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Take this job and shove it

Last week, a disgruntled Jet Blue flight attendant became an instant folk hero to overworked and underappreciated working schlubs everywhere after he quit his job in dramatic fashion – he triggered an inflatable emergency slide and scooted to freedom with two beers in hand. Then a story about a young woman who quit her thankless clerical job via pointed messages to her lecherous, Farmville-obsessed boss on a dry wipe board hit the news. The dry wipe story turned out to be a hoax, and accounts of the Jet Blue incident have been contradictory, but whether the tales are true or not, they struck a nerve with an increasingly burdened and dissatisfied workforce.

The stories went viral almost instantly. Even in a bull economy, the urge to throw off the gilded handcuffs of gainful employment isn’t unusual. OfficeSpace, a film about a group of affable white collar IT slaves who exact revenge against their employer by embezzling company funds, was released in 1999 and became an instant cult following. In an economy where the job market is still on life support, the possibility of escape is even more remote, and consequently the fantasies of telling your employer to “take this job and shove it” have become even more intense. Last week we were able to live vicariously through the Jet Blue refugee and the fictional dry wipe quitter. For a brief moment, we escaped with them and it felt good.

Well guess what? I’m not ready to quit cheering. I’m not ready return to the grind. So I asked a few familiar faces about their own history of leaving terrible, horrible, no good, very bad jobs. Here are some tales of leaving histrionic and homophobic bosses, thankless low-paying jobs, and in my case, the biggest group of douchebags south of the Mason-Dixon line.

 

When I first moved to LA, I worked for a year as a personal assistant to an actress. As you can imagine, being someone’s assistant sucks. She ended up firing me, because I hated my job and so, in return, was a terrible assistant.

In hindsight, I should have quit months before. Right after she yelled at me for the hundredth time for not doing something exactly the way she wanted it done, I should have told her to take my low-paying, bitch work job and shove it up her uptight Hollywood a-s!

Too harsh? Then I would have grabbed her cat – ‘cuz her cat was awesome and secretly gay – and we would have gone immediately into West Hollywood, grabbed a drink, jumped on the bar, started dancing, and come out of the closet at the same time! Victory!

One of my first jobs after college was as a PA on a low-budget film. The hours were brutal: 6 a.m. call with a 2 a.m. wrap, and the same the next day, and the next, and the next. This went on for a couple of weeks. The pay also sucked out loud. It was so low that I’m ashamed to even tell you now. Apparently “Paying your dues” is code for “Taking it up the a-s.”

Because I was just out of college, I had resumes out all over Manhattan. One rainy day, while shooting a scene inside a leaky, filthy, abandoned warehouse, I received a call. I was being offered a job at a well-known production company owned by SNL creator Lorne Michaels. I put down the grimy cable I was holding, walked up to the production manager, and said simply, “I got another job. I start tomorrow. Bye.” And I walked out of there – into the pouring rain – and never looked back.

If I were to go out in flames, today, I would just tweet that sh–.

 

A few years ago, I was fired for being “too gay.” Yes, “too gay.” My boss actually used the words “too gay.” I was working for a well-known English language Latino network as a producer/writer and on-camera host. There was a specific segment in the show that highlighted Latinos in the community to show that we hold other jobs other than standing outside Home Depot, cleaning houses or selling oranges.

Along with producing segments on Latino lawyers, artists, and business owners, I produced two stories on the Latino LGBT community. One of them was about Odalys Nanin, a prominent, well-known LGBT activist, writer/producer and executive director of Macha Theatre, and the other was about an immigrant woman who struggled to come to this country and was an executive in charge of an LGBT rights organization. I did such a kick a-s job on them that GLAAD took notice of my work and awarded this network with a Special Recognition Award. An award for my work.

Out of the blue, my boss calls me in the office, sits me down and tells me that he’s letting me go because I’m “too gay.” I was calm at first and asked what “too gay” meant. He just kept saying I was “too gay.” I finally lost it and let him have it! I was yelling at him so loud the entire office was outside the door! I flung open the door and in front of all my co-workers I said something to my boss like, “You’re so f——g full of s–t!”

P.S. I got a new job, and guess who came to that network sniffing around for a job? When my present boss asked what I thought about him – well, I told the truth.

Oh, my turn? My first job out of college was at an investment bank in the South. I was the lone female analyst in a team of classy specimens who would go to two hour lunches at strip clubs and come back tipsy. I was not invited to these jaunts, which was disappointing in one sense but kind of a relief, because seeing my morbidly obese boss being felt up by a woman in a thong and pasties would have been traumatizing. The managing director and VP were recent Wall Street transplants, and they had Wall Street personalities. They would scream for the sake of screaming, and haze the analysts by getting plastered and then calling us to run to the office to fax something at 2 a.m., and then say “Made you do it!”

The senior analyst – the only decent one of the bunch – was only 25, but he was going gray and looked like a refugee camp survivor. I looked into his eyes, saw barely any signs of life, and his forlorn posture and interminable air of defeat indicated that those who stay either become despicable human beings like our coworkers or zombies like him. I knew that I had to leave.

I set up interviews in Manhattan, called in sick, and interviewed at three or four places over the course of two days. After I received an offer, I sauntered into the office in jeans, sneakers, a new navel ring and a few extra earrings, and I gave my two weeks notice. I was asked to clean out my desk immediately, and then I jumped into my car, took the nearest exit to I-95 and drove to New York City. I was stopped by the cops on the way for speeding, which wasn’t a surprise, because I couldn’t get away fast enough.

Now it is your turn. Readers, have you ever quit a job in dramatic fashion? Do you have any such fantasies? Let’s spill it in the comments. Go!

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