At a little after 4:30 today, the man I was hired to replace walked out the door for the last time in his pre-retirement life. While he is not officially retired until April 1st, today was his last official day of work.
I must admit, I was unsure whether this day would come quite when it did; I was hired knowing that I would one day replace him. When I was hired, his retirement was something of a running joke, always “in three months” when the last time we asked was three months ago. When he formally announced, while it was fairly obvious he was serious this time, the temptation to treat it as something of another instance of “oh, maybe in three months” still existed. Nevertheless, I engaged as best I could in the practice of knowledge extraction; that is, transferring the wealth of knowledge about the work he did from his head into mine, hopefully in a semi-efficient manner, and hopefully in a way that ensured that others would benefit further down the line.
He is, in ways, a lot like me – quiet, reserved, someone who most coworkers would describe as dedicated to his work but not particularly open with them. Indeed, to gain his trust and to have him talk to you in something more than terse responses was something of a trick. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t tell you all you needed to know when asked – it was that he is not the type to dally. He is the type that walks into meetings and immediately starts getting things done; no chit-chat, no waltzing around the subject. His wry reactions to organizational decisions and the realities of the work we do would always be humorous, and typically be somewhat cutting, an indication of the true meaning of a particular practice or standard. He also is the sort with voluminous amounts of information about the business and the rationale behind decisions in his head. Alas, he did not often transcribe that knowledge to paper.
I joked with others that perhaps the true solution to the problem of all the knowledge that would walk out the door with him was simply to lobotomize him, devise some sort of brain-to-computer connection, and then hook him up to our computer network for open access to all employees. We would laugh over it, since, indeed, this is often what it feels like when someone who carries what he did in his head leaves. I would see e-mails half-jokingly stating that he should not be allowed to retire, that he was, in fact, too valuable to the organization to lose. In the past, or so I’m told, this transition from one person to another of all of the requisite knowledge and procedures is not something my organization has been particularly good at, which has resulted in knowledge walking out the door that would require work to relearn – or, in more than one case, frantic rehires of the retiree (which is allowed, but only after a waiting period, and is dependent upon the retirement plan to dictate whether this is something doable).
Hopefully, I did better than most.
This is not to say he will never grace my presence again as a fellow coworker; this possibility has not yet been ruled out, and our long-term forecasting of workload suggests that this is a distinct possibility. But as always, we must plan as if once he’s gone, he’s really gone. No rewind button. No handcuffing to the chair. No last-minute requests for that one nugget that nobody else thought of.
A few of us sat around, including my manager, chatting with him in the last minutes – I think we all knew what was about to happen, even he, and we wished to belabor the point somewhat. After a good half hour or so – slightly longer, for I had joined mid-stream – he shook our hands and said his goodbye, then walked out as he always did, brown leather jacket on, satchel by his side, badge in hand. None of us followed. Rather, we looked at each other – a sort of “well, that’s that” moment – and then moved on with the conversation.
Others popped in moments later to coordinate followup steps now that he had left – revoking access to various resources, making sure appropriate people were updated, and so on and so forth. One coworker popped his head in and jokingly pointed out my sudden leap in seniority; with his departure, I am now the lead for the programs I support.
I had known it would come; I even knew it would come today. Yet, it hasn’t sunk in.
Perhaps Tuesday, when the realization that that satchel won’t be under the desk for three days a week anymore hits me.
But until then, a pumpkin sits on his chair, a sort of wry acknowledgement on my part of his departure.
