I went out for leaving drinks with my co-workers today (some contractors got cancelled; nobody leaves by choice...). I enjoy the company of my team even when they are all pissed out of their skulls and I'm not, and those who know my standard attitude to drunk people will realise exactly how much of a compliment that is. People let their guard down after a few drinks, and you learn a lot about them. Amongst all the other stuff I learnt, it's just occurred to me that even at speech-slurring levels of drunkeness, nobody said anything even remotely approaching homophobic* all evening. That's very reassuring, as I have not yet addressed myself to the delicate task of coming out at work.

The whole concept of coming out at work is tricky. Firstly: is it even necessary, really? Sexuality doesn't really come into the working environment, not when you create web pages for a living. But there's a certain amount of casual conversation during the day, and then during a five-hour drinking session, comments on the attractiveness of various bystanders is guaranteed to come up, at which point you begin the politely evasive comments which can spiral so quickly down to the stifling emotional suffocation of being closeted. Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt. Not an option.

But how does one bring it up? If someone were to ask me outright, or ask if I have a girlfriend, that might be a good opportunity, but that's yet to happen. I did get one easy opening tonight: discussing (with the fifth person for the evening) my non-drinking, it came up that I go clubbing without drinking. So my co-worker asked if I perhaps took "performance enhancing drugs". I replied that I didn't, but I was often asked if I had any, which he said was ironic since I was "probably the only straight person there". This made me giggle internally, and I nearly replied about how unlikely that was, but he was then distracted. Ah well, I suppose it'll come up naturally some time.

The easy and hassle-free way, of course, would be for my co-workers to discover my blog. I've not really mentioned it to anybody, although one of my interviewers mentioned that he'd checked it out -- but apparently missed anything that might have clued him in. Maybe that'll still happen.

In general though, I'm really, enormously digging Yahoo!. I'm digging it so much that I'm actually obeying the ridiculous punctuation conventions that surround the company name. We do interesting stuff, we do big stuff, we do new stuff, and usually we do it properly. The resources available in-house are absolutely staggering: every piece of software we use (most of which is open-source, but heavily customized) comes with its own cadre of gurus, often including lead developers of the OSS project or the original inventors of the technology.

Oh, and tomorrow I finally get a permanent desk. Time to move in my Yoda doll.

* Mysogynistic, possibly, but not homophobic. And I'm selfish, remember? So all I care about is the homophobia.