As of Friday at 4:30pm, I am officially unemployed.<\/p>\n

Wednesday afternoon, my counterpart Johnny and I began testing how things would run after my departure by changing several key passwords and temporarily disabling my account. As a domain admin, not only does my account have carte blanche access to the network, but I also have access to our internal password database. Any password I didn’t have memorized, I could easily look up. That afternoon it hit me that, in the very near future, this organization I’ve been a part of for almost fifteen years would soon be continuing on without me.<\/p>\n

Back when I quit Best Buy in 1994, my dad shared his “finger in a glass of water” theory with me. A company is like a glass of water. Now stick your finger in the water — that’s you. When you quit working there, you pull your finger out of the water. Notice there’s no hole in the water; the water just fills in where you were, and the overall level of the water drops a bit. That’s kind of how it works. The work will get done, but the water level may be a little low for the time being.<\/p>\n

Occasionally my imagination gets the better of me, and as the week came to a close I began watching out for some imaginary security guard to put his hand on my shoulder and inform me, “It’s time.” That never happened — in fact, for the last two hours of my final shift, I was the only person working in my department. My last official work duty was disabling my own network accounts and turning in my physical keys. I’m proud to have built up that level of trust from my co-workers and employer. <\/p>\n

I haven’t decided what to do during my stretch of unemployment, but I need to hurry — my new job officially begins Saturday at midnight. I had hoped to make it down to the unemployment office today to find out what kind of assistance I could apply for. I know that to get unemployment benefits you have to be looking for a new job, so I thought it might help that I already had another one lined up. Can you get your hands on a block of government cheese in less than 24 hours? I should look into that.<\/p>\n

Photos from my Going Away Dinner at Chelino’s<\/a> are here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As of Friday at 4:30pm, I am officially unemployed. Wednesday afternoon, my counterpart Johnny and I began testing how things would run after my departure by changing several key passwords and temporarily disabling my account. As a domain admin, not only does my account have carte blanche access to the network, but I also have access to our internal password database. Any password I didn’t have memorized, I could easily look up. That afternoon it hit me that, in the very near future, this organization I’ve been a part of for almost fifteen years would soon be continuing on without… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}