Old Timer

The company I work for has a great way of solving problems sometimes.

Problem:
Employees bring crates of beer into the office at the end of every Friday and all the rooms end up becoming a mess of empty beer bottles and full ash trays (plus there was the time we cellotaped one of the designers to his chair).

Solution:
Buy lots and lots of beer on Friday for the employees but only allow them to drink it in one room to contain the mess.

With spring starting hopefully they will let us start using the garden again as well. We used to have great fun with drunken water fights on a Friday night because the company had given us all Super Soakers for the Christmas before.

But last night as I drank my company payed for bottle of beer and chatted with my coworkers I realized something….. I’m old.

I was not thinking about the amount of birthdays I have had. I was thinking about how long I have been working for the company compared to most of the others. As I looked around the room I realized I didn’t really know quite a few of the people I was drinking the company’s money with. There seems to be new fresh faces in the office almost every day.

When I joined it was a small company. Since then I’ve watched people come and go. The company has changed names, changed owners and changed buildings. In fact last Wednesday was five years to the day I had my interview.

In a strange way I like being one of the old timers of the company. It makes me feel like part of a select group. Like someone who knows what these new members will go through and can laugh at the way they think because its how I used to think. As if I now know secrets they will have to learn over time just as I did.

Who knows, maybe one day I’ll be in a rocking chair surrounded by young hopeful game designers, “Oh yes. I worked on a computer game once before you had your new fangled holograms.”