For the last two days, I have been conscious of my breathing. A faint asthma-like wheeze had developed in my chest since my Valentine’s Day car wreck. I suspected that my belabored breath had something to do with the accident but later I decided it was due to good ol’ fashioned life stress. I had made my mind up that I would quit my job (without a new one lined up) and give notice to my boss at the end of the day. Because that’s when people quit jobs or fire people, right? At 4:45 pm on Fridays. It lessens the chances of drama being played out with freshly fired employees shoving picture frames and dying plants into cardboard boxes. And, if you quit too early, the water-cooler chatter about who’s just quit may incite the malcontents to follow suit and cry “Revolution!”
In my attempt to quiet the gurgling in my chest, I bumped up my 5:00 pm target quitting time and sent my boss an instant message at noon. The conversation took about eight minutes. A company veteran of eighteen years (unheard of!), employed straight out of high school, this Company was the sole source of income for this woman for little more than half her life. Amazingly, for the most part, she remained bitter-free. I imagine my boss was a World War I sergeant in a past life. I picture her in full soldier regalia, face dirty and determined, dragging the half-alive bodies of her subordinates into fox holes, dodging bullets and grenades and crawling through circles of barbed wire. But in this life, she sat across from me, a woman so petite you could put her in your pocket, her head tilted to the left and the corner of her mouth slightly turned up. “It’s really okay,” she says. “You need to find out what makes you happy.” Unbelievable, I thought, she saw this coming a mile away. I am amazed at my own transparency.
For the last few months at work, my body spoke what I could not. My mother would have been greatly disappointed with the slumpy posture I adopted and she would have been appalled (but not really surprised) at the Grumpy-Gus face I wore, as I dragged my chunky black heels through the cube maze day after day. I rarely took off my coat, always ready to bolt out the door. K, my cube neighbor to the right, was a sixteen-year veteran of the Company. She had designed a diorama depicting her life story using 3-in picture frames, company plaques, commemorative cup-and-saucer sets and refrigerator magnets on the shelf above her cube. The only “decoration” I had in my cube was a $2.99 plastic wall clock from Target. I never really made myself comfortable.
It’s 12:08 pm and I walk out of my boss’s office, relieved of the letter of resignation still warm off the company printer, and breathing much easier, thank you.
