walking away

Today has been busy and emotional and just plain weird.

I jumped in the car first thing this morning and drove into town to go and pick up all my crap from my desk at work.

I was a little early, so I sat in the car for a while, just watching the world go past, until the clock ticked around to just before 7am and I went to wait by the front door.

For some reason I was under the impression that the doors to the office opened officially at 7am... turns out they don't, they open at 7:15, which meant that I was standing outside with a box under my arm for fifteen minutes as other people started arriving.

Thankfully nobody I knew turned up... and as soon as the security woman opened the door I bolted for the elevators.

I really wanted to be in and out as quickly as possible, and especially before anyone from my team showed up, but the fact that I got in quarter of an hour later than I'd planned did get my adrenaline pumping. I packed up all of my Lego and vinyl toys and notebooks and whatnots, pulled all my postcards and stickers off the wall, and then sent out a bunch of emails.

I wrote an email to everyone yesterday which maybe didn't say everything I wanted to say to everyone, but covered all the major points:

Hi everyone

As you may or may not have noticed, I'm not at work today and my desk is completely empty of all my personal items.

It turned out that my contract wasn't going to be renewed in mid September, so I made the decision to leave work on Friday. Senior Boss is going to send out an official email to everyone later this morning, but I wanted you to all hear it from me first.

I'm sorry I didn't tell anyone (other than discussions with Senior Boss last week, and I'd like to thank her once again for everything), but I didn't want a lot of fuss, it's a hard enough thing to have to leave and it would have been much harder having to explain it in person.

My apologies to anyone who's upset by my decision, but I felt it was the right one for me given the circumstances.

And anyway, given the number of times I've been in and out of the building over the past decade, just because I'm gone now, it doesn't mean I won't be back at some stage.

You should all already know how I feel about you, so I just want to thank you all for making it that little bit easier to come to work every day even on those days when the work itself made me crazy. And that includes those of you that also drove me crazy for one reason or another.

All the best,

yani

I flicked off a few other emails, set my out of office to say that I was no longer working there, put my security pass on H-San's desk, picked up the two boxes and headed out the door.

And that's how the last four and a bit years came to an end. It started just after my birthday in 2009 and this is how it ends... with something of a whimper.

All those emotions that I've been trying not to feel since last Thursday tried to creep up on me once I got back in the car, but crying and driving is never a good mix, so I put a lid on it and instead headed off for breakfast at McDonalds.

Then I came home, and it was only just after 8am.

And I've spent the day tidying the place up... firstly to put away all my work stuff, then to do the final cull of my DVD collection, moved some stuff around and then decided to tidy out my kitchen cabinets.

While I was tidying up I watched Death Becomes Her and the Toy Story trilogy. By the time I got to Toy Story 3 I was pretty much done with tidying up, so I just sat down to watch it.

It's a movie that makes me tear up at the best of times, but when I got to the final scene I pretty much lost my shit. It was definitely more of an emotional reaction than I remember having the first time around... so I'm pretty sure everything that's been welling up since Thursday got released. Or at the very least I released some of the pressure.

During the day I got text messages from three people at work... two who I wasn't surprised by, one who I pretty much was, since she didn't even have my number... but I also didn't get a message from a couple of the people I thought I might have.

And this would be the point where I say something about the first day of the rest of my life or the next part of my life... but I'm really not feeling that just at the moment.

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