:: St. Stephen's Musings ::

:: Wednesday, December 18, 2002 ::

A Resignation Letter

Early this week, a good friend of mine here at work abruptly quit in the middle of the day. He was well liked, outgoing, and a fantastic worker. Needless to say, the rumor mills have been cranking out false stories faster than the New York Times (*wink*).

Today, he sent some of us a letter explaining the reasons for his departure and I thought I would share part of it here. It shows that many of us Gen-Xers are starting to wake up from the rampant careerism and materialism that has come to dominate many of our values and priorities.

Here is what he had to say:

"In life, especially in business, there will always be irreconcilable differences....Some can be accepted, some based on principle, can not. The ultimate reason I decided not to come back and try, was for a paradigm shift in the way I think about my career. Since college, every minute of every hour I have worked was dedicated to making a client the most money humanly possible. No matter the day, no matter the hour, no matter the sacrifice my mindset was to strive to make money. To some people "sacrifice" is too harsh of a word and that's fine, but I'm confident in knowing I always gave a 110%. Well, a few nights ago, I received a phone call that will forever change my life in ways I can hardly explain in words.

It was 7:56 pm on a Tuesday night and I had started work at 6:50 am. The day before I had worked from 6:30 am to 8:00 pm ...considering since deadlines we're upon us. The message was broken up from being made on a cordless phone and all it said was....."Daddy........IU........home". Kobi, my oldest son knows about 10 ten solid words and what my two year old had just said was "Daddy I love you, come home". I hadn't seen him in two days. My mind had been so geared on meeting this "deadline" that I hadn't even thought about eating let alone home. I looked around and thought to myself "what am I doing?" When they're older will Kobi and Ryan understand the reason daddy isn't home is because he is working on a twelve revision of a postbuy analysis? When I'm 80 looking back on everything will I be able to explain to them the how much I achieved in helping drive a clients CPO [cost per order] down? From that phone call on, I had lost my passion. A lot of you could tell and told me so....
I want to wish each of you all the luck in the world, you truly have been great work mates and friends."

:: Karl :: 9:11:00 AM [Link] ::