I recently got all of my desk crap from the office. It was a little like opening a time capsule - nearly 8 years’ worth of history packed into a couple of cardboard boxen. The card signed by my former teammates that was on my desk my first day, a snakes’ nest of cables and dongles and adapters, conference swag dating back to 2014 or so…you get the picture.
Of the things I didn’t throw away, I passed off a lot of these “goodies” to my kids - the LinkedIn-branded Rubix cube, the squirt gun from some cloud vendor or other, etc.
…and then I came across this:
Let’s talk about this lil guy. Once Upon a Time - during _Erica Lockheimer’s reign as Director of Growth Eng - I was a Growth SRE. At the time the _giant panda was the Growth team’s mascot. (If memory serves, this had something to do with the panda’s diet consisting almost entirely of bamboo, which is the fastest-growing plant on Earth). Somewhere along the way Erica acquired approximately One Berjillion little panda figurines like the one pictured above, scattered them across her desk, and instituted “Panda Acts of Kindness”.
Here’s how it worked: Suppose someone did you a solid. Maybe they helped you troubleshoot a tricky bug, or covered an oncall shift for you, or even just did something that brightened your day in some way. You were then authorized - nay, encouraged! - to grab one of the panda figurines from Erica’s desk and gift it to that person as a small token of appreciation.
It was a sort of non-monetary Bravo (before we had Bravo).
Over the years I received a few pandas. I re-gifted some, some got lost in desk moves (my desk migrates about once every ~6 months and I’m not always around to pack it up myself, so the process tends to be a little “leaky”). This panda is the last one I have left.
…and I hesitate to give it to my kids, for reasons I only vaguely grok.
Here’s the thing: I don’t actually remember who gave it to me, or what for.
Let that sink in for a minute.
I have things that hold sentimental value because of who they came from - a gold chain my grandmother gave me, my dad’s old ring and his belt buckle. I also have things I hang onto not because of the “who” but because of the “what” - high school yearbooks, a dance contest winner’s certificate from my honeymoon (yes, I won a poolside dance competition on my honeymoon).
…but this little 2” panda figurine holds sentimental value for me even without being attached to a specific “who” or “what”. I think that’s remarkable. Thinking through this a bit, the panda represents something I did for someone some time in the past - something nice, something decent - and their appreciation of that thing. The thing and the time and the one don’t actually matter so much; it’s solid, physical proof that somewhere along the way I connected with someone as a human being, that I was appreciated - that we mutually mattered.
I was marveling about this with my buddy JoJo a few days ago, talking through why I was having a hard time letting it go to my kids (who will inevitably lose the thing or let the dog chew it up). JoJo had a suggestion: explain to them what it is and why it’s significant, and then pass it around as a “trophy” for doing nice things - a sort of immediate family version of PAoK.
I think it’s a lovely idea.
I just might do it.