Has anyone done one of these? HR called my boss and set up an exit interview on the 25th, my last day. I'm highly suspicious of these folks after thirty years of watching how they work. I'm leaning toward telling them I don't care to participate.
I think that a couple of years of ER will make the HR exit interview fade from significance. It might even be possible to later regret a few utterances that seemed appropriate at the time.
My feeling was that if I couldn't take the responsibility for trying to fix the problems as part of the work force, then I couldn't enjoy the privilege of throwing hand grenades on the way out the door.
About halfway through my career I had a raving sociopath for a supervisor. I'd like to think that the painkillers for his chronic medical condition contributed to the problem, but that's a pretty flimsy excuse for his behavior.
Nearly a decade later, as I was on the final months of my tour at my retirement command, he became the CO. I was ready to take up the offensive again but then I realized that there was nothing he could really do anymore to affect my quality of life. I'd built up a pretty strong network at the command and as long as I didn't overstep my rank then I had more support than he did. We spent the next 18 months together mutually ignoring each other. I didn't even bother to submit a retirement fitness report, and he didn't bother to ask about it.
As I learned more about his family, I realized he'd had nearly two decades to do to them what he'd only had a few years to do to me... and he was reaping the rewards for his efforts. Not only that but his medical condition had thoroughly had its way with him and he was doing everything in his power to make it even worse. For example he was advised to take a couple weeks of bed rest to enable infusions of antibiotics to help clear up a staph infection in his hip implant. However he felt that the command would grind to a screeching halt if he wasn't in the CO's office every day between 7 AM and 5 PM. So a month later the surgeon literally removed his implant. His self-imposed karma was its own reward.
During my exit interview I told him I had nothing for him. I'd enjoyed my career and I was looking forward to my retirement. Aloha oe.
A few years later the DoD's investigative service called me to update his application for a security clearance. I have no idea why he'd put my name down for a reference, but I assured the interviewer that I felt the best thing was to say nothing at all.
I do, however, have a Google Alert set for his name...
). Still, I knew I was never going to need any more bridges, so to speak, so I answered the questions truthfully.
