Coda

Now it’s time to say goodbye
To this here crappy job.
T – O – M
(Mmmm, mmmm – I’ve got a sweet new gig waiting for me!)
M – Y – G
(Gee, don’t you wish you could quit, too?)
R – E – S – S – E – L...

(With apologies to Jimmy Dodd and Roy Williams.)

So this is it.

It’s my last morning with my employer. In a couple of hours we’ll all go to lunch, then I’ll hand my manager my badge and head off into the sunset. Th-th-that’s all, folks.

My desk is completely packed, except for my headphones. I brought a big box of Kiss My Ass Donuts this morning. My bookmarks are deleted, my temporary Internet files cleared, and my logins are ready to delete.

There’s not much left to do. Or say.

I did go to my exit interview yesterday – short, sweet, and to the point. They asked me why I was leaving, and I was honest, but not brutally honest. They asked me if I’d recommend to my friends that they come work here – I told them “probably not”. (I wanted to say “Hell to the No!”, but I was being civil, remember?)

Then they asked me if one day in the future I’d consider coming back here to work. This one really stumped me. In many ways it’s a moot point, since I’m moving 100 miles away. But hypothetically, I don’t know if I would come back here, even if I was living nearby. I mean, they’ve been good to me in many ways, but they’ve been rotten to me in many more.

I’ll leave with 9 years of memories – most good, some bad. There’s all of my adventures with my former manager Skippy Whitebread, my missing the H.R. tap on the shoulder 11 times, the smell of brownies wafting through the air from the nearby Nabisco bakery, my getting the rock star parking post all last winter, all of my battles with the beyond-senior citizen “security” guards, the horrible-yet-intriguing slop served up in the Argentina café, and all of those bizarre training sessions where we had to figure out what “shape” we are. (I’m a squiggle, by the way.)

But it’s also been a lot of fun at times. I won 3 essay contests while sitting at my desk, and I was twice chosen to represent The Mouse as a trivia contestant in between tasks here. I’ve been fortunate enough to work the last 9 years with a pair of headphones on, so there’s always been music in my life. And thanks to the power of the Internet, I’ve been able to babble non-stop to all of you, courtesy of this blog. So it all hasn’t been crap – sometimes the sun does come out.

For the past two years I’ve been planning my escape – daydreaming of the day when I could leave all of this behind and move on to something bigger and better. For a long time my dream was focused on moving to Florida, but being close to Little Baby Emmy is more important than palm trees and swimming pools right now. Besides, the new gig is SUPER, has a world of opportunities, and made me an offer that I really couldn’t refuse.

And it won't look ANYTHING like this.

So starting Monday AM I’ll be part of a new team with a new company. I’ve read (and signed) their thick stack of confidentiality, non-disclosure, and privacy agreements, so the odds of my being able to post blogs during the work day from here on out are just about nil. So I guess I’ll have to save my snarkiness for after work and post from home.

And before long Mrs. G. and I will have a new house to go with our new job, and then the real fun of relocating will begin. Packing, unpacking, changing addresses, trying to figure out the new channel arrangements on the digital cable... Oh, the trials we face.

Still, I think in the end it’ll all be worth it. Mrs. G. and I are pretty happy whenever and wherever we’re together, and just like the Jeffersons, we’re movin’ on up. Us, our two cats, and an amazing collection of stuff we’ve somehow amassed over the last 8 years in our house.

So that’s it. It’s time to sign off from this trek, and get ready to start an all new adventure on Monday morning.

Thanks for sticking with me and listening to all of my griping about this place, and we’ll see you on the other side of the fence on Monday.

Happy trails!

-- Thomas J. Gressel