Farewell and thank you, Mike Schramm!

This is a very much unplanned for extra post at the Pink Pigtail Inn, written at 02.15 am Saturday morning, when I should rather be asleep if I was any sensible at all. But something came up that needed to be commented on, and as I've never quite gotten rid of my journalistic instinct it had to be done asap. So that's why you'll get a PPI post at this unusual hour.

What happened was that out of the blue, Mike Schramm at wow.com has suddenly informed us that he's going to quit his job.

Embracing the community

I don't know if you have any idea of who Mike Schramm is. Maybe you do like most of us, browsing the headlines at Wow.com in order to stay updated, occasionally plowing into a post that somehow grabs your attention - making you upset, curious or entertained. You don't spend too much time thinking about the author behind it.

However, Mike Schramm has certainly put his personal mark on Wow.com over the years. As a blogger I especially appreciate how he has embraced the blogging community - not by taking advantage of it, using ideas without giving credit for it. Instead he has put a spotlight on posts hat have interested him, no matter if the blogger in question has been an established one or completely unknown to the audience.

I believe that there are more than one blogger around who have Mike Schramm to thank for their breakthrough. I'm one of those - Mike is by far the writer at WoW.com who has quoted PPI most. To be honest I'm not sure if anyone else in the staff reads PPI. But Mike surely did - and not only that, he has even commented at the PPI on a couple of occasions. And that's what I like so much about him. He's not a stranger - he's clearly one of us.

In his farewell post, Mike tells the story once again how he started at Wow.com, at that point called Wow-Insider, as a forum troll. When an opportunity opened up to join the staff he grabbed it, and until now he has written no less than 3 300 posts. That is just amazing, especially since I believe many of them are pretty well written. Somehow Mike manages to give his posts a personal touch. Without looking at the author name I can tell which posts that are his.

A guest of honour

We can only speculate on the reason why Mike Schramm is leaving his position now - the post doesn't tell. Maybe it's just a natural development. I've done it myself a few times in my career. One day you wake up and realize that you've learned what you can learn from your current job, that you need to move on to keep learning and growing in your profession.

I hope the motive for leaving is along those lines and that Mike Schramm has some really exciting projects awaiting now. I hope his heading somewhere, rather than escaping from something.

Mike - if you're reading this, I just want to let you know that the PPI always will receive you as a dear and honored guest.

Considering this, I refuse to say "farewell". I will rather say "see you later", hoping that you'll keep stopping by here, not for professional reasons, but just because you feel at home.

Thank you for all that you gave the community. You will be missed.

Cheers!