Take it from Snee: Quit your job

Before I get started, I just want to wish everyone a happy National Grammar Day! If you are inclined to comment on the following article, please observe this holiest of days in the comments section by posting a coherent response. All failures to do so will be ridiculed to the point of suicide.

So I was waiting for a haircut when I witness this scene:

MAN walks into the shop.

MAN: Excuse me, when’s Shakira* working next?

HAIRCUTTER: I honestly have no idea. She hasn’t shown up for work that past two days.

MAN: Ah. OK.

*This name was changed to protect my failing memory.

I’d already heard of people quitting their jobs by just not showing up anymore. I always knew it said very little about that person’s intestinal fortitude, but that was their problem that they could ignore, hoping it goes away.

But, when I consider the problems our country faces these days, I couldn’t shake it off this time.

Ladies and gentlemen who simply walk away from your job without the decency of an obscene phone call: for shame.

I don’t mean the kind of shame that comes from screwing a picnic table or even the shame of disappointing your mom on Mother’s Day. I’m talking the shame of shirking one of the greatest experiences of life — rites of passage, if you will — just to ignore some phone calls from your presumably fat boss.

(Those other greatest experiences include fighting a bully, driving an old sports car, scoring the game-wining point and making love to an Eight or above.)

We’ve all held lousy jobs. Hell, even Beethoven started out as a punching bag. The whole point of having a lousy job is working up enough experience to get a better one and then quit the shitty one.

I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but quitting (not quilting, Schools) was once the premier American activity, maybe even our original pastime before baseball. We used to revel in it. Even the very founding of this nation is based on a document published on July 4, 1776, which told the British to take their taxation-without-representation and shove it.

That’s the point of quitting: we want you, the employer, to know that you are no longer the boss of us and that you can do my work after I’m gone for only marginally better pay. We’d rather face destitution than share a smoke break with you ever again.

But we’re not the quitters we used to be. Why, today, we need interventions and daytime talk show ambushes just to learn that we need to knock something off. And don’t think drugs aren’t a job. If you’d suck ass for money, then drugs is a job.

So, (wo)man up. Quit your jobs. Tell these companies that have crashed our economy into the f#$king mountain that you don’t care for the cut of their jibe. For all you know, you might be quitting before they can lay you off. How about that?

It’s what Ben Franklin did when he was tired of being a dad, what Thomas Jefferson did when he was tired of being a sort-of abolitionist and what Abraham Lincoln did when he was tired of leading America.

(What, too soon?)

Oh, and afterwards, could you let me know where you quit from and if you were in a position that someone with a B.S. in English could fill? And maybe your pay level? Thanks.