leave the keys on the engine

I read this for the first time in an article in the Times and was reminded of the story reading about it again in Greek newspapers yesterday. More than 3000 cars (most of them luxurious vehicles) have been confiscated by the Dubai authorities after having been abandoned at the parking lot of the Dubai International Airport. Stricken by the crisis, their owners had no choice but to leave them there before taking flight from what used to be the Mecca of real estate economy. That was before the bubble burst. Now that it has, all those aspiring entrepreneurs could think of was to abandon the sinking ship leaving everything behind. Most of the cars had the keys on the engine. And in many back seats, there were piles of unpaid bills, bounced checks and overdraft credit cards. A few have even bothered to leave an apologetic note:

"So long and sorry for everything!"

I was thinking about these abandoned cars -as symbols of jobs that remain undone- while getting ready to leave Barcelona next week, leaving a number of pending issues behind (almost all of them work-related). It then occurred to me that I might look like one of those car-owners "abandoning the ship". I even remembered my boss using this exact term in a sudden outburst of poetic despair one day last December.

I don't think of myself that way though. Next week, when I come in to pick up my stuff I 'll have the sense I am leaving as a gentleman and not as a coward. No unpaid bills, no unfinished reports, no traces of latent procrastination in the back seat. Instead of a goodbye note, I will be leaving my boss with 100 pages of well-documented results. I 'll then load 60G of data on my external hard disc drive and clean up my desk.

The car may stay here but I'll be taking the keys with me.