digitaldiscipline ◾ ◾ Trigger pulling nostalgia

[blame

angelsil for my hunting this link down]

My best resignation letter, ever.

Date: Tue Oct 3, 2000 3:51 pm
Subject: So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

October 25th, 1997.

I should have shot myself then. Instead, in search of "valuable work experience," I accepted a position in a town I'd never heard of in an office of fifteen people trying to support five thousand frequently-fucked customers.

The trepidation and indecision I felt leading up to that phone call should have warned me. The fact that the woman conducting my interview couldn't give me directions from the nearest major airport and used the phrase, "It's a really big brick building - you can't miss it" to get me to the office and interview site should have clued me in.

The fact that the best apartment I found was at the end of a mile of dirt road on top of a fucking mountain should have driven the point home.

I said "Yes" anyways.

And I have regretted doing so almost continuously ever since.

I said yes to forty hours a week of being berated by customers infuriated by the incompetence of my company's planning and execution. Forty hours a week of coping with people who might have had more sense than fingers, but only just barely. Forty hours a week existing as an ear, a mouth, and a pair of hands controlled by a brain that wanted nothing better, ninety-seven percent of the time, than to turn that ear deaf, give voice to a true word, and strangle the stupid fuck at the other end of the line, and not being able to do any of those things.

Forty hours a week of having to take it.

And one hundred sixty four hours a week of being in God's own backwash of a town. Roll up the sidewalks at sunset. No booze for sale on Sunday (how the fuck are you supposed to watch football?). Inbred redneck assholes as far as the eye
can see, and probably farther.

Until coming here, I'd never been threatened, asked to leave a restaurant, or felt any kind of despise towards those around me spread with broad strokes. I've been suspected of being a member of the group thought to be behind the massacre at Columbine High. I've had my tires cut. I've felt the drooling hostility from people I was supervising, the inept contempt of the local authorities, and the bland indifference of people who I thought were there to help.

I will be the first person to admit I am a bastard to work with on a personal level - I expect competence from others and expect respect for my own. But I don't play politics well, so there has never been an avenue out of the lower legions, regardless of what the company's promotional policies state. I made my boss's boss uncomfortable because I never lost my rough edges. If anything, the longer I chafed in a useless role, the rougher those edges have become. I make no apologies for who and how I am - I kick ass at my job despite the fact that I
loathe even coming in each morning.

But for three years I have been here - moving from the lowest, most thankless tier of technical support masochism to something less hateful but no more fulfilling. I have sacrificed portions of my health (to allergies), my car (winter + dirt hill = inadequate traction), my socialization (internet and phone only five days a week, 120 miles to friends, family, and social events). For what?

A job I detest.

Will I miss it? I think that's abundantly clear. Will I miss the people? A few, but most of them I feel no obligation to. Hell, I barely recognize one person in three in this cubicle farm.

For three years. But no longer.

I still don't have "valuable work experience," at least in the sense that I can go get a job that I'd enjoy without having to prostrate myself for headhunters or employers. I have career time in jobs I never want to do again. I have a large cachet of bitterness towards the nameless, insipid hordes of the online world, the slavering mouthbreathers that pass for entry-level support personnel once the barrel has been scraped clean, and product and personnel management that, when it's not being inertially clueless is actively hostile.

But I have a silver bullet for the abomination. It's just a square of paper on my cubicle wall, but it says everything I need it to.

"October 26, 2000."

So long, and thanks for all the fish.