Today was my last day working at the University of MN. It’s pretty mind-blowing, and it’s barely begun to really sink in. I brought my plants, my penguins, my pictures, and all the other stuff from my desk at work home with me today. I no longer have a U of M parking permit hanging from the rear-view mirror of my car. I’ve reconciled my last procurement card transaction and processed my last expense reimbursement.
Most of those “lasts” happened yesterday, actually; today was mostly about handing over the reins, clearing out, packing up, and—for most of the afternoon—partying and saying my good-byes. Retired former coworkers (including my old boss, who hired me nine years ago) showed up to see me off and wish me well. I was told dozens of times how much I’ll be missed and how freaked out everyone is about who they’re going to go to for help and to “get things done” from now on. My boss, who has observed over the years which candies I always selected from the dish on her desk whenever I would stop by her office, made sure that there were mint-chocolate treats on hand. And I received several cards and a couple of wonderful gifts. Most notably (and I am in awe of this), many of the faculty & staff of the departments that I served contributed cash towards a fund to help keep me afloat during my student teaching stint—and their contributions added up to $418! That’s a pretty amazing gift! There is also a bottle of sparkling wine, and…well…read on.
My main reason for writing just now is to tell the story of the gag gift that I actually received on Monday during a smaller farewell lunch with my immediate coworkers and office mates. In retrospect, I totally should have seen this coming—but I didn’t, which makes it all the better. In order to fully appreciate this gift, you need to know a few things: For starters, my coworkers are well aware of my fondness for silly hats; I have been wearing my pumpkin pie beret to work on the last work day before Thanksgiving for several years now, and various goofy Santa-themed hats around Christmas, etc. Second, there’s some important history. One of my roles on our finance team was to serve as the “procurement specialist.” Don’t bother asking what that actually means; it’s obscure and unimportant. What matters for present purposes are a) the title (more on that shortly), and b) the fact that whenever a certain one of my coworkers had a question for me, or needed me to do something, that related to this aspect of my job, she would often preface the request by saying “Put on your procurement specialist hat, Dave.” And many times, I would respond by saying that I wanted an actual, literal hat (sometimes joking that I would only do whatever it was that she was asking of me if she could produce an official procurement specialist hat for me to wear).
And then, finally, there’s the Dilbert comic. Another coworker (someone with whom I have gotten along quite well, and with whom I had a fun, jokey, give-each-other-a-hard-time sort of relationship) has one of those page-a-day desk calendars with a different Dilbert comic for each day. A while back (just a couple months, I think), he brought a page from his calendar over to my desk for me to read. It featured the “boss” talking about how it had taken x number of hours at a recent management retreat for all the executives to come up with a good name for the company’s new procurement policy: it was to be called the “Procurement Operations Oversight Policy” (the joke, obviously, being that a bunch of high-paid managers spent hours coming up with a name whose acronym spells…). Well, in light of this comic, it didn’t take long for this coworker to start referring to me as the “poop specialist” instead of the “procurement specialist.”
And so, in light of my previously oft-expressed interest in having a literal “procurement specialist hat”…
Since I ended up going back to the U, the sense of ending/finality that I had when writing this post no longer quite makes sense. Still a great gift and a fun story, though!