Never can say goodbye with dignity
So, you’re leaving. You’ve informed your line manager of your decision and worked out your notice. You’ve resisted giving the chairman a piece of your mind and stolen the requisite number of Post-It notes. You’ve started falling ill on Mondays and Fridays and spotted your PA making a contribution of just one pound in the inevitable whip-round for a leaving present. The only thing now standing between you and freedom is your leaving do.
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Office farewells used to be special occasions. In Fleet Street, for instance, there was a tradition of “banging out”, in which a retiring employee was walked out by colleagues through the presses, as the printers beat out a ceremonial slow-march with hammers. But nowadays, with the job-for-life having been replaced with the job-for-a-little-while, some of us would be lucky if colleagues raised a stapler in acknowledgment as we crawled out of the building with rentacrates and security guards in tow.
The brown-envelope whip-round has become as common as the printer jam, gift shops are overcrowded with leaving cards the size of Japan (to accommodate hundreds of straining-to-be-witty messages written at an angle), and every corner of every bar on every Friday night is occupied by a gaggle of suits and skirts saying farewell to someone whose name they can barely recall. I have attended four leaving dos for various people at various companies in the past fortnight alone. However, the greater frequency of these farewells does not make them any easier to deal with, if you are the one doing the leaving.
To some extent, the challenge of the leaving do is the challenge posed by every office party: the mixing of the personal and the professional; the combination of people with wildly differing views of what constitutes a good time; the dangerous presence of cheap alcohol. But what makes it unique is the profound sense of anti-climax
