Flashes of Panic

Yesterday afternoon I went back to my old workplace. I managed to leave a framed poster in my office on my last day in August (oops,) and this was the first time I’d been back in Amherst when I could reasonably expect the office to be open (that is, weekdays.)

It’s a different place, of course; they lost their receptionist this fall, as well, and there are new people in the building. It’s slower to change than many places its size, though, because it’s a good place to work so people don’t generally want to leave. I collected the poster and stood in my successor, N’s, office door for an hour or so, distracting everyone walking by and answering the same questions. Yes, it was a lot of work. Yes, I miss being here (in the sense that I miss being able to shut off the office lights at 5 and leave the work behind.) Yes, school is the right place for me now.

One of the things that was brought home to me was how important it actually was for me to leave. Not that I was doing a bad job, but because I had stopped coming up with good solutions to the existing problems. It was gratifying to talk with N for a while and hear what he had planned for replacing the geriatric office server, among other things, and upgrading the web server I built. (I just deleted the phrase, “my web server.”)

He has some creative solutions happening, with a mix of rebuilt machines and new hardware, doing interesting stuff with a minimum of waste and expense. As I was leaving, I thought it was good that he took over, because he was getting things done where I was stagnating. It’s as though I needed to leave just so they could have someone new in the job.

It’s funny, but I have a way of picking good employers to be from.