...I knew they were coming, but I think I sat in a state of denial for a while. As some readers may already know, there's been a change of officers at my company. I've known that it was coming for months since my boss announced to us well before the end of 2005 that he was going to retire. But it's not something that I've been able to discuss because of my position in the company and the visibility of his position. After all, when you work for the COO, it's not like you can pour your heart out in your blog and say he's retiring. Especially when it's not been announced to the rest of the company and you're paranoid to begin with. After all, blowing a 7 year gig by being stupid and mentioning it in your blog, having the rumors circulate through the blogosphere and hitting the press before the company announces would be a Very. Bad. Thing.

So I've suffered in silence, with the exception of telling a couple of very close friends because I needed to talk to someone other than DH about it as I watched candidates come in and out.

About a month ago I found out who his replacement was going to be, and to me it was just another name on a piece of paper. Nothing special, no matter where he came from or why we hired him. The new guy went through his initial week at a group of meetings at Sundance, and I met him at the studio party the company was involved in. He seems like a nice enough guy, and we'll probably get on quite well (his wife, who I met at the same party as I did him, seems to think we'll do fine). But I didn't have a 1/1 with him that first week, and I was a bit confused as to what my position in the company really is. Do I report to him? Is there another change coming? After all, when I was introduced to him he said he didn't have someone with my name working for him. And paranoid me figured that must mean I am not long for employment here.

But yesterday morning that all changed. A small digression: it was really timely that I posted the lyrics to Chicago's "Feel" yesterday - I pondered them quite a bit yesterday morning.

Yesterday morning, my soon-to-be ex-boss cleaned out his office of all his personal stuff. And he officially passed the torch to me as the keeper of all that is data related. I'm training someone at the moment who is eager to learn to back me up on these metrics that I keep up so that they don't fall into decline should I take time off from the company, and she's doing a really good job so far. She's not ready to turn everything over to her (and that's not what we're going to do anyway -– she's just going to take a few of them daily and we'll trade off so that they get done more quickly and so that I can work on other data requests). My soon-to-be ex-boss told me this morning to make sure I schedule my own 1/1 with the new boss because the new guy will forget to do it and needs to be kept abreast of the data. He also mentioned that I need to make sure to do some trimming on the biggest of the models because it needs it.

I think the thing that floored me, cheered me, and almost sent me to tears was this: He told the new guy that if he needed anything data related at all, to ask me specifically. Because I would know where it is. He's right about that - I would know where it is because I built a lot of the models where data is stored. And anything I didn't build, I pretty much know inside and out. Shortly after that, he gave me a hug and I thanked him for everything. For all the challenges, and the education, and everything else he's pushed me to do over the last 7 years, because it wasn't "all that much", as he said. It was a lot.

It's my entire career here, and now I have to carry it on without him here. I am the owner of all the data models, including the ones he's left behind. I'm the master tinkerer, analyst, and fixer of all that is in those models. It's not like I didn't own them before - it's that he was always tinkering and finding ways to refine them, and asking me to make changes to something that I'd just built (but he was right with those changes, because they made the model better). I know he's going to be around for another 6 weeks, but it's still hard because I know that I have to depend on solving any issues that crop up without depending on going to him if I can't figure it out. And knowing that I own them. May the powers that run the universe help me if there's something that goes south that I can't figure out.

As someone else said when I recounted the conversation to him that the soon-to-be ex-boss and I had, "Job security for life - don't give away the keys to the kingdom." Come on, if I don't let someone play with the keys how am I going to get better sets of keys. But the point is this: I don't think that I need to worry about who I report to, or how long I'll be employed. The paranoia about that is temporarily quelled - at least until I read something else into the data set.

Geez, this is harder than I thought it was going to be, even though I'm in control of the changes and modifications that I want to make. I even ran a couple quickly past the soon-to-be ex-boss and he nodded and told me to have fun. I spent part of yesterday sitting in my office trying to figure out how I feel about the whole thing. Am I scared? Little bit. Sad? Yeah. Happy? Yeah. This is an opportunity and an adventure. Yet, I still want to cry and cheer at the same time. My boss is finally taking some long deserved time off -– but he's also leaving us and the workplace. He definitely deserves it, and I know it's just my little bit of selfish that's sitting here in this blog - I don't want him to go, even though I know he has to. I already miss him and he's not even close to gone...

...and it's time for me to stretch my wings yet again because the sky is the limit.