The Best Way to Resign - No Kidding!
Having just been reading about the “more than bizarre” exit and resignation letter of Stewart Butterfield and Catherine Fake from Flickr, as well as about other interesting exits from companies on the Valley Wag blog, and having come across the more than amusing Yahoo Rezinatr web site - the quick way to draft a resignation letter to Jerry Yang - I was reminded of my own resignation antics some years back.
On April Fool’s day 2004 I drafted a fake resignation letter and emailed it to the entire company I was working with at the time. The fact that it was addressed to the heads of the company and none of them were included in the CC list was lost on most, as was the fact that it was April Fool’s day. I pity the one poor fool who rang the bosses at 630am to ask with trepidation: “Have you seen the email from Vincent?”
When the employees rolled up to the office at 7am, they found a desk, freshly cleaned and minus all my gear, along with other signs of my departure. Personally, I was enjoying a lie-in at the expense of a good joke, whilst I let them all sweat. I am sure that when I did finally climb out of bed and turn up to the office some hours later, more than just one or two of them were secretly wishing it hadn’t all been a joke.
Despite repeatedly telling my boss, prior, that there is “no such thing as a free joke” sic, ne’er a truer word has been said in gest, it still took another 2 years before we finally parted company, by mutual consent. That being said, the head of PR and marketing for the company was well impressed that I had been able to highlight major problems with the style of work and operations in an email to the entire company, and at the same time take a certain sting out of the tail by masquerading it as a so-called joke.
Anyhow, as I finished the email: “If it sounds too good to be true … It usually is!”
