Since leaving my 27-year gig at the end of last September I've given two updates to a handful of people at the place I used to work. My staff was about fifteen people and internal customers numbered about 700 across the country in seven or eight regional offices and many commercial construction job sites. While I miss many things about that position it's a handful of people who I spoke with daily that I miss. There were people I spoke with daily that I do not miss, too. The following letter was sent as the second update, at eleven months, today. It's taken much longer than I expected to "be done" with this 27-year engagement and that's probably reasonable. It's possible that this will be my last communication to this "handful," narrowing it down to three, maybe four individuals. Perhaps they are the four friends that came out of this investment.
The Eleven-Month Email
One of the noticeable changes when you leave an executive/professional position is that the phone stops ringing. Vendors, as friendly and chummy as they might be spend their time calling people who still have a budget, discretionary spending, etc. You have no worth to "internal customers" and peers once you are officialy "out of business." Money cannot buy you friends, only vendors and transients.
LinkedIn has been interesting. There are a lot of good feeds and a certain amount of networking that takes place. I'd recommend going beyond simply positing your profile. There are many 'groups' with specialized interests, whether that be some niche part of IT, everything you ever wanted to know about concrete and on and on.
Several "positions" have been of interest. I am quite particular about the kind of organization and work that I'm willing to commit to. After eleven months the notion of getting up and going to a job five days a week is becoming less attractive. There are a lot of opportunities outside of the 8x5 paradigm. One of my profile photos is of me at my desk at that place I used to work. You all know the look...business casual, fake wood desktop, vinyl wall covering, file cabinets and credenzas that represent the way people used to work. Work and the nature of work and the nature of work spaces (check out
http://cocomsp.com/ ) changed. Forbes has been interesting in their progressive moves in the media and publishing world and their reliance on a world of contributors. Clearly companies are decoupling functions into specialized networked organizaitons.
Working today is remarkable. While I still like my home office setup I spend a lot of time writing and creating and networking and working while out an about. Wifi creates a remarkable opportunity. At the moment I'm sitting at a Ramsey County Library in front of a window overlooking a delightful small pond surrounded by large one-hundred year old oaks. This experience also includes sitting next to a nice guy covered with prison tatts who offered up an extension cord when I ran out of juice. I switched offices about two years before my departure. To the best of my recollection I put nothing in the file cabinet or desk other than a few office supplies and my nail clipper. Upon my departure I missed a couple of things. If there have been any company messages about a found nail clipper or two bottles of "Five Hour Energy" please let me know. Actually I brought home four or five boxes of past work that I thought might be useful; I've thrown (recycled it all, now). It's a nice world out there.
While employed I did have access to a lot of computing resources. During this post-work time period I've employed and explored a lot of web resources. I will confess that 98% of my work is done on a $219 Samsung Chromebook using Google applications, including spreadsheet, and presentation tools. I have versions of Microsoft Office, both fat-client and hosted solutions but rarely use them. I believe they are close to a non-necessary expense. LibreOffice and Ubuntu also play into this phase of my working. One should still remain cautious of "cloud" tools, resources and storage. Many of these solutions still remain unprofitable and as we've seen in the past year cloud storage certainly is totally open to the eyes of the cloud vendors and government. You might want to consider encryption and an anonymous proxy server solutions.
I have not been to Denmark yet to visit my son. I am a terrible father but you can't be good at everything.
Some of you know that I've had a few lose end in the real estate world and that has taken some time. I'm still working on my mother's condo and hope to have that on the market by this weekend....the tattoo guy just made me have a mental flinch...I hope to have it on the market by this fall.
