Goodbye, Farewell and Amen

One more blog entry about TCS since today is my last day with the company.  What follows is a modified version of the article I wrote for the final company newsletter.  Thanks to the writers of the series finale of M*A*S*H for the exceptional title that I stole from them. 

The numbers are staggering when I think about them.  I started at TCS 9,573 days ago.  That means I’ve spent a significant part of 1,367 weeks engaged in the work of magazine fulfillment.   Figuring 40 hours a week minus vacations, holidays and whatnot, that’s over 50,000 hours spent inside TCS offices.  Few other places have had as much impact on my life.

It has certainly been an amazing journey.  On my first day, I learned I would be doing customer service for American Family Publishers and didn’t know what I was getting myself into.  Day 2 I was suffering from a bad case of food poisoning and forced myself to come in because I figured they would fire me if I didn’t.  (I’m glad I did!)  Around Day 90 I had to tell someone for the first time that they were not the Ten Million Dollar sweepstakes winner.  Day 900 or so is when I joined the Marketing Services team, began interacting with clients and really started to learn about the business of fulfillment.  It was near Day 1,800 when I became a junior programmer, and about 1,000 days later I was the first person to sign in to the COSMO multi-title fulfillment system after being the point person for building it.  Sometime around Day 3,600 I took over responsibility for the billing and renewals programming area and life got busier.  It was probably close to Day 6,500 when the powers that be dared to let me host Customer Service Day for the first time.  Standing in front of the entire company trying (and hopefully succeeding) to be entertaining was a trip every time.  Work also took me on more literal trips.  Back on my first day I never could have imagined that 8,000-ish days later I would be traveling to India as part of my job.  What an experience!

It was Day 9,234 when we were told that TCS was closing down and that in another 365 days or so it would be gone.  When something has been a part of you for so long, it’s hard to imagine life without it.  I know I will miss my job and the sense of accomplishment it brings.  And definitely the paycheck too!  But what hit me more than anything else between that day and today is that I won’t see the people I work with all that much anymore.  Your co-workers become like an extended family over time, especially at a place like TCS where the tenure rate must be higher than almost any other company around.  Like any good family, you don’t always see eye to eye with everyone, but still come together for the common good.  You get to know people’s strengths and how you can lean on them for support.  You help them through their weaknesses.  You laugh with them.  Sometimes you cry with them.  They become a part of your life in a meaningful way that will be hard to replace.  There is no doubt it’s the people I will miss the most.

It was probably around Day 4,000 when a friend told me I was lucky to have my job.  They had seen me grow in my career over the years and lamented that their place of employment did not offer the same kind of opportunity.  At the time I probably didn’t take the words all that seriously.  I might have said “I guess so” or some other non-committal response.  But thinking back on it now, my friend was absolutely right.  I was damn lucky to have my job.  I worked at TCS.