Why I miss my crowbar..

The beauty of having a real crowbar in an office is the social aspect. What is your crowbar?

For the last ~12 years of my career I had a crowbar in my desk drawer. It wasn’t a very long crowbar as you picture in your head, but it had the proper look and feel of a very strong piece of steel to it. I had a very special attachment to it. It made me feel like I am doing real – actual – work and that helped me fall asleep at nights. I actually used it once for work purposes to unbox a server that was shipped from Tokyo to our local datacenter – it was boxed ‘real good’ by a shipping company. Not sure if the shipping costs were higher than the price of a new server! To clarify, I am a Cloud Consultant and my tools are normally far from a crowbar.

It was unintentional

I remember I brought the crowbar to the office by accident one day as I was doing something at a friends place and had the tool with me in my bag and then just left it to the office the next day without a thought.

I brought the crowbar to the office by accident one day as I was doing something at a friends place and had the tool with me

The social aspect

The real beauty of having a real, physical, crowbar with you in an office is the social aspect. In a large office, people quickly start to refer to you as ‘the guy with the crowbar’; or they ask you to show it to new employees as they are doing their first introduction rounds etc. It is an awesome ice-breaker! Imagine the water cooler chats when you walk around with it and people start asking you why you have it with you. Sometimes I even took it with me to meetings to (jokingly) set the expectations (performance review meetings, hello)!

Nowadays as companies no longer run their servers in the basement or pollute the planet with heavy server shipments I need to find the feeling of ‘real work’ from elsewhere. Recently, it has become apparent that my role at Solita Oy as a Senior Cloud Consultant is exposing me to such depth and bredth of real life customer projects that I sleep very well even without my crowbar in the office! The cloud is simply full of benefits for everybody, every size and maturity.

What is your crowbar?

Do you have a similar, unique, item that you have memories of? If you don’t, think if there is something in your life that you could utilise.

While I have since left the crowbar at home from my workplace, at Solita Oy, I find myself contemplating about bringing it back.

Let’s see if the crowbar makes a return during 2019 to the water cooler!