All of my adult working life, up until yesterday, was spent as a monkey, and nearly 50% of what I’d consider my total adult life as well. So… I’ll always be a monkey, at some level, regardless of the letter I sent yesterday[1].
Can’t speak to the Novell ID.
Some of the things I’ll remember, in roughly chronological order:
- Peter telling me in IRC that Helix had decided over dinner that they needed a bugmaster, and that he and Thunder had said they knew just the right guy.
- Coming to the office for the first time, during the Ximian GNOME (aka ‘prion’) release crunch. exchange from one of the many fairly grungy people on a couch: ‘are you the new QA guy?’ ‘yes.’ ‘great. you can’t leave.’ ‘I have to leave, I still have to graduate.’ ‘you don’t need to graduate, we need you now! please!’
- The old office, which just ruled in general.
- Thunder and Dave cursing mightily about HPUX.
- Lots of totally, totally exhausted people trying mightily to enjoy the TMBG show the night before (after?) the evo 1.0 release.
- Having a meeting canceled with Sun Ireland during world cup 2002, saying ‘great, that means I can watch more soccer’, and sitting down to realize that the game on during the meeting was… Ireland-Germany. Immediately opened evo to cancel a meeting two days later during a US game.
- Telsa calling me to invite me to be part of the release team after I obnoxiously barged in and said ‘I think we should track bugs this way.’ I don’t think I’d ever actually spoken to a non-Ximian GNOME person before.
- The general headrush of the Sun contract and GNOME 2.0.
- Having to explain to Chema what it meant when Richard decided to become Rachel.
- Drinking on Dave’s couch, waiting for the actual release of 2.0 to happen.
- 400+ hours in the office the month before XD2; running across the street to buy food and toothpaste and such all the time.
- Monkey wars.
- Nat emailing me on the day of the acqusition to say ‘The CEO is coming at 1. Please make sure your team is sober.’
- “Do you own a trenchcoat?”
- St. Patrick’s day in an Irish pub. In Germany.
- A thousand other things and a hundred or so really awesome people.
Anyway… it’s been an awesome ride, and I hope I’ll always have the friends I made as a monkey. I hope this post starts bringing me some mental closure, too… Christine made fun of me last night for the ‘we’ habit, which will be hard to shake. :)
[1] Yes, it was cliched, I used ‘thanks for all the fish.’