Photo by Adam Whitlock on Unsplash
I was just out of college. It was my first job, away from home.
A computer technician before computers, as we know them today, existed. There were no terminals or keyboards - we used punched card and paper tape.
To drop a deck of cards was a nightmare. You wouldn't believe the rigmarole to correct a coding error. No online editing in my day!
And it was thrilling.
Among the first Computer Technology graduates in the country. Snapped up by a Silicon Valley satellite lured to Ireland with the promised of highly educated youngsters. Old fashioned canteen breakfasts, table tennis at lunch time, house parties, and quarterly drinking fests courtesy of the company.
35 years on I attended a reunion of that first job. We picked up where we left off; the gossip, the stories, the flirtations, the grudges. We were pioneers, bonded together by adventure but what really sustained us was not that we were at the leading edge of the information age but that we were family.
It is no accident in my mind that Suits, set in a Law Firm, and Call My Agent, set in a Talent Agency, are highly popular Netflix series. The mechanisations of the work environment are a backdrop to the heart and soul of family; the drama, misunderstanding, bad behaviour, lies, intimacies, rapprochements, forgivenesses, new beginnings. In both series the 'firm' dies or transforms but family remains.
My fondest memories of my work life are the memories that include family.
I am a freelancer, an introvert, a loner but I have learnt that good relationships at work nourish me.
It is my profound pleasure, as I enter my eldership, to be part of a peer group that hold 'fostering kinship' as one of our top 3 values.
#family #kinship #work