People Behaving Badly #17

It's not supposed to happen that when you get laid off from your job, people say "Congratulations". Suddenly finding yourself unemployed is not generally a cause for celebration. And yet, here I am, on Day Two of The Rest of My Life, and everyone from my better half to my best friend to my Mum have all expressed nothing but joy at the fact that I am no longer employed by the miserable tyrant that is THEmedia.

I started working with them two years ago, and for the first couple of months, I was happy. Making decent coin, moving up the ladder, gaining experience and working with a cool crew of people. Somewhere, though, I knew something was wrong. Something just didn't feel right. Maybe it was being reminded that I had taken 63 minutes for lunch, and being asked when I'd make up those missing three minutes on my timesheet. Or it could have been one of the days when a co-worker, attempting to call in sick, was told that they're 'too important to not be here' and forced to come in anyway, all snotty-nosed and shivering. By the time they quietly cashed a $30,000 cheque on an invoice the client had already paid, I knew it was time to start planning an exit strategy.

Ah, but therein lay the dilemma. Trying to escape from this place without burning any bridges or getting fired doing it would prove more difficult than escaping from Alcatraz in a dinghy made of rain slickers. It's a fucked up hierarchy with the obsessive-compulsive King on top, three of the King's Men, and the wench, Stompy, firmly in the King's back pocket. The rest of us peons were just that, pathetic minions charged with the impossible task of keeping Stompy happy so that she could bow before her King as the perfect little brown-noser she strived to be.

And Stompy was the worst - this little sorority bitch with a God complex who couldn't walk in heels, even though she wore them every day. She would make impossible demands, and blame us mere mortals for the uncontrollable ways of the universe when her demands were not met. She would find fault in everything from pixels to punctuation, and when she couldn't find anything valid to criticize, she'd pick apart every minute detail of something completely irrelevant. I never really understood how she kept going; I would think it would be exhausting, or at the very least depressing, to only see the negative in every situation. But there she was, day after day, this little pessimistic ball of bitchiness dipped in saccharine pretentiousness. I hated that I had to interact with her.

As the days wore on and I started to lose more and more of myself, I started to do some soul searching. Lucky for me, these guys had sucked most of it out of me already, so it didn't take long to come to a decision. I didn't care if they found out that I was looking. I didn't care if they fired me for it. All I cared about now was getting out, with as much remaining sanity as possible. Carpe Diem. Seize the Day.

When another company called me for an interview, it was the same day Stompy had made one of her most ridiculous demands to date. I was at my wits end and she needed to know it. So I marched into her office the next morning, and told her I would not be working overtime that evening, as I was going to a job interview instead. She put on her sourest I'm confused face and asked, "You're not happy working here?"

"Nope, not particularly." I then proceeded to tell her many of the reasons I was feeling unhappy, uncomfortable, and underrated. I intentionally kept quiet on my criticisms of her - still in the interest of trying not to burn any bridges - as I knew she would go running up her chain of command and I would soon have the opportunity to express my concerns to someone who had more authority than her.

Sure enough, the next few days are a string of dirty looks, closed-door meetings, and the silent treatment. Finally she asks if I can meet with her and one of the King's Men. The King, though all of this, has been invisible - he doesn't care what his peons think or feel, as long as at the end of the day they've produced at least eight billable hours for him.

So I sit down with Stompy and the Man, and the Man proceeds to tell me that whatever my concerns are, they're irrelevant. He doesn't care about the how or the why of my being miserable, only that it's a waste of his time for me to be there if I'm not focused solely on making him money. I don't know all the ins-and-outs of running a business, but it seems to me that if I had employees, and one of them came to me saying they were unhappy and had some concerns, I would want to hear about it. Even if I wasn't going to do anything about it, I'd at least pretend to care, and humor them long enough to listen. I suppose I should have known going into it, though, that any concerns of mine would have fallen on deaf ears. In two years, they haven't shown any inclination that they know I'm a person, not just a billable hour, so why would I expect it from them now?

So instead of launching into a diatribe of all things wrong, I simply asked them if we could mutually agree that I was not a good fit. Brilliantly, I convinced them to lay me off. My ideal exit strategy was to quit, but make them think it was their idea, make them do it for me, and make them pay me on the way out. And can you believe it? All I had to do was ask.