Enough to make your eyes water

[muckefuck]

I didn't realise quite how much utopian_camorra's imminent departure was affecting me until this evening's meal. I was struggling to relay to monshu what he had told me about an intriguing dispute at our workplace and when the Old Man contradicted on a point, I just shut down. There's a lot I'll treasure from our working together, but as I told at the end of our lunch out, I felt like the culmination was when I was volunteering at the front desk and he was in charge of it. That felt like a real collaboration: He told me I was his most valuable volunteer--"someone who actually cared"--and I felt listened to and respected.

The contrast between that and the current regime is stark. I've learned to my cost they're not interested in consulting me about how to fix the problems there. What I didn't realise is that they haven't been consulting him--someone who ran it very successfully for six years--either. Why does every good thing get ruined? As monshu's experience shows, you spend years building something up only to see it fall into the hands of incompetents who run into the ground before your eyes. It was good that he got away from that and I'm glad UC is getting out, too. Yeah, there'll be problems at his new job, too, but as he put it he won't have all the "baggage" of a place he's worked at for fifteen years in various positions.