… Or the importance of friends.
The past week has been kind of depressing for me. I realized just how much some folks in my life really influenced where I’ve come over these past five or six years. It took one of my coworkers turning in his resignation for it to really sink in.
I guess the best place to begin is back where this whole tale started, late October 2002. I went to get out of bed and heard (and felt) an enormous pop resound from my back. I spent the next year plus trying to recover from three ruptured disks in my back. In December 2003, I was trying to find work, any kind of work that my back would tolerate. The money had long since run out and I was living off my credit cards and loans from Mom and Dad. I got called about a local company hiring. They were looking to fill a data entry position. “Data entry… I can do this.” I thought to myself. Years of chatting on the internet had made me a fairly decent typist. I knew that it wasn’t the perfect job. I would be taking a drastic pay cut from what I had been making before my back decided to take its vacation, but anything was better than nothing, which was what I was making at that moment. It took four months and a bunch of paperwork to finally start working.
I walked in their door as an employee on April 5th 2004, the day before my birthday. I began my life as a data entry person with the thought that if my back didn’t improve drastically, I may be stuck typing the rest of my life. Fortunately for me, fate had different plans. My electronics background and computer experience led me to look at a temporary position that was being offered. The job consisted of prepping and packaging laptop computers for distribution to the field. There would be some lifting involved, but my back was proving itself and I felt I could tolerate the required lifting. The money was better and while it was a limited placement, it might give me a chance to move to the I.T. Department. I threw my application in the pool.
I got the call to come for an interview. The appointed time and day arrived. I strolled down to the I.T. Department, after a detour to the Fish Bowl Conference Room which is where I had been told the interviews were. Great! Late to the interview, this is going to make a good impression. I found the place I was supposed to go and walked in. I was greeted by three individual; Karen, Brenda and Ron. Karen was the overall manager I’d be working under. Brenda was the Help Desk Lead and Ron was the Lead PC Technician. From the get go, Ron was pulling for me to be hired. It came out that we had similar work histories and knowledge backgrounds. I was asked why I hadn’t applied for the PC Tech position that was also open. I hadn’t seen the posting as our floor was in disarray due to construction. It was sheer luck that I overheard someone talking about the temporary position and went to find the posting on a bulletin board on the other floor.
To make a long story short, I started the temporary (detail) position and within a couple months was asked to take the PC Tech slot that was open. The detail was now permanent. Ron showed me the ropes. We hit it off fairly quickly and started having lunch together. We soon teamed up with Dave, who would later become a faux PC Tech. He was given all the duties but not the title or pay of a PC Tech. The three of us became good friends. We had a blast horsing around from day to day and even more fun when we were called on to go out on location to swap hard drives in laptops. We became the self appointed three monkeys. You know the ones; Hear No Evil, See No Evil and Speak No Evil. We chose the monkeys after all three of us were chastised by our boss during our trip to San Francisco. I was See No Evil because I was told I wrote unprofessionally after sending an email over the head of the Help Desk Manager and straight to the Help Desk. Dave was Speak No Evil because he got told to stop questioning every decision our boss made. Ron got the remaining Hear No Evil because nobody would listen to him even though he was right and they all knew it.
The comical thing is that it happened in San Francisco. We completed our tasks early and had Friday to kill. Off we went on a little site-seeing journey. One of our planned stops was Chinatown. We had to stop and take photos at the entry arch going into Chinatown’s main thoroughfare. There on a park style bench sat our namesakes in bronze regalia. We laugh to this day about that trip. In Chinatown, you find all kinds of little knick knack shops. Ron and Dave found The Three Monkeys. They were a must have. Ron cheerfully showed them to the gang as he packed his desk last week.
Ron had told me he had been testing the waters for a new job. He even had a lead or two that looked solid. I don’t know if others caught on that he was pushing off critical tasks onto the other techs or not. I took it that he was preparing them for a soon to come day when he would be leaving. Sure enough, two weeks ago at lunch, he told me he had accepted a position at another company. I was happy to hear it. Ron is a very talented individual. I’ve always wondered why he stuck it out where he was. He had little opportunity to advance due to roadblocks that had been put up around him.
This year has been a year of people stepping out of my life. A situation dissolved a friendship of nine years. Vince, Jess and their clan moved to North Carolina to rebuild their lives just as it seemed our friendships were really taking flight. I’m really glad they took the opportunity to move. I still talk to them daily online and we started playing Anarchy Online together, so it’s not like we’ve lost touch. One of these days, I’m going to break off from work and go visit. Time and finances will tell on that, though. Ron’s leaving drug me back down a depressing road that I was just starting to head away from. Dave now works for another company and with Ron gone I’m the last monkey left.
I guess to make matters worse, I feel like I don’t really fit in to the department I work in. I’m not on the tech level but I’m not quite a manager either. It puts me in the awkward position of having to work on projects with the guys, yet also having to push them to manage their time on project better. There are also some issues with our beliefs conflicting from time to time. These guys are, for the most part, great guys, but they are extremely sexist and bigoted. I’ve seen numerous circumstances that could bring the Human Resources department knocking. I digress. I don’t even want to get started down that rant.
Anyway, God does work things in his own way. As one friend, leaves my daily environment, a new one has stepped into another area of my life. Where will our friendship go? I don’t think either of us knows just yet, but we have a lot in common. Time will show us what the kind of plant the seed grows up to be.
Friendships are like germinating seeds in a greenhouse. You give them what they require and they turn into individual plants, each unique in its own way and bearing its own fruit. The well nurtured ones become strong healthy plants that vine and intertwine through the structure of our lives. They add their own little color to our character.