This morning, after coming back late from Boston last night, I took the 7am flight from JFK to SFO. Bleary eyed and sticky, I arrived at my new company’s San Francisco headquarters and was greeted with seemingly endless warmth and welcome, hugs, and smiles, and multiple invitations to lunch.

I think you know you’ve come from an abused or misused environment when people are friendly and warm with you, and you are slightly taken aback by it and question their motives. You hesitate, and you wonder for a second whether this person really does want to grab coffee or lunch with you, whether this person really is happy to see you and wants to spend time with you. In just a day, my entire week has filled with lunch invitations from people across departments who want to chat with me and get to know me. This is not what I am used to given my previous situation. No one really wanted to eat lunch with me or get to know me at my last job with the exception of maybe two or three people total. No one really cared what I did outside of work, or even what I did at work. There wasn’t a genuine passion or drive that I felt any of my ex-colleagues had… other than to make a lot of money and/or bring home a paycheck at the end of the day. But people here really do seem to care about their work, what our company is doing, and they even seem to care about me and ensuring I am happy and doing well. That is a foreign concept to me, but one that makes me smile. This is my new world now. And so far, it’s a good one.