Part Thirty Four: Two Weeks Notice

J Hunter
J Hunter
Sep 5, 2018 · 4 min read
Image via Pexels

At 4:29pm a week before I go on vacation, I email my two weeks notice resignation letter to the CEO and the Director of Administrivia, and then head straight to happy hour with my friend.

I’ve had the letter ready to send as a pdf for a week already, and have taken great pleasure in signing it electronically so that no hard copy of the letter exists. As my friend and I are sitting at the bar celebrating the end of a week and my ability to resign from the Form Letter Factory, I check my personal email on my phone and see that four minutes after I sent my resignation letter to the CEO, I had an email from her asking if I was interested in having a confidential feedback session with her on my time there.

I quickly email back that yes, I would be happy to share my thoughts on my time there, and my friend and I start strategizing. I want to make sure that my feedback to the CEO is constructive, as she’s only been in the job for three months, so has inherited the insanity of the Form Letter Factory and their outdated systems. So none of this is her fault. Also, I want my feedback to be constructive in a way that she doesn’t get defensive about her organization so that she might hear me and implement some of the changes.

I get into the feedback meeting with her with a list of things to tell her and some prepared ways of approaching my talking points. Similar to the whole team feedback session with the Director of Administrivia, but with less contempt for incompetencies.

I mention carefully that I’ve spent a lot of my time at the Form Letter Factory asking why certain things are the way they are and the CEO’s eyes light up. She says she loves people who question things as she has a science and engineering background. It’s a pity she’s the CEO of the Form Letter Factory — if the work wasn’t so deathly boring, she’d be a good person to work for. I then mention that whenever I asked the question of ‘why’ I got a lot of pushback, so eventually I just stopped asking. She responds that she can understand the reasons I would have gotten that feedback, which makes me think that while she’s not saying it outright, she knows exactly what’s going on here and who’s not pulling their weight. Good news.

The CEO is surprised that it takes our typing pool 48hrs to turn around a pdf that normally takes her personally only a few hours to write and collate. I mention that some of our systems duplicate work, but also point out that there’s several levels of management for getting a form letter into the mail, which can be frustrating when you’re checking for double spacings at the end of each sentence. She laughs and says she really hopes that no one is sending things back over double spaces being missed in letters, to which I laugh and tell her I had a letter sent back to me by my supervisor telling me that I had missed three spaces in a four page document, but neither fixing it herself nor showing me where I had missed said spaces! She’s both horrified and resigned to the scale of change that she’s working to create.

I ask if she’s ever read the Goldbricking paper that my friend at work sent me and she’s not aware of the concept, so I promise to send it to her and tell her that it perfectly encapsulates both the work ethic of the Form Letter Factory and the logic behind it taking 48hrs to turn around a single letter.

At the end of the meeting she wishes me well and tells me to reach out if I ever need anything. Despite the fact that I know she’s just saying that to seem nice like everyone else in this city with their fake niceness, I almost believe her. I wish her well sincerely — I really hope she manages to bring an end to the gravy train and drag that office into the 21st Century workplace. However, for now, I’m just glad it’s no longer my problem.

On my final day at the Form Letter Factory, there’s already another woman in the typing pool who’s leaving for a job offer in Tokyo, and the Irish woman who had been there for only a week also leaves because she gets a job offer in her field of expertise, so doesn’t need a typing pool to pay the rent. This leaves the Form Letter Factory with a typing pool of three, only one of whom has been there longer than the six months I was stuck in the job.

Our supervisor is frustrated that she can’t get any applications for jobs from recruiting firms to fill any of the typing pool positions after she offers a temp role to someone who also turns them down. She doesn’t realize that it’s because my friend and the Irish woman both gave negative feedback to their recruiters about the Form Letter Factory. She may also want to check my review on Glassdoor, but given that everything in that office is on paper, I doubt they know Glassdoor exists.

I wipe the Form Letter Factory from my LinkedIn profile and delete the request from the Director of Administrivia. When my final paycheque arrives from them in the mail the next week, it comes with a handwritten carbon copy government employment record form, which I didn’t think even existed anymore! It’s perfect as it sums up that place exactly. I wasted six months of my life and intellect in that office and I’m finally free.


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