Return to work
I went back to work last Tuesday.
It was strange to see how little things had changed. Some whiteboards hadn’t been erased since I left at the beginning of the summer. The pregnant women were a little more pregnant, a few people had left, but for the most part, nothing was different. On my desk things were exactly as I had left them. Files that I had been working on were in the same state. I went to sleep for a summer, and woke up the same day I left.
But as my therapist said: The point of the exercise was not to see how much changed at work, but to effect a change in myself.
I had forgotten how quiet the office is, like a library, or a fertility doctor’s waiting room. Very little talking, and most of it in quiet voices. The hum of the machines mixes with the air conditioning to form a bath of perfect white noise. I have to fight the urge to fall asleep.
Since I’m only coming in two days a week for the next month or so, I’m working on our tool set. I wrote parts of the original code, but it has grown baroque in the last few years. The temptation, of course, is to start from scratch, but I finally have enough experience to know that that approach makes projects late. So I’m gingerly making changes, making sure that I don’t break something. This part of the job is fun.
I’m not sure about the other parts. I had forgotten how many meetings we have. How many pointless emails come across my screen. I really want to be doing something different. Sleep.