keep in touch
I found myself mulling over these words last night as I put away a
couple of cards from work. My job finished on Friday, budget cuts meaning release
of all temporary staff. People rooting for nice things to say in the awkwardness:
you’ll be missed
good luck
I will miss your cakes and medication (I always have pain
killers in my bag and it did not go unnoticed)
and
Yes there are some people from this workplace where effort will be made to stay
in touch now we are no longer in close proximity for 37 hours each week.
Yes some of the keeping in touch is guilt laden because of
the manner of release (please let us know where you go next so we don’t feel so
bad.)
Sometimes though these three words are tossed carelessly into the
air for something to say when we find ourselves at the uncomfortable point of
saying goodbye to someone and moving on. Because we don’t know what else to
say.
There is one person in my life for whom keep in touch is a diktat. Someone who
wants me to do runabout because they want a self-centred need to be fulfilled and this neatly
avoids them having to ask for help.
Over the years we have moved around a fair bit so I have encountered a number of farewells. I aim to try and only use keep in touch honestly and not throw it away. But I am sure that in reality when the goodbye moment arrives, there has probably a good deal of word-tossing.
Equally in the awkward, help-stop-this-scene-going-on-forever situations like last Friday in the office I genuinely have no idea what I said in those last minutes as I clocked out for the last time.
PS I am taking a few weeks off in the run up to a close family wedding before
resuming a search for new work
