Leaving Emirates the Airline

Two years ago last week I left Dubai and Emirates (the airline) after 12 years, to come home and help with the launch of V Australia. This series of posts documents the leaving process - partly as my first attempt at a blog (which hopefully someone will find worth reading), partly as an assistance to others in my position. While this blog should provide some amusement, it should also be of assistance if you are leaving soon as well. There will be differences however - a lot of this depends on your years of service, and I'm sure some things have changed - hopefully for the better!

03.Mar.2008 : The Memo

I haven’t told many people about resigning yet – but those who’ve asked (because they’ve heard the rumours) are getting the truth. I guess that’s about to come to an end – an internal memo of some sort has gone round, so shortly the entire office will know. You think I’d be included in that …

04.Mar.2008 : The Paperwork

The first of the paperwork has arrived in the inbox. Several things now stand out as being a big problem to our smooth transition out of Emirates and Dubai – all concerning cash flow. It seems I should have been saving to leave Emirates. According to the paperwork …

Ek will withhold my last pay check until “Final Settlement is received”. This pay check will probably include profit share as well. Since the first thing we do when we get back to Australia is pay about 30,000 dhs in school fees for Term 3, this is going to present a challenge.
Yet to be confirmed, it looks like SmashWreckBank is going to want to cancel my credit cards 60 days before we leave. It’s proving hard to get increased limits in on our cards in Australia when you haven’t worked in the country for 15 years, and don’t technically have a job at the moment …
I can’t find anywhere whether or not Ek will pay school fees during resignation notice period. I’ll be asking that tomorrow. They’re due in April.
All tickets purchased from staff travel during your notice period must be paid for in cash or against a credit card.

And so it begins. All large corporations have established processes for the resignation (and termination) of staff. Often they’re inflexible, and occasionally they’re driven by an almost psychotic focus on the rejection that is implied by your resignation – irrespective of your actual reasons for leaving and your personal attitude to your erstwhile employer. Ek kind of takes that attitude to a different place-on-steroids-to-the-max …

Next Week : The HR Briefing. This is like drinking from a fire hose. You go in with a host of questions, all of which are answered, giving you enough information to begin to realise a few of the questions you should be asking, but can’t think of yet.