Today was my final day at the company I’ve been with for 10 years. I chose to make the obligatory company-wide leaving email memorable.

The writing was deliberately obscure as I had things to say, so I’ve included translations.

To:     Business Systems Team
Date:     26/09/2014 09:48 a.m.
Subject:     Daniel's gonna mosey on out of here.

Dear Team,

Back in ’04 I was hired by this fine company to be their copper smith. They had some dire problems in need of fixing and (if you'll pardon the metal pun) ironing out of the underlying nature of things. Pretty soon I had a lot of copper in place, plumbing the organisation and keeping things flowing smoothly.

I was hired as a Lotus Domino admin and developer. The Lotus Domino servers were a poorly configured mess - I fixed them. The Lotus Notes apps were ugly, buggy, and hard to use - I made them both prettier and easier to use and people started using them more.

But time moved on and copper fell out of favour. Pretty soon I was given the privilege of not only smithing all kinds of metals, but guiding other up-and-coming blacksmiths in their smithing work.

IBM bought Lotus Notes and then lost interest in it, so we started building solutions in Microsoft .NET instead. I became development team lead and hired more developers to help us and built an amazing team.

For many years, times were again both prosperous and good.

We were largely left alone to get things done, and we got things done.

Then in ’14 the company decided to go with a new blacksmith from the next town over. And this decision I simply could not abide.

Please ask your team to train their outsourced replacements from India, then fire your team and manage those replacements.

So adios amigos. We have all come a ways, shared in the ups and downs, and accomplished many feats. The journey has been long, grand and adventurous. But sadly at this point, we must part ways. Happy trails y'all.

Your copper-smithing friend and colleague,

Daniel Wright

Good luck. Don’t call me, I’ll call you...