Monday, October 17, 2022

Quitting quietly... or otherwise

HALLIE EPHRON: First we were reading about The Great Resignation. People quitting their jobs during the darkest days of Covid. Now it’s morphed into a buzz around “Quiet quitting.” In other words, mailing it in – doing the least possible to stay on the payroll.

I’ve quit several times, but I’ve never been a quiet quitter. I volunteered to get laid off from my job as an educational consultant after eight years working at Digital but they wouldn’t put me on the list. My performance ratings were too high. So I had to quit (no bonus for me) to take a job at a small training company, a job I hated so much (SO dysfunctional, they specialized in MISmanagement and burning out their young hard working employees) that I quit after 6 weeks.

Yes, I admit I had another contract job (flexible hours) already lined up, and it was the step I needed to take to make space in my life to write fiction… in the hopes that it would one day pay off with a book contract.

Have you yet uttered the words, “I quit.” And how did it pan out for you?

RHYS BOWEN: Since I’ve had very few “proper jobs” in my life I haven’t had much chance to exclaim “I quit” and march out with dramatic flair.

The only one I remember quitting after one week was between college and starting at the BBC when I was employed as a tea lady at IBM. There were supposed to be two of us. We had to make huge urns of tea and coffee then wheel the trolleys around the building. The trolleys were so temperamental and heavy that I couldn’t control mine, flying down hallways and crashing through doors willy-nily. The other girl quit after one day. I was also expected wait tables in the executive lunch room.

It was all too much for one person so I quit. The only time in my life.

Otherwise I never actually left the BBC. I took a leave of absence to go and work for ABC in Australia. I left Australian Broadcasting to get married. I left doing PR for the California Nurses Association to have a baby (couldn’t wait! Lots of old cows there). Since then I’ve been a writer. My own boss and very happy.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Hmm. That is a great question. I tried to leave my TV job a while ago but they wouldn't let me, so now I work at the station free-lance, which is absolutely great.

I did quit my summer job at the Dairy Queen a million years ago--circa 1967–because my family was all going to Europe. I do remember that they were really, really angry about it. Summer jobs were hard to get, and they thought I was leaving them in the lurch. They were right, of course, and I still, all these years later, feel bad about it.

Oh–and I once quit a job before I started. I was hired away from Channel 7 in maybe 1984 by a local TV station in Washington DC. I agreed to the offer,...and went into the big boss’s office to resign. And he was so upset, and kind of got…threatening? About it. He said–you’ve worked here for less than a year, and you’ll get a reputation as a quitter, and no one will ever hire you again. I was so intimidated that I un-did the whole deal.

I’m glad I stayed. Completely.

JENN McKINLAY: I’m not a quiet quitter, although I did ghost a few lame retail jobs back in college. Sorry not sorry. Treat employees right and they won’t leave you in the lurch.

Other than that, I’ve only had one full-time job which lasted three years and that was it for me. After that, I did a variety of part-time library gigs until I went full-time with the writing eight years ago. Writing is, of course, full time but if you love what you do…well, you know.

LUCY BURDETTE: I was desperate for cash in college so took a job taking care of axelotls in the biology department. These are prehistoric-looking amphibians and there were walls of them, each in its own plastic box of water.

I can't recall what experiments were being conducted, but I do know that some of them were albino and some were grafted together, stomach to stomach. Since these creatures won't eat anything unless it's moving, I had to take chunks of frozen liver in tweezers and wave this in each axelotl's cage--then they would snap at the liver and gulp it down. They needed four or five bites apiece. APIECE.



And then to make things worse, the boxes needed cleaning twice a week. Dump the creatures into the sink, scrub out the slimy boxes, return axelotls to their containers. But I kept at that until I scored a job that had something to do with filing in the library’s card catalog.Phew!

One more: I was home from a semester abroad and missed the opportunity to apply for a lot of summer jobs. I saw something in the paper about sewing in a handbag factory. I could sew so I applied and got the job.

Sewing leather on an industrial machine is nothing like sewing aprons on your Singer at home. It was so hard! And the foreman hated having a college girl on his team. Plus the other workers were largely Hispanic, some spoke no English, and none of them had the option of quitting a difficult job.

I couldn’t take it and I’m still embarrassed that I quit after 3 days and begged my mother to go down and pick up my check.

HALLIE EPHRON: I had a job briefly going door to door selling encyclopedias. Also calling people and offering magazine subscriptions. Lasted one day in each.

