About 18 months ago, I left home and moved to another country for a massive job opportunity. (Dublin to London) I don’t regret it. Career wise it was a wonderful move and some other things turned out really well too. I’ve gotten to do alot of travel since then for myself and the notion of me being sent on a business while once foreign become if not regular, always there.
I’ve made alot of friends here, I work with some great people who were pretty good at the making feel welcome. I guess I was lucky in that someone else just moved to London and the same dept as me from another country and we ended up good friends.
But there have also been the downsides, through various problems (not all of them my fault) such as e-mail addresses dying and loosing my mail, and my mobile been stolen (with all my numbers in the sim card and damn right I keep a paper copy now, why do we always learn the hard way?) it left me without contact details for alot of people. Some I was able to get to through mutual friends others I was not. I’ve only managed to spend a little time in Dublin since I moved most of it on business so the chances of bumping into them at local haunts was never great. One time I felt certain I would meet some was at a con in London earlier in the year, in the most ironic of all things I was sent on a pretty important trip and spent over 3 weeks in the US. This had an upside as I got to meet some online friends, some of whom are real special. The downside was other online friends were in London for the con and I missed them. (Online friends is just a description I work online and AIM is the primary method of communication for me. I don’t differentiate between online and “rl” friends.)
I don’t know what I am saying here, there are some people who I would really like to get in touch with, could I be more proactive about it? yeah possibly, but it’s pretty hard.
What brought this on? well I ran into somepeople I had not seen in a while, but the events of the week aswell I guess. So far I think I’ve been pretty lucky I don’t know anyone hurt, missing or worse. But I know people that do.
I wasn’t going to comment or say anything really in this post, but I guess just appreciate the people while you have them.