Note: This post is an approximate response to a challenge issued by Lorelle VanFossen over on her blog. She issues a weekly blogging challenge, and this was from a while back, but it basically asked that you write a “memoir of a moment”.
On a wonderfully warm spring day in March, many thoughts pass through my mind. I can remember the smell of the laboratory on my first day of work. My butterflies and sweaty palms almost return, as I recall that original excited anticipation of my first real job after graduating from college. Images of the people I met during that first day, people who would become lifelong friends, still roll across my mind like a “this is your life” movie projected onto a screen.
It is as if seven years’ worth of life events were compressed into a single day, and it happened just yesterday. The sounds of the automatic double doors that opened to the airlock separating the laboratory wing from the administrative offices, the lightly colored cinder block walls that created the corridors connecting the laboratories, the heavy oak lab doors. The feel of the white linen lab coat and the sound of my feet on the tile floor as I walk through the halls for the last time. The familiar ‘whoosh’ of the door opening to the walk-in cooler, and the pleasantly cool air inside, with metal shelving lined with petri dishes, small tubes, jars, bags and buckets, all teeming with life too small to be seen. All of this experience, all of this experiencing, would come to an end today.
My friends and co-workers had thrown me a farewell party some time before. I’d been asked to speak. I wanted to be eloquent or funny or just memorable, but it was all I could do to choke back tears and spit out the simple sentence “Thanks, I never thought I’d be leaving.”
With those seven words still echoing in my head, in that always-stupid-sounding noise that is heard when you listen to yourself talking out loud, I handed my security coded key card over to the woman who had hired me and was my supervisor still. For just a moment while we both had our hands on the card that had let me enter the lab for the last seven years, I didn’t want to let go. Then I did let go. I provided her with an official resignation letter, thanked her and said my goodbyes. With that it was over. I had reached the end of the day.
After a weekend to finish up moving my worldly possessions, I would begin my new job. Still in a laboratory, but instead of a small city I’d be located in a decidedly small town. No more microbiology, but natural products chemistry, science of a different kind. No more weekly group meetings, no more lunch in the company cafeteria to network with new people, no more friendly competition between different laboratories.
It was a different kind of job. It was a different kind of company. It was a different kind of laboratory. It was a different kind of town.
It was a different kind of day.