I was highly unsupervised as an adolescent.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I just have to speak up for the “quiet quitters” of the workplace - if you read the news stories in business sections (which tend to slant heavily toward the bosses…hmmm) you’ll find they often define “quiet quitting” as such reprehensible practices as 1) only working 40 hours a week, 2) not being available via email after work or on the weekends, and 3) not volunteering for unpaid work “for the good of the team.” I highly recommend Ed Zitron’s Quiet Quitting and the Death of Office Culture to anyone who’d like to learn more.

That being said! I’ve had a lot of jobs that were, by definition, ending: summer jobs, temp jobs, a contract legal documents review job. As my recent Social Security reminded me, I have a spotty history when it comes to working for other people - I was in school most of my 20s, a stay-at-home mother for most of my 30s, and have been self employed since I hit 40.

I had a lovely first career job as the Development Officer at the DC Historical Society, and I was sad to quit, but they actually threw me a party because I was leaving to marry Ross and start law school!

I did get fired once, though. Like, back to your desk, clear it out, security walks you to the door fired.
It was the law firm I worked for around the time Youngest was born, after I’d entered my first book in the Malice Domestic contest. As you all know, it was published, and about a year later, the HR lady called me in to her office and gave me the chop.

They said I was spending too much time on the job working on my career as an author - and she did have a point, I was emailing and doing publicity stuff from my desk. Although in my defense, I was still carrying NINETY TWO CASES on my docket.

Because I got fired, I got unemployment, which the firm challenged because - all authors will shriek at this - I had a book out and must have been making too much money to qualify. Needless to say, one visit with the State Unemployment agent cleared that up. All I had to do was show him my advance and explain I wasn’t seeing anymore $$ until up to a year later. :-)

HALLIE: So what about you? Have you ever quit a job? stomped out in a huff? Quit quietly? Hung around and mailed it in? And lived to tell about it??

51 comments:

  1. Jobs can be awfully difficult . . . .
    Aside from all the temporary summer jobs, after school jobs, and the fit-work-in-around-college-classes jobs, I’ve pretty much hung in for the long haul. I did leave a teaching job for a position in aerospace education program development; mostly, I just keep on keeping on . . . .

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    1. You're lucky if you can keep on keeping on with a job that you actually enjoy and, most importantly, work with people you enjoy workingwith.

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  2. My first sort of full-time job was working in a medical lab as a secretary. I did not know that the department was in a sub-sub-sub basement. Far away from light. Then I was told I would have to help in the lab with stuff that you would not want to be helping. I went out to lunch after I leaving the sub-sub-sub basement and never returned. Called them while eating and said I quit.

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    1. That would have drive me out, too! Cold, dank, dark... feh.

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  3. Sorry not to have got my bit in on the front end! It has been a crazy week in the UK, but I'm now settled down a bit.

    The first proper job I had after college was doing secretarial work and writing ad copy for a big car dealer's in-house agency. This "agency" consisted of two guys, one of whom was married to the dealers owner's daughter. I have to admit that I'd lived a pretty sheltered life up until that point as far as dealing with sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior, but these guys were the worst, and mean with it. When they berated me for not wanting to make the drive to work during an ice storm, I quit.

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    1. There are probably still workplaces like that. I did some work briefly at a radio station that was toxic in that way.

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  4. You really do learn something new every day. Now I know what an axolotl is -- and I can never un-know it! 😱 When I was eighteen, I quit a summer donut shop job before I even started it. It was to be Day 1 on the job, and I turned off my alarm at 3:45 a.m. and decided it just wasn't going to work out. I still feel guilty about bailing. At least I called in and apologized -- before I went back to sleep!

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    1. NOT time to make the donuts. :-) ANd yes, that video is ridiculous--it's in my head forever.

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    2. I once had a great summer job but I had to be there at 6:15 AM - silver lining was missing Los Angeles freeway traffic... an hour and a half commute in traffic, 20 minutes without.

