The Co-Workers

Two years after my somewhat inglorious departure from the world if IT in Germany, I am now about to return. It is a prospect that is somewhat unsettling.

When I left, I absolutely hated the job and wasn’t sure whether I’d ever come back to it. I was fed up with sitting in front of a computer all day and having to deal with supervisors that know as much about leading people as a Malaysian butcher knows about pork chops.

Now, after having been away for two years, I am keen on working in the field again and I hope that contracting will make it easier to deal with some of the problems.

I’m up for a rough start as I haven’t touched a proper programming environment for two years (I don’t count PHP in Notepad++ here). Still I’m not overly concerned with the technical side of things, as I’ve always been on top of things when it came to programming a computer.

What concerns me more is the environment I will find myself in, the people I will be working with. After all the travelling I am used to having lots of people around me. Interesting, open-minded and self-confident people with a solid amount of life experience under their belt. IT specialists seldom are like that. They are a hunched and pale lot who love to do all kinds of geeky stuff in their spare time and talk about it over lunch. As opposed to sharing stories about the beauty of Angkor and the chaos of Hanoi - topics I am accustomed to by now.

The two guys I shared an office room with at the last company were a pleasant exception to the rule. They had actual real-life partners, an interest in the world and drinking habits that pushed the upper end of social.

We got along well and it was nice to be around people with similar interests who didn’t mind a chat about personal stuff as well. Behind closed doors we would talk about our bosses in a way that could best be described as open and honest. The stuff that showed up on our monitors on a daily base would have been a legal reason for canning but for us was a welcomed opportunity to get our minds of things for a few minutes.

These guys and the environment/habitat they provided were of great help in dealing with the daily crap of IT work. I doubt that I’ll find something similar any time soon and thus I will have to learn to fit back in. But I think that is an area I have to do some catching up in anyway.