8:50 AM – Settled in for my second-to-last day on the job I’ve been at for five years and four months. I have had by longest tenure, by far, here. So, while I have experienced many last (two) days, this one is different. All of my pet photos are off my cubicle walls. I have a few papers to sort through, but most of what needs review, at this point, exists on my hard drive. If there are any important documents that exist on my PC but not up in network space, I’ve got to get them uploaded. I do have a sincere desire to do all I can to “transfer knowledge” in these closing moments. It’s been a difficult slog at times. I do hope things go smoothly for those I’ve worked with. I do hope that, in retrospect, my efforts are appreciated. I realize that much of what I’ve done may be figuratively thrown out in the next year or two; this is unfortunate, but a reality of work in the IT field.

9:30 AM – Have successfully gone through My Documents root. Now for the subfolders…

Everyone asks me, “Are you taking any time off in between?” When I say that I’m not, people seem surprised, since, aren’t you supposed to? “Don’t you have any sick days?” someone asked. Everyone means well, but I wanted to explode here. I’VE BEEN SICK FOR THREE YEARS. I had over two weeks of vacation time stored up by early 2008. Then I got a kidney stone that eventually required surgery. I lost all of time right there. Between kidney failure fatigue and three fistula surgeries, I wound up veering into negative numbers for time-off. Since I’ve been on dialysis, I pretty much have used sick and vacation time as I’ve accrued it. Thus, I take an occasional three-day-weekend and that’s been it. Oh my God, I’d love to take two weeks off to just chill before I start my new job. But I needed to give a month’s notice here; my new job wanted me to start asap; and I can’t afford to have no income coming in for any length of time. I am so thoroughly exhausted…but no time off. A four-day Thanksgiving weekend is approaching. I will watch West Wing DVDs in my living room while my cats eat their Roasted Turkey Fancy Feast.

2:00 PM – Lunch at Toast was so very, very good. I wish I had made the very short walk to Main Street more. I’ve gone through all of my documents and uploaded the relevant ones to our wiki or emailed them to my teammate. My desktop is essentially cleaned out. All of the cabinet drawers are essentially cleaned out. I have a five-year-old box with what appears to be 500-or-so business cards. I think I’m progressing well toward a goal of being essentially done by the end of the afternoon, where tomorrow can be a no-stress day.

4:00 PM – Real work to do because of something I bungled. Learned something from TM—F2 allows you to edit an Excel cell directly in the cell, which I never, ever know after all of this years.

5:15 PM – It was not a stress-free afternoon since a query I had used to help migrate some data neglected to include 5% of instances. I had to scramble to fix that. But with “that”, I did manage to finish up a task I had been anxious to get done for five years. I had to manually tweak some data, and in doing so, I saw the names of individuals and groups that had flickered on my screen these past five years. I’ll have an entirely new set of names and groups and terminologies and screens to look at starting Monday. I think I’ll be relieved.