Goodbye to work

So having made the decision to leave, the last few days were quite a rush, with lots of things to get finished off and everything left tidy. John finished almost at once but I still had to do another week in order to leave things in the best possible state as I didn’t really have anyone to hand over to. Poor Fatima was very upset at the news as we both enjoyed working together and as this was her very first job she had presumably hoped to learn more from me. However, she knows much better than me, how to make things happen in this different culture and she is much more confident about expecting people to do things for her. I suspect that many of the things of a more strategic nature, that I tried very hard to do, will be left undone as not being as important as corporate gifts and basic Power Point slides! We spent quite a bit of that last week looking at pictures of gold and silver plated falcon’s heads which the boss wanted to buy as VIP gifts. What surprised me was that I engaged in several meetings about these items and only stopped to think that it might be funny when I was telling John about it later! I also got a lashing from the boss because some Power Point slides he wanted were not available because the companies concerned had refused to tell me anything about themselves! So secret they didn’t even want to tell me what they did so the chances of being able to put briefing slides together was pretty remote but it didn’t stop him questioning the point of having a marketing department. It all helped me to feel quite sure that the decision to leave them to it was the right one – especially in the final days when he suddenly asked me to present something with 20 minutes notice on Emirates Skills. A project I’d worked on weeks before but assumed had gone the way of the Institutes of Technology work and hadn’t bothered to put the final presentation together. Still Fatima and I did manage to get something quite creditable together within the hour but by that time he’d lost interest
It was sad saying goodbye to Fatima and to several other colleagues from the subsidiaries, especially Al Shaheen and their new partner Dascam. I collected some very nice emails and promises to stay in touch including from Ali and Ibrahim, impressive young Emiratis who I hope will be able to realize their potential in an organisation where there is so little delegation to the younger generation.