I had an interesting experience today. I had the work equivalent of having Facebook ell you that you had too many friends.  Our internal messaging system (Sametime) told me that I had more than 500 chat friends and it stopped working for me.. Now.. don’t get the wrong idea.. i don’t regularly talk to 500 people, but these names tend to accumulate over the years, I had to do something to start clearing them out…I started the task a little apprehensively as It’s the internal equivalent of ‘unfreinding’ someone.. though they never know it happens.

I was surprised, releived and bummed out all at the same time when I found that mostly what I had to do was to remove friends from the list that were no longer working at IBM..

as I scrolled through the hundreds of names I clicked off the ones who had left. some had retired, some had moved on to other careers, some had been laid off.. some had died… As I  clicked ‘remove’ i tried to remember the last interaction I had with that person.  what had we worked on together ? how did I know them ? . i pictured their face.. and tried to conjure up where they were now.. and what had happened that made them ‘elsewhere now.  It was a reverse history of my last 15 years or so at work..

it brought back soem great memories..a  few sad ones.. and many ‘where are they now’ questions. n the end this was a much more spiritual and emotional exercise than it was a maintenance exercise..

it reminded me that working, like life,  is about relationships and about love.. .. it was nice to be  reminded

ntite all, nite sam

-me