Chapter 6:  10… 9… 8…

I have had a “countdown” app on my phone since last fall when, amid exhausting work crises and a few dispiriting personal realizations, the notion of retiring at 55 took hold in my frazzled brain.

This app is my favourite time-wasting toy - literally. When I have had a crummy day, I would open it up and watch the seconds tick away, or sometimes recalculate work days versus calendar days and find new ways to compress the passage of time so that my final work day could seem almost imminent. 

This was something of a stretch since, when I started, I think it showed close to 400 days to go… but each passing second was a tiny notch of optimism that brighter days would come. And suddenly, here we are. My final 10 days of work as a public servant, as a diplomat - as a person with a job and somewhere to go in the morning.

Now that it is here - this dreamed for, longed for, meticulously planned for time - the weirdness is not in the leaving, but in the complete lack of sense of what I am actually supposed to be doing in this time before the actual leaving.

There is an impatient surrealness to each of these final days, like living in a metaphysical parenthesis that is waiting to be closed. Chris de Burgh would have me in a half-life, on that train between Guadalquivir and Old Seville, biding time until the final cards are thrown down, and I can move on. 

Well, in my head, at least. And I said lord, oh lord, you’ve got to win! The sun is down and the night is riding in. That train is still on time and my soul is on the line…

In reality (so overrated and lacking in glamrock musical numbers), I continue to review briefing notes, sit in meetings, find pithy things to say about budget management, and - apart from an obvious and nearly unbearable air of smug giddiness - I go through my day as if it were A Completely Normal Time. 

Which it so is not. 

When I try to picture what the respectable final working days of a dedicated public servant should look like, all I come up with is golf and gold watches. Not quite me. But what constitutes a good end-of-career victory lap these days? 

Maybe there should be a concierge for soon-to-be-retirees, hovering modestly in the doorway to offer a delicate throat-clearing when we entrap terrified staff with one too many stories of glory days (You should have seen that memo! They don’t make punctuation like that these days, I tell you!). The concierge would make us sign our forms and tidy our recycle bins, and then effortlessly guide us towards cake. 

Through a year of counting down, I probably should have paid more attention to making these last days count. One last lap around the photocopier. A final flattened, greasy grilled cheese from the cafeteria. The ritual deletion of a 10,000 emails.

I hear the faint, disapproving cluck of my concierge. Not one of these things matter, and focussing on passing the time is far inferior to filling it up. How much gratitude can I pack into 10 days? How many messages to let people know how they have made my life better  can I send in 1,440 minutes before I hand in my laptop? Could there ever be enough time to express what all this has meant to me?  

I really hope the concierge ditches the watch and brings me a stack of kleenex instead.

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