Community Colleagues

Community services in Perth is a place where you often bump into people you work with, people you have previously worked with and others you will probably work with next time either you or they change jobs!  This morning Merv was booked for his annual community services review.  The young  (younger than us) man who knocked on the door was a previous colleague of mine!  Not only did he join my last workplace after I was well settled, we had both worked at a different organisation before that!  I began in the first workplace we shared in 2004. He was in the IT department and his help was often called upon.  I left in 2009 and he joined my new workplace a couple of years later.  He came not as an IT person but a gardener, a team member providing safe gardens for persons of need in the local community.  It was a job, more of a break from IT than a permanent change. An opportunity as an assessor came his way a year later. Today the assessment lasted ninety minutes, we completed Merv's  assessment as we recounted stories, laughed at our memories and delighted in a little harmless gossip.