Life in Terms of Watermelons

Over the past 10 years I’ve had a number of jobs and each change has added some new benefit. Definitely, if you look at it in terms of watermelons! I started out in grad school. On the measly TA pay, a watermelon was a luxury. And if I were to buy them from Whole Foods, I might have just pledged two months of my salary to get one.

Then came Amazon! Now, I earned enough to afford them. But eating watermelons at Amazon.com was verboten. Maybe they thought that eating them might improve employee morale to an unacceptably high level. Or maybe they were afraid that the watermelon rinds would increase their garbage bills or they might have to pay the janitors $1/hr more to cleanup. Whatever the reason was, everyone just accepted it, and ate no watermelons. Except for the ones that came from watermelon rich jobs, but they didn’t last very long.

Then there was Blist (now Socrata). This was just like any normal place – you could buy watermelons and eat them too. For most people this doesn’t sound like a big deal, but coming from Amazon, this was huge! Finally I got to taste these wonderfully refreshing fruits at work. And then life kept getting better. First came Ning. Now, I didn’t have to buy watermelons anymore. They bought it for me – I still had to cut them, but still a definite improvement. And now I am at RichRelevance – here they buy the watermelons and cut them too. All ready for me to gobble down!

So given this trend, and the simple mathematical technique of extrapolation, at my next job I expect a better watermelon experience. But I can’t seem to predict how exactly it might improve.  I guess, we’ll just have to wait and see.