Don't burn your bridges

I can imagine some medieval King telling his soldiers as they march through enemy land "burn the bridges behind us to stop the enemy using them" and then being destroyed later when they need to retreat across one. Of course, if you build you bridges well, they never get burnt to begin with.

It looks like I may be returning to work at Author-it after a two year break.

The strange thing is, I'm happy where I am, but I don't feel the same sense of satisfaction I used to get working at Author-it. I imagine I'll start doing crazy hours again, but somehow it felt less like work than what I'm doing now. There is something that I truly enjoy about business analyst work; the process of discovery, the gap analysis and the solution. Hopefully, cunningly simple, blindingly fast and elegant.

The only thing I'm not looking forward to is telling my current employers that I'm leaving. It's a good company and if I'd started working there five years ago I think I would have made a good run of it. Unfortunately, I don't know the product as well as I'd like and I'm sitting between people who know it in the production process. This slows things down and as I've never been the slow turning cog before it's a new and unpleasant feeling.

Hopefully, the experience of having been the slow cog will make me a better person; and hopefully, I'll never experience it again as long as I live.