Salad Bowl days

So, I've been working for the same company for nine years now. Nine years. That's longer than I've done anything, with the exception of live with my parents. And by default, it makes me something of an old-timer at the office. Granted, there is a handful of people outside of the Chief Whatever Officers who've also been there about the same amount of time, and far more who've been there for 5 or 6 years. But still.

In those years I've seen a lot of change, of course, as the company has grown from 40 or so people to over 200, been acquired, taken on new customers and projects. And by default I am perceived as something of an expert on certain subjects since I've been working with them since the inception. Which means that I get to spend a lot of time in meetings. Sometimes useless and futile meetings. But often they can be quite productive and serve as useful exchanges of information or as collaborative decision-making exercises.

Anyway, this afternoon in a meeting with people from Engineering, QA, Project and Product Management, Support, and Broadcast departments, it occurred to me why I often leave these gatherings so exhausted. You know how hard you have to concentrate when listening to someone with a heavy foreign accent, to understand what they're saying? And as long as you focus, it gets easier after a while as you get into the groove of their style of speech? Well, I realized that that process gets broken for me when shifting back and forth between multiple accents.

In this one meeting were thick Indian, Chinese, and Russian accents, as well as Scottish, an unidentified Northern European and an Eastern European accent... or French. I can't tell anymore. Individually, I can generally cope fine, but when going from one to another in rapid succession, it takes so much of my concentration to hang on every word that I left the meeting mentally drained.

It's really neat, actually, that there's so much diversity. And I'm totally amazed that some of the non-native English speakers can communicate so well with one another. Or maybe I'm the only one struggling because of my complete language deficiency.

That's it really. I don't have any summary here. Just thought I'd share.