From Bread to Smart Phones

I spent the evening after work today with my co-workers. We decided to get together after several seemingly long stressful weeks and just unwind—totally my boss's idea—them with beers, me with ginger ale. (I don't say this boasting as I'm not opposed to an occasional glass of wine. But I'm still adjusting to my thyroid hormone replacement medicine, so I've been a teetotaler for a bit.)

It was a nice evening for it too. We headed to the nearby golf course that happens to have a restaurant/bar and sat outside at tables on the balcony overlooking the green. It was a pleasant evening filled with conversations as diverse as the proper way to bake bread to corruption in government to the best smart phone apps. (I was particularly interested in this last subject since I purchased my first smart phone in January that does all these really cool things, only half of which I've figured out.)

I've worked a number of places over the years, and I have to say that at a time where I'm looking for balance in life, I'm pretty fortunate to find myself working with such a great group of people. No egos in the bunch.

We're all pretty talented at what we do and extremely committed to it. More often than not when we're frustrated at work, it's not with each other, but with a client or client manager asking for some nonsensical page/site update, or the jacked-up server network and content management system that we use to maintain our Web site. But sometimes we can get so busy during the course of a day or week troubleshooting problems, debating with clients and trying to juggle non-stop project requests, it can feel like we barely have to time to say "hello" to each other, let alone just stop and talk.

My boss is good about sensing this; hence his periodic suggestions to just go hang out. (Once, we took a mid-day break to Starbucks, his treat!)

Every now and again, it's good to get out of the office and away from our computers and just share stories about other things in our lives besides jacked-up clients and nonsensical network servers. After all, despite the fact that we spend most of our waking hours at work, there is more to our lives than that.