Herself and I had dinner with a former coworker tonight, out from the Old Country to take her son to band camp. We had fancy tapas and made small talk and gossiped a little. It was nice.
I miss my old colleagues sometimes, and not in that “I’ll aim better next time” sort of way. They were personally likeable and since I’d been there so long, I knew them pretty well — that’s important form someone that isn’t good at making contact with others.
I worked there for what seemed like a million years, and that culture is a big part of who I am professionally. I miss the autonomy I had there; I could do pretty much whatever I wanted, as long as what I wanted to do magically lined up with the priority of the day as determined by some combination of magic buzzword 8-ball and slips of paper drawn out of a hat. Maybe the randomness wasn’t so much.
My sphere of influence was concrete — when I had a bad day at work, as many as 56,000 other people were having a bad day (to a lesser degree) with me. It wasn’t the kind of bad day that meant there were power outages or people dying, but it was definitely the topic of mild dinner table bitching and backseat driving at houses throughout the area. I miss that what I did made a difference, even if people only noticed when things were going wrong.
The list of things I don’t miss is longer, though, and more frought with hair-pulling and bottle-opening. So I’m grateful for the opportunity to stroll down memory lane because that means I’m not living it every day.