Still there?It's not true that all my stories occur in 1995. Here's one from 2004.
I resigned from MPI in the middle of a huge project after doing everything I could to save it. Some people will have a different version of that sentence, and theirs may be more accurate, but that doesn't really matter anymore. I was a kid then and a bit idealistic about how companies and projects are run (still am, I suppose) and basically I had enough of office drama - I think my exact sentence was "This is no longer fun." As if that was the point of working in a multinational corporation.
Anyway, people had already known my intentions for a while, so when I tendered in my resignation it was immediately followed by the exit interview even if I still had 30 days to go. In fact I had two interviews: my team lead who was at the project site in Ortigas when I got to work, and in the afternoon with his boss who was in the Makati office. So after lunch I left my car in Ortigas, took the train southbound to talk to her.
The second exit interview took over two hours. Where she found the time out of her busy schedule I don't know. I'm way too honest at these things, and I can't stop talking.
This was on the 1st of October, and I had a night out planned in Metrowalk for the first day of Octoberfest. So by the time that the exit interview ended it was 5:30 PM on a Friday in Makati and I was without my car. And this part I remember quite well. I ran to the station and somehow (on a Friday afternoon) ended up on an empty train car. I made it to Ortigas in fifteen minutes. I asked permission to leave early (everyone else was doing overtime) and when it was granted I kissed my functional consultant thanks and good-bye.
I got my car and made it to Octoberfest with time to spare and got seats on the second floor balcony away from the crowds and spent the evening with cutest thing I've ever seen.
Now that was an awesome day, but somehow it's a day I don't want to happen too often.
In that second interview I had a gem of an answer to my boss' question: "What makes you happy?"
"The perfect Sausage McMuffin on the perfect Tuesday morning with the perfect girl listening to the perfect song."
(I said it was a story, I didn't say there was a lesson.)