Wow, I was going to retire!!! But I didn’t want to blow it. Among other things that could go wrong, I worried about how to tell my friend, Boss15, about this, and if that would poison my last days at D&B. Various websites advised not to announce retirement until the last minute for fear of retaliation, etc. But I knew that if I just walked out the door I’d feel horrible. I still remember my conversation with Boss15 in early January 2021 clearly. I asked if he remembered our recent conversation about planning for retirement (he was a conscientious manager and had raised that subject), and told him that my biggest worry was leaving my friends in a bad spot when I retired. He thought I was rambling but then got it and said, “Oh my God, when??” He probably had no idea that I was of retirement age, but he understood right away what I was trying to tell him and what it meant. He was afraid I was going to say, “In two weeks,” and when I told him that it’d be the end of June he let out a huge sigh of relief and said, “Ok, message received, we have to start planning for this now. And by the way, congratulations!!”
My last six months went really well. I wrapped up parts of the huge news vendor project and handed that off to finance people, and was told that my one remaining goal was to document everything I did.. The question was who was going to succeed me? The long-term plan was to not depend on one person or one technology for the important task of ingesting and analyzing news, but this was not going to happen soon. Luckily, we were able to re-hire a colleague who’d worked with Avention legacy technology before. My last few weeks were mostly meeting with him and walking him through parts of the @200 pages of documentation, spreadsheets, slide shows, and back of the envelope drawings I’d compiled. My qualification to everything I showed him was, “This is how I did it but you should do it your way.” And I’m content in feeling that he will. I ended my work career doing a highly multi-dimensional task, and feel that my colleagues will continue to do right by it, which may (should!) mean moving on to better technologies and methods. Time for me to head out to the upper pasture.
And I was very fortunate to get five retirement parties! I went out to drinks and dinner with some old work friends from Inforonics. I also had lunch with my successor and his current manager, who was my Boss12. Many of the old gang from OneSource/Avention (including some who didn’t work there any more) took me out for a big lunch at Kimball’s in Westford, a place I’d been going to for years for work lunches and other functions. And the big official going-away party was at the Mighty Squirrel brewery in Waltham. Lots of people from the Waltham office showed up; the office hadn’t existed for almost a year at that point and it was a reunion for everyone.
The fifth was that I finally got to meet and hang out with Boss15. He’s a Red Sox fan (grew up in Connecticut) and drove up to visit his sister in Lexington, and then take me out to a Red Sox vs. Yankees game at Fenway! We had great seats and it was a warm, mellow afternoon, and the Red Sox won. What a wonderful gesture from a friend I’d gone through some work battles shoulder to shoulder with over the past year and a half. This was a great ending to my work career.
June 30th 2021 came, and there wasn’t much more for me to do. At the end of the day I logged off the VPN, shut down my faithful laptop … and the world didn’t end. Another chapter of life had started.
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