One of the peripheral things that I used to like when I worked at Nortel was glimpsing the daily family life of the returning Canada Geese each Spring. The Nortel campus was/is beautifully landscaped. Every year the Canada Geese would return to one of the campus ponds and start quickly raising new families.

Geese and Goslings

Each day as you drive past one of the ponds there, you’ll see the flossy little green goslings grow into huge noisy adults that will wisely depart for warmer climes in the fall.

Especially when my kids were a bit smaller I could completely relate to the Geese – constantly checking on their goslings to make sure they were still following them, quacking at them to hurry up, scurrying across the road as fast as they can, guarding and hanging out with them as they ate.

Over a decade ago, when I was playing football (soccer) during my first summer in Canada, I remember seeing the geese fly over the field, and was totally culture shocked by their size. They seemed like pterodactyls or something from the land that time forgot. You just don’t see birds that big flying so low, and in such large numbers in the UK. Certainly not the parts that I lived in.

The geese have been a constant herald of the warmer months here – a fantastic reminder that I live in Canada. It is lovely to see them come back, funny to see them living in their wild families and of course sad when they’re taking off again.

I know that it seems absurd, but when I left Nortel I was sad that I wouldn’t see the geese in the pond everyday. That’s a silly thought to have had when there were so many more serious consequences at the time.

But guess what! There are ponds and open areas where I work now too. There is a new gaggle of geese there, and this year I became the fly on the wall of their family lives each day.

Next week I’ll begin my second year of work at IBM Rational. I’m trying hard to make a new career there, and for the past few weeks have especially liked the work that I’ve been doing. It continues to be an adjustment for me to adapt to IBM culture – not because it is a difficult culture to adapt to, or a bad culture or anything – just because it takes me time to relate and understand it all, and I still feel a bit impatient about that.

The geese I see on my way to IBM every day are the same breed as the ones I saw on my way to Nortel – just in a different setting, and maybe with slight differences in behaviour. I’m glad of this constant, and grateful to have learned that there are other ponds bursting with new life for me to discover.