Ladies and Gentleman, my last day at work….

Gotta love last days at work. All the attention, all the love, all the extra money. Not to mention all the free booze. It's like your birthday, without any cake or people singing you stupid-ass birthday songs.

The thing I dreaded most about my last day was the whole goodbye thing. I am not a good goodbye person. I hate good-byes. I don't like saying goodbye to people I like and I don't like pretending that I care about saying goodbye to people I don't like. I'm all about slinking out before anyone notices.

It's especially tough saying goodbye in a work environment because I've had enough jobs to know that no matter how friendly you are with people at work, you're still mainly work friends and despite all the proclamations of how you'll hang out with each other after you leave, nobody really means it. The "let's do lunch" or let's do drinks" that everyone says is definitely your basic "let's do lunch." Not that I didn't like the people I worked with- some of them I really truly did- but I don't see myself hanging out with most of them. That's the thing about work friends, take away the actual work part and you have nothing really to talk about.

Then there are the few people who you really do like and really would like "let's do lunch" not mean "let's do lunch." Sadly, I've been around the block enough times to know that even when you say "let's do lunch" with people you really want to do lunch with, it usually turns into "let's do lunch" anyways. Its no fault of anyone's, it's just that, well, see above comment about not having anything to say since you're not really working together anymore. And when you don't work with each other on a daily basis, you're out of each other's lives. There's a new person in place, a new work dynamic, new gossip and people who leave slowly get forgotten.

Then there's the people I'm neutral about- the people I worked with but didn't care that much about. It's not like I hated them, but it's either I didn't know them that well or I just somewhere made the decision I didn't really care about knowing them. The problem is that a lot of the neutral people liked me, or at least made a big effort to show that they did and so I had to make a big back. I am not very good at pretending I care about people I don't care about. Some of them were so nice to me during the last few days that I started to feel guilty I wasn't nicer to them when I was there.

And finally, there are the people I didn't really like. Or at least didn't like because I thought they were incompetent twits and were the bane of my existence when I worked there. Saying goodbye to them was tough not only because once again I had to pretend that I cared, but also because I know I spent some amount of time trying to get them fired or hoping they would be. One of those people, my bosses boss, someone who gave his poor eighteen year old a lengthy straight-out-of-Hamlet soliloquy about how his screwing up made me leave, I pretty much avoided for the past two weeks. He didn’t even show up at my going away lunch because he felt so bad about everything that he was avoiding me (as I was to him). Another one of those people, the Manager I almost got fired a few months back (and might just have done after I left) also issued a mea culpa about my leaving and kissed my butt for my last two weeks. He did such a job of kissing my butt that he kept on threatening to throw me a good-bye party at a bar. This despite any evidence that I wanted to spend anymore time with him than I had to.

All of this led to the big drama of my last day- the giving out of my digits. While everyone said they wanted my info (real e-mail address, phone number, etc.) there were only a few people who I wanted to give it to. Some of them I wanted to give my info out too, some of them who asked I didn't really want to give out because I knew we were only in the "let's do lunch" realm and I'm too cynical to make the effort to give out, and some there was no way in hell I'd give them it. One of them I wasn't going to give anything too because besides falling into the neutral category (with a smattering of spillover into the trying to get fired category), he also creeped the hell out of me. Let's just say that even though he was over 40, I don't think he was quite sure of what team he played for, if you get my drift and I think that you do (not that I have any problem with it, of course, except when there's a fine line between friendliness and hitting on and the line was crossed a few too many times). He kept on bugging me for my phone number all week, even taping a note to my desk before lunch to remind me for the umpteenth time to give me my info. After being pestered at my desk, I gave in and gave him my e-mail address. For my phone number, I lied, something I have absolutely no guilt about, especially as he also hinted after I gave him my number that we should meet up for drinks that night. Iyick.

Still, I'll miss the people I worked with, even some of the one's I didn't like. I'll miss the endless selection of heavy metal favorites and obscure indie bands that endlessly serenaded me during the workday. I'll miss burning discs of said heavy metal favorites and obscure indie bands. I'll miss endless discussions of the Giants and the endless amounts of shit that were thrown back and forth. I'll miss gossiping with my boss and my coworkers and knowing that I know everything that goes on in the Department. I'll miss being able to say the snarkiest and sarcastic thing in front of my boss and have her rifle something as equally snarky and sarcastic back. I'll even miss being thought of as the one everyone went to when something went wrong and got to be the one everyone kvetched too. But I won't miss the stress or the incompetence. And I won't miss the being jerked around, the inability to treat anyone with respect, and the sheer insanity of my last job.

Oh well, onto bigger and better things…..