And, in the end...

The school district just e-mailed me a lifetime pass to all events there (whoopee!) plus a $50 gift card for Crossgates Mall. Also, a copy of a speech I assume my old boss wrote and recited on their staff/retirees recognition day, which I chose not to attend.

It sounds like an obituary! Yeesh! Parts of it are very nice- the teachers, I've been told- Did love me... I can tell my boss wrote this because he was clueless about a lot of things, especially me, and I hardly ever saw him, except at meetings, where you couldn't get a word in edgewise if you wanted to.

I've never been accused of being an extrovert, but the co-workers I liked and of course, the teachers, I don't think, had nearly the difficulty he had in "starting a conversation" with me. I was actually quite comfortable around most of the people in the school district- other than the boss and supervisor. The "obituary" makes me sound like the epitome of the quiet computer nerd who can only talk and think technology.

Oh, yeah- it was more than 600 computers, and there were a lot of people involved too- who I advised, made recommendations to, broke the rules for, made house calls to help them with their home computers. It's odd that after 9 years I was the only one in the Tech Dept. who really knew anything about Macs (not my fault)- and they're still trying... (Luckily the teachers and some students took some initiative themselves..)

My replacement walked off the job after one month, and his replacement was just fired.

I'm pleased not to be there, I had a good run, and I'll consider this "obituary" a good reference for my next job:


"Mitch Sternbach

Mitch was loved by the people he worked with. He was quiet and competent and worked long hard hours to make sure the Macintosh computers in the District were working well. Mitch was our only Macintosh technologist and he maintained about 600 computers. Although it was tough to start a conversation with Mitch, when you engaged him in conversation you always left amazed by his depth of knowledge and understanding of how computers worked. When it was announced that Mitch was going on medical leave- everybody's first thought was "What are we going to do for Mitch?" not "How are we going to survive without Mitch fixing our computers?" Mitch was loved by the people he worked with. We wish him well."