anniversaries and goodbyes / #6
on milestone emails, work memories, and what metrics can't measure
An anniversary email lands in my inbox (happy 5 years! ⭐️ don’t forget to tell us about your past year!) — quickly followed by another asking me to complete my exit survey (tell us why you’re leaving us).
There’s something ironic about being congratulated on my 5-year milestone by the same system that's also processing my departure; both things completely automated.
Five years, though!
That’s one-third of my entire career, concentrated in this single company.
Those first few weeks in February 2020 were a surreal flurry of "are handshakes okay or should we fist bump?" with new people — until suddenly, we were all squares on a screen.
Now, half a decade on, the team is a shadow of what it used to be. Rounds of layoffs and quiet departures after, and people who once filled out breakout rooms are now 🎶 empty chairs at empty tables 🎶 on my screen.
The ghosts of past collaboration linger in archived channels and dormant group chats.
I find myself writing individual goodbye notes to the ones who are still around.
Each note becomes a time capsule, replaying memories of:
Victory dances shared via gifs in group chats after impossible meetings
Back-to-back calls, with unlimited question marks and crying emojis; frantically and privately
Fifteen-hour days — not because we had to, but because we cared (or maybe I hadn't learned to say no — jury’s still out on this!)
That whole adage of “you won’t remember what they did, but you’ll remember what they made you feel” rings true here.
The system will record my tenure as a neat set of dates.
My experience refuses to be so tidily contained.
In the exit survey, the system wants me to quantify my "journey".
Your job aligned to your purpose and your values — strongly agree? Disagree?
On a scale of 1 to 10: During your time here, how proud have you been to work for us?
In your own words, what are some things we could improve on here?
But the real story isn't in any of those Likert scale answers, nor takeaways and learnings that will fit into a short answer input field.
Instead:
It's in the mentors who saw through my people-pleasing, and didn't let me get away with it, as they parted so graciously with their time and energy.
It's in the colleagues whose "quick syncs" turned into friendships, somewhere between project updates and life updates.
And it's in my team, who let me be part of their stories, making leadership mean something more than delivery plans and team bonding activities.
Maybe I’ll fill out that survey. Maybe I won’t.
Either way, the system will keep its records, and I’ll keep what mattered.
Other things
I was doing well in using my phone as little as I can, and iOS tried to sabotage the efforts by counting the hours I turned it off as 100% usage
Apparently Mount Everest’s namesake pronounced his last name eave-rest — according to Into The Silence’s author, Sir Everest was a miserable man who disregarded cultural norms and monuments, and so goes the ironic legacy of having a mountain named after him, yet mispronounced for all time
I’m consuming a lot of content about mountaineering/Mount Everest despite the fact that I can’t hike MacRitchie (one of the few trails in Singapore, where the monkeys in the photo above roam) without wheezing
But! I’m trying to make this year the year I start to improve my lung capacity, so I’ve been jogging; meter by meter; step by step.
Until next time,
J