A Prodigous Resignation

I have a friend from college who lives in Hawaii. He works for a small engineering company.

Apparently the company has been having trouble making ends meet and has started laying off some of their employees.

My friend tells me the workers are obsessed about keeping their jobs. There has also been a lot of back-room hostility against some of the company leadership.

Anyway, one of the employees who was laid off sent out a company-wide goodbye email which I thought was worth posting here. I contacted the man to ask to reproduce it. He heartily agreed after requiring me to omit his name.

I sensed the tone of the letter was merely the tip of an iceberg.

To my fellow workers,
Aloha,


After graduating college I had no earthly chance of getting this job.

Still I heard an absurd voice in the back of my head -telling me to apply for it. I was afraid of getting let down, but the voice said, "Even if you lose this job, you will be taken care of."

And so I believed -not by earthly means- but by virtue of the absurd.

Many things have changed while I have worked at this site. One thing has never changed: I was in good hands when I worked here, and I will be in good hands when I leave.

Death has a strange way of removing masks. For this reason, people are usually taken at their word when they are in their final moments of life. As best I can tell, I am not about to die, but I will leave you soon and I hardly tempted to wear a facade before people I am not likely to see again. To this extent I swear by neither heaven nor earth.

If you believe I speak truly, then also believe that behind my business-like movements, my professional-sounding words, my casual-appearing glances was someone who believed in you just the way you were, who identified with your weaknesses and follies, and who suspected that good intentions were at work in you.

My time here has been amicable with most of you. Some I have loved as close friends, some as aquaintances, and others I have loved as enemies. Whether your relation to me was as friend or foe, I now confess the truth: that I have dearly loved you and prayed for you and your welfare under heaven.

I hope each of you comes to the place where you can personally see your job here as a chance to support your nation, your homes, and your neighbor. If you succeed in this effort, you will not find your job to be a sad burden or an unjust cost of living.

Tragedies may happen with or without your consent. If you are unable to succeed in seeing your job in such benevolent terms, I challenge you to remember this one thing:

The smallest act of kindness is greater than all the achievements of science, business, and academic understanding.

As I part ways, I ask only one thing for myself if you think of me.

When you work with someone here who seems lost, incompetent, hot-headed, a worker who means little to anyone, please extend to this man or woman the same kindness and generousity that you have extended to me.

I have made many mistakes here: technical, mathmatical, interpersonal, and others.

Perhaps one of my worst mistakes has been to look at our senior staff, our geniuses, and our leadership and say to myself, "These unsung heroes are the true causes of our success here as a business!"

They are heroes, yes, and too often they go uncredited.

But the true cause of our success (if any recognition belongs to any human here, and perhaps it does not) is that single employee who hides himself away in his closet and earnestly asks heaven for its blessing.

Whether such a worker is an engineer, a manager, a janitor, or a secretary, you should know, my friends, that such requests never fall upon deaf ears.

This reminds me of something a project manager once told me: that the best resource for any project was divine intervention.

He said it to me in such a way that I could not tell if he was making a joke about how unpredictable everything seems to be -or if he was betraying something elusive and in a perfectly serious attitude.

Thank you for the time you have shared with me. How undeserving of it I was!

May you always trust, may you always hope, may you always perserve, even to the extent that love never fails.


Mahalo,

Albert Anonymous