As of Friday, I’m an unemployed bum!

My last day at Mitel was short and sweet — I came in at 9, spent a couple of hours taking ssh keys out of root accounts and otherwise shutting off my access to standalone servers and anything else that would escape the standard departing-employee process, and then a bunch of us went over to Local Heroes for lunch and a few drinks.

My manager was off this week, so he drove in from his cottage near Brockville  for lunch. He brought a gag gift of “school supplies — construction paper, crayons, a kid’s backpack — plus a watch and pen set and a card signed by the whole department. After lunch he headed back to the cottage, which made the last bit of work a bit odd: I went back, did the rounds of saying goodbye, then left my laptop and Blackberry at his desk, dropped my access card off at HR, and headed out. Self-serve!

This is a long weekend, so the impact hasn’t really sunk in yet. It’s a bit weird not having a Blackberry, but it went off infrequently enough that I don’t really feel like I’m “not on call” yet. It’ll sink in on Tuesday.

School doesn’t start for another two weeks, so I’ve got some time to relax and prepare. I need to do some clothes shopping and talk to the bank but outside of that there isn’t a whole lot to be done.

This is the first time I’ve been without a job since midway through my undergrad, so it feels a bit weird. (When I left Concordia, where I was working full-time while going to school part-time and then just working full-time after graduation, I left on Friday, met the movers on Saturday, checked into my Ottawa hotel on Sunday, and started at e-smith on Monday.)

But now I’m a grad student. How weird is that?