There are already twenty signatures on the card and two inches of space left. How short is too short?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nOne sentence is plenty, as long as it is a sentence only you could have written. What reads as not bothering is almost never length; it is genericness. All the best followed by a signature is the line nobody remembers, and it takes up the same space as thank you for covering my first month here, which they will read twice. If the space really is down to a corner, spend it on a noun rather than an adjective: the shift, the account, the class, the drawer of spare batteries they kept for everybody. Four specific words outrank two vague lines every time. The one rule worth keeping is not to start something you cannot finish in the space you have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Does a short retirement message have to include a thank-you, or is a good wish on its own enough?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt depends entirely on whether you worked with them. If you did, thanks belongs in there, because a retirement card is one of the few times gratitude is expected rather than awkward, and leaving it out is noticeable. If you did not, a good wish on its own is the honest version and it reads better than borrowed gratitude for work you never saw. Somebody from another department writing thank you for everything you have done for me invites the obvious question of what that was. Wishing you a great retirement, from the third floor is short, true, and lands fine. The combination to avoid is thanks with nothing attached: thank you for all your hard work is the phrase people scan past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Half the card already says enjoy the next chapter. How do you avoid repeating what is written above you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nRead the card before you uncap the pen. It takes fifteen seconds and it is the only way to see which lanes are taken, because the first four people write about the future and so does the fifth. If the top half is full of new chapters and well-deserved rests, take the past instead: name one thing that happened, one problem they fixed, one habit of theirs you copied. Concrete memories almost never collide, because nobody else has your version of them. If the past is taken too, take the smallest detail: the mug, the handwriting, the way they answered the phone. A card where thirty people wrote thirty different things gets kept; one where they all wrote the same thing gets read once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In two sentences, do you look back at the career or forward at the retirement?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe shape that works is one of each, in that order. The backward sentence carries the specifics; the forward one releases them and stops the card reading like a summary of a life. Thank you for teaching me how to run a handover properly, followed by enjoy every slow morning of this, covers thirty years and the next thirty in about twenty words. Two backward sentences start to sound like a eulogy. Two forward sentences sound like a form letter, since the future is the part you know nothing about. And keep the forward half free of instructions: they are about to be told what to do with their time by everybody, and a card that joins in is doing the opposite of a favor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Do you sign a retirement card with your first name, your full name, or your team?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nSign with as much as they need to place you, and no more. If you sat near them for years, a first name is right and a full name is oddly formal. If you are one of several hundred people in the building, use your full name, because a card signed by eleven Mikes is a puzzle rather than a keepsake. Where you are from another department or another floor, add it in small letters after your name; that is the detail that turns an anonymous signature into a memory. A job title is the one thing worth leaving out, since it dates immediately and reads as though you signed on behalf of the org chart. If you worked on one specific thing together, name that instead of a title.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The card lands on your desk with twenty signatures already on it and about two inches of blank space left. Somewhere in that gap you are supposed to acknowledge thirty years. That is the real difficulty with a retirement message: not what to say, but how to say it in the room you have got. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":583,"featured_media":5278,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3724],"tags":[],"moimportance":[],"motype":[],"moformat":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5277","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-greetings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/583"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5277"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5281,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5277\/revisions\/5281"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5277"},{"taxonomy":"moimportance","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moimportance?post=5277"},{"taxonomy":"motype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/motype?post=5277"},{"taxonomy":"moformat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moformat?post=5277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}