What to Write in a Retirement Card
The card has been going round since Monday
It has got fourteen signatures, six “all the best”s, and a drawing of a golf club by someone in accounts who has never once seen this man hold a golf club.
Retirement is the easiest card in the building to write and the one people fumble most. The reason is small and it is this: it is the only office card where you are allowed to take the mickey straight at the person, and almost nobody uses the permission.
Nothing has been taken from them. They chose this. They have been counting down for two years and have told you the number of days more than once. They will be more offended by a bland card than a rude one.
Three questions before you write anything
1. Did they pick the date, or did the date pick them?
This is the only question that really matters and it takes ten seconds to ask someone who knows.
A voluntary retirement is the safest occasion in the whole calendar. You can call them old, call them work-shy, tell them the place will run better without them, and it reads as affection every single time.
Somebody pushed out at sixty-three, or stopping because their back finally went, is having a completely different Friday. The exact same joke lands as a boot. Same words, opposite card. If you do not know which this is, find out before you write.
2. Is it the end of the work, or the end of the working?
Half of them are consulting by March.
“Enjoy doing nothing” is a small insult to somebody who has already lined up three days a week somewhere else, and it is a fair bet with anyone who has run their own thing or been self-employed. If they have talked about “keeping their hand in”, believe them.
3. Is this the collection card, or your own?
Twenty desks means it gets read out at the do, by someone holding a warm glass of white wine, in front of their partner.
Write for that room. Not for a private note, and not for the version of the joke that only works between the two of you.
Why every funny retirement card is about golf
Worth saying plainly, since we are in this business: the reason the shelves are full of golf, gardening and putting your feet up is that those cards are written by people who have never retired and can only picture the leaflet.
The good line is never about the hobby. It is about the twenty-nine years. Or the alarm clock. Or the fact that they know exactly how many days it is and have told everyone in the building, including the contractors.
Aim at the length of service, the daily grind, or their own smugness about escaping. Not at a sport they may well have never played.
Signing the collection card
You get one line and about four square centimetres. Most people spend it on “All the best!” and an exclamation mark, which is the card-writing equivalent of a nod.
- Thirty-one years. I’ve been here four. Feels rude signing this.
- Right. Off you trot.
- You’ve done more Mondays than any person should. Go.
- All the best. Don’t answer if we ring.
- You made it to the end. Not everybody does.
- Well played on the long game. That’s the whole trick.
From someone they trained
This is the one that gets kept.
Nobody ever tells the person who taught them the job that they taught them the job. They assume it was obvious, or that it was years ago and does not need saying. It was not obvious and it does need saying, and a leaving card is the last easy chance to do it.
- You taught me the job. The actual job, not the training course.
- Everything I know that works, I got off you.
- You covered for me in my first month. I never said thanks. Thanks.
- I’ll be passing on your bad habits for years.
- I still hear you when something goes wrong. Usually swearing.
- You told me not to take it home. Best advice I ever ignored.
- Twelve years of your patience. I did test it.
- I’m going to be quoting you at people who never met you.
From their team, if they were the boss
Most managers get a card full of polite nothing because nobody wants to sound like they are angling for something. They are leaving. You are not angling for anything. Say the true thing.
- You never once made us feel small. Rarer than you’d think.
- Thanks for taking the flak upstairs so we didn’t have to.
- Whoever’s next has no idea what they’re following.
- You ran it properly. Nobody ever says that about a manager.
- The next one will get told how you did it. Constantly.
From family
A different job entirely. The office is marking the end of a role. You are marking the end of forty years of them getting up in the dark.
- Dad’s retiring. Mum’s already worried.
- Home all day, every day. Mum is thrilled.
- Forty years of getting up at five. Have one lie-in. Just one.
- You get a card because you never want anything else.
- You worked so we didn’t have to worry. We noticed far too late.
- Grandad’s finished work. He’s ours now.
- No more “I’m at work”. You’ve run out of excuses.
When it was not really their choice
An early retirement on health grounds, or a restructure wearing a nicer word, is a redundancy card in a party hat.
Aim it at the situation and do not congratulate them. “Enjoy your retirement” to somebody who wanted another five years is the same sentence as “glad you are gone”, however you meant it.
- Retirement on paper. We both know what it actually was.
- You’d have done another five. Everybody knows it.
- They’ve dressed it up as retirement. It suits nobody.
- Your back made that decision. You’d have carried on.
- Whatever the leaving do says, this wasn’t the plan. I’m sorry.
- You didn’t finish on your terms. That’s the only bad part of this.
- Take the flowers, take the speech, keep your opinion of them.
When they have been counting down for years
You know the ones. There has been a Post-it on the monitor since 2019 and it has been updated daily.
- You’ve had the date on a Post-it since 2019.
- Countdown’s over. What are you going to talk about now?
- You told me the number of days. Every day. For two years.
- You’ve thought about nothing else since your sixtieth. Go on then.
- You’ve been mentally gone since March. Now make it official.
- Be as smug as you like. You’ve paid for it.
- Three hundred days of gloating. Worth every one, apparently.
When you did not like them
Thirty years is a long time to have not liked somebody.
This is harder than the same problem on a leaving card, and it is worth knowing why. A leaving card ends a working relationship. A retirement card is handed to somebody at the end of the entire thing, so anything cold reads as cruel in a way it would not if they were only moving to Bristol. You also cannot leave it blank, because nineteen people are reading this page and one of them is in HR. Write something small and true. Neutral is not rude. What gets noticed is manufactured warmth, because everybody in that office knows exactly how you two got on.
- Thirty years. That’s a long time. Enjoy the quiet.
- You were always going to be the last one out. Well done.
- Congratulations on the retirement. Sincerely, from the desk opposite.
- Nobody does it your way any more. You did it your way regardless.
- I’ll notice you’re not there. That’s not nothing.
- Every single one of these signatures is compulsory. Mine included.
Six words or fewer, because there are nineteen of you
By the time the card reaches the far end of the office there is a strip of white about the width of a thumb. This is not a failure of effort, it is geometry.
- Well done. Now go home.
- Congratulations. Don’t come back.
- Earned. Every single day of it.
- Lucky sod. All the best.
- About time. Well earned.
- All the best, boss.
- Go and be bored somewhere nice.
- Bored by October. Guaranteed.
When you cannot be funny about it
Some people you have worked beside for fifteen years and a punchline would be the wrong note entirely.
- You gave that job a lot. I hope it gave something back.
- Thanks for being decent when you didn’t have to be.
- Some people change a place when they go. You’re one.
- Have the time. You paid for it in advance.
- Whatever you do next, do less of it.
- I hope it’s everything you kept saying it’d be.
- Enjoy every single dull Tuesday.
The cards we print, for the idea of the register
All of these aim at the retirement, the employer, or the person’s own smugness. None of them is about golf.
- Sorry you’re leaving. It’ll be much quieter now.
- We won’t forget you. But you will. A lot. Because you’re old.
- Your replacement starts Monday. Younger, cheaper, and much better with computers.
- They’ll all say the place won’t be the same without you. It will. Exactly the same. By Tuesday.
- Enjoy the pension you spent forty years paying into. Both weeks of it.
- Retirement: the slow discovery that you never had any hobbies.
Still need the card itself?
We make retirement cards for people who have earned the right to be insulted properly on their last day.
Blank inside, so the words above are yours. Printed and posted in the UK.
The cards we print for this
For the last day, the whip-round and the cake nobody ordered. Blank inside, printed and posted in the UK.