Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes. Sorry. I mean two million six hundred twenty eight thousand minutes. Five years. That's how much time I gave to my soon-to-be ex employer in blood, sweat, and tears (mainly tears actually). And actually actually, you have to take off the evenings, weekends, weeks of vacation, recharge days (and weeks), sick days, times when I was sitting at my computer but not doing anything anywhere close to working, team fun event days, lunches, etc. and I think that then the true number is somewhere closer to around 1000 minutes or so. And what did I get in return? Well, I did get to go to California a couple of times. [As an aside, even I have to admit that a lot of the content on this here blog is kind of missable at best and cringe at worst but I just re-read that California Redux post probably for the first time since I wrote it and personally I don't think it's even close to half bad.] Other things that this friendly Silicon Valley tech corporation that has never made a profit in its life gave me are stocks that have lost more than 80% of their value (I did manage to sell many of them though), a drawer full of branded t-shirts (that I wear regularly), and a healthy dose of wisdom from the school of hard knocks. I also now know how it feels to be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown. So there is that.
But it all comes to an end in just a few short weeks. And on September 30th I will finally say "Sayonara". The new gig (after a short recharge trip to Rome) will start immediately afterwards and I'm hoping -- I guess obviously -- that it doesn't kill me. But hope is a dangerous thing for someone like me to have. The new company -- which shall remain nameless for now (and no I'm unfortunately not starting my own "start up" yet because getting rich is so 90's) -- has two main hubs. One of which is located in Canada's largest city and the other is (I believe) next to MI6. Crazy that after all this time Pemulis would join a Canadian company but (for now anyways) still remain in Germania. The latter of the hubs, the Londres one I mean, is one where I imagine I may be spending some of my time over the next several months. That should be fun and exciting for me because I really like rain, baked beans, complaining, being cold, being miserable, and non-rhotic pronunciation. What about you guv'nuh?
