Opening a Time Capsule

A package was sitting on my front porch when I got home tonight. It was from a friend of mine in Chicago who I used to work with. She still works for the same small company and they are moving offices. She apparently had cleaned out the file room and found a parcel of what were my belongings.

I left that company in October of 1999 so this stuff is almost exactly 7 years missing. It was like walking through time. I found brochures of an apartment I had rented with my ex-roommie Meg back in 93. There were photographs from trips to Montreal, a ticket stub from Miss Saigon, a British Airways timetable (in the days before Travelocity and the internet) and to my shock...the missing NASA patch I had blogged previously about and even more forgotten, a photo Hubble. I had written in black marker on the back of the patch, "STS-61, December 1993." This little patch is 13 years old and it's finally found it's way back to me after all these years.

I know I've often said I've been on a journey. This year has been so utterly special and I'm not sure what it all means and adds up to. How many things in my life has been lost (including my own sense of self?) and brought back to me in the most unusual fashion. It's so strange because no matter how you look at it, I have not thought about that crazy mission in nearly 13 years. All in the same year, I find the documentation I contributed on the NASA site, I locate a pin to replace the patch and then lo and behold, I have now sitting right in front of me the lost patch and Hubble photo.

Though the packet has been out of my posession for the past 7 years, it's actually been lost for possibly exactly 13. 1993 was the year I accepted a position with the "spin off" company. I moved from the 36th floor to the 35th and clearly this packet was from that move
and I never had opened it up in the six remaining years I worked there. Everything in this packet is from 1993 so it truly is a time capsule.

1993 was a big year. I had a gorgeous new apartment, my first management job, I had gone overseas and to Montreal (wooo!), I was in college still and I had just gotten my first computer - a Packard Bell and the internet to me meant anything that was content on Prodigy or Compuserve. In fact, I kept my computer in the closet because I rarely used it for anything except making phoney brochures, writing stories and using EasySabre on Prodigy and Cserve. The only person I had every chatted online with was a guy from Germany named Rik and I felt that I was committing some irresponsible act in doing that.

Times have changed so dramatically. Today I have a nice house/yard/car, I'm in my fourth or fifth management position, I've been all over the world and worked in all the major business cities in the US and key ones in Europe, I'm on my fourth desktop and I have four laptops of varying conditions, my whole job is on a PC and I implement systems. I used Travelocity and Expedia. I have chatted with many many people online, met several and not one has ever turned out to be a psychopathic killer. In fact, dating online is the obvious and safer thing to do than the freaks you meet in a bar.

What a journey it's been. Today was another day working with C-level executives and VP's, and learning how perform at a whole new level. Yesterday, the Hubble project was the coolest thing in my life. It's great to know that 13 years later, it mattered. I wonder what I'm doing today that will matter to me tomorrow?