Meeting hundreds of people at once

I’m laying in bed, unable to sleep due to both excitement and nerves, thinking about the events of tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon I’ll get on a plane and fly to Park City, Utah, to meet about 250 colleagues I’ve been working with for nearly a year but haven’t met.

Every year the entire company gets together in what they call a “Grand Meetup” to get some face time with one another. Automattic is a distributed work environment. Everyone works from home (or coffee shop, co-working space, or anywhere else that has internet access). So the importance of a yearly meetup is necessary to create those personal bonds we can’t get day to day working in an office.

This will be my first Grand Meetup since I started working here in October of last year. Out of the 260+ employees I have only met about 15-20 of them. Which means I’ll be meeting almost 250 people at once, and spending an entire week with them. I suppose it’s not much different than the first day at an office job, but that’s also nerve racking and doesn’t happen 11 months into the job.

It’s just feeling a bit surreal right now.