Hit 'send,' then hit the door

Within an hour, Oh said, her e-mail was posted on a widely read legal affairs blog, then made its way into the mainstream media.

Oh has no regrets. She is also changing professions.

"I am glad I spoke out," said Oh, 38, who has launched a blog, is taking writing classes and is pregnant again. "It's been really good for me on a personal level. It made me reassess my life, and that's a good thing."

Will Schwalbe, coauthor of "Send: Why People E-mail So Badly and How to Do it Better," said the farewell e-mail was a reflection of two intersecting trends: the universality of e-mail and the confessional spirit of the times, which have resulted, as he put it, in "the democratization of the process."

In the pre-computer world, Schwalbe said, "Personnel wrote something -- a memo, Xeroxed -- generally, you didn't get to do it. They did it. But what had been an HR function is now a personal function." That, he said, leads to a different sort of message.

When Pasadena-based Wescom Credit Union, a firm with about 1,000 employees, had layoffs recently, there were no mass e-mail farewells because workers don't have access to all-encompassing e-mail lists.

"We have very strict standards, safeguards that IT has put in place don't allow that to happen," said Diane Norton Smith, Wescom's vice president for human resources. "I have seen situations where somebody said goodbye and you get the reply all, reply all, reply all, 'We're gonna miss you,' and that clogs up the whole system."

That occasionally happened last summer and fall when the farewells of laid-off Los Angeles Times staffers hit inboxes in successive waves.

Some of the goodbyes were bittersweet, some philosophical. Many were entertaining.

Jaime Cardenas, a young sports reporter, spliced his note with stanzas from Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" ("I used to rule the world . . . Now in the morning I . . . Sweep the streets I used to own."). Perry Crowe, an editor for the Guide, compared losing his job to a scene from a movie: "It's sort of like in Superman II when Non rips the light off the top of a police car and hurls it at a boy in the distance and it explodes like a motherlovin' mortar round and a woman cries out, 'He was just a boy!' "

Outplacement professionals, naturally, are against the parting shot because they fear for a person's ability to land a new job.