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  5. I'm much more a "hang in there forever" person than someone who quits. There was one exception. I got back from my overseas study program in October 1978, so I knew I had to get a job right away and not go back to college. I found one that I thought would use my studies in psychology. The job was a "counselor" at a group home for troubled youth. The shifts were 12 hours, day and night. We took the girls on outings, made meals, supervised chores. It was ok, except for driving and parking the huge van. A few weeks in there was an incident where one girl grabbed a knife and threatened someone. The other staff person jumped on her and took the knife away. I thought about it and decided I would never have been able to do that, so I gave my 2 weeks notice. A few days later, I was scheduled to work an overnight shift. There had been an ice storm, which resulted in some power outages. Our power was on, but the boys' home nearby still hadn't regained power. The counselor from the boys' program came by with a couple of his charges to take some wood from our big wood pile. One of my girls jumped on the pile and said, "you can't take our wood!" They, of course, did take the wood. As soon as I closed and locked the door, she started punching me in the face. I was so shocked, I had no idea how to respond. She ran away. I stayed there for the rest of the night with a couple of girls who remained. I'm ashamed to say that I did nothing until the day shift staff person arrived. Needless to say, I never went back.

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    1. Gillian, that sounds like hardcore prison-level issues! I'd have been as much in over my head as you were in such a horrible situation.

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    2. That is terrifying. Absolutely terrifying.

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  6. I have not ever said "I quit" and stormed out, but within less than 3 hours of starting my 'editorial assistant' job after graduating from journalism school I knew I had made an awful mistake taking it. While the company was ahead of the curve (an early version of LexisNexis = online law database), the job was nothing more than data entry and I wanted way more than that with my fresh degree in hand. I didn't do anything that day; just suffered quietly. The next day, I got a summer job offer from a national financial newspaper in Toronto (on its copy desk) and I accepted on the spot. While the position was only short term, it was in real journalism and I learned a lot (including how to write headlines for articles I barely understood). Then, I did say "I quit" early, leaving the editor in the lurch, when I was offered a scholarship to a publishing program; I wanted that more than I didn't want to suffer the ire of the editor. I loved learning about book and magazine publishing in Canada -- and I regret not pursuing that line of work to see where it might take me, but personal circumstances made it seem impossible.

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  7. My second ever job was right out of high school--pump jockey at a gas station. The owner fired me/I quit after one week because I wouldn't 'flirt' with his pals.

    But the quiet quitting, I totally understand and support. At a former professional job, I was required to call in every day of my vacation (and getting to a phone was a nuisance). None of my projects had been left in less than capable hands, nothing required my attention while I was gone--just an owner/manager who needed to show me who was boss. And in another job, I did quiet quit before it was a term. On salary, one project required 15-16 hour days, seven days a week for three months to meet a federal deadline. Did I receive any compensation beyond my 40-hour week? No. After that, I put in quite a few 20-hour weeks. I have always been fast and efficient--40 hours of work in 20 hours was something I could manage easily for many of my projects--unless I was in the field.

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    1. This reminds me... The beauty of being "on contract" as a writer was that I could set a price in advance and then work only as long as it took me to get the job done. Because I'm a fast worker, that worked out well, and no one was ever the wiser (but me.)

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  8. I've quit several jobs, for various reasons, but usually gave notice. Except for when I was working at the employment agency, cold calling doctors' offices to place staff. They had a script we were supposed to use, but it was almost impossible to get past the receptionist or other non-doctor office denizens, and why wouldn't it? Their job might be the one to get replaced. It was a really high stress job, and for absolutely minimum wage. I did get to talk to a couple dentists who answered their own phones and I found that talking sports was the easiest way to get them to stay on the phone. (And I went out with one dentist, then stayed friends with him for decades.) I never placed anyone, though, and ended up walking out one day at lunchtime. I almost immediately found a much better job, one that I loved working for a small chain of retail stores.

    My son-in-law is a corporate attorney who used to work for a company that expected him to be available around the clock, seven days a week. He was in the international division, and since his two areas were Europe and South America, he was fielding calls at all hours. It was SO abusive. For the last 12 years he's worked for a German company that does not expect their employees to work nights and weekends, but they would like him to be at their New Jersey headquarters, which he absolutely refuses to do. Over time, he was spending more and more time at his home office, until Covid. Now he no longer has an office outside his home, and even moved 200 miles from his former office last year. He's practically a professional quiet quitter!

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    1. I know for a lot of people having that home office has allowed them to work less... less hard, fewer hours, because who's the wiser? But I also know it can go the other way and someone who's SO conscientious and has such a huge workload that they never take the breaks they need or say "NO that's too much" or "Not enough time..."

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    2. Work/life balance! My middle daughter also works at home, and she ends up working a lot of hours, also because parts of her team are in different time zones.

