My last day is Friday, so I just had my exit interview, the lame-ass ritual you have to go through when you leave a job that makes Human Resources feel important. What a royal pain in the ass. To top it off, their floor is under construction, so it took me 10 minutes to find this woman's temporary office. I had to ask 4 people, because I didn't see her where her temporary office is – turns out she was in a meeting. God forbid she should keep her appointment, especially when she knows it's hard to find her in the first place.

Anyway, so she's finally sitting there, making chit-chat about where I'm going as she's inputting my info into the computer, asking me how many vacation days I have left (5, and I'd better get fucking paid for them), asking if I need COBRA info, giving me 401(k) info, all that procedural crap.

Then she gets to Pandora's box. "How have your experiences been while working here these past 3 years?"

Now, this woman has overseen countless exit interviews from my department. She has received complaints about certain people, and watched as other people were unfairly treated and let go. She's no stranger to the goings-on here.

So I sit there, silently trying to decide if I should be honest or not. I mean, what's the point? It's not as if she or the rest of HR would do anything about any problems I'd bring up. Clearly, nothing has been done so far! I'd just be bitching to get this hatred and misery off my chest. And I don't really need to do that. So I sit there, contemplating my options. Then, as if she really wants to know, she says, "Come on, give me the pros and cons."

So I say, "Well, there was one pro, and that's my boss [I give his name]. He's the best boss I've ever had, hands down."

She says, "Okay" (not taking notes or anything, not writing my boss' name down so he can get any recognition for being a great supervisor). "Now, what are the cons?"

I took a deep breath.

"Well," I said, "I guess that would be everybody else." She looks at me. "No one takes any responsibility for themselves or their work, they all point fingers and blame everyone else. There's a complete lack of integrity, a lack of responsibility, a lack of ownership. There's bad management, bad hires, and too much turn-over, and no one gets trained properly."

Then she asked me what the job's problems were, so I continued: "I provide information for these people to do their jobs, and they ignore it. I created copy guidelines and packets of information, and they don't read it. I point out things that they should change, and they fight it. They'd prefer to see things just slip by rather than fixing them. And because I'm part of the last step before things are shipped out, it's my responsibility to catch these things that shouldn't be happening in the first place. And since I don't have a legal background, I have to contact the legal department to check on everything. My position should really have someone with a law degree to monitor these things before they're sent out, whether they're ads, catalogs or direct mail pieces. Because the legal department doesn't see any of them unless I ask them about it, and then I have to call and fax and email them so they can discuss it."

As I paused to catch my breath, she said, "Okay, well, thanks for coming in. Here's my card in case you have any questions." And she ushered me out of her office before I could go on.

On the way out, she stopped and looked at me and asked cautiously, "Do you have any friends in your office?" I said, "I did, but they all left. 30 people in 3 years have left, and that's only the copy and art departments. Turn-over is terrible. That's part of the problem. No one gets trained and everyone is new." She nodded sympathetically, and said that the two VPs in the department were working on it. I wanted to say that they were part of the problem and give examples, but I guess she just saw it in my face because she quickly shook my hand and said goodbye.

The whole thing took about 20 minutes. 20 pointless minutes that won't make any difference. But, damn, it felt good to bitch.