I’m sitting in my office the day after my “last day” of work finishing packing up stuff and taking care of some final pieces of business – and I’ve just found a note about what triggered the decision to retire early in 2007.
We had been talking about it and moving closer to making a decision for a couple of months. There are a lot of things that went into the making the discussion, and I can’t really point to any one thing as a reason for retirement.
The note says: “April 30, 2007,” (the date I initially set for the final day of work), “Trigger was response in All Hands (meeting) to question about procedure compliance being impacted by manning issues.”
Without going into specifics, what I saw was upper management taking an employee”s question personally in a very public forum and going off saying that it had been positively determined that manning issues had nothing to do with the procedure compliance issues that had led to the meeting, which was NOT what I heard the employee asking about.
After that meeting, I expressed my frustration about managment’s response and other things on the phone with Karen, and commented that I was really tempted to just retire as soon as I could. Her response was, “Well, just plan on it.”
So I did – and subsequent decisions have moved it even sooner.
