Items From A Different Life

Six years ago, Richard and I left our jobs at Intel in Penang. We boxed all our belongings from the apartment and have kept them here in my parent's Ipoh home. Many of the boxes have remained unopened until now. Its finally time to decide what we can keep and what we really should throw out.

I came across this messy looking bag:


These were the final items I had in my cubicle on my last day of work. It almost looks like I just dumped everything into the bag without really looking. I can see that some of the items had some sort of sentimental value at the time but others are ..... odd.



There are the souvenirs from Costa Rica and San Francisco. The little FCPGA and OLGA things are my 'inventions' from my first job at Intel. You can also see a few dummy substrates and rejects because I just couldn't chuck them out. If you look carefully, there is a clear stamp there. Its of my name and I used that because I was in charge of approving visitors to the production floor. It used to be a pain-in-the-behind extra job that I had to do at the end of every work day - wade through a pile of applications and stamp my name on those that had a valid enough reason to visit the factory.

The usual items like highlighters, hairbrush, earphones name tag, badges and other stationary are expected.

And then there are the odd items: A fork from the Intel canteen. A spoon from some takeaway packet. And two packets of the free 3 in 1 tea that we were given each day.
I can't imagine what I was thinking when I decided to sweep all those items into the plastic bag!

So am I throwing these things out? Part of it - I'm keeping the souvenirs.

Looking through all our old things brought back lots of fun memories. Even the memories of all the late night and early morning phone meetings we had to participate in at Intel seem fun in hindsight. Its strange how unpleasant experiences that occurred alongside positive ones seem to have their unpleasantness fade but the positive ones get remembered in an exaggerated way.

I almost wish I had stayed on in the workforce but that would mean wouldn't be "enjoying" all this slavery for my kids now. LOL! One day, I'll go find a job where I can work for myself.