The strange psychology of the workplace departure e-mail.

This last week the Associated Press promised to reveal the art of "the departure e-mail"—those bulk-mailed notes to colleagues and associates typically sent out on one's last day in the office. Given that 45 million Americans left their jobs last year, the timing couldn't be better. So how do you bid farewell with dignity?

Well, according to the AP, you say very little. The compositional caveats stack up—don't be too angry, don't strain for a joke, don't use the F-word, don't mention your recent miscarriage.

"Don't show any bitterness. Don't complain. Just be positive" is how one career consultant cited in the piece sums up the formula. To see if this conventional wisdom was really conventional, I took a cursory sampling from friends in a cross-section of industries: "As many of you know," they were all off to "pursue other opportunities" but really "hope to stay in touch." It's striking how this relatively new form of communication (e-mail has not been around that long) could become so rote so soon. Earlier this month, a reporter for Fortune was caught committing a huge professional sin—lifting passages from another writer's article and plunking them into his own—and still felt moved to write the usual bland assurances, as if he'd gotten a job at Bloomberg. ("I have enjoyed working with all of you over the past few years and I will look forward to keeping in touch.")

The standard goodbye e-mail is a model of outstanding impulse control, especially considering the nonstandard circumstances that surround many leave-takings today. A lot of people are getting pink-slipped, most not for cause. That the workplace norms would still have the recently dumped omit any mention of anger or ambivalence is striking.

In some sense, the endurance of this extreme politeness is evidence that hope springs eternal. Many people justifiably believe that an elegant departure might help them land their next gig. But it also confirms something that cranky observers of the white-collar classes have been harping about for decades now: The system depends on forced smiles.

When David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney started analyzing a trend toward "other-direction" in American life in the late 1940s, they had in mind the glad-handing that increasingly determined who enjoyed professional success and who didn't. A good day at the office, they claimed, all but required devoting any free unstructured moments to smoothing and forestalling antagonisms, "talking to salesmen and joshing secretaries"—never mind, to paraphrase their conclusions, that given the real economic pressures, such easy sociability was "neither free nor sociable."