Memories

When I was coming from India to the States with my then new husband, some of my friends from my workplace came to the airport to see me off. It was there that Aman gave me a CD of videos and pictures of my farewell from that job, which had happened a few weeks earlier.

That day, at the airport, they had a bunch of technical difficulties and their X-ray scanners were replaced by staff members manually checking every passenger's carry-on baggage. After I got home and unpacked over the course of the next few days while recovering from jet lag (Actually, I don't think I was ever really jet lagged. But I was kind of in a trance from weeks of sleep deprivation during the wedding planning, the actual wedding, and everything that needed to be done in the meagre, and now extremely blurry, ten days between the wedding and the flight to the States.) and adjusting to a whole new environment, I never saw that CD and thought I had lost it in all the commotion at the airport.

Then, a few days ago, I was cleaning out some stuff and I found it. I'm not sure where it was for the last fifteen months or so, but it was obviously somewhere in the house.

So, on Sunday, my husband and I watched the videos which showed me laughing and talking with my friends and then colleagues, accepting gifts from them, singing and laughing with them and threatening to beat them up at the slightest provocation.

My husband tells me that I was very lucky to find a group of friends like that in my workplace. The work culture here is drastically different, of course, but he never experienced that sort of thing in India either. It's a different industry, and perhaps that makes things different.

I had some really beautiful times at my old job. The team I worked with has since undergone a whole lot of changes, including reorganizations, new hires, and people leaving the company for bigger and better things. And, luckily for me, I left at a time when they were just reorganizing things in a big way. So I remember things for the way they always were - totally fabulous. I would never have wanted to work for a different boss or with a different set of coworkers after being in that setting. I would not trade the teammates who routinely made fun of me and passed all sorts of comments about me for anything else. Because they made the job worth doing.