Heartfelt Retirement Speech for a Coworker (About 3 Minutes)

The toast

Good evening. I'm Sally. I've been a dispatcher here for nineteen years, and for most of those years, I've known Sal mainly as a voice on the radio. I could pick it out of a hundred. Low, a little slow, never in a hurry, even when he should have been.

Sal has been climbing poles for this co-op for thirty-eight years. Most of you have seen him do it. I mostly heard it.

The night I think about is the ice storm in my second winter. I was twenty-six and I'd never worked a storm. We had more than four thousand houses dark, the phones wouldn't stop, and I was writing outages on my arm because I'd run out of paper. Around three in the morning, Sal came on the radio. Not to report anything. He just said, "You're doing fine, dispatch. Slow down. We'll get them all." Then he went back to work. I've said those exact words to every new dispatcher I've trained since.

Here's the thing about Sal on the radio. Every time a house came back on, he'd key the mic and say two words. "Lights on." That's all. He didn't have to. Nobody else did it. But on a bad night, I'd sit there and count them, one house at a time, and it was the only way I could tell we were winning.

What most people here don't know is that after a long outage, once the lights were back, Sal would drive by the houses on his list where somebody older lived alone, and he'd knock. Just to make sure the heat had come back on too. He never logged it. I only know because some of those folks called us to say thank you, and asked for him by name.

Sal tells me that this winter, for the first time in thirty-eight years, he's going to sit on his porch and watch a storm come in and not go anywhere. His wife says she'll believe it when she sees it.

Sal, from all of us on the other end of the radio, thank you. We always knew where you were. Now we know you're home.

Will everybody please raise a glass. To Sal. Lights on.

Why it works: The speaker knows him mostly as a voice, and she builds the speech on exactly that, which no one else in the room could do. The two words he always said on the radio become the toast, so the ending lands without any big language.