Today was my second-to-last day in the Day Job. On 3rd January I’m hopefully* starting a two year career break, and so with the fortuitous combination of Christmas, non-working days and a concessionary day, my last day happens to be tomorrow.

I’ve spent the past two weeks at work frantically trying to get all the jobs I’m working on to a nice happy place where anyone taking them over will not have to wring their hands in despair. I am hoping someone will be taking them over, and they won’t be left in analytical limbo, but you never know, and without wishing to sound smug, after tomorrow I won’t give a Sage and Onion stuff.

I have one more task to do tomorrow, and I will no doubt finish by shredding another four inch-high pile of A4 paper. I spent much of today shredding. Every time I thought I’d finished, I found another pile that needed it. Of course, I could have left it all, but given the nature of my role I’d rather it was properly disposed of before I go so that in a few years’ time some poor sod doesn’t have to read through it all to decide if it’s important. It isn’t any more, although it was, once: all the notes, telephone analysis, annotated witness statements, timeline drafts, copies of analytical reports – all of it was exciting at the time, and fascinating: peeling away the layers of data to get to the nuggets buried within them, the facts as well as the inferences that can make the difference to an investigation. I loved working on these jobs. Some of them had good results, some of them had partial results, some of them ended up coming to nothing. But for all of them, I kept my notes – because for those that got away, there is always the likelihood that one day they would come back again.

And I’ve nearly finished shredding all that, knowing that, like me, every analyst  has a similar pile of notes for all the jobs they’ve worked on, and that sooner or later the ones that slipped through my net will be caught in someone else’s. You never know, in a few years’ time I might see a familiar face or two on the news, recognising that they finally made one mistake too many and got caught. I hope I do get to see that.

And so tomorrow I’ll finish off the shredding, and say goodbye.

*Hopefully by tomorrow HR will have got around to reading and processing the career break application – they’ve only had it for three weeks…