Moving On

On Jan 18^th, 2006, at 5:49 PM, I tendered my resignation with my current employer, and have accepted an offer with a consulting behemoth, in hopes of a better future and enhancing my career opportunities. Despite looking ahead, towards a hopefully better future, I cannot but feel melancholic about my departure with the current employer.

For the past 10 years, for better or worse, I have been an employee of this firm, except for a 1 year hiatus in Melbourne, Australia. 10 years out of the 16 years in my professional life. That’s a long time, and the company has been good to me. It has provided me with decent opportunities and I have been well like and respected by my peers and superiors (well, at least that what I think !!!). So then what was the reason to leave, one might ask?

After 10 years, a sense of jaded monotony had set in, and there wasn’t anything dramatically new that I was learning in my current responsibility. The challenges didn’t seem insurmountable and the motivation, or rather lack of it, simply didn’t warrant continuity in the current work life. There were other external extenuating circumstances, which were beyond my control, which forced me to take a long term view of my professional life and move on. Hopefully, for the best. Only time will tell.

But how does one just walk away from 10 years of associations and camaraderie that you build up without feeling a tinge of sadness? All the battle scars to prove the wars that you fought with your team mates, office lunches and parties, sharing baby pictures and swapping spouse tyrannies, sports talks, the office grapevine stories, whining about the common foe viz. the top management, discuss goal/objectives in life, vacation stories and all those little things that make your work place just not work alone.

Someone must sure have calculated this, and I don’t have them handy, but most of your adult life and most of your conscious hours are spent with your colleagues and team mates. Your workmates may change over a period of time, but if they demand that much slice of your time, then they must be the most important associations that you are going to build in your lifetime.

For the most past, over the past 10 years, I’ve had fantastic rapport with my immediate bosses, including the current one. That’s what make it that much more difficult when you leave. It would be so much easier if the boss was an asshole, you could at least rub his face in the incredulity of your departure (assuming that your departure would mean greater impact to the organization). Not true when you have bosses that you respect and revere, in which case parting ways becomes that much conflicted.

Nevertheless, like all milestone decisions in life, only time will tell what the future holds for me. Until then I brood. Brood…brood.