Embracing the awkward goodbye
I am not good at goodbyes. Awkward. They often involve touching, and I’m not big on touching. At a party, if I can get away with it, I slide away quietly when it’s time to go home, without saying goodbye to anyone. Rude, you may think, but I’m always keen to avoid that hideous one-kiss-or-two-kisses-or-a hug rigmarole with people you’ve only just met. Also, I don’t want to go and find the host and interrupt them when they might be in the middle of telling a very funny joke. So, if anything, drifting silently through the door as if a ghost is actually incredibly polite. You can text the host on your way home. Much better. No bodily contact.
This touching aversion is one of the reasons that, several weeks ago, I started worrying about leaving my job at Tatler. I left the magazine on Friday after a magnificent five years of dukes and castles and labradors and working in an office where someone would look up from their computer and shout “Who’s the Earl of Puddleduck’s son?” and someone else would genuinely answer it. But it was time to go freelance and I’ve written a novel, which is coming out in June, so I dare say there will be a few Modern Manners columns on the etiquette of reading coming this way soon. “How posh is your bookmark?” and so on.
It’s an odd thing though, isn’t it, leaving a job after a number of years. Leaving a group of people that, on a day-to-day basis, you’ve spent more time with than your own family. You know their tics. You know what hue they like their tea. You know if their jaw crunches when they eat. You know about their relationships. You know when their children have a birthday or a cold. And then, suddenly, one day they’re going, or you’re going, and you promise to keep in touch and that you’ll have lunch “soon” because that’s what you say but, probably, that hurried hour in Carluccio’s will never happen and so, after some sort of bumbling physical gesture (A handshake? A hug? Hard to know where to pitch it these days), you just vanish.
But on the basis that you should always leave a tidy stable behind you, and if you’ve been lucky with your office and your colleagues as I have, there are some basic rules for leaving a job. Tidy your desk and remove the detritus from your drawers, obviously. I spent most of last week packing up 262 hair ties and half-empty vitamin bottles. Go through your email folders and remove anything alarming since, technically, your office owns all your work emails. (Although, if you’re anything like me, your in-box will largely consist of emails to other colleagues asking “Is it lunchtime yet?”) Make sure your personal email address isn’t something embarrassing you set up when you were 16 (tinkerbell69@hotmail.com or similar) and email everyone with your new address.
Also, and this is hugely creep-like, but write a thank-you letter or a card to your boss. I’ve done it whenever I’ve left a previous job, because I’ve always been enormously grateful to anyone who’s employed me and put up with my booming voice and my habit of scattering bits of bike clutter – trainers, helmet, lights and so on – across the office. I’d say it’s a canny move for anyone who’s done a week or two of work experience, too. I don’t want to sound like a LinkedIn promotion, but it could help you stand out in a crowded job market. (I’m newly available for motivational speeches, if anyone’s interested?)
In the end, on Friday, I gave myself a stern talking to about the touching thing and went around hugging everyone as if some sort of deranged, albeit perfectly decorous, Father Christmas. Ho ho ho, come here and let me clasp you in my arms, colleague-who-I’ve-sung-Happy-Birthday-to-for-five-years-but-may-never-see-again.
It wasn’t the time to be stiff and half-hearted about saying goodbye or sneak wordlessly through the door. It was the time to say goodbye like a grown-up. I will miss them.
