Working With People You’ll Never Know Again
Ever since I wrote about bartending, those years have been walking around in my head again.
The bar. The late nights. The noise. The people I worked with — some of them larger than life at the time. People who felt central. Permanent. Like we were all in something together that would matter forever.
When I think back on how I behaved back then — forty years ago — I cringe at some of it. The ego. The certainty. The things I probably said with great confidence that absolutely did not deserve it. I imagine how at least some of them might remember me, and I don’t picture a wise, measured, thoughtful man. I picture a younger guy who thought he knew more than he did.
Every now and then I imagine running into one of them. I picture the conversation. Do we laugh? Do we reminisce? Do we pretend we were closer than we were? After the first ten minutes of “Remember when…?” do we have anything else?
Twice, I have run into people from that job.
Both times, they barely remembered me. Even after I reminded them who I was.
That’s not a complaint. It was… educational.
Because here’s the thing we don’t like to admit:
People do not think about us nearly as much as we think they do.
Those intense-feeling work friendships? The bonds forged in shared chaos, shared bosses, shared customers, shared misery? A lot of them aren’t deep. They’re situational. Survival-based. You’re thrown together in a weird little ecosystem, and you form alliances the way people on a long flight do.
It feels real. It is real — for that moment.
But that doesn’t mean it’s permanent.
I’ve worked, what, fifteen jobs in my forty-five years in the work force. Different cities. Different industries. Different versions of me.
I’m technically “in touch” with a bunch of former coworkers. We’re Facebook friends. We like each other’s posts about dogs and weather and holidays.
But in all those decades, across all those workplaces, only one person I worked with has had a significant, lasting impact on my life.
One.
Not because the others were bad people. Not because those years didn’t matter. But because most work relationships are built to help you get through the shift, not through your life.
And that’s oddly comforting.
It means the stupid thing you said in the break room in 1987? Probably gone. The awkward phase you had at that job? Forgotten. The version of you you’d rather not revisit? Largely erased from other people’s hard drives.
We carry our past selves like permanent records.
Other people treat them like expired receipts.
Most of the time, we weren’t the main character in their story. We were part of the set dressing while they were busy being the main character in theirs.
There’s something freeing in that.
It doesn’t mean those connections were fake. It means they were what they were meant to be: temporary bridges across a particular stretch of road. We helped each other get through a season — a job, a version of ourselves, a time when we were all a little less formed than we are now.
And maybe that’s enough.
Not every person we meet is supposed to shape our whole life. Some are just there to stand beside us while we figure out who we are at that moment. They share the shift. The jokes. The bad music. The long nights. The version of us that existed only then.
And every once in a while, one person walks across that bridge with you and keeps going.
Those are the rare ones.
The rest?
They were still part of the road. And you were part of theirs, even if only for a while.
And that counts, too.