quitter

Today, I quit my job.

Well. That's probably oversimplifying the case a bit. Today, I attempted to quit one of my part-time jobs, my first job, only to be informed that I had to talk to the general manager to have such a thing properly approved, and he will be in tomorrow.

(It is occurrences like these that further convince me that my life is actually a sad art house film with vague soul-food, coming-of-age overtones; the kind of thing that Tobey Maguire and the chick from Juno might star in, with Tyler Perry both producing and appearing in drag at some point.)

It is a truly ridiculous world we live in (or maybe it's just me?) where I can't even quit my job without being given the middle-management runaround. Meditating on this ridiculousness helps me to not think about the fact that I have worked this job for three years solid and no one, not a single person that I spoke to about my imminent departure, even attempted to get me to stay. I mean, it's a crappy job. A wage-slave, dead-end kind of a job. And yet, the idea of quitting it felt like failure at first. When I left today (vowing fervently that I would never, ever return as an employee; I'll call in tomorrow to speak to the GM but I'll be darned if I'm ever going back in that office), there was nobody to wave goodbye or say that they would miss working with me, or even to say "good riddance", for that matter. It just didn't make much of a difference. I didn't make much of a difference, I suppose.

To be fair, I was never in it for more than the paycheck. Like I wanted to be in food service for the rest of my life? My fellow employees (those who didn't work two weeks and then walk off/get fired; we went through a lot of flaky people while I was there), for the most part, didn't care about what we were doing any more than I did. Sure, some of us stuck out in that we actually liked the customers and the people we worked with, took pride in our work, and maybe even thought our company was a generally good one. But it wasn't something we belonged to. We just worked there.

I spoke to Faith & Co. about my growing desire to quit, long before I actually did so. She pointed out something that I had never considered before: at this stage in my life, there's no good reason to work a job I hate. Losing the extra income is a risk, sure, and kind of scary, but it's not the end of the world. And I have other options.

C'est la vie, I guess. On to the next thing. Like deciding how to productively structure my suddenly-extremely-flexible schedule...