I was in the office today, and I noticed walking down the hall a guy who had retired 1-2 years ago. Within the past couple of months, I believe someone had mentioned that the same guy had visited the office recently.
There is ZERO reason that he would need to visit the office for any retirement-related matters. All I can imagine is that perhaps he was meeting someone who still works here to go to lunch or something. Just struck me as odd. When I retire (in <2 years), I GUARANTEE that my shadow will never again darken to door of my workplace.
How about you? If you quit or retired from a job, did you ever return to the office? If so, how often, and why?
I can only think of one workplace that I’ve ever gone back to visit after leaving. That was a regional airline where I worked in the Tech Pubs department for several years. We got along fabulously, and I only left because I got my engineering degree and got a job elsewhere. I happened to be close by the headquarters one day and decided to pop in and say hi and see how everyone was doing. This was not an uncommon occurrence at that company in general.
I’ve gone back to two workplaces. I had friends still working there. I visited to have lunch or coffee with friends, and their office was a convenient place to meet up.
Where I’ve worked it’s significantly difficult for former workers to get into the non-public areas at all. Certainly true of the military and also true of the airlines, despite my former work areas there being located at big public facilities called airports. Ordinary workers don’t have escort authority backstage. So I’d need to make an appointment with a supervisor, have some reason, etc.
It’s also the case that the nature of the co-worker situation is such that even if we’re great friends, work isn’t the practical place for us to meet up.
So I suppose I’ll distinguish between the case of “I have interest in visiting the workplace” versus “I have interest in socially interacting with my former co-workers”. I don’t really have the former, but do have really the latter. Most of my long-time friends are former co-workers.
OTOH, when I do travel, I’m always curious to feel how it’s different, what’s familiar, what’s changed, do I recognize anyone, etc.
The OP expressed his preferences in negative terms, “no interest in …”, but the same taxonomy applies: is it the place, the people, or both, you disdain?
The other businesses I’ve worked at don’t exist any more. If I have occasion to visit those cities I often drive past the neighborhood of the old facility. And my old residence as well. More for curiousity about how stuff nearby has changed, than how much it’s stayed the same.
When I worked in LA, my office was in a building built for WWII (or earlier). It was also behind a security fence, so no non-invited visiting. A few years ago I went back. The company has moved, the fence is gone, so I drove right up to it. But I didn’t go in, because I have no idea what’s going on in there. “Hi! You don’t know me, but I used to work here. Just want to look around. I am not a nut.”
Never. The only former workplace I’d like to visit is Ridley Mission Control Center at Edwards AFB. I doubt my employer is still there after 30 years, but it was a cool place to work and it would be great to see how things have changed.
However, two years ago, I was laid off from a job I’d taken the year before, when a long-time colleague and friend, who had just started there, recommended me for a position. As it turned out, the people were great, but management was toxic, and they got rid of me, in large part, for having had the temerity to point out that management needed to change how they did things if they wanted to succeed.
My friend was still working there*, and last summer, I went downtown to have lunch with him. He told me, “people were asking me about you, and they’d love to see you,” so after lunch, I went back to the office with him, and spent an hour or so catching up with the people I’d worked with. It was actually really nice.
*- Not too surprisingly, they finally laid him off, too, a couple of weeks ago.
I retired three years ago after 36 years working in one place. I have returned once, about six months ago, to attend a retirement party for a friend/ex-cow-orker.
I’ve been quite friendly with several cow-orkers over the years, but I can only think of two whom I ever saw after we parted ways. By the same measure, while working with them I played the occasional round of golf with a couple of cow-orkers and had meals with them and their spouses, but I’ve pretty exclusively been friendly with but not friends with my cow-orkers.
I forgot to mention this, probably because it hasn’t happened yet.
I worked at a major ad agency’s Chicago office for twelve years (2000-2011). The agency, which had a hallowed name in the industry, was shut down, and the name retired, late last year, as the new holding company which had bought it a year or so ago decided to restructure, and saw no value in its heritage*.
