I was onsite with a customer all day today, and to end the day, we had a surprise wine flight where we had to guess the country and varietal of the wines we were trying (I failed miserably), and then I had to rush off for my team’s dinner since two of our team leads were in town from San Francisco. One of our leads picked out Tree Bistro for dinner, and it was a quaint little French restaurant in the East Village that without her recommendation, I probably never would have noticed before.

I had so much fun, and really before I worked here, I really can’t remember ever genuinely enjoying not just the food, but the conversations at my work dinners…. even the ones with my customers. A lot of time because I am me, I’d pick the restaurant to make sure it was a place I wanted to try on my list that would potentially be good, and I’d pretend to enjoy the company just so I could try the food. Most of the conversations were forced and trite, about topics I cared little about, or things I had to pretend to be interested in (the future of the company… like I care about my last company at all). Tonight, we talked all about traveling to see every state of the country, the current state of politics, and about a number of different books, including one about the history of New York.

I finally work with people who see the world beyond themselves and the cities they live in.