A Christmas Story
By TRISOFT team
It was the evening of Christmas Eve and Dan woke up to find his coffee and breakfast biscuits cold on the kitchen table. His girlfriend had left them there in the morning, before going out shopping for the Christmas dinner. He looked out the window of their small townhouse; the city was white and frozen, like a silent ghost. A friendly one, he thought, as he admired the millions of little lights shaped like wizards and mermaids hanging out all around the city centre. He walked around the house for a bit, picked up a few slippers his dog had chewed on, bumped his head on the mistletoe branches above the living room door and sat down at his computer. It was time to go online, work won’t wait for his holiday melancholy to pass and competition was fierce on his latest projects.
So he did. The orange lights of his Skype windows kind of resembled the lights outside, as they were quickly coming up, blinking impatiently. Clients are so impatient this time of the year. It’s like they have left all the hard work for last, like everything that counted for their business was supposed to be done between Christmas and New Year’s. Dan was used to this kind of attitude. Year after year, his employers would insist on the importance of pleasing the customers during the holidays and clients seemed to be more and more demanding and unreasonable. Maybe that was why he hadn’t slept at night for like a month and only caught up a few hours during the day, when he felt like his head was about the explode and his family and friends were so very close to giving up on him for good. They have had so many arguments on his working too much he couldn’t even remember the last time they sat at a table in peace, just hanging out and being with each other.
He started coding. This new project has to be perfect. Has to be more than perfect, if possible because he wanted to take a sort of break after finishing it. He had wanted to do this for some time now and every project was supposed to be the last one before reevaluating his life and priorities. Christmas was not supposed to be all work this year, but somehow he got caught in the …web (ha!) and now it was too late. Or was it?..
A snowball hit the window in front of him, violently, leaving a white rounded mark on the side of the glass. His dog started barking like crazy and after just a moment of panic, he started laughing. Crazy kids…
He opened his email inbox and started replying to the 100 messages he had received in the past few hours. He was just getting to the 3rd one when a knocking came from the front door. Dan got up and walked slowly to it, wondering who might be. He opened it. No one. That’s strange, he thought. He went back to his desk and got back to replying to his emails. The knocking again. Dan got up and walked to the door, opened it, but still no one was there. Was he imagining things? He decided to wait by the door and open it quickly if the knocking was about to repeat, so he stood there, in the dark, with his hand on the doorknob.
He waited for 20 minutes and nothing happened, so he returned to his desk. The night had really fallen over the city outside and the lights were all the more bright and colorful. Dan looked at his desktop screen and he looked out the window again. He couldn’t do this anymore. He was tired, he realised. So, he wrote a quick email wishing his client happy holidays and letting him know he’d be back in 3 days, got up, shut his computer down, grabbed his phone and jacket and walked out the door and into the glittering snow. It was already late, but his friends would be so happy to see him. And he still got time to write to Santa.
So he sat on a bench in the park nearby while waiting for his friends to show up and wrote Santa the shortest, yet most sincere and ardent wishes of his life: Dear Santa, please give me the strength to make the right choices for myself from now on. Give me balance and clarity in my work and personal life; help me find my way to a professional environment that would allow me to put in practice everything that I have learned; give me the chance to be a better version of myself, because I have learned that this is the only comparison worth doing at the end of the day. It’s not about being better than your colleagues, your boss, your competitors even; it’s about being better than your former self, learning from your mistakes and growing with each day. Thank you and happy holidays!
This is what we wish you this year! May you be the best version of yourself! A Merry Christmas from TRISOFT! May Santa bring you bright business ideas along with the bright city lights, a great team to share them with, a professional environment where you can thrive and flourish and all your loved ones by your side. Don’t let your coffee get cold, stop ignoring your dog and don’t wait for Christmas to come knocking at your door. Get up and enjoy it all! And don’t forget: this season is about learning our lessons and appreciating people for who they really are. So if you know someone like Dan, or if you are Dan.. contact Santa or us :) and become part of the amazing TRISOFT team.