Well, it's a day that I have been counting down to with sadness. My longtime co-worker, teammate, partner, colleague, and most importantly friend is retiring. Ronald "Coop" Cooper has been my teammate for about 11 years now. We have been a team of many and a team of two. While I was on maternity leave he was an amazing team of one. He will be missed!
We put together a surprise party for him. He planned a going away lunch earlier in the week and invited all his friends to say goodbye. That's what he thought was happening. Well, little did he know, we had spent a month sending around a memory book to all the different sites we work with all over the nation. We had another book circulating through the Layton site. People donated money for gifts and we were able to buy him some really nice stuff.
He had mentioned that he had a bunch of vinyl but nothing to play it on so we bought him a record player. Then we had lots of other money and gifts cards so we were going to put together a race car gift basket. (Anyone that knows Coop knows he is a racing fan). Well we went to buy the gifts at Target (because of the gift cards) and they hadn't received their racing shipment yet. So we wandered the store to find ideas and finally decided to buy him a digital camera Donna, another co-worker, decorated his desk that morning so he thought it was pretty neat. When he left for lunch we went into action. We pulled out the gifts and the cake and had some of his friends sneak into our office. The biggest surprise of all though was his camera.
I opened his camera and pretended it was mine. I took tons and tons of pictures of him. Then at the end of his day we had someone take a picture of Me, Coop, and Donna. Then I turned around and said, "Coop, this is full of your memories and it's yours." He was so surprised and he was overwhelmed. It was so fun to be able to surprise him like that.
Coop - Thanks for being such a great guy! I truly miss you but wish you the best. Enjoy your time! You deserve it.
No comments:
Post a Comment