Well, it's all over. Yesterday was my last day at work. We had a party the other night and on Friday they had cake and ice cream for the rest of the office. About a hundred people showed and it was great. My boss, who had been in the office all week, and at the private party Wednesday night, stuck around long enough to MC at least the start of the party yesterday before he had to catch a flight home (he lives in the UK).
I have to say that I had at least one rather unusual experience during the party. The company's CTO, who himself is retiring in a few months, said a few words as well (I had worked with him for over 30 years) and he described me as an 'institution'. Not sure that I ever thought that someday I would hear someone refer to me as an institution.
Note that even after the party, I went back to my office and before they came to load up my office workstation as well as pick-up my laptop, I managed to do a little last minute work. I had promised one of the programmers some old sample files that she needed to validate that the changes she was making to the software would be compatible with some very specific type of legacy files, and at the last minute they realized that I might be the only person in our building with the type of files they were looking for and which were also old enough so that it would be a legitimate test. The guy from our hardware group was literally waiting for me to finish typing and to send the email so that he could take the laptop. As I noted to the email's recipient, that message, with the attached files, represented the absolute LAST piece of work that I would be performing as a Siemens employee after 35+ years with the organization, and that she should feel really special.
A few minutes later I was turning in my office keys, my ID badge and my company credit cards. Despite it being my last day on the job and a Friday, I didn't actually leave the building until well after 4:30pm.
I have to say, they got their money's worth, even on my last day at work 
BTW, these were the last items taken off my desk, a picture of the my father and one of me and my wife:
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