This is the week I will quit my job. On Thursday I will hand in my diplomatically written letter of resignation and the 3-month countdown will begin. Fortunately for me my resignation happens to coincide with one of the most difficult periods at work I’ve had to deal with, and this makes things easier. It makes it less likely that I’m going to be ambushed by the False Loyalty fairy who often comes to visit every time I have had to hand in my notice. It’s a little voice that whispers in my ear ‘How are your clients going to cope without you?’, ‘How will your colleagues feel?’, ‘You are a mean, horrible person for putting your own needs before theirs’, and ‘You should work at this company forever’.
Obviously that little fairy is not loyalty at all, it’s really my HUGE EGO which tells me that my work place, which survived quite happily without me for 11 years, will somehow not be able to go on once I hand in my notice. At the moment, however, my desire to quit is so overwhelming that the other little voice (I suspect this one is called SELF-PITY) is drowning out the ego.
Before I go on I would like to just clarify that the little voices I talk about are purely metaphorical and please don’t let it put you off coming to stay; I can assure you that among my many unnerving characteristics multiple personalities is not (yet) one of them.
So… as I was saying, self pity is totally consuming me. So much so that I want to just email the entire company and tell them I quit because I can’t be treated like this any longer: CUE: Carmina Burana style music, soft focus lighting and the back of my hand held dramatically to my forehead.
I have spent the weekend dreaming about how I’m going to hand in my notice, how guilty I’m going to be able to make them feel, and how they will forever change their ways once they realise they’ve lost me. I suspect, reading this back, that my ego is not as drowned out as I thought it was, and as you can see, left to my own devices I can actually forget that I am resigning anyway: That since June of this year I have been planning a whole new life in St Ives and how work do or don’t treat me is neither here nor there, more importantly it’s actually nothing to do with the origianl reason for leaving.
It’s going to take all my energy to behave myself at work today and to not think ‘What the hell, I’m leaving anyway’; mainly because come the end of the day I will feel icky if I’ve done that. Personally I blame my Jewish upbringing for the disproportional amount of guilt I have a tendency to feel which, incidentally, also hampers my ability to pull a sickie.
So today I won’t do anything I will regret, instead I will just wait patiently till Thursday, whereupon I will resign in an appropriate fashion – no tantrums, no self-pity, and as little ego as I can manage.
Journey to Cornwall 