Rumours were spreading since I started telling a few people about my impending change and a couple of things were waiting for it to be “official”. Now those are set in motion.
The first being the invite email that my friends are waiting to send out. They had booked the party room at our favourite pub (Willie Stouts) the same day they heard and have been busy compiling mailing lists of people I’ve worked with over the years… there are a few!
The other is that I will need to get a big bin to put stuff in that I’m sure no-one else will be interested in. I have documents dating back to 1982 with names on them of people no longer with IBM and a fair number no longer with the living. I couldn’t start on that without people asking so now that it’s been announced I’m able to get started. I’m curious how much (or how little) will be of value to anyone but me. And I’m curious what few things I will keep as reminders.
For me, the joy of the job was the people I had the good fortune to work with. People like JDH, “Oggie” and Mark for example… all dead a number of years, all very influential in who I am now. And Denis, who is just too smart for his own good. Rick, Johns (JPC & RJC in particular), Jackie, Peters (SIS seems to have had a lot of Peter’s over the years), Hec, JD, Crash, and just too many to mention. Then there’s the lunch gang who have played Hearts on and off for over a dozen years. And these are just the people directly involved in the little corner of that big multinational corporation; the early days of VM and messaging, TOOLS disks, through to the current collaboration suites has brought me in touch with folks like Chess, George G, Thorsten, Larry, Gregoire and many talented folks.
I’ll leave off with that for now, just getting started thinking about people! I’ll mull over this thread for a while… and look forward to seeing some of them at this party I’ve been invited to.