I give notice and someone else quits first

I give notice and someone else quits first

I never realized how soul-sucking working for that school district could have been until I saw how other people reacted to certain things. I had been going back and forth as a contractor and then a full-time employee, but the whole time they weren't paying me much. At some point, I needed more, and they weren't about to do that, so I decided to leave.

One Monday morning after deciding what would happen, I went in and met up with my friend the webmaster. He was the only other person in the whole place who really got the whole Unix/Linux thing and appreciated the non-evil ways to do things. We had done some cool things together, including a couple of programs written in good old C to do things for our users.

Anyway, I turned to him and said "hey, want to be the sysadmin for an entire school district?". He asked "which one?" because there were about a dozen in our area and I might have been talking about any of them. I said just "this one". His eyes got wide and the wheels started turning.

I told him that I had just given four weeks' notice, since I planned to move at the end of the month and had just made the decision that weekend. I was going to be leaving the area entirely, so there would be no more hanging out and working on cool things together.

His response was to go walk down the hall and give his notice to the boss. He actually gave the standard two weeks. Apparently, things had been so dull and annoying the whole time, that he didn't want to face it alone. I don't blame him. With me gone, he would have been surrounded by the weenie "network engineers" who ran the Windows side of the network.

This led to a very strange situation where we had a combined going-away party of sorts of his last day two weeks later, but then I came in to work for two more weeks after that. I had started the whole thing, but he had gotten out first.

That should have told me something right then and there. Unfortunately, I was too inexperienced to notice and act before that point.