A woman in Chicago wrote an out-of-office email reply in a single afternoon in 2022. Three years later, it has been screenshotted, framed, quoted at conferences, and read aloud at a friend’s wedding. It is the best writing of her career. She wrote it in forty minutes. She has been trying to make peace with this.
A woman in Boston drafted a beautifully composed resignation letter in 2019. She has updated it forty-seven times. She has not sent it. The letter now lives in her drafts folder like an annual Christmas card — refined, never mailed, present.
A senior executive at a Boston firm discovered that her executive assistant — who she had been emailing every workday for two years — was actually three different contractors in three different time zones. The work was excellent. HR had not encountered this situation before.