Category: Just me being me

Today marks the start of my last week at my current job. After almost exactly 6 years of working for this company, it feels a bit bittersweet to be saying goodbye.

At this point, most of my loose ends are wrapped up. I have exit interviews scheduled for Thursday afternoon and will not be returning to work on Friday due to out-of-office meetings.

So it would be appropriate for me to send out a “goodbye” email to the employees within the next couple days. Which gets me to thinking, what on earth am I going to say?

I certainly can’t tell the truth! Talk about burning bridges, if I unleashed the bitterness of my feelings on losing my job it would be like shooting a missile at bridge and obliterating it! In my imagination, my farewell email calls out those people who have wronged me and brings to light a bunch of dirty secrets I’ve been sitting on for years. There are lots of stories about people who do just this, including this one.

The email is entirely inappropriate. However, it also has a lot of really great points (cough, cough).

Anyways, my desire to “Keep it Classy” means that I’m stuck writing a polite and non-inflammatory email to my co-workers.

For anyone else who needs to write this type of email, here are some tips:

• Keep your message short and sweet. If you’re losing your job and not leaving on your own accord to go to another company, don’t bother going into details. There is really no way to keep it nice when referring to a lay off, so take my advice and avoid it altogether.

• Say something nice about your co-workers. Even if you hate them all and hope they go down in a fiery blaze, pretend that you like them. Mention projects you worked on or events you enjoyed together. Say something simple like “I’ve enjoyed my time with [company] and have appreciated the opportunity to work with you.”

• Give them some way to contact you. If you don’t want everyone to have your personal email address, that’s fine. However, I think it’s a great idea to include your LinkedIn account and encourage them to connect with you. I also plan on including my Facebook account link, so that interested people can ‘friend’ me if they’d like.

Depending on the size of your company, it is up to you whether you decide to send the email to everyone, or just those who you are close to. In my case, I’m going to pick and choose my recipients and then keep the “To” list as a BCC.

Here’s my email that’s going out on Tuesday:

Hi everyone –

You may have already heard the news, but I wanted to take a moment to let you know that this is my last week here at [company].

I have enjoyed the last 6 years here and appreciate having had the opportunity to work with each of you. Thank you for your support over the years and I wish you all well in your future endeavors.

Please keep in contact, by connecting with me on LinkedIn here:
http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=26067821&trk=tab_pro

You can also “friend me” on my Facebook page here:
http://www.facebook.com/julie.dellinger

Thank you all,

Julie

Short.
Sweet.
To the point.

Now that’s keeping it classy.

Sorry I’ve sucked at blogging for the past week or so – the Big Move totally took over my life. In fact, it’s still dominating about 85% of my thoughts and 100% of my free time.

To sum it up, I’m exhausted.

I’m not just a little tired – I am mentally and physically exhausted to the point of nonsense.

I’m so tired that I closed my eyes for about two seconds and almost fell asleep in 695 traffic. I almost cried while reading my friends Facebook updates about dogs about to get euthanized (ok, that would have probably happened anyway). I’m breaking into giggling fits for no reason. Ditto with the wanting to bite people’s heads off. When I answer the phone, people immediately ask if I’m sick or crying.

You get it; I need a nap and a vacation.

The good news is that after weeks and weeks of sorting/organizing/packing, we’re finally moved into our new place. Even better, all of our furniture fits. And as of about 10:00 pm last night, we have working Fios TV and internet. So let’s all give a big cheesy group ‘high five’ for that.

There is still a ton of stuff that needs to be done before I can really call the new place “home” or even “temporary home” for now. I’m one of those people who can’t relax until everything is in its place and we still have stuff to do before my shoulders can leave their new favorite spot by my ears.

Old House
We’re almost totally done with the old townhouse. My husband needs to go by one last time to pick up a few things left in the shed tonight. The huge pile of trash behind the house also needs to be dragged out to the curb for tomorrow morning’s trash pickup.

