In any case, even as I interviewed for two separate grant positions last fall at another college, even as I did the finalist interview for one of those positions and felt like it had gone well, I think part of me still hoped that somehow I could stay where I was, with students I like, with colleagues I really like. I don't remember being very disappointed when that college failed its search.
After spending almost eight years very seldom friending any current coworkers on Facebook as a matter of personal policy (for retired ones I was more open to it), it may have been the pandemic that finally got to me: this April or May I set myself a deadline. No matter how this most recent position interview turns out, I thought, whether I'm cutting my final positional ties with the English department or not, I am finally giving up and friending the English department, and anyone else I want to besides.
And I got the position, and I did lots of friending, and I have not yet been utterly disappointed by anyone's publicly-online persona, though I'd hardly dare take any bets on some of their perceptions of my own.
My former director probably was annoyed about my leaving, despite putting a good face on it. At any rate, after some congratulations during the meeting when I told him I was taking the new position (and some genuine thanks to him from me, since all the intraprogram complications since 2018 meant that I'd had little choice but to ask him to be my managerial reference for the new job, and he had agreed to do it, thereby helping to seal his own staffing-problem fate), I don't know if we ever saw each other in any program-related meeting after that. Past that day, even on my last day, I got no goodbye, no token expression of thanks, no involvement from him in the sendoff organized for my retiring colleague and me, no offboarding from the program to speak of (he gave me one item to make sure I did once I told him what my last day would be, but that was it). I doubt my colleague did, either (she announced her impending retirement probably a couple of months before it happened, and her last day came two weeks before mine). Given his personality as a manager, the extent to which he's been disengaged lately, and how essentially dead in the water the program is, I wasn't expecting much, and I don't think I'm bitter. But I will say that it was even less from him than I had anticipated, and I do wish there'd been something.
But though it's early days, the new assistant dean seems like she may become my best supervisor yet. She's smart, straightforward, and kind of intriguing. She seems fair-minded, and (though this is more of a neutral quality, I find it interesting) has a sort of calm outward manner overlaying more intense depths, a combination that reminds me of an English-department colleague who also happens, like her, to have spent a lot of her childhood on a farm.
And though I'm sad to lose most of my reasons to professionally hang out with the English department, I'm happy about the prospect of the library-and-tutoring team, whose members seem likeable; and it's also a definite plus to still be semi-collaborating on Writing Center matters with one of the English faculty members I like most (at least until he rotates off at the end of next year). As for the advising staff, despite the mild reservations I expressed in the previous post, overall I did like them, and can at least hope that I wasn't too insufferable a presence on their Teams channel; it'll still be nice to see them in collegewide contexts, and it wouldn't be an awful idea for me to request an occasional few minutes to talk tutoring and learning-community matters at their staff meetings.
So, altogether, this seems about as good a resolution as I could have asked for. I'm grateful, and interested to see where it all goes next.