washwords

Yesterday was my work friend T’s last day. We were office neighbors, colleagues, team-mates and pals since the day I started at my current job, some nearly four years ago. A quiet-at-first but actually quite hillarious and super-sharp fellow, T and I shared a similar workstyle, sense of humor, and sense of the world, as well as a love for the random and absurd.

One day T, a social science researcher with a quantitative methodological background told me he was conducting a new experiment. “Oh?” my interest peaked, expecting I’d be reading about it in a health policy and public affairs journal in no time. But T’s experiment was following the oyster cracker he’d dropped on the office stairwell a few days back. His research objectives were to determine: 1) how long it would take to be broken or otherwise “reformulated” (a longitudinal analysis!) and 2) the cleaning staff’s patterns of behavior vis-a-vis the cracker for handling items left in stairwells. After about 5 days for research, absolutely nothing had happened. Eventually the cracker did disappear though results were inconclusive as to how and why it had been removed.

Another day T presented a treasure he’d rescued from an abandoned room: a box, an OLD-TIME box, wooden with a fold down lid. I asked him what he would keep in his old-time box and T pondered. Important old-time stuff, no doubt!

We also worked. (Imagine that!) I saw him get a well-earned promotion and he saw (and helped) me get more and more comfortable in my role. We won awards for work completed together, successfully navigated “matrixing,” new staff, leaving staff, difficult projects, painful working sessions, and joyous celebrations at producing some really fine, important work together.

I saw a rising star in the making, one I was planning to hitch my wagon to. So when T told me a month ago or so that he was leaving, I demanded he rethink. On further review, I decided to allow him to go – he is following his wife to a new city for HER new, very impressive job and hey, woman power and all that. I knew I would miss his encouragement and appreciation for my work, an ally in management. He was both an advocate for my participation in our new work union, standing up in particular for some erosion of rights for those in my position and a sympathetic ear when union work turned out to be kind of rough (shocker!) and personally challenging.

But what I hadn’t expected was how sad I was going to be at missing my friend. After all he was “just a work friend.” We didn’t see each other outside the G hallway or even socialize much at work. He had his regular lunch buddies and I had mine (or union work, or…) but the little quips, the trading articles (a favorite topic, the difference between 20-somethings and “our generation” in the workplace), the writing discussions and achievements were constants in my life. Important constants that brought a small but important feeling of pride and satisfaction, professionally but also more personally.

I wish T and his family all the best – I know they won’t need any luck. And I’d like to think we’d stay in touch, but know over time we probably won’t. When he left, T gave me the Old -Time Box (and a lot of other junk too, thanks a lot!). I’ll put my memories there. And an oyster cracker, too.