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    3. My last 18 months or so of career-FT-work were at home during Covid, and I have never worked more intensely. Oy. The day started bang at 8am and often went past 5pm; formal breaks were often ignored, as meetings just rolled into each other online. The foolish considered it boastworthy to say they'd been in non-stop meetings all day -- as if we couldn't tell!!!!!

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  9. Anyone else humming 9-5? I am.

    I have quit a number of jobs, always with a better one in the pocket, though, so I rarely had a long layoff between jobs. There was one job though - my first and only as a waitress. Gave me great empathy for servers. It's a rough job.

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    1. Waitress??? ME: Running screaming from the room. I'd have been perfectly dreadful at it.

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    2. I lasted a whole week! Then I punched out in the middle of my shift and was gone.

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    3. Never even tried the waitress thing. Knew I would be bad at it and would hate it. When a friend asked “why do you tip so generously?” I replied, “Because they are doing work I never ever could do and are doing it better than I could if I did.” Elisabeth

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    4. Hardest job I ever had, waitressing in a diner when I was in high school.

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    5. I worked at the dairy queen, but that was not like being a waitress. SO HARD! And aw, thank you for the wishes! xxx

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  10. Nope, I have never said "I quit" and left a job. I worked part-time jobs in the school library in junior high, high school and university and LOVED it. Not a big surprise, right?

    I worked in both federal and provincial government for 4 to 8-month work terms in university for 5 years and was offered a 6-month position at Environment Canada before graduating in 1990. That position was extended a year and then I won a position as a climatologist in 1992. I worked with the feds, mostly Environment Canada, until I retired in 2016.

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  11. And your work sounds SO INTERESTING! Which is so important.

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  12. Great stories! But Roberta - those poor amphibians. And the factory job reminds me of when my son, a previously undermotivated worker, got a night shift job in a yogurt factory during the summer between college semesters. I was so proud that he never called in sick once. One of his Hispanic coworkers told him, "Allan, don't you dare not go back to school." The guy never had the chance to go to college. Allan assured him he'd be going.

    I quit my job at the gas station after a year, during which my boss kept sending me to trainings (tune-up school was one of the best) and had offered me a job managing another station he owned. I loved the work and the learning and the shock on people's faces when they saw this "girl" mechanic in 1974. But I wanted to live with my first great love while he was in Navy training school in San Diego, so I quit and we found a little one-room place to be blissful in. I sewed a quilt a week and sold them to a quilt shop. I ended up living with Tim in Japan for two years. Changed my life.

    My last big quit was leaving the day job in 2013 to write fiction full time. SO glad I did.

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  13. I worked in academia - college professor for 10 years, after 5 years of postdoctoral research, 4 years in graduate school and a year as a lab tech after college. All those years were at 60 - 80 hours a week. So I can identify with the quiet quitters who want reasonable work loads. The older tenured professors did reduce their work loads as far as research and committee work. And in academia they were referred to as 'dead wood.'

    I was in a small car accident with whiplash associated disorder which led to chronic daily headache. I took a leave of absence but my health didn't improve so I never returned to work. Still fighting those migraines twenty years later. I would have liked to have left the work force on my own terms, but it was not to be.

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  14. I never had an easy resume. Many of my jobs were great fun and then my husband would be relocated. Then here in Tampa I kept moving up the professional ladder by moving from one library system to the next. Finally fired - Peter Principle demonstration. Then the hearing disability took hold so I left the airline cuz I could not understand the callers. I finally did a nope not for me resignation when a new supervisor was hired. It was as if they walked in saying "Hi you won't like me and that is great!." I thought: nope goom bye.

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  15. Julia, thank you for speaking up in defense of the "quiet quitters ." I had been mentally composing my remarks to that effect as I read. I think in many cases the current crop of young adults are just wiser and more clear about their priorities than we were at their age.

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  16. Those poor axolotls! My nephew's daughters have one that they've managed to keep alive now for three years, which I understand is quite a challenge.

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    1. Pet axlotles??? Do they have personalities? Curious minds…

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  17. I quit many jobs, but almost always with notice. The one job I quit without notice was one I had taken in IT with a contract that said either party could decide to part ways if I had been on the job no longer than 90 days. I realized right away that I was totally burned out from my previous job in IT. I had thought a new venue would work. Nope. So I finished the project I'd been assigned, went into boss's office (he was a really nice guy) and told him I couldn't continue. He asked when I was leaving. I said, "Now." He got up, closed his office door and said fervently, "I'd do the same thing if I didn't have a family and a GOAT FARM IN NAPA to support." And I went straight to a North Beach Italian restaurant and took myself out to lunch.

