Bravo sent his goodbye to people from both spheres of his life -- "pretty much everyone I knew on a personal level or a work level who I thought might have some sort of need to get in touch with me."
He was straightforward and brief: "I apologize for the mass e-mail, but today's issue of DNR will be the last. . . . We folded last week and are now on 'forced vacation' to put it nicely. . . . If you need to get in touch with me please use this info."
"I think my biggest concern was not to make it sound melodramatic," Bravo said. "There is nothing worse than those e-mails, nothing worse than mass e-mails, period. So you can never make a mass e-mail classy, but I wanted to make it as close to being classy as one could."
His e-mail lead to a number of freelance assignments, Bravo said, "so it definitely succeeded on that front."
Last year, when Yahoo executive Stewart Butterfield composed an absurdist, mock-epic goodbye to the struggling Internet giant, he seemed to be dinging a corporate culture gone complacent.
"As you know, tin is in my blood," wrote Butterfield, 35, whose photo-sharing website Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. "When I joined Yahoo! back in '21, it was a sheet-tin concern of great momentum, growth and innovation. I knew it was the place for me."
But, Butterfield continued, "my ability to contribute has dwindled to near-nothing and not entirely because of my advancing age. . . . I will be spending more time with my family, tending to my small but growing alpaca herd and, of course, getting back to working with tin, my first love."
A few years before Butterfield bent the genre, an aspiring comedy writer named Chris Kula penned a long mock farewell e-mail on his blog. At the time, Kula was a receptionist at a New York engineering firm, honing his craft on the side.
"For nearly as long as I've worked here," he wrote, "I've hoped that I might one day leave this company. And now that this dream has become a reality, please know that I could not have reached this goal without your unending lack of support."
The missive was linked on blogs around the English-speaking world and was even plagiarized by an Irish employee of the accounting firm Ernst & Young, who was forced to apologize (not to Kula, but to his former bosses) when he disseminated the letter as his own, complete with a reference to a co-worker's flatulence.
For Kula, however, the fake farewell, which he penned after deciding to leave the engineering firm, was a career boon.
"I used it as a sample piece," said Kula, 29, who was hired by a website that specialized in office-based humor, which led to a gig with an improv troupe, which led to an agent and his current job, writing for "MADtv."
"I always wondered if the guys at the engineering firm saw it," Kula said. "I would love to know if they still talk about it."
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robin.abcarian@latimes.com
