I’m Outta Here!

That flight attendant’s abrupt quitting of his job last week had me all misty-eyed, thinking of my own past walkouts.  My all time favorite is probably when I found out I was being replaced at the end of the week and preemptively used an electromagnetic VHS tape eraser to wipe a server containing years of important proposals and documents before going to lunch and never coming back.  (Knowing my moronic boss, he’s probably still sitting at his desk, years later, waiting to chew me out when I return.)

Another job so wrong that even the tableaus of individual desks seemed to bristle visibly with pure malignant wrongness, the post-it notes and desk lamps and ergo-stools on fire like a Dilbert cartoon rendered by late-period Van Gogh. Less than an hour into my employment I raised one finger during the office tour, freezing my guide in mid-sentence, and said, Wait one second, I’ll be right back. I walked calmly around the corner and then ducked into the stairwell, instantly sprinting mindlessly down the stairs, taking them four and five at a time, careening off walls and fire extinguishers and other stairwalkers who shrank against the wall hugging papers to their chests and cursed me as I passed, so frantic that I missed the ground floor entirely and somehow became shunted into the bowels of the building, left to whimper down winding gray subterranean corridors lit by enmeshed bulbs (did this really happen or was it a dream I had?) until I found myself rushing headlong towards a red door marked EMERGENCY ONLY ALARM WILL SOUND and I don’t even hesitate, fuck it, I bang right through at full speed to emerge into the massive loading bay where the sudden commencement of various klaxons and alarm bells have frozen the workmen where they stand in a schoolchild’s diorama of blue-collar industry, one man motionless with a cigarette raised halfway to his mouth, and I zigzag through them and out the freight entrance onto a street still congested with commuters going where I’ve just fled and I can’t decide if I should kiss the ground or dance a little jig or whoop in celebration so I try to do all three at once and the crowd shrinks back as a crowd does only in the presence of insanity.

I went back to my shitty unheated apartment to starve, and there was never any doubt, then or now, that I made the right choice, because like the original rebel said, its better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.  (And look how well things turned out for him!)