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  18. Ha ha!! That made me snort my coffee…

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  19. Yikes--so many overworked people! And Lucy and the axolotls deserved to be free. I decided to quit a job when I was on a stretcher in an ambulance (exhaustion a big culprit), the very best or very worst time to make that sort of decision.

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  20. I've never resigned from a job like that, But I can understand why it would feel good to do just that.

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  21. Does it count as a quit if you leave the interview right at the point you are certain that the job is not for you? I was interviewing for a mail list manager position (that’s the person who used to determine what names off multiple mailing lists should receive a catalog in order to make the catalog profitable. Probably all done by computer logarithms now.) And a voice in my head shouted: “You want to do this for the rest of YOUR LIFE? Get out NOW! And do that law school application!” And 4 years later at the age of 46, I passed the bar. Practiced law for about 16 years. Never wanted to quit again. Elisabeth

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  22. I left my yard work job when I left the area to go to college. I think that's it. I was getting ready to leave a job (as in I was going to start looking for a new job) when the company was bought out and I was laid off.

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    1. I was no aware of what quiet quitting really entailed. There are too many managers and upper management who need to realize that they are requiring too much from employees. I get that sometimes, something comes up, but it needs to be a true emergency, not a lack of planning. Or a plan to exploit. There is too much exploitation out there.

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  23. I worked as office admin (dogsbody), for a father and son company. All three of us. The son had a fearful tempers and swore foully at me one day for an error which had nothing to do with me. I was upset, he left. I called the NY State office of employment and explained. The woman said why are you still there? I called the father the following morning to say I quit - and - he didn’t ask for a reason. But I’m am wondering if Rhys was pouring tea at IBM when I worked there in 1965.

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  24. That’s from Celia, sorry. Blogger hate here.

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  25. Sorry I got a note from my browser saying that the website was not working. Looks like i can comment. Yay!

    Wow! This is a great topic! I would recommend subscribing to Robert Reich's daily notes. He also is on FB and Instagram. He was the Secretary of State under the former President William J. Clinton. He mentions people quitting their jobs because the bosses did not treat them well. So I totally agree with what Jenn just said about treating your workers well.

    There was a job donkey years ago. I worked for a big box chain bookstore, now no longer there. I was hired to sell books then without asking me or informing me, they moved me to the stockroom. And I found out when I got my weekly schedule. I asked my boss why. My boss said that a customer complained that I was not helpful (hello! I could not hear that person's very soft voice and I DID OFFER A PEN AND PAPER!! Good grief!). And I got that job through a "job developer, working with disabled". The job developer did everything to undermine me by telling my boss that I was a cochlear implant failure, showing up late for a training day (she was also the sign language translator) and implying that I did not know how to work hard.

    Even if I was working in "stock room", I still had One cochlear implant. I still had to put new books on the shelves so I was on the floor meeting customers. Funny story. I had just watched the Friends tv episode with the African American actress from San Francisco. She just published a book and I had just put her books on the shelves. My boss panicked because a customer was looking for her book. She told me and I said "I know where the book is." I led the customer to the bookshelf where the book was. MY boss was embarrassed. I am sorry if I embarrassed her. I was trying to be helpful.

    There was a high turnover at work. The friendly co-worker turned out to be a racist even if he was gay. He said things like that our colleague (name) is lazy and not willing to work. I KNEW she worked very hard. Yes, she is African American and she worked harder than some of the White co-workers. I knew that I could not trust that co-worker with any problems.

    So after a year, I applied to the paralegal program and got in. My boss was rarely in the office. When she finally made an appearance, I told her that I worked for a year and I got another job working at a law firm.

    Diana

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  26. I've never "quiet quit." There was my summer job at the pool store, which I quit to get a full time job. I quit that job to get married. Of course I quit a couple high-school jobs. And I quit my first job as a technical editor to move to another firm.

    I have been fired. Short story: I made the mistake of trusting a new VP when he said, "Tell me what you think." Three months later, it was "You need to find another position." I said, "You have to fire if you aren't going to wait until I find a job." So they did.

    But that was the summer I took off to finish my first novel (the "training-bra" book) that started me on the path to where I am now, so really, I think it worked out pretty well.

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  27. Yikes, Lucy!! You win, or make that, LOSE! ICK!

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