Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021

The new programmer starts talking to me in Russian. I don’t know what he’s saying. He can tell. He quickly switches to Hebrew. I still don’t understand him. He pauses. “English?” I nod. His English is quite good. We talk for a couple of minutes. He asks if I’m from England. Nope, the US. “Really? I have never met an American who speaks as clearly as you do.” I tell him that I used to be on the radio. Across the aisle from me, a long-time programmer digs into system code. He repeatedly shakes his head, tsks, and repeats the name of the programmer who died last year, who had worked at that same desk. He was a good person, but left a trail of bugs in his wake. Another programmer, who retired at about the same time, has come back to work for a few days. He and the boss are hollering at each other behind closed doors. They work well together and are quite close, but you wouldn’t know that from listening to them. The sales person whose father passed away last week has returned. He sometimes would participate in the afternoon prayers. I figure that he will join us to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. He doesn’t. He can join if he wants. There’s no pressure to do so. Toward the end of the day, we get a new rule about ordering lunches. Some of us have waited each morning for the group text nudging us to order, since sometimes the bosses would order something different for us. Now we’re told to order every day that we want to. If the bosses want to override that, they can. But if they don’t, orders must be in by a certain time, with or without the prompt. They send out a Google Invite for every workday starting now, so our calendars will automatically remind us. That will work, too.