Friday, September 15, 2006

Nine years....

I've been in my current office for nine years. When we first moved into the Westford 5 building on July 21, 1997 (I know this because I just found a little compass commemorating that move!), I was briefly in an upstairs office as the downstairs area was not yet complete. By fall, I was in my first floor office, and have been the first and only occupant since. On Wednesday, I am moving upstairs to an office near my team. It will be good to be near the team, but I am oh so sad and feeling very sentimental. My husband says that he can't imagine feeling this way about an office, but when I think back on nine years....

I did my R5 Domino Designer work here, with Pete on one side of me, and Ned on the other. R5 was a long march, and I spent many late nights here (this was before the days of laptop working at home). There's a champagne glass on my shelf from the day R5 shipped. V6 Domino Designer was built here, too, with a few new and continuing team members. Next to the R5 champagne glass is another (somewhat smaller) glass for the V6 ship. Then V7, too, until I decided to spread my wings into Workplace Designer. And on my corkboard, the six calendar pages of my children's birthdays that have been in each of my offices since I returned from each maternity leave.

I have to clean today - I am a bit of a packrat, and when choosing between doing some code or cleaning, the choice has always been easy. But today I have to make up for the lost cleaning time. The archaeology is going to send me right down memory lane, I'm sure there will be some tears shed. It's been a good nine years - I hope the next office brings me as much luck in finding good work and good people to do it with. I know for now I'm fine - we have a great team and great work to do, but what will the world be like if I stay in my next office nine years? I know in the fall of 1997 I probably couldn't even carry on a conversation with my 2006 technical self, how will we all be different in 2015?

3 comments:

Brian said...

Which office are you getting Maureen? Hope you don't mind the radiation from the power-line side of the building...

Maureen said...

round the corner from Phil, next to Mez, so sort of angled off from the main line of radiation (I hope!!)

Bob said...

Next to Mez? That's close to my old office. Over the course of eight years in WTF5, I had five different offices. All of them except the first temp office had windows. Two of them were partically palatial in size -- there are probably two or three people in those now. It's amazing how different Iris and IBM are about office space.

Btw, I found my old Iris compass in a box a while ago. The needle fell out. I think that's a sign or something. ;-)