Dear Colleagues,

It is with a heavy heart that I say goodbye to you today. I wish you the best of luck in completing that shit show of a project that has basically destroyed my entire life. I must admit I feel a little guilty in leaving you to have to deal with the cluster as it explodes, while I get to avoid the hell that is sure to be paid when the project is late, over-budget, and the thousands of bugs are discovered. But due to my nervous breakdown and impending divorce (See, I’m not getting off scot free!), my doctor says I can no longer work here.

As you all know, I did my best as your teammate to warn management that considering the lack of resources (Due to the endless rounds of layoffs! What are we on now, four?), there is no way that this project can get done by the deadline that was established when we were fully staffed. Even with a full team, the deadline was a pipedream. Now that we are down to 30% of a team, it’s a joke.

But I know you’ll carry on as best you can, as you always have. You are strong people who have an amazing capacity for resilience (And nonsense!). I know you won’t let this defeat you, like it did me. And don’t worry about me – once I get the proper medical treatment and endure the however many years it will take to heal from losing my family – I will be free. It may be decades, but since I’m only 45, I probably have an ample amount of quality time left before my body starts failing in some dramatic way. It’s possible that if I stick with my health regimen, I could have up to two years of peace before I start dying.

I want you all to know how important you have been to me during my tenure here. I wouldn’t have been able to make it this long without you. It was your friendship that got me through – all those lunch breaks full of whispered conversations about how fucked up everything was – those meant the world to me. As isolated and broken as I feel now, I would feel a thousand times worse if I had had to endure the torture alone. We are brothers and sisters in arms. We’ve been through psychological torture together. Though our friendships will be severed now, we are bound together eternally in our collective remembrance of this horrible time in our lives.

Whenever you are feeling like you want to kill yourself during the daily check-in meeting or the weekly three-hour staff meeting, don’t ever forget what life is really about. It’s about relationships. It’s about leaving this world a better place than when you arrived. It’s about being part of a community. It’s about helping others. Don’t forget this, because life is short.

As for me, all my relationships are wrecked, and I can look forward to ruminating for the rest of my life about how I have contributed to the destruction of the environment and the exploitation of people by working for this unethical company, and how I’ve had to cut myself off from my community because after working 12 hours a day, I have all I can do to drive the two hours home and collapse in my bed, and how I can honestly say that I’ve helped absolutely no one while working here.

Life is short, and now that I’ll be unemployed and completely alone, I’ll have lots of time to think about how I’ve wasted most of mine making rich people richer by doing things that violate my personal values. I guess the consolation is just that – that life is short, so at least I won’t have to reflect upon these regrets for too terribly long. Here’s hoping there’s not an afterlife!

Well, IT is probably just about to shut down my email account and HR is probably on their way with someone from security to “escort” me out, so I’d better send this off.

Good luck to you all! You’ll need it ;)! And you can help yourselves to my office supplies starting… NOW!

See you on the other side (Hopefully!),

Pamela