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
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