My friend Dermot -- my very, very good friend Dermot -- arranged a retirement party for me last night. It was a very nice affair. Good food, good beverages, nice parting gifts, good friends and a cake (a very cool cake). It was time to say good-bye to my colleagues, friends and boss. But the good-byes were not quite as I expected them. One or two tearful hugs, but mostly see-you-laters and promises to keep in touch. It wasn't so long ago that the promise to keep-in-touch was somewhat idle -- a phone call or two, then just the exchange of Christmas cards each year. Things change and people move on, that's to be expected. However, email, text messaging, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media make it easy to extend the relationship and its seems likely that I will continue to communicate with a lot of these fine people long into the Life After.
Now that said, I want to say thank you to everyone for making the Life During such a great experience. Thank you for accepting me and letting me do what I do the way I wanted to do it. I won't miss the staff meetings, status reports, performance appraisals, organizational development meetings, strike assignment training, expense vouchers, outside counsel bill reviews, and all the administrative things that had to be processed, updated, annotated, forwarded, clicked-on-here, approved-there, verified, certified and spindled. But I will miss the people who did those things with me, to me and for me, at least until the next email or text. "Good-bye" is a outdated term, at least the traditional definition no longer applies. I'm not going to use it anymore and I definitely won't miss it.
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