Well, the time has come.  For months, one of my coworkers has been preparing to go off to business school (in China) and today was his official last day.  We’ve gone out to lunches, dinners, and even had a little in-house party.  We presented him with a cake, a card, a goodie bag, and an iPad!  All in all a pretty good sendoff, I’d say.  By now all the loose ends are pretty much tied up and his replacement, a friend of his, has been all trained up and is ready to take over his role.  Tonight, eight of us joined him at his place for one final shindig to send him off.  I’m glad that we got a chance to hang out one more time, since I was getting kind of sad at the end of the work day.

So by this point, all that was left was to spend some quality time with him before he flies off to a faraway land where Facebook and Google don’t exist.  Thankfully, we’ve got some techy guys who can set him up with a VPN account so he won’t be completely cut off from the world.  After all, he just got a Google+ account and what a shame it would be to set it all up only to never use it!

This time when we left him, it felt right.  We’d spent as much time as we could together and got some good old bonding in outside of the office, all of us just friends.  It’s the kind of camaraderie I was hoping for when I mentioned potentially setting up happy hour sessions after work.  It’s great to get to know my coworkers in a relaxed setting with no time constraints and it’s a pity we don’t do it more often.  I hope that it doesn’t always take someone leaving to get us all together.  And I hope that we’ll be able to stay in touch as our friend embarks on a new chapter in his life!