The Perks Of My Old Job

It's been a little over two months since I left Citrix Online and started working at UCSB. I wrote a bit about the why here. Shortly before I started working here, I came across this post by Young and Thrifty, a personal finance blogger I follow. She wrote a post about the perks of your job, and at the time, I was transitioning into the new job, and really missed the perks of my old job. Funny isn't it, how easily we take things for granted when they're readily available at all times.

First up, the food:
The kitchens at Citrix Online were well-stocked with all kinds of snacks: granola bars, Cheez-Its, Wheat Thins, peanut butter crackers, Corn Nuts, peanuts, sunflower seeds, various trail mixes, popcorn, pretzels, cookies. Whatever you had a hankering for, something was guaranteed to satisfy it.

Every Wednesday the Tech group was treated to free bagels with a wide assortment of cream cheeses. I could never decide on which cream cheese to get, so my bagel always ended up looking like a Christmas ornament-- 1/3 honey walnut, 1/3 strawberry, 1/3 blueberry.

And to keep things healthful, there was always fresh fruit onhand: apples, bananas, strawberries and grapes.

Then there was the drinks:
We had fancy coffee machines that dispensed a variety of different coffees and hot chocolate. You could control what kind of milk you got, and what flavorings were added. 
There were tons of Tazo teas in addition to the standard Lipton. I usually drank these.

There were sodas: your standard Coke, Diet Coke, root beer, Dr. Pepper, Mountain Dew
Other cold drinks included apple juice, orange juice, Snapple (various flavors-- both regular and diet), lemonade, pineapple juice, and V-8.

Even the water had plenty of options! There was ice, cold water, hot water, room temperature water, and even fizzy water!

And a lot of other things:
The work-life balance is pretty enviable. For the engineers, at least, the hours were relatively flexible. You had people working all kinds of hours, from the standard 8-5 to a typical engineer's 10-7 :-) And when not in the office, our own remote access products enabled us to easily work from home anytime, whether we simply felt like it, or had to stay home to mind a sick child without taking time off.

There are plenty of ways to take a break at work, besides feasting on the myriad of snacks and drinks in the kitchen ;-) Each of the buildings on the Citrix Online campus housed something different in its break room. One building has billiards. Another has foosball. Yet another has ping pong. And all have some large-screen TVs featuring either cable channels or an electronic game system, such as the Wii. One building even has all the equipment for Rock Band!

One unique thing about the company was the ability to bring dogs to work. We took this a step further and brought our kid to work. Twice a week Todd would come hang out with us in the afternoon, saving on after-school care costs. One day he'd be in my building, another day in Allan's. It worked especially well when he got older, and I could simply plop him in the break room to read his book, watch TV or study. He knew his way around the building well enough that he could even hit the bathroom on his own when he needed to.

Contrast that to my current job, where I think we're lucky to HAVE a communal fridge, sink and microwave to share. We just recently got a water filter installed, so now I don't have to lug water bottles back and forth from home anymore. There's no denying that I miss a lot of the perks from my old job, but so far, it's been worth the trade-off.

What kinds of perks does your job have?