Tuesday, June 30, 2020

After the afternoon prayers, we all gather in the hallway. One of our programmers is retiring today. He has been with us for almost thirty years. I don’t know if anyone else has worked here for that long. At least one other programmer is older than he is. Both had to work from home during the lockdown. The boss gives a speech about him, punctuated by comments and jokes from other long-time workers. Someone finds a photo of a company party in 1994 and posts it to the company WhatsApp. I only recognize the boss, though apparently other current workers are there. The retiring worker spends much of the afternoon with our newest programmer, who joined us on Sunday. They talk together in Russian or something like it. I hear some programming terms, occasional bits of Hebrew, and a few computer-related words in English. At some point, while I’m in a meeting, he leaves. I don’t get to say goodbye. We rarely talked, anyway. He speaks almost no English other than job-specific words, and I have trouble understanding his thickly-accented Hebrew. I suspect I’ll see him again. Former workers often drift back in. When you’ve been with a small company like this for that long, you never completely leave.