Once in a pink moon

This blog and my facebook account for that matter has had a "Separation of Work and personal life" policy that was maintained a lot better than the separation of Church and State policy by our government.

There were reasons for that! Very valid reasons.

Although many of my co-workers follow my travelog or see pictures in it,  they sent me comments to my gmail id rather than post comments on the site. Well, everyone has their own policy.

As for facebook, an incident two years ago prompted me to defriend 140 people in a single day and reduce my "friends" list from 200+ to 60. Why?

My then boss left my company and moved to St. Louis. As it so happened my sister relocated from New Jersey to St. Louis as well the same week and I had made plans to visit my sister for her son's first birthday function which tradition requires a maternal uncle be present. My brother was in India and I was the only maternal uncle within flying distance.... and I made the mistake of posting a comment on my ex-boss's facebook account saying "See you next week in St. Louis!". It was a harmless comment, as all I wanted to do was to say hi to him in the new surroundings.

It so happened that this was picked up by the rest of the workforce that was already deeply upset by his move to St. Louis.. what with him being the founder of our workplace and all.. as a message that I was going to join his new workplace. The rumor mill starts flying and folks give me the "et tu brutus" look for a couple of days. By the time someone was kind enough to tell me what was going on, yours truly had "had enough".

Cancelled the St. Louis plan, addressed the folks and kept going. Hindsight being better than 20/20, should have gone on that trip. That was a long time ago and it is water under the bridge.

Why bring all that up now?

Well once in a pink moon, it is okay to break that separation and post something about work. After driving to the same parking lot for the fifteenth year one gets used to the routine. Have gone to work by mistake in a trance so many times on a saturday when I was supposed to go somewhere in that general direction, find myself in an empty parking lot and have come back home. Have spent more time in the fab at work in terms of total time spent in any location in my entire life.

Seriously, kid you not. Have lived in many different homes as part of childhood, dorms in college, apartments as a bachelor, five different residential addresses over the last 10 years .. but one place that anchored me was the fab.

That place is expected to be closed in the very near future! Tempted to go on a rant about our current public policies, the fate of American manufacturing and R&D, etc. etc. but will refrain. That is another post for another day. We all know there is not much silicon left in silicon valley. There is going to be even less after this fab closes! Sad thing is over the last 18 months, started liking Austin and all those trips there, the wonderful folks there and another "fab" in Austin and that too gets the locks soon.

It is heartbreaking to see this happen and we still have to go through the motions of a person who has to perform his last rites while still being alive but that is part of the job at this point.

This blog has been an open letter of sorts to the world on happenings in our life and if anything warrants a post, this does!

A lot of things need to be done at work, at home, on the road. The mind is in pieces even after sleeping at 1, waking up at 5 and doing Yoga bright and early on a Saturday morning.  Have a lot of good leads and potential opportunities and am confident of getting jobs. Just need to know inside that "I am not settling" for anything but going for something that brings back those goosebumps on a day to day basis!

Now that most of those folks that were "defriended" (if that is what Facebook calls them) are not going to be co-workers in a short time, time to add them all back on facebook!

Last time, wrote them a note at work saying "My apologies for taking you off my friend list!". That from a guy who writes an open blog!

Now, it is just a post announcing to folks that they are going to get requests from me.. and they can send me one too..