Yesterday was my last day of work for my employer. I am officially retired, after 37 years of “Doing computers” for them.
Mildly interesting, I also got an email from past me via https://www.futureme.org/:
Future Me
The following is a letter from July 26, 2021, delivered from the past by FutureMe Dear FutureMe,
Friday I powered off 80 of 81 servers, shutting down GroupWise at work. My 25 year career as a GroupWise administrator has been on hospice care for seven months now. Night before last, I pulled the plug on it.
I was sad, of course. I don’t actually agree with those people who say on their deathbed that they regret spending so much time at work. I built things. The work I did made other people’s lives better. I loved that job (until it changed, and I no longer did). There is a lot of good to say for becoming really competent at a big old complex thing.
But, with my career in seven months of hospice care, I managed to get to the acceptance level in my stages of grief. I was great at something no one wants anymore. Such is life.
The whole Microsoft world is such a mess. These people have the attention span of a five-year-old, and it shows. Competent they ain’t. Well, the PowerShell idea was a good one. And they often do get the different cats in the herd to step up and at least try to define their interfaces. But overall it is a wild mess.
Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my non- GroupWise life. I hope something good comes along
P.S.: Did I call it? Microsoft now has their official Linux distribution: CBL-Mariner. Therefore, Windows 15 will really just be CBL-Mariner running WINE. 😉
Five years ago, I was motivated to pay off my mortgage as soon as possible. I started paying $2,000 per month to get to zero. This was accomplished in November of 2025.
I had to drain my cash reserves a lot. My financial advisor had told me that she wanted me to have $25,000 in cash in the bank when I retired. I calculated when that would be and picked a date. Later I had to move it a week to better align with the company pay periods. But it was a happy coincidence that my retirement date was five years after I was made to shut down GroupWise.
I had even asked my manager if they would have given me a golden handshake to get rid of me; he ran it up the chain of command, and they said no. But if the truth is to be told, I was a crappy employee these last five years because my heart wasn’t in it. I needed about $20,000 to pay off my mortgage, and if they had left my position unfilled for seven weeks, that would have offset it. Then there would have been additional savings, as it would have taken a while (four years) for the promotion chain to bump people up from step 0 to step 5 (to where I was). So I stuck around. I needed the cash.
I did do everything that was asked of me during the migration to Exchange Online. Not only that, but I even learned some of the features that Exchange Online has that GroupWise will never have. But man, search in Exchange / Outlook sucks. It should be an embarrassment to all of management at Microsoft.
I also ran the project to get rid of Proofpoint to go all-Microsoft. We lost capability there too. But even though it sucked, I did what I was told.
My retirement going-away lunch was great. My co-workers were super kind. They got me a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM. I hope they didn’t have to buy it new, because the price of RAM today is ridiculous, and it would have been too much money.
Another gift was a whole collection of Buc-ee’s steak grilling spices. I love it! I’ve never been to a Buc-ee’s yet, but I’ve been told that they are as large as a K-Mart used to be.
The cards people signed were enough to make a grown man cry.
I will be forever grateful for the path God put me on that let me be “The GroupWise Guy” for my employer for so many years.