Tim **** and I have kept in touch and will be having lunch in a week or two. Years ago, before his racing career, I told him that golf was a pretty boring game. Traveling around a track at 100+ seems to have caught his attention much more than a 15mph golf cart. Tim and I share some small town upbringing experiences but it ends there. We were of dramatically different work styles when we began working together. I learned a lot from Tim. He was a quick study, requesting just the needed information to make or confirm and decision and let you do your job. Once after a couple of years I tested him a bit asking about a performance review (we never had them back in the day). His response 'Why would we do that? I'll tell you if there's something we need to talk about." I loved working for Tim. Never underestimate his compassion and caring for people and employees. When you fall out of boat or end up in the deep end of the pool you want him holding the life ring.
The creative side of my head and hands is getting a bit more time. I've written several articles submitted for
publication, kept up a couple of blogs, one serious, the other profane and tested the limits of friendship on Facebook. I've restarted "Marriage for Dummies" after the loss of the first rough draft. Attached is a recent small project, one of many. My plan is to take a carload of work to the Nova Scotia Folk Art Festival in 2015.
When I consider taking a "real" job I think of Dave S*****. Dave and I were left-handed, shared a birth year and seemed comfortable with our ad hoc conversations. When I asked him why he was retiring his response was simple. "I can and I have things I want to do." We spend a lot of time as employees doing what others want us to do. Certainly we perform professionally and enjoy some parts of our jobs but at the end I don't think we'll surround ourselves with proposals we've written, contracts negotiated or work done long ago. Once in a while I create an image of some old geezers standing around a shuffleboard court, all of them retired programmers or network administrator (or perhaps even a long-ago CIO) talking about some algorithm implemented, a unique VLAN solution or a Ruby subroutine. Nobody cares about your past work. Being gone from the corporate world helps define and narrow the definition of what you really like, what you want to spend your time doing and what you may or may not be good at. It's a good transition. The fish was a simple little thing, a basswood log culled from a acreage clearing effort, a slab sawed off and tossed aside and then a notion of something that might look like a fish to hand work and then it turned into something else. I follow other artisans and craft persons' work on Facebook and have found some delight in international collaboration. This would not have happened if I was still doing the commute, parking in the ramp, walking past the local, pondering the mall sights through the four seasons and gluing myself to that fake wood desktop. Spending your time on lasting work and lasting friendship should be a priority. Dave Sterk retired and died two or three years later. Going back to an office 8x5 (or more) seems like a pretty illogical thing to do (some sort of 3x10 thing might be good).
Dave H*** repeats the same lines pretty regularly. "Life is short. I try to enjoy each day." It's good advice.
I've reconnected with some of my past employees, even some who left not of their own choosing. Jobs and companies change, dissolve, morph, grow, shrink get better and sometimes disappear. The connections (other than vendors), relationships and friendships persevere.
Years ago I worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. During the new employee orientation this hard nosed old HR woman stated simply that there would be a six month review to determine if
they had made a mistake. At that very moment I decided that I had made a mistake. I waited two weeks and then two more but then began a job search and left successfully at eleven months. It was the best bad job experience ever. Following that experience I had a great five year run at a startup and then provided the IT infrastructure for the growth from $35m to $750m at that place I used to work. There were other jobs, too, that are topics for the future. Now I'm enthused about each day in this era of my creative life.
Other than one business casual funeral I've not worn any business casual attire in almost eleven months. Not once have I pondered a departmental budget statement or attempted to explain the core issues of IT governance to people who just want free iPads. The place I used to work was OK, but it was the place that I "used to work" and the work there was of a certain type, not necessarily the work I'm doing now or in the manner of working that we are evolving to.
As I mentioned in my earlier update I do miss a few people, those with authentic greetings, smiles, a sense of humor and a commitment to unconditional teamwork.
You can follow my life, even be a part of it, if you wish.
Best wishes.
P.S. What do I miss (other than the previously mentioned):
- summer on the Mall
- lunch on the Mall
- evenings on the Mall
- walking down the Mall with a hot coffee on a cold day
- smoked chicken enchiladas at Rock Bottom
- rooftop at Crave
- coffee at Cafe Pateen where the owner thought I was a cab driver. good service comes quickly when your hack is double-parked
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