The new owners will be doing a walk through tomorrow morning, so hopefully they find everything to their liking. It is super clean, since I spend about 5 hours cleaning the place from top to bottom after we moved out. The lawn and front flower bed also looks fantastic, since my husband dealt with them yesterday.

We did have a bit of a stress/scare when it came back that the townhouse deck is a few inches too long and goes into the ‘no building zone’. This is news to me, since the deck has been there for at least 15 – 20 years (I’ve only been there 8). I wasn’t really sure what they wanted me to do about it, but I did offer to take a chainsaw to the side of the deck to shorten it if that would make them happy. Apparently it didn’t because I haven’t heard anything about it since.

Settlement is TOMORROW! Part of me (ok, about 82.5%) feels like something is going to happen and the contract is going to fall through. It’s like I can’t really let myself get excited until I exit that building tomorrow afternoon with a nice check in my purse. Yes, that’s true, we actually MADE MONEY off this house sale even though the market is crap right now. Amazing. 

New House
As I said, the furniture is in place, which is a huge help. Also, most stuff is unpacked since I did that little by little when I started moving a week ago. However, we still need little stuff done like: hanging curtain rods and curtains, put together a snazzy kitchen cart from Target that comes in about 10,000 pieces, putting  up pictures, cleaning out the spare room (currently a home for orphan boxes and miscellaneous that needs a home), etc.

The most important thing is that I need to find time to go to the grocery store. We have no food at our house and you know it’s bad when it’s gotten to the point that we’re actually sick of eating out!

So by the end of the week (most definitely by the weekend), I should be able to finally sit down and put my feet up. I have some TV to catch up on, some books calling my name and a comfy blanket to curl up in. After weeks of work, it sounds like heaven to me. Then, next week (my last week at my current job) I can throw myself back into my job search.

After weeks and weeks of preparation, the big move is finally on the horizon. Four days from now we’ll be packing up a U-Haul truck with everything left in our townhouse and taking it about 15 minutes down the road to our new place.

We’ve already stored oodles and oodles** of stuff at my parent’s house. The rental that we’re moving to doesn’t have a ton of closet/storage space so off-season clothes, home décor, outdoor furniture, and that type of stuff isn’t coming with us. It is easily accessible though, so if we’re still there when the weather gets warm it won’t be too difficult to grab our summer clothes.

This past weekend, we took the first official load of stuff to the new place. Mainly it was just some kitchen stuff, a couple rugs, our dining room table and some closet organizers. I had this idea in my head that by bringing the rugs in advance, I wouldn’t have to worry about heavy furniture having to be schooched around more than once.

And yes, schooched is a word. Use it in conversation today and you’ll see that everyone knows what it means.

I took another SUV load over yesterday, so our kitchen table and chairs (super small and lightweight, so I could do it myself) and everything from our linen closet now lives in the new house. Which is awesome, except if I run out of soap or something before Saturday. Hmmm…I guess I didn’t think that one through.

Oh well. Anyways, now that I’ve partially moved, I simply can’t wait to get everything moved over into the new place. I’m one of those people who likes everything in its place (which obviously means I’m a dork for organizing stuff) and I just feel unbalanced when stuff is all messy. To help with my insanity, I’m planning to take over some more of the small stuff on Thursday. That way, all that will be left is the large furniture that our strong and manly helpers will move on Saturday.

If everything goes according to plan, I’ll be able to do absolutely NOTHING on Sunday. Which sounds totally fabulous because every weekend since Labor Day has been crazy sprinkled with busy, rolled around in exhaustion.

Of course, my plan was to leave this new temporary house as bare as possible so that we felt added incentive for me to find a new position and move into our dream home. But knowing me, I just don’t think I’m going to be able to survive without hanging a couple pictures on the walls. We’ll see though, I’m starting to get some job feedback so maybe we won’t be at this new place very long after all…

 

*What’s funny is that we actually ARE moving to the “East” side of the rental property. Great, now I’m never going to get this darn song out of my head!

** FYI, for those not ‘in the know’, oodles and oodles is equal to the entire top of a pool table + ¼ of the basement + part of my childhood bedroom.