In recent weeks, a group of my former colleagues has started up a LinkedIn page for alumni of that office, and organized a reunion this upcoming May. The agency had moved out of the offices where I had worked about a decade ago, but the building still stands: there’s a hotel now in the space where our offices were, and it appears that the organizers of the reunion are renting meeting space in the hotel for the gathering.
*- one of many reasons why I feel that the ad industry – particularly the big companies – is completely destroying itself.
The job I retired from (21 years there) was hospital librarian. It is my local hospital somI go there for test, MD appts, etc. I have never been back to the library. I never visited any other former places of employment.
I’ve had the same employer thru various name changes for many decades thru *six different buildings. Of the first four buildings, all of them are still physically standing, but have completely different tenants, so there’s nothing to go back to, really. But once I’m gone, I’m gone, although we do have drop-ins for retirees occasionally, and I’ll show up anywhere that involves food.
*Or five depending on how you count. The current building and my previous one are linked by a small hallway, so it’s technically one edifice (sorta like Lakes Huron and Michigan).
I’ve gone back to the Safeway I worked at, but it’s been remodeled and no one I know still works there. It was essentially a completely different place.
When I was a kid, my parents, along with my aunt and uncle, owned two different True Value hardware stores. The first one, which we bought in '75, and sold to another guy in '79, is in an old building which is still standing in downtown Green Bay; it’s housed a homebrewing supply store for years, but I’ve not ever been back inside.
We then built a new building, for a new store, in a suburb in '79, which we owned until we closed it in '83. The building is now a church (after being a roller rink for decades); a few months ago, when I was visiting my parents, and we were out running errands, we drove by, so that my parents could see it. I’ve not been back inside that building, either, but I’ve been in touch with the pastor who runs the church, and I have a standing invitation to come inside and visit.
I left my last two jobs on very bad terms with my boss/supervisor (college professor and the owner of the tutoring place I worked at), so I have had less than zero desire to go back. I’ve had two former fellow employees* also tell me things they experienced in each location that dovetailed very well with my experiences.
*One of which is one of my birth sisters, who left 9 months before I arrived–no, she didn’t recommend the prof. to me, as I didn’t even know her at the time, having sent out an adoption search inquiry a month before I moved there [Rutgers, NJ] to start graduate school. I got the adoption info about a month into the 1st semester, found out they all lived within half an hour of me. If I were a year or so earlier I could have unwittingly started dating my own sister…
My retirement from the Census Bureau is the only time in my life where a change in job wasn’t accompanied by a move of hundreds of miles. I did visit the college I taught at in northeast Tennessee once, less than a year after I left, and it was enjoyable, but it’s a long way down I-81 to the Tennessee line, let alone the part of getting over to 81 from the DC area.
Visiting the Census Bureau after my retirement in 2023 was a very different experience from people who’d retired a decade earlier. They could come back and visit a year or two later, and find most of their friends still working at the same desks, and could drop by a friend’s cube just as if they were still there. But disruption on top of disruption has made it a very different story for people who retired around the time I did.
First, of course, there was Covid, when they kicked us all out of the building for a year. Then, another government agency was to occupy a good portion of our workspace, so they decided to not let us back in as the Covid threat diminished so that they could ‘reimagine’ our workspace to fit the same number of us in less space. Workspaces were moved around, hotelling was initiated, and my old co-workers didn’t even get back into the building until the summer of 2024. And then of course an election went the wrong way, and Musk and DOGE and Russell Vought got rid of a ton of people.
I’ve been back a couple of times, but it’s depressing.
I work in a very insular and esoteric area of the business. We joke that we’re all each others’ customer, supplier, and comptetitor.
At job A, I frequently worked with and visited companies B and C.
My next job was at company B, and I routinely worked with and visited A and C. When at A, I would almost always see my old office.
I then worked for company C, and I was a remote worker so my office was at home. But I routinely worked with and visited A and B. Company B changed offices in the middle of this, so I don’t know if the new building counts as going back.
I now manage company D, and A, B, and C are all customers. So…
There are a few other companies in the business, of course, but I haven’t worked for them
