year since I've spoken with her. Everyone asked what kind of programming I do now and I was even more ashamed to tell them I don't really get to to that any more.

Everyone talked about the glory days. It was invigorating and depressing. It really is time to sit down and take stock of my life and decide what I think I should be doing with it because I suddenly have the feeling that this ain't it.

** I wrote this on Friday right around the start of the outage. The outage has saved this space from some serious angst. Perhaps there is a God after all.