My friend Garrett and I have maintained a friendship over sixteen years. We first met each other on a very important day in both of our lives, the same day we both started our careers in the games industry as QA testers. He eventually transitioned into being a UI artist and now I’m a software engineer but the roots of our friendship started in the lobby of EA campus in Burnaby.
Now when I returned to EA last year, Garrett was already working there but on the NHL team. He eventually joined the PvZ team late in the project. That was so cool! It was the first time in sixteen years we were on the same team, since we were both testing NHL on the PlayStation. He moved into the UI artist area, which was not really that close to where I sat but still close enough that I could visit.
I left to go on my awesome travel-filled four-month vacation soon afterwards though. When I returned, I discovered that they put my new desk right next to Garrett! So since the beginning of June, we’ve had the pleasure of sitting next to each other at work. It’s genuinely great to sit next to a real friend at work. It’s easy to talk to each other and go on coffee breaks together.
Unfortunately, we have a team move coming up and some people needed to move early, including Garrett. He had to pack his stuff today and move like twenty feet in another direction to another cluster of cubicles. Twenty feet might not seem like far but it might have been in another building. I was honestly a bit sad when I looked over to his empty desk.
I’ll be moving desks next week too. I’ll be on the other side of one of Garrett’s cubicle walls. We’ll be close but now we’ll have that wall between us. There will be a physical wall but there will never be a wall in our friendship.