Dan, I hardly knew ye

I've copied below the body of an email exchange I had recently with one of the guys where I work.

All,

After close to 6 years at Vecna I have decided to move on. It has been a great time, and I feel privileged to have been able to get to know and work with many wonderful people. During this time Vecna has experienced great growth and success, and I am sure will see that success continue in the future.

My last day will be Thursday, Sep 6.

I will remain in the DC area and so hope to see many of you around, and wish everyone the best.

- Dan

Dan,

Man, it's hard to believe you are leaving! You're one of the last of the elder statesmen of Vecna engineering. Well, I can't claim that we were close, but I have appreciated the technical expertise and experience you've shared and the guidance you've given to the projects I've managed. Thanks.

Good luck in your new endeavors.

Mike


Mike,

Thanks! i think that's the first time i have been called an "elder statesman". kind of frightening - but i'll take it as a good thing :-) . it was a pleasure working with you also on the few occasions we did, and good luck in the future.

-dan

So why does this exchange mean anything to me? At first brush, it's just a pleasantly mundane email exchange between two coworkers, one who's staying and one who's moving on.

Now for some back story.

When I first met Dan, I didn't really know what to make of him. I was just another new guy while he was clearly part of the engineering "in" crowd. I got the impression that he had important things to do and didn't really have the time to talk to someone new and relatively green like myself. As time went on, I never really made any inroads into the engineering "in" crowd, but luckily for me, I had other friends in the company that I knew prior to joining the company, so I managed to get along in spite of that handicap.

The thing is, in the early days when I joined Vecna, it wasn't the kind of place where a loner or introvert was likely to succeed. Getting into the "in" crowd wasn't just something to make the work day brighter, it was necessary to keep your job. Your daily work life was ruled by three big realities:

1. The "Free Market System" (FMS),
2. Your "Minimum Billable Requirement" (MBR), and
   
3. The fact that Engineering was king.

Now, in a lot of startup IT companies, the third reality is well-understood and is just taken as a given; however, the first two realities were both new to me. Having never been a lawyer or a consultant, I'd never experienced first hand the joy of trying to track every minute to one client or another in order to meet an imposed minimum number of billable hours to be generated each week. Furthermore, in spite of my general familiarity with and support for free markets and capitalist economics, I'd never lived with them as a daily reality.

But that changed when I joined Vecna.

You see, at Vecna, at the time that I joined the company, everyone had to shoulder the responsibility of ensuring Vecna's continued profitability by making their MBR every week. If you missed your MBR too many weeks in a row, you could expect to have an uncomfortable talk with the company president.

And how were you to meet your MBR?

Well, at the time I joined the company, you did it by participating actively in Vecna's FMS. You see, in the FMS, all employees are peers and free agents who make contracts with each other for work that they need completed. So how do you get work (so that you'll have some that needs to be completed)? You market your skills and experience to someone who has work that needs to be done. Assuming that they accept your offer, you've got work, and, if they don't, well, every hour that you spend hunting for work is non-billable and counts against you meeting your MBR. Oh, yeah, and the FMS -- it's completely unregulated, pure laissez faire economics.

So I think you get the picture:

• If you don't meet your MBR, you're out of a job.
• To meet your MBR, you've got be hustling every day in the FMS, competing against people who have already established their presence in the market place and can leverage their personal relationships.
• The engineering "in" crowd rules the FMS.

Now, imagine having that reality dawn upon you at about the same time that you realize that you are never going to be a part of the engineering "in" crowd. That was me about three or four weeks into the job.

So why am I telling you all of this when this post is supposed to be about me and Dan, a coworker who's now leaving the company and with whom I was never really all that close?

Here's why:

About that time (three or four weeks into the job), something happened that ensured I would never be all that close with Dan.

During my first job, my brother, who is just a year younger than I am and who matters a great deal to me, gave me a toy monkey. Nothing big, just a monkey with a banana on a string attached to the monkey's belly. It's made of plastic and is about two inches tall and an inch in diameter, and if you hang its banana over the edge of the desk, it will walk to the edge off the desk and fall off. Not all that valuable. Except to me.

Every job I've gone to since, I've taken that monkey with me. I've even given him a name - Mao. For a while, a coworker and I in my first job had a running joke about Mao. "Bow to the Moa!" We'd say to each other whenever anyone would call us for help and then we'd chuckle. We even took pictures of Moa, blew them up, and made a poster.

So you see, Mao was a big deal to me.

When I joined Vecna, they'd just recently moved to a new building and set up a cube farm on the second floor. Dan and I were assigned cubes in the same aisle directly across from each other, an arrangement that would seem insignificant, except for this fact: his desk was the closest desk to my own that wasn't blocked by a partition.

Why does that matter?

One morning, I came into work to find Mao broken in pieces on Dan's desk.

Well, you can imagine for yourself how I felt about that. Here he was, an accepted, even venerated, member of the "in" crowd who couldn't even be bothered to talk to me on most days, who had just assumed he could play with my monkey and now it was broken. AND HE HADN'T EVEN BOTHERED TO HIDE THE EVIDENCE!

I was fuming. All morning long, I thought about it. At this point, I was very familiar with my precarious position in the organization. But I couldn't let it go. HE HAD BROKEN MOA! Finally I dashed off an email telling him to leave the things on my desk alone and sent it before I could talk myself out of it.

Then I never heard a thing from him about it.

Now here's the trick of it all: One morning, a few months after I'd finally gotten established, I was watching the President's children playing in the office. It wasn't uncommon for them to be there because he is the President and his wife is the CEO, so the company and its offices are just an extension of their family home (something that was literally true when the company was first founded). Anyhow, as I watched one of them grab something from someone's desk, I suddenly realized I'd been totally wrong about Dan. He hadn't touched my monkey at all. I felt a great sense of foolishness mixed with shame.

But there was nothing I could do about it.

He had never called me on my accusations and he still hardly spoke to me, except when absolutely necessary. Suddenly, I could understand why. No doubt, I'd come across like some kind of paranoid lunatic, someone best to be avoided as much as possible.

And so much time had passed. I didn't really know how to broach the subject, and, besides, maybe he'd already forgotten the whole incident. I didn't really know. In any case, it seemed best just to let it be water under the bridge.

Except, of course, that you can't actually do that.

Every interaction that I had with him from that time forward was always colored by the fact that I'd once accused him of something he hadn't done and had never apologized for it. Eventually, as you can tell from the email exchange, we came to have a functional working relationship, but we never became friends or even just friendly coworkers.

So, you see, in a way, my email to him is an attempt to say "I'm sorry" and to acknowledge that I know he is a better person than the kind of person I accused him of being. I hope he saw it in there somewhere, hiding inside the mundane well-wishes of one employee who is staying on to another employee who has decided to go.

Good luck to you, Dan. I wish you well in your new endeavors.