Today is my last day at Best Buy. I'm pretty much emotionally exhausted with the many, many goodbye conversations I've been having. And yet...what does goodbye mean nowadays?
I see tweets from my BBY friends all day long in Twitter. I've friended a bunch of them on Facebook. I have all of their contact info in Gmail and my iPhone. It will be easier for me to connect with all of them after I've left than it was to connect with people inside companies I worked at earlier in my career.
As recently as 1995, my wife and I went to Europe for three weeks with our then-4-year-old daughter. We traveled with a collapsible stroller and backpacks, took the Eurail from city to city. It was a fabulous trip. But in terms of staying connected with people, we may as well have gone to the moon. No email, no mobile phones; we left our itinerary with relatives, along with phone numbers to the hotels we planned to stay at, but our departure was pretty much: "See you in three weeks. If our house burns down, don't try to reach us...it'll just ruin our trip."
In a remarkably short time, staying connected has become not just easy, but part of us. We're not separate from the network of friends, social networking sites and internetworked technologies we're plugged into.
So goodbye really doesn't mean what it used to. I'll know as much on a daily basis about many of my BBY friends - what they're thinking about, working on, having for lunch - as I have while working there.
There really isn't a goodbye any more, until that final, permanent goodbye which comes (hopefully) much later. And who knows? Maybe that one isn't really the same either. In 30 or 40 or 50 years, when my physical self conks out, how much of "me" will remain in the cloud? All of my filters, auto-replies, bots, time-released postings...will they continue to run indefinitely? Will some ghostly remnant of me continue to haunt my friends and taunt would-be marketers? Heck, maybe some of the marketing will work with my shop-bots and what's left in my PayPal account.
I'll turn in my badge today, set up my auto-reply email, drop off all my gear, bag up the last of my stuff, and head out for whatever lies ahead. But I'm done saying goodbye...that old idea just doesn't work any more.
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When I left BBY 7 months ago it was the same for me. I have remained very connected to all of the people I worked with. I still chat all day with them on gtalk and twitter yet now live 3,000 miles away. The world is much smaller now and will continue to be even smaller.
ReplyDeleteCouldn't agree more! Let's say hello to a whole new type of connected communication. Besides you have left your prints all over so many projects, and your wisdom with so many of us at BBY that you aren't really leaving. Your legacy will continue, and isn't that the whole point anyway! Shouldn't we all be striving to leave the place better then how we found it?
ReplyDeleteSee ya Monday in our new connected space! And I am on the hunt for the CS...so send another clue. Jennie