Back to the office, sort-of

One of my colleagues is leaving our company after 11 years. She's been a huge part of the company and we are all very sad to see her go. So we had a get-together yesterday to celebrate. It was weird, and great.

I hadn't been back in the office for any meaningful amount of time for about 16 months, so it was very strange to be back there in person. Stranger still was that there were a bunch of people there. A good chunk of our engineering team had congregated to see her off. It was very strange to be around that many people indoors after such a long period of isolation.

I realized both that I have really missed being around people and simultaneously that I kinda love keeping to myself. Working remotely has actually been good for me - most of my team has been remote even before COVID, and we have a culture that is very inclusive for remote work. I told my boss that it would be a while still before I'm ready to come back to the office to work, and that even then I would probably want to be remote some of the time.