My new employer offers free massages on Fridays. Can you believe it?

They mentioned it during the interviewing process and it sounded almost too good to be true. What’s the catch, I thought? And it wasn’t even difficult to get a slot – when I booked mine on Thursday evening, half the slots were still free.

This was very, very nice. Afterwards, my body felt like a fluffy, soft pillow. And I was extra aware of all the times I tensed my shoulders.

This was one of the years where the holidays all fall on weekdays, so you get maximum amount of Christmas break for a minimum of vacation days spent. I was home for 17 days, for the cost of 5 vacation days.

Yesterday was my first day back at work after the break. I spent most of it on getting my new computer up and running. It was all installation files and license keys and VPN configurations and access tokens. Bleh.

Today was my first full day at the office at Active Solution. I was told that Wednesdays are a good day to come in if I want to meet people, because there is Wednesday fika in the afternoon.

The office had a very homey vibe, quite unlike the sleek lines of the tretton37 office. A slightly labyrinthine layout, soft carpets in muted tones, throw pillows, and lots of plants.

Visited Active Solution, my new employer, today for an intro session and to pick up my equipment. Time reporting, intranet, door tags, here are the office supplies, here’s the printer, etc etc.

My new computer threw a tantrum during the setup phase and got sent back to IT support, so I didn’t actually get access to any of these systems, but I did come home with a new phone. Same brand and series as the old phone, but four years newer and a slightly higher-end model.

It definitely wins over the old one in the “most camera lenses” category – as well as in “fewer smudgy fingerprints”. Samsung appears to have switched to a more sensible material for the phone body.

Reviews say the Samsung Galaxy S24 has a great camera, and I’m hoping that with the four lenses, this phone might replace my pocket camera for everyday use outside the house. (For any planned, more serious photography, I’ll still be using the Olympus, of course.) The little Sony camera I have is nine years old and some bits are starting to wear out. It would be nice if I didn’t have to buy a new one – and a lighter handbag wouldn’t hurt, either. My old phone (four years old) took decent photos in good light, but in low-light conditions the results were pretty horrible, and it had no optical zoom so any attempts at zooming in were likewise atrocious.

We celebrated the end of a great year with the developer team at Sortera. Dinner at a Bengali restaurant (Mowgli’s kök, delicious food, wide range of veggie options, indifferent service, 10/10 would recommend) and then indoor mini-golf.

I’m usually bad at hitting or throwing balls – with or without equipment – and making them go where they’re supposed to, but I finished in shared second place. I also had the most uneven performance of us all, being responsible for both the most holes-in-one and the group’s singular 7-pointer.

Here’s me hitting a hole-in-one at the last hole.

Party #1. The old one. Farewell fika at tretton37 for the twelve (!) people who will be leaving the company around the end of the year. And that’s just for the Stockholm office. Someone likened it to a funeral feast. Usually these events have an element of excitement, because the person leaving is going to something, but now we’re all going from something.

My last day isn’t until the 31st, but this feels like an ending.

Party #2. The new one. Christmas party at Active Solution, with a “Wild West” theme. (The symbolism of photographing a pair of doors closing behind me and another pair in front of me was unintentional when taking the photos, but it fits rather well.)

Nice people, relaxed atmosphere, good vibes, decent food. One obvious difference to tretton37 is the higher average age here. At tretton37 I am older than the majority, and I believe there are few who are older than me. Here, I feel that wasn’t the case.

For a “Wild West” theme party, you could get by with just a pair of blue jeans and a plaid shirt, and wouldn’t need to buy anything at all. Assuming you own blue jeans and a plaid shirt, neither of which is present in my wardrobe. I tried on five or six pairs of jeans at a charity shop, and one of them fit me like a second skin, which is a very rare thing with trousers, so I might actually keep these! I don’t wear blue during the cold season, not out of any master plan but because it just happens, but I can see myself using them in the summer. The plaid shirt… eh, maybe. It has weird epaulette-type things that I’m not too fond of, but on the other hand it is very soft. The suede waistcoat will probably go straight back into the circular economy. It’s done its job.

One last Christmas fika at tretton37. Not cheerless, per se, but melancholy and lackluster.

Every time we get together, we can’t help talking about who have left and who will leave, and at some point inevitably someone wonders out loud why we aren’t getting any information about what management is up to and what the company’s situation is like, and then we force ourselves to change topics.

Sortera included consultants in their Christmas party this year. With very short notice, but hey, free party, can’t complain.

I hadn’t realized just how big the company was. There were about 250 people at the Christmas party, out of about 350 employees. In Stockholm only, not even counting Göteborg, Malmö or Örebro! I only see the office staff of Sortera Recycling and some of Sortera Group, so it’s easy to forget about the other businesses. And while I am very aware that all the drivers and facility staff are out there doing the real work, so to say, I lose sight of just how many they are.

Sortera’s customers are mostly in the construction industry, so they follow construction industry hours. Many in the staff start their working day at 7 and hence finish work at 16, so that’s when the pre-pre-mingle at the office started. Then we moved on to the pre-dinner mingle at Färgfabriken at 18. By 21 I had been mingling and socializing for five full hours and was feeling all peopled out, and called it a day.

Active Solution, my employer-to-be, invited me to participate in a workshop (about networking in Azure). I have a ton of unused vacation days and flex hours at tretton37, so I said yes. The workshop sounded useful, but mostly I just wanted to start getting to know people, and for them to be at least slightly familiar with me by the time I start.

The workshop was a disappointment (for everybody who was present) but it was very nice to meet my future colleagues. I am somewhat face-blind so I can only connect maybe four or five names to actual faces (two of which were women, handily distinguishable from each other by their hair colour, so that’s like two freebies) but it’s a start.

Every week there is a leaving fika for yet another coworker. Or two. Or three. Today was the leaving fika for our head of talent acquisition, the person who recruited me, among many, many others, and pretty much made the Stockholm branch of tretton37 into what it was.

Most days, there are no more than two or three developers in the office. We only come here to say good-bye to yet another beloved colleague.

The CEO is clinging to the hope of turning things around. But what’s left now to build upon? The people, who made this company into what it was, are leaving. The culture has been smashed into pieces. The Stockholm office has no managers left (except one freshly appointed one who has never held a managerial position before).

We had something wonderful, and now it’s been destroyed, and it’s such a sad sight.

I had a chance to go visit the Sortera facility in Rosersberg, while users there were trialling a new feature in one of the apps our team is working on.

Piles and piles of garbage. And loud, clanking machinery.

High-viz clothing, steel-toed puncture-proof boots, and safety helmets.