Monday, June 23, 2008

Today was the day at work when I needed to inform folks that I'd be leaving in two weeks. I'm not one much for good-byes, but I can send an email as well as anyone.

I perused my "Sent" folder and slowly assembled a list of folks who might actually give a crap if I left the company. I included various programmers, testers, some managers, and a couple of VPs. It was a pretty long "To:" list but I didn't want to offend anyone by leaving someone important off.

I then tried to contemplate what I was going to say and realized that it was way too early to say good-bye. What's the point of that when I'm still going to be working there for another couple weeks? Instead, I needed to send a heads-up email to the people I work with on a daily basis, which is a much smaller set of folks than I had in my "To:" list. I decided to save this email for a couple weeks and start a new one instead for today.

I fumbled around looking for the "Save This Email For A Few Days" button and then suddenly the email disappeared. *Poof*.

I looked in the "Sent" folder and there it was. I had just sent a blank email, with no subject line, and no text in the body, to pretty much everyone I had ever worked with at my company. Awesome. Nothing says "You're going to miss my technical expertise" like a company-wide blank email.

For the remainder of the day I had to field various replies via email and IM from folks who wanted to know why I had sent them a blank email, as though I had hidden some secret message inside my signature. (The secret is: I'm a tool! Shhhh!). So, that was pretty fun.

It's good to go out on a high note.

6 comments:

SiƓn said...

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Mike said...

Nice.

David said...

Are you able to recall messages?

Mike said...

Doh! Man, I CAN recall messages. During my previous 18 years in corporate America I've never simultaneously had both the ability and the need to do recall them, so I had forgotten that it's even possible. Yesterday would have been the time though. Damn. Me dumb.

Neel Mehta said...

Gosh, there are so many times where I've wanted to let everyone know that I have nothing to say to them.

So this was brilliant.

Mike said...

Neel, you're welcome. Feel free to also employ the hang-up phone call as another instance of this type of genius.