I Quit My Job
By Sam Dean
When you actually come up against it, the ease with which you can quit a job seems pretty fucking crazy. Explaining to your boss that you don’t want to come back is a true speech act. The words make a new reality, and suddenly 40 hours/week just open right up.
I heard that I got an unpaid internship around 2 PM on a Friday, and began to freak out about how to actually quit, possibly in Japanese. The Internet provides sample letters of resignation, but it’s hard to trust the products of content farms on anything weightier than soup recipes. No one in the office knew I was even unhappy, and it’s standard Japanese protocol to work at any given company for at least two years. I was defecting, out of the blue.
Adding some wrack to my nerves, too, Egypt was rising, and being movingly televised. My resolve weakened. “I could be covering something like that,” I thought, “I could be carrying a tripod and doing interviews where something important happens. TV can, sometimes, be good for the world.”
Even though an unpaid internship at a place I respected was enough of a push to make me jump ship immediately, and even though I was months deep in serious belief that my job was killing me metaphysically, the financial gall of it made me balk. I may not hoard rubber bands, but the economy has bred a caution in me that even my parents, and most of their friends, find alien.
I checked my bank account online, again and again, calculating how long I could live without my paycheck, on 30 dollars a day, on 20, on 10.
I took a breather, took a walk, and called my family. They reminded me how I hadn’t seemed happy. I hadn’t told them the least of it, since parents generally don’t like to hear their kids’ treatises on boredom-induced long-term depression. They said I could tutor or something to pay rent, which was true.
So I wrote a letter to my top boss, the boss of them all, whose English was best, and printed it out just around quitting time. My hands were weirdly spazzy, so I accidentally printed 12 copies of the letter, 11 of which are now sitting under a pile of crap on my desk. He expressed mild surprise and disappointment, and suggested we speak about this with my more immediate superior when he was done doing his live feed to Tokyo.
So I waited, more, guiltily going through the motions of the end of a week. The office glowed with a kind of pre-nostalgic aura. My coworkers seemed interesting and approachable, all the camera equipment glamorous and fun. I had a fairly fluent conversation in Japanese, and felt a pang for the neural pathways I was giving up. I knew this was all bullshit, so tried to ignore it. If anything, it’s just proof that my brain generally doesn’t have any idea what it’s doing.
When I was called back into the office, my immediate boss was slumped in an armchair next to the big boss, looking grumpy. They both grilled me for a few minutes, the grumpy boss slurrily snarling in Japanese, and the big boss translating what I couldn’t get. I made it through, and said I was sorry, but I was sure about this.
And so, I was free.
The next week was, thankfully, murder, as the Egyptian stuff died down and the dark boredom returned. Vindicated, I just left on my last Friday and never went back.
The internship, now, is only 3 days/week, and during the other two days, I still do nothing. But somehow, that nothing feels totally fine. In fact, it feels great.