When people ask me if I miss anything about Corporate life, my answer is only the steady paycheck. But the other day as I was lunching with a former colleague, I realized that was not true. If you think I am about to add having an expense account to the short list of what I might miss I’m not. I do miss that, but more so would be the people.
When I say, the people, I am referring to that group of individuals who over the years became more than my colleagues, they became my friends.
I was lucky. No matter how crazy Corporate life got, I was surrounded by co workers who made it easier to get through the day. Many of them I worked with for most of the eleven years I was at my last stint.
Together we saw children born, others off to college, parents age. We attended birthday parties, weddings, and funerals. We laughed more than I can remember, sometime at each other, often at the absurdities of what we witnessed every day. We cried when we lived through the tragedy of one of us dying too young, sat in a conference room and watched in horror as that plane hit the second tower. We felt the fear it might happen again the day of the blackout. We saw the dot com boom and crash along with the stock market. In between it all, we did our jobs.
You can get to know people pretty well when you work with them every day. Some you don’t want to know any better than you have to. But if you’re lucky, as I was, alot you do.
There are not many of that group that are still there. A combination of time, moving on to bigger and better ventures and downsizing are responsible for that. The ones still left know who they are. So if you are reading this, and you think I don’t miss anything about that world. I do. I miss you.
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