Retirement · A coworker · Warm · about 2.5 minutes
Warm Retirement Speech for a Boss (About 3 Minutes)
An assistant manager speaking at the hotel's retirement dinner for the front desk manager he reported to for fourteen years, wanting to praise her without sounding like he was angling for her job.
Given by Roy, who started under her as a night auditor. 347 words. The names are made up.
The toast
Hi, everyone. I'm Roy. Fourteen years ago Rita hired me to work the night audit at the front desk, and I want to start by apologizing to her for the first six months.
Rita ran that desk for twenty-two years. If you've stayed here, you've met her, even if you didn't know it, because she read every single comment card a guest ever filled out. Not a summary. The cards. She kept a box of blank index cards in her top drawer, and she answered every complaint by hand, on one of those cards, with her name at the bottom. Hundreds of them a year. I asked her once why she didn't just send an email. She said a person who took the time to complain deserved a person to answer.
I'll be honest, because she'd catch me if I wasn't. Rita was not always easy to work for. She checked every bill twice. Every one. If you'd made a mistake, she didn't yell. She just set the folio on your keyboard with one small pencil circle on it and walked away. I got a lot of pencil circles that first year.
What I didn't understand then is that she was checking my work so nobody else had to see it wrong. Not the guests, and not the people upstairs. She fixed it with me, quietly, and she never mentioned it in a review.
In my third week, she handed me the master key and went home for the night. I didn't sleep at all. But she trusted me with it, and I think that's the moment I decided to stay.
Rita and her husband are going to take the trip they've been planning for about ten years, a month of driving with no reservations anywhere. She tells me she's going to stay in a different hotel every few nights and not check a single bill. I give it until the second hotel.
Rita, thank you for the key, and for every pencil circle.
Please raise your glasses, everyone. To Rita. Checkout's at noon. Take your time.
Why it works: Every compliment comes with something she did, so none of it reads as flattery. He admits she was exacting, which makes the praise believable, and her own habit of checking the bill turns into a kind joke for the toast.
Make it yours
Borrow the shape, not the lines. Put your own people, your own year and your own detail in each spot, or answer a few questions and get a first draft built from them.