Take friends out to lunch, regularly.

I made it to an academic conference last week, and got to remember how much fun it is to catch up with old friends, meet new people and hear about their work, trade stories, etc. I ended up in the hotel restaurant/bar with a Canadian professor, some of her friends, and a couple acquaintances, and had a wide ranging conversation from life in Hong Kong to cloud computing to Brigham Young to incorrect handling of the “volatile” keyword in C. I miss that.

And with the Canadian dollar doing great, the professor enjoyed picking up the cost of the meal for us poor Americans.

Mmmm… malaysian restaurant with two of the coolest and smartest folks from my old company. I forgot to order something fun and interesting (noodles in broth with fish balls and shrimp – good, but I know there were spicier and more interesting things on the menu), but I got to enjoy a fun conversation about research, building real software, my research area, their research area, and someone’s trip to Sicily for a physics conference.

One of the guys also had the great news that he was just finishing writing his Ph.D. dissertation (after a year’s delay caused by going to work.) I was really happy he’d almost finished the writing; after all the effort of going for a Ph.D., it seemed silly not to finish the writing and get the diploma.

Now, I can start pestering him about converting his dissertation into a couple of computer science journal articles. Some day he’ll be interviewing for another job, and having publications will help the job search.

My friend D.’s a professor at a university out in California’s Central Valley, and he’s been working insanely hard ever since he moved back to California to take the job. We’ve seen him and his wife a couple times, but he’s always busy and working, and getting out to see him is a struggle because of the 2-3 hour commute (which is always worse on weekends.)

So with time off ending, seeing D. seemed like a great thing, so I suggested driving out for lunch. After a couple of e-mails, he finally agreed, so on Friday, I set off at 9am, climbed over some mountains, drove past sixty miles of flat farmland just for lunch.

It was worth it. He was happy to see a familiar face, and we had a great time touring the campus, having lunch at a nearby Thai restaurant, and wandering in downtown. I finally headed back home at 4pm, stopped for a bathroom break and milkshake in a farm town, and was home in time to cook dinner. I worry I took away too much of D.’s Friday, but I suspect we both needed a long, long lunch.

I don’t know how to top this – fly to Southern California for coffee?

I’ve been reminded yet again that I’ve definitely got to keep up the lunchtime socializing after I’m back at work. I had lunch with a friend I hadn’t seen for a while. I heard about his latest project, learned about new ways of building programs, got to tell him about some great projects he needed to check out, socialized some, and ran into common friends. Fun ideas, fun conversation!

I met up with a friend from my former employer twice this week; he works long-distance and was in town this week, so it was a great chance to be social. We’ve got similar research interests so our conversation ranged from blue-sky problems to talking about implementation details of his current work to work politics to just talking about life.

It’s fun being detached from the job; when he mentioned one of the technical problems and the big solution he had to implement, I occasionally challenged him with “do you need to do all that? Is there a halfway step? Will that help many customers?” Because I’m not part of all that, he could reflect and answer the question in ways he might not have during a real meeting.

That conversation reminded me how often at work we’d be so focused on the problem at hand that we’d never step back either to think whether we were going the right way, or just think philosophically about the problem, or we’d get way too worked up about a particular solution. That chance to stop, reflect, and talk without all the tension of work was really pleasant.

Wonder if I can figure out how to keep that needed detachment and reflection when I’m working?

I had a another chat with a couple other coworkers a couple weeks back. In that case, talking about a work project was obviously tense for him, and behind that look I could just get see the years of exhaustion and frustration and feeling like things never quite worked out right. I’ve had that face in similar conversations.

One of the other traditions I’ll need to keep up after returning to the salt mines is Friday lunches. There’s a group of model railroaders that get together every Friday at a nearby Chili’s, and talk about models or whatever else. It’s a fun crowd for pretty much everyone works in high tech (imagine that in Silicon Valley!), all in their 40’s and 50’s, all very technical, and all very sociable. Stories about travel, strange circuit boards, and hints about doing history research at the local library aren’ There’s usually a crowd of 12-14, and the staff usually has a table ready. It’s a great group, and I’m really grateful they invited me to join ‘em.

I’m already thinking twice about one of the places I’m considering because their offices are too far away from the lunch meeting place. Am I being petty, or just realizing that quality of life just might matter a teensy bit?

For me, it’s a bit of a change just because I’ve never been a joiner. I know about the Leave It to Beaver model of America where all the men belong to one of the fraternal organizations (Elks, Moose Lodge, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Masons, Toastmasters, etc), but I never saw my parents involved with those sorts of groups, and I don’t see my friends involved. At first I thought it was because those groups are fading away, but now I’m suspecting they’re just hidden and often not affiliated with larger organizations.

I found the same thing with hiking; the local Sierra Club chapter runs very few hikes, but the internet group I’ve been working with has several hikes a week, and they’re only one of ten or twenty groups in the Bay Area! Is this just that times are changing, or are we giving up on formal organizations for informal ones?

Last week, a bit of a change. Most of the friends I’ve been getting together with are friends from work or school. This time, I suggested lunch to another model railroad person that I’d talked with a few times. He’s edited one of the hobby newsletters, and is a frequent author, so I hoped to pick his brain about how to write an article for one of the model railroad magazines.

Lunch turned out great for both of us; he’s an interesting and social guy, so we had a pretty wide-ranging conversation over sandwiches at the local sidewalk cafe. He was even interested in doing lunch again in a couple months.

Anyway, I’m just surprised how we’re all a bit starved for socializing, and I’m glad I’m suggesting lunch to interesting folks, even if they aren’t already in my close circle of friends.

Mmmm… thai food and hearing that a friend’s getting away from the evil manager and moving over to a team that values her. The more friends I see, the more happy stories I’ll hear.

Mmmm… lunch here, lunch there, stories about the place I used to work, catching up, just being social.

Except for today. Because xxxx stood me up for lunch. He hasn’t been around on e-mail, nor on IM. I ran into him last week when going back to my old job to see friends, and suggested we get together. I really wanted to catch up with him because I know he’s been going through a messy divorce. I wanted to hear how he’s doing, and give him a chance to vent.

But no contact for a couple days.

Sick? Problems at home? Flaked? Um… laid off?

No idea. I’ll hope it’s just that he flaked. He’s got enough problems that he doesn’t need more.

(He was sick as a dog. He’s better now, I think.)