Some people are good and kind. Others take those qualities to a different level. That’s Jean. She ‘retired’ today after thirty years (and nine months) with our company. I say ‘retired’ because as any fool can see, Jean is nowhere near ready to retire. She’s full of verve and life.
Although not quite technically there at the very beginning, she was certainly in the company when it was in its infancy compared with the huge corporation we’ve become. She joined in the days when our founders were very much a part of the day-to-day team. Apparently (so I heard today) she walked in off the street with her young son one day and walked out again with a job starting the following Monday. I can quite believe that of Jean. She’s got so much ‘get-up-and-go’ in her that I’d have been surprised if any other outcome had occurred.
I’ve been friends with her since I joined the group in 1993, at which time of course she was an ‘old stager’. I always feel as though I’ve been in the company since the early days but the truth is that we were already set on the path to growth when I joined. About six months or a year before I joined, the company had acquired another Market Research agency from the estate of the late Robert Maxwell, AGB. I started my career at AGB in the late 1970s so two of the three companies I’ve worked for over my career are now one company.
Jean is one of the loveliest souls I know. Nothing is ever too much trouble/time/effort/whatever for Jean. She knows no such words as ‘I can’t’, because she certainly can! She has been kindness and light to me over the years and I will miss her dreadfully partly for her smiling face when she sees me come into view and partly as someone who ‘knows a man who can’.
Anyway, Jean was, for the last ten years or so, secretary/PA to my friend John – remember him, I wrote about his illnesses in 2004 and 2005. John hasn’t been at work now for a very long time so Jean too is moving on.
We’ve (all us ‘old-stagers’) been to a do in Jean’s honour tonight, celebrating the happy times and forgetting about the recent months of misery for her. I have had the time of my life, meeting up with people who I rarely see now because they’ve moved on (Christine and Kate as two examples) as well as people I rarely see for other reasons. I had such a fabulous evening, one of those occasions when you look around and feel as though you belong. In my life, that’s happened rarely.
I even got to meet the other member of the ‘gang of three’ who formed our company, Liz Nelson, whose name the company still bears. I’ve known Hugh and Tony (the other two members) since I joined but Liz had already moved on by then. She is some woman, a real human dynamo and amazingly charismatic.
Probably most encouraging was seeing John, who, despite being quite poorly, came along to say goodbye in a work sense to Jean, though he’s having coffee with her tomorrow morning as he has done twice a week ever since his stroke over two years ago. It was great to see John and he looked pretty good to me, though he’s still struggling to recover from his cancer. As soon as he arrived, Jean started clucking around him. Typical Jean. That’s a demonstration in the most positive of senses about our Jean. Since John’s illness began, she has seen him twice a week, never missing and never out of duty, simply because she cares so deeply about the man who has been her boss for a number of years. What a lady.
So, this is my toast to Jean, who has pledged to stay in touch with me.
May sunshine fill your world!
Morris the tin miner was last year's subject.
