The total number of days between Monday, July 24th, 2006 and Sunday, July 21st, 2013 is 2,554 days. This is equal to exactly 6 years, 11 months, and 27 days. 2,554 days is equal to 364 weeks and 6 days. The total time span from 2006-07-24 to 2013-07-21 is 61,296 hours. This is equivalent to 3,677,760 minutes. You can also convert 2,554 days to 220,665,600 seconds.

This will be the amount of time I’ve spend in the Cayman Islands.

Here’s the first picture I could find of me in Cayman, taken my second day on-island.

I didn’t waste any time getting stuff sorted.  I thought that Cayman would be my new home and I would be able to settle down, and hey, they’d get rid of that pesky rollover policy before MY seven years elapsed.  Right?

I mean it sucked that some people had to leave, but the government would eventually see that replacing one expat with another would lead to a talent drain, like my friend Alan Markoff wrote about in the paper.  Right?

One of the the major goals of the Term Limit Policy is to guarantee first preference for a qualified Caymanian worker to do a specific job.  The way I see it, the work permit process itself is designed to handle that. Why kick someone off the rock just because time has elapsed?  If they can do the job better than anyone else regardless of nationality, and their company wants to pay for their work permit, then what’s the problem?  Everyone wins.  The safety valve is in place and we’re all good. Right?  As recently as the last elections cycle in May, the public and government seemed to feel that the policy was having a negative effect on the economy as expats with disposable income were leaving and not enough people were arriving in the territory to fill those jobs.  Add to that some of the financial services companies didn’t want to have their workers take a one-year break when they were generating revenue.

Yeah, not so much.  Rollover continues to be in play despite much talk ‘on the marl road’ about it being summarily expunged just like Bermuda did when they figured out it didn’t work.  People continue to leave.  It’s a fact of Cayman life.  My first month on island I went to three farewell ‘dos.’

So my/our seven years is up, friends.  Time to make like a baby…  I’ll miss this rock terribly, it’s been my home and I do love it here.  It’s not perfect, and I’m sure time and the human brain will do it’s thing and those down moments will fade away and only the happy memories will remain…

Like some of these…

An upcoming post will get into where’s next for the wife and me…

Because I do this for the Compass...
Editor's note: This post has been changed from the original for clarity