The Leaving Email

Subject: Goodbye!

Hi everyone,

Today is my last day. Thank you very much. You are a great team. I am going to miss you. Please keep in touch.

Best wishes,
Maria

Subject: Goodbye and thank you

Hi everyone,

This is a short message to say that next Friday is my last day at the café. I started here two years ago, when I was 19. It was my first job and I was a bit scared. You all helped me a lot.

I have learned how to make good coffee, how to speak to difficult customers, and how to be quick on Saturday mornings.

Thank you to Anna, my manager — you taught me everything. Thank you to Marco, who always made me laugh on long shifts.

I am going to study at university in September. I am sad to leave but I am excited too.

Please keep in touch! My email is julia.r@email.com.

Take care,
Julia

Subject: Last shift on Saturday

Hi everyone,

It is half past three on a Tuesday, the kitchen is quiet for ten minutes, and Marek is shouting at the dishwasher in the back. So this is a good moment to write to you. As you know, Saturday is my last shift at the restaurant. I am going back to my home country to start a master's degree.

I started here three years ago, when I was 22. I had been in this country for two months and my English was much worse than I thought. I was given the easiest job in the kitchen and I was still bad at it. You were patient with me. You laughed when I broke things, but in a kind way.

I want to thank Anna, who taught me how to chop an onion properly and how to swear properly in two languages. I want to thank Marek, who always shared his food on Sundays. I want to thank Chef Daniel, who once told me, when I cried in the cold room, that everyone cries in the cold room in their first month.

I am sad to leave, and a bit relieved, and a bit excited. All three are true.

Please stay in touch — I am on Instagram and email.

Thank you for being my first family in this country.

With love,
Lena

Subject: Three years and a final shift

Hi everyone,

I am writing this on the bus home after my second-to-last shift, with a bag of leftover bread on my lap and a flat white I shouldn't have ordered at this hour. Saturday is my last day at Roselli's. I am going home to start a master's in September, which feels both very planned and very sudden.

I started here three years ago, when I was 22, two months after I arrived in this country. I had been told my English was good. It turned out my English was good for restaurants in films, and not for actual restaurants. I was very slow. I held knives wrongly. I once asked a customer if they wanted their soup 'medium-rare', as a joke that landed badly.

I want to thank Anna in particular. You taught me to chop an onion properly, and to take a deep breath before walking out into the dining room on Friday nights. You also told me, on my third day, 'You will be embarrassed for about a year, and then you will be fine,' which turned out to be precisely true.

I want to thank Marek, who shared his Sunday food with me when my pay had not yet come through, without making me thank him for it.

There are people I am not going to name whose unkindness I have learned from. I have decided not to be the kind of cook they were to me. That is a real piece of training, even if it is not the kind you put on a CV.

I am going to miss the kitchen more than I had planned to miss it. The neat departure I had imagined — small wave, taxi to the airport — is, it turns out, not what is happening. I am leaving a part of myself in the cold room, with the trays of half-prepared lemons.

Please stay in touch. The bread is for whoever finds it first.

With real gratitude,
Lena

Subject: A goodbye email I have been postponing

Hi everyone,

I am writing this from the bench in the lobby, with the security guard nodding at me each time he passes — Mr. Anim, whose name, to my embarrassment, I learned only six weeks ago, after eighteen months of cheerful smiles. I begin with him because he has, more than anyone in this building, taught me that I have been working with my eyes half closed.

Friday is my last day. The leaving email is, by now, a recognisable form, and I do not want to write the standard version of it: the affectionate list, the gentle reassurances, the closing flourish about staying in touch. I have read enough of these to know what the genre expects, and I do not, today, have the appetite for it. I have, instead, a few honest things I would like to put on record.

First, I owe specific thanks to Maya, who said to me in my second week, 'You don't have to know the answer; you have to know who knows the answer,' and who has now repeated this, at intervals, every time I have started to drift back into pretending. Second, I owe specific thanks to Daniel, who has, with a patience I now think of as genuinely radical, fixed every printer I have broken without making me feel small. The second of these debts is, in my experience, the rarer.

I want, also, to acknowledge — because the genre would prefer that I did not — that not everyone in this office has been a teacher to me, and that some of what I am taking with me has come from working out, over time, the kind of professional I do not want to become. I am not naming anyone; the people in question know the smaller parts of what they did, and I am, on reflection, quite finished with the energy that would be required to address it.

