Two Pleasant Goodbyes ... and Awkwardness!

Today I slept a lot during the daytime. I have still been stress-sleeping (i.e. still worrying about things while I'm sleeping), and because I over-ate a bit had a few nightmares, so it wasn't perfectly restful.

But in the morning we all went as a family to vote in the referendum about strengthening Berlin's climate neutrality commitments and advancing the deadline for meeting these commitments to the year 2030 instead of 2045. Afterward we went for ice cream: I had a waffle cone with a scoop each of lemon gelato and yoghurt-cherry gelato.

Last Thursday I had a goodbye event with the colleagues who speak to our clients and then let us know what they need from us, and vice versa. We ate cake together quietly in the office dining area, and we exchanged presents and chatted. The fudge that they gave me is all eaten up now, but there's still a pretty bouquet with eucalyptus, a sunset-coloured chrysanthemum, pink baby's breath and other flowers in it on the windowsill in the kitchen.

On Friday, we had a scheduled question & answer session about the many colleagues departing the company, with two higher-up managers. We had a few technical issues and started late, and the team also didn't submit any questions. So I moderated the discussion and asked the questions that I thought might be on my team's minds. It was extremely tough.

I was quite tired of euphemistic, official explanations of why x or y colleague had left. These always gloss over the severe mental health problems that working in our company in its current state has caused for at least three people I know of, plus self-reported exhaustion of five or more further colleagues.

The official explanations also never acknowledge that not everyone can skip from one job to the next. I decided not to mention this during the meeting, but in my early 20s I was suicidal for several months because of the strain of unemployment. I definitely did not hop out of this job lightly. What I also didn't mention is the impact on family and friends of someone being dissatisfied with their jobs or jobless: I remember whenever my father left a job because he couldn't stand it there any more; it was so bad to witness as a little girl who was fond of him, that I realized as an adult that I had absorbed a deeply fearful mindset about jobs in general. And I've also been worrying constantly about friends who have been pushed out of the company purposely or through the force of their own annoyance, who haven't found new jobs yet.

So I took the risk of sounding a little insane. I introduced the session by saying that job dissatisfaction and unemployment are closely linked to people's sense of self-worth, and that unemployment can lead to suicidalism, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, as well as loss of residency and broken relationships for people who are not EU citizens. In short, we were talking about serious issues here. My voice was all shaky, the acoustics weren't working well in the room, and it was deeply embarrassing. Besides I'd happily repressed my unemployment years and was feeling a bit shaken by the resurgent memories lately, although I've been putting a cheeky and happy public face on my new employment liberty. But at the same time I felt that, although I needed to avoid putting emotional pressure on managers who are already under pressure, it was important that I loyally represent the colleagues who had left, and also respect the truth.

Then I invited teammates to mention colleagues who'd left whom they'd personally known, while acknowledging that for some of us we didn't know them that well and that I wished to represent both perspectives. Crickets. So I mentioned four colleagues myself and gave a brief tribute to each, and then suggested that we concentrate on discussing the case where three colleagues left from the same team.

Fortunately, the managers did not seem angry or upset at me for the way I started the conversation. (I was also scared of risking our friendly relationship.) In their answers, they respected the privacy of departing colleagues while explaining fairly accurately why these colleagues departed.

The managers also frankly addressed my next question: for any of my teammates who might depart in future, would it be possible that their work messenger accounts would just be deactivated from one day to the next, without any goodbye email or announcement beforehand? (The answer was, highly unlikely; this is done in other parts of the company, certainly, but they don't like the practice and aren't involved in it except for colleagues who asked to leave quietly.)

Then 25 minutes were up. I thanked the managers for appearing in the call and answering the questions, and then I opened up the floor to any more questions for the remaining 5 minutes. There were none, except a bit of pleasant banter, which indicated some emotional catharsis.

Afterward, three of us teammates and one of the managers went out to a Vietnamese restaurant and then to a bar, and chatted about work and plans for the future. It was candid and friendly. It also was a little sad because, had the team been able to speak directly to the manager all along, I think that developments might have been better. I'm rarely taken seriously when I try to present summary of the spectrum of views across the team; but one-to-one conversations with teammates seem to carry conviction.

But while it's a glib joke to make, it feels like many (not all) of us are living in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, while the management sees Thomas Kinkade.

I know that taking risks is good for the character; but I absolutely hate it, especially as I'm a natural lily-livered coward and am practically drowning in vulnerability and fear beforehand. It's not much comfort if colleagues call me brave. In the end it feels egotistical: I'm just making everyone uncomfortable because I'm weirdly determined to carry out an inconvenient impulse and foist it on everyone else.