End of an Era

A longtime colleague of mine, let’s call her Emily, recently received permission to move to an office location closer to her home, which will save her time and money, and which triggered a small move of my own, because my boss wanted me to move into Emily’s cube once she had vacated it. It also triggered a wavelet of celebrations/goodbye lunches.

I joked that the person I’ve been sitting next to would want to have a party to celebrate the fact that I was departing, and Emily and I would need to have a goodbye lunch, and then we would need to have a party to try to cheer up my new neighbors—at some point, before we knew Emily was leaving, the idea of me sitting next to her was proposed and she said, “No! I don’t want that—the noise, the laughing, the coughing.” I’m so sure!

Emily and I did go out to lunch on Thursday, of which more later, and my closest neighbor, Jan, and I went to lunch on Friday, confusing Jan’s colleagues. (She’s in a different group from me. The only person I physically worked with who is also in my group was Emily, now gone. I’m all alone.)

Jan explained that there were two different lunches and that I believe in overdoing it, which I thought was a very nice compliment. While Jan and I were walking back from our lunch, at California Pizza Kitchen, where we went just to see what it was like, we encountered Willie Brown walking toward us. “Hey!” I said involuntarily. It was odd to see a face that is so well-known from the newspaper right in front of my eyeballs. He ignored me, but genially greeted another man who called, “Hey, Willie!”

As for my lunch with Emily, that really was interesting, because we have taken turns over the years, five or six years, not speaking to each other, sometimes for months. She is extraordinarily prickly, and some have said the same of me. She has a long list of dreadful personality traits and a long list of excellent personality traits and talents; perhaps she would say the same of me.

We have never discussed any problem openly, and I figured she wasn’t interested in doing that kind of thing, at least with a coworker, so I just assumed we never would, and it was fine with me. However, there was just one thing that was nagging at me that I needed to say, so a few days before she was to leave, and before our lunch, I said I was sorry I had been mean and grumpy the first year we worked together. She said she remembered it as being just a couple of months, whereupon I retracted 5/6 of my apology.

She said she figured it was for X reason, which it really wasn’t, but I suppose that was sort of part of it, tangentially, so I said, “That was part of it,” and left it at that, because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings at this late date, and also because I have reliably been able to get angry about Y and Z pretty much anytime I think of them, even all these years later, and I didn’t want to again.

So I was really surprised when, at our lunch, she asked what else had made me upset back at the beginning. I said it was brave of her to ask and she pointed out that she had waited until we were done eating to do so (which reminded me of another, much closer relationship that ended right after lunch in a restaurant). I said I would tell her if she wanted to know, though I hoped it wouldn’t wreck our relationship, which has come to be quite good on the whole.

And then I just told her: Y and Z. She received this calmly, and said that what I had thought was true at the time had indeed been quite true.

After we discussed that, I remembered a time she hadn’t spoken to me for many weeks and asked what that had been all about, and she told me. And then I told her a couple of pieces of extremely juicy gossip I would never have imparted in a cubicle at work, and she told me one in return.

I also told her the things that had made me stop hating her and start liking her: how I came to admire her ability to plunge into things and figure them out on her own, and how I realized she is on the whole a kind and peaceful person, and one of immense discretion. I know I can tell her any piece of gossip without fear because she never, ever tells me anything she has heard from anyone else.

Thus it was an extremely satisfactory lunch, much more so than I could have imagined, had I imagined anything.

So I am sorry to say that on the actual day of her departure, we had another fight before we had even looked at each other, and my last sight of her, after certainly no hug, no handshake, and not even meeting each other’s gaze, was of her stalking off down the hallway, shoulders set, a sight I have seen many times and will not miss not seeing again, but there are many other sights I will miss seeing. Plus, as mentioned, I’m all alone now.

(I mentioned to another coworker that Emily and I had a fight and he said, “Wow, you guys must really like each other if you can say those kinds of rude things to one other,” or words to that effect.)

As for Emily’s cube, I had to spend a good while cleaning it, which did mitigate my feeling of loss. I’m kidding; no, it didn’t, but I was slightly irked that she left actual items for me to discard.

The cube is larger than my old one and has a much better view—I brought my binoculars to work to take advantage of it—but it also has way more neighbors, and people can sneak up on you from the back. In fact, if they want, they can actually walk through the back of my cube to get to some other place.

The same coworker who admired the closeness that permits Emily and me to be angry with each other said, “Would you say your ass is hanging out in the breeze?” That’s a good description. I was happy in my smaller cube with Jan as my neighbor and with my back firmly to the wall, but cube assignments do tend to change not infrequently, along with managers. I have had nine cubes and eight managers in nine years. This is more good than bad, because you know any situation will change in due time, and not even that much time.