Moving on from Growers

Wednesday the 23rd was my last day at Growers, the end of almost exactly six years there. I expect to write a longer form post reflecting on the job now that I have a little perspective on my period there, but for now a quick update and old project log. I start my new job Monday at Quantum Sky in the internal R&D team. The position is fully remote, with periodic visits to the HQ in Reston, Virginia.

On Wednesday, I went into the office to collect the few things I had there at my desk. We've had an office the whole time I've been at the company, but during the COVID lockdowns nobody was there, and in the years since, most folks (myself included) who got used to working remotely preferred to stay that way. I had set up one of the desks in the office as my workstation, but in an average month I was there one or perhaps two days.

As I was packing my things, I was reminded of an early project so crude I hesitate to even call it woodworking. But six years ago, I knocked this together to solve two problems: raise the monitor to a comfortable height and give a little cubby for the USB hub that everything plugged into.

Having some 1x4" pine scraps and a few cutoffs of 3/4" plywood, I grabbed the nail gun and some wood glue and just knocked this together. A quick coat of rattle can spray paint and it was done.

And so it served, functional but ugly, for six years. I remember being unsure how it would hold up under the constant weight of a computer monitor, which is why I made it so small, theorizing that having the load directly above the vertical supports would avoid the whole thing wanting to bow in the middle and fail. I think that's true. For fun I just stood on it with one foot and then jumped on it and it didn't seem to budge.

This project is good reminder for me, as I spend more time thinking about woodworking and making projects, that aesthetics are good but not strictly required. If you can, make each project beautiful in some way. But if something just needs to be functional, it's fine to knock it together with glue and nails in an afternoon and call it good.