I am also going to admit something less flattering. I had imagined I would leave this place neatly — that I would write a short, controlled email, decline the leaving drinks, and walk out with my box of belongings under one arm. I am leaving with a slightly thicker throat than I had budgeted for, an unexpected number of small private goodbyes already said in stairwells, and the recognition that I have been more attached to this office than I had let myself believe. The neat departure was a story I told myself when I was 22 and trying to look composed.

There is a single piece of advice I would like to leave behind, and I would like it to be remembered if anything is. It is this: the small kindnesses you offer to the new starters in their first weeks — answering a stupid question without sighing, walking them to the canteen, knowing their name on day three — turn out, two years later, to have been more important than either of you realised at the time. They are also the part of an office that the official systems will never measure, and that is why they matter.

I'll be on my personal email — at the bottom — and I owe a great many of you a coffee in London. The bench in the lobby is, I have decided, my favourite place in this building. I would not have known to write that two years ago.

With gratitude, and a little embarrassment about the length,

Sam

Subject: With apologies and a final small confession

Hi everyone,

I have been writing and deleting versions of this email since Monday, on the bus, in bed, and twice during a meeting I should have been paying attention to, and I would like to begin by being honest about the abandoned drafts. The first was philosophical and pleased with itself. The second tried to be brisk, professional, and almost unreadable in its blandness. The third — the one I am now correcting — turned out to be too long, too literary, and faintly embarrassed about both of those things. I have decided, with some discomfort, to send the third anyway, on the working assumption that an email written under the wrong constraints is more useful than no email at all. Please skim the parts you find self-indulgent. There will be several to choose from.

Friday is my last day at the bookshop. I joined three years ago, when I was 22, after I had abandoned a master's degree in a field I am no longer prepared to name in mixed company. I had told the manager, at interview, that I would stay 'for the summer'. I am leaving, by my own count, ten quarters later, with an apology owed to her about the original timeline and considerable affection for the room itself: the dust on the philosophy shelves, the small electric kettle that has now produced something in the region of nine thousand cups of tea, the chair behind the till in which I have done some of my best thinking and most of my worst posture.

I want to thank Anna in particular. You said to me, in my second week, 'You are about to recommend a book you have not read; please do not do that.' You said it without irritation. I have not, since, recommended a book I have not read. The instruction has gone with me into adult life as a small ethical principle that has, on inspection, surprisingly wide application. I want, also, to thank Marek, who taught me how to talk to a customer who has come into the shop because they are lonely rather than because they want a book. The skill is, on the whole, more useful than I had imagined a bookshop job would teach me.

There are people I am not going to name whose unkindness I have, in retrospect, mostly stopped being angry about. I have come to suspect they were tired in ways the work could not address. I am not going to forgive them, because no one has asked, and forgiveness without an asking-for is a slightly fraudulent gesture; I have decided, more accurately, to spend the energy elsewhere. I record their existence here because to omit them would make the warmer thanks above harder to credit, and because the bookshop has been, like all real workplaces, an uneven institution, partly wonderful and partly difficult, and I would rather acknowledge the unevenness than pretend.

I must apologise also to Mrs Wynne, who has been coming into the shop every Thursday morning for the last two and a half years to complain, in detail, about the philosophy section, and whose first name I learned only last week. I had thought of her, with affection, as 'the Thursday lady'. She is in fact a retired professor of moral philosophy. I have, in eighteen Thursdays, missed the chance to ask her almost everything she would have known. I would like, in passing, to make a small public correction: she is right about Spinoza, and I have been wrong.

I had told myself I would leave neatly. I had told myself I would write a paragraph, decline the leaving drinks, and be elsewhere by six. The neat departure has not, on inspection, arrived. I am leaving with a thicker throat than I had budgeted for, an unanticipated number of small private goodbyes, and the slightly embarrassing recognition that the bookshop has been more important to me than I had let myself believe. The dust on the philosophy shelves is, in some sense, mine.

If there is a single line worth taking from this email, it is this: be patient with the new staff, especially in the first month, when they will be apologising for things that are not their fault and asking questions whose answers seem, to you, obvious. The patience you offer them now will turn into, in two years, the kind of colleague they become. It is, on reflection, the only training the shop has ever really given anyone.

With gratitude, with embarrassment, and with the dust still on my hands,

Lena