A discussion of how the "challenges" presented as people with strong religious points of view working in I.T. can be supplemented by our teammates. 

Transcript:

Leon: [00:00:00] Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate I.T.. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as I.T. professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is technically religious.

Josh: [00:00:21] All right. Hey Leon how are you today?

 

Leon: [00:00:23] I'm doing good. It's happy not frozen Sunday. I know that a podcast is sort of timeless but we're talking about this during the winter and the polar vortex is not in my part of town. How about you?

 

Josh: [00:00:34] I feel like in Canada it is always cold during the winter. So my my wife says suck it up princess.

 

Leon: [00:00:46] Right. Exactly. It's like “this is why you moved to Cleveland.” I'm in Cleveland so yeah. Same thing. Yeah.

 

Josh: [00:00:53] If I was going to pick an island to live on I probably should not have picked one with snow, I probably should have picked one with palm trees. You know lessons learned.  You know looking back at the past is always it it allows us to hopefully make better choices. Which is interesting because making choices is where we're headed today on this podcast. At least that's where I want to head if you're willing to follow along.

 

Leon: [00:01:16] I'm always happy to follow you if nothing else to to watch and see what happens.

 

Josh: [00:01:21] That's what I love. I love to hear it. So in fact just this morning Leon I was I was reading the e-mail that I sent you before I interviewed with you and the rest of the team before you hired me.  And then abandoned me but we'll get into that story later.

 

Leon: [00:01:38] He's not bitter.

 

Josh: [00:01:38] I'm not bitter at all. It's all right.  And I realized how flippant my email was to you it was like "Hey Leon you know let me introduce myself here's who I am." And I knew you by reputation and I also knew that you were Jewish. But I have a little story to share with you. Once you hired me and once I finally met you although I knew that you were Jewish I was surprised by how Jewish you were. Does that sound weird or what?

 

Leon: [00:02:09] It it's it's an interesting phrase it's not one that I have not heard before. But yeah you know it's. "Oh you're very Jewish. You're really..." Yeah it's so yeah I'm for those people listening I'm Orthodox Jewish. So that's the most observant. I think that's the the probably clearest way to put it. And if you've never seen a picture of me I have a nice bushy beard and I have this funny little hat on the top of my head called I kippa or yarmulke, and I have little fringy strings hanging out of my pants and all sorts of things. It's all the things.

 

Josh: [00:02:44] Yeah. And I think that that's what struck me. You know my idea of Judaism was probably skewed to the polar ends. And so when I first met you I thought Wow. Leon is really Jewish.

 

Leon: [00:02:59] He's reallly... Wow.

 

Josh: [00:03:00] Yeah like it should have been something that I knew but I didn't know it. And. In the same vein in context I was born and raised a Mormon. And we'll get into that a little later so I'm used to people being a little surprised when they interact with you and they're like oh you're Mormon right.

 

Leon: [00:03:22] Yeah yeah. So I think that that one of the underlying ideas for this entire podcast is that we've all had that experience of "Oh oh you're really... you're REALLY this thing" like whatever this thing is like.  It's not just a word that you use or dance around like you really are into it. And how do we make our career in I.T. and our interactions. So from my side you know you had mentioned that you were Mormon and I had worked with other people who are Mormon so