July 25, 2007
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farewell messages
It is an awkward and difficult and quite annoying thing to write a
farewell letter. I did not have any clue how to do such a thing, what I
should say, or even if I should bother. But the hardest part, was I
think, determining the scope.I don’t know the protocol. What’s appropriate and what’s not. And I
don’t think I’d be particularly inclined to follow it if I felt it was
rather stupid too.What I had observed when others departed was usually silence. Most
people didn’t bother to write farewell letters. Instead they told
everyone directly in person or over the phone that they wanted to tell
and let the trickle down effect do its duty. It wasn’t long at all
before everyone knew and if you didn’t find out. Too bad for you.The other observation was the blanket letter sent on ones very last
day, saying good riddance to you all. Actually it says something about
how they enjoyed their experiences and blah blah and keep in touch and
I’m off to do bigger and better things that most of the people reading
it don’t care about and are only reading it for the research
opportunity so that they can emulate you when they write their own
farewell letter. That’s the only reason I ever read any of them
leastwise.The other option is to write personalized letters to each individual
you want to say good bye to, and telling others in person as is
appropriate. This is what I elected to do.The problem with this approach is that if you try to write person
letters to everyone with whom you have worked with closely, that can
get pretty out of hand pretty quickly especially if you are a person as
verbose in your writings as I am. So in order to limit the scope and
size of your emails in order to avoid spending the rest of your days
writing, you adopt two strategies.Strategy one is the BCC emails. Basically to cutdown on the shear
number of emails you instead write blanket emails to smaller subgroups
with whom you have similar relationships or interact with in the same
way. E.g. you might send the same email to everyone in the same
department or to all the people at a specific center or everyone with
whom you go to lunch with regularly but don’t know particularly well or
some other pattern. But to be a little sneaky you bcc the addresses so
that nobody knows you didn’t send it to them. Hence even if you forgot
someone everybody thinks that everybody has been included. And on top
of that, everyone even feels the sensation as if the letter is being
sent specifically to them or to a small group. The more personal
details you can include that apply to anyone in the group the more
personal they will feel the email. You can get trickier still with this
kind of a thing but you get the idea. I opted not to use this strategy
because it felt too deceptive to me. I did send a blanket email to one
‘group’ with which I interact in a similar fashion, but I didn’t do any
BCC stuff.Strategy two is the ‘formatted’ email. That is although each of your
emails is personalized for specific people, each email still follows
the same format, paragraph structure, and consists of the same basic
overarching message just with details specific to the person you are
conversing with filled in. That works pretty well most of the time and
it is pretty much exactly what I did, though it still pisses me off. It took a long time and felt like cheating.
Plus anyone I didn’t get to feels left out or betrayed. Not that I care that much about that last. If I did I would have written that person an email. But most of all it bothers me because it’s just too boring. There has to be a more interesting way to say goodbye.Something clever. Something interesting. Something unique. There must be a way. It’s
probably too late to do anything particularly amusing this time, but
next time I will strive to be better prepared to shock and amaze.
