Hey you - the guy reading this at work, slacking off on the job because you're tired of reading expense accounts or memos or writing your TPS report or whatever idiocy they have you banging on your keyboard like a monkey for - have you ever thought about quitting your job? Of course you have, and I bet you're thinking about it right this very second, with how your veins are throbbing in your forehead.
I can see them through the camera that your boss has covertly installed in your cubicle to tell when you're looking at porn, news, or news about porn. Maybe you have some problem coworkers, the kind of guys who like to talk about how hilarious Jay Leno is around the water cooler and then also demand that you stop drinking whiskey at your desk during lunch or they're going to tell HR. Don't they know that this is the only way you can even survive now? All of their eyes constantly watching you, waiting for the slightest slip-up, until it finally gets to you and you want to run into your boss' office and scream "I'M TIRED OF PULLING MY PANTS DOWN FOR YOU IN THE MEN'S ROOM" and then you pull out the gun and BAM end of your problems (and possibly your boss' and maybe a few coworkers as well (depending on how much you like them (you probably don't)).
Well, to prevent mass murder and take advantage of your paranoia and the fact that Heavy isn't yet blocked by your company's internet filter that keeps you from reading about hilarious wedding cake disasters during the nine to five, here's a handy guide to quitting your job.
You can always do the polite thing and just walk into your boss' office and tell him that you quit in two weeks, and then go back to your desk and seethe for another half-month but pull an additional paycheck out of it. Do you really want to do that? I bet that if you do, you're in some kind of respectable job where they make you wear a tie and you've probably had to bring a tuna sandwich for lunch on more than one occasion. I bet you had to write your name on the bag to keep from confusing it with everybody else's tuna sandwich. If you're going to do this (pussy) you can start looking for another job in those last two weeks (wuss) and then move straight on to the next soul-crushing experience. Your boss might even have some nice things to say about you. Do you really want that? Don't you want to burn all those bridges and just forget this place ever existed, with its bad fluorescent lighting and flickery old monitors and the guys who punch numbers into Excel spreadsheets day after day after day after forever?
You could just walk out. I know people who do this, and sometimes it works out for them; nobody notices they're gone. They're already invisible and so they might even pull a few more checks before somebody at a meeting realizes that they're missing, and maybe someone should call them? at which point the phonecall comes through to you while you're sitting at home playing Civilization and you get to say those magic words: "I QUIT." But maybe you'll make up a story first about why you've been gone so that they don't make you pay back some of those checks of yours.
Of course, there's always the flipside to that, where your goody-two-shoes coworkers have their giant, unblinking eyes constantly focused on you, where the closed-circuit cameras are always monitoring your desk, where the building security logs are checked regularly to see if you've been swiping yourself in and out of the locked doors that exist to keep corporate espionage and thieves out, as if they couldn't just break a damn window or go through the garbage. Maybe you should engage in some corporate espionage. Maybe you should take some confidential documents with you when you leave, and pawn them off to the highest bidder. Maybe you could make some money that way; enough money to live comfortably for five or six months, watching daytime TV and finding out that Jerry Springer is still on and yes, he still brings the awesome freaks with disturbing regularity.
These are the ways normal people would quit. But you're pushed to the limit. To the absolute breaking point (see: our introductory paragraph). Your hair is starting to fall out and you feel like you've contracted a disease. A deadly disease, infecting your mind. It drives you absolutely mad to the point where finally yes, you make like Son of Sam and kill a bunch of dudes - but hold on. There are still more productive ways to vent your anger. Yell at your boss, tell your coworkers that they need to stop having sex with dogs in the break room (maybe they are; who knows what those sick bastards get up to both on, and off, the clock?) Say that you've been abused by the company CEO, touched in your no-no place, and then show the federal investigators exactly where on the doll (I'll leave the choice of location up to you, but touching the doll on the wallet works sometimes). Start pissing on people's desks, in their mugs that have a cat on them with the words JUST HANG IN THERE! Jump up on your desk and fling poo like a wild ape, or avant-garde artist. Hell, maybe you could make a living being an avant-garde artist by flinging poo, you wild and crazy person you! No more offices, no more coworkers, just an endless parade of self-important dicks who drink bad wine and probably laugh like they imagine the French laughing. A nonstop twenty-four hour party of booze and sex and drugs, and enough food to crap hard enough to make your next masterpiece (don't forget to eat corn; it adds texture to the canvas).
Maybe that's not for you. Maybe you're a little more sedate, maybe you're more passive-aggressive. This is where we stop talking about quitting, and go for the smart man's quitting: Getting fired. Getting fired means you get insurance continuation and probably unemployment benefits, allowing you to ride the system like it's a penny pony at the grocery store. The downside is that it might make it hard for you to get another job, but no harder than quitting any other way; besides, who wants another job right away anyway? You deserve a little time off. Some time to sit at home and work on your own projects, which you'll forgo so that you can watch daytime TV instead. So instead of going balls-to-the-wall crazy (or ovaries-to-the-wall if you happen to be a lady) when quitting, be a little more subtle. Grab some asses. Call your boss something inappropriate that might be a racial slur, but nobody can ever be sure that it is or not. This works best if they're the whitest person alive. If somebody visits from overseas, ask them if they speak "ching chong language" (works best if they're not asian.) That last one is pretty sure to get you fired, but this is the bad way to get fired: This is the way where you get fired and never get another job, and might never go on unemployment. There's nothing left for you to do except buy a case of Blue Nun and move to the underpass where that weird guy who used to beg you for change with the ZZ Top beard lives. But that's no way to live. No. There's a better way to get fired.
Congratulations for reading this far. This means that you haven't taken my advice yet and quit your job, maybe you've even made a bullet-point list of what to do or not do, and the pros and cons of each approach (you tireless worker, you!) This means that it's time for the ultimate secret of quitting your job: Do just enough of it that it's questionable if they fire you, but that they're going to have no choice but to "let you go" for poor performance. Maybe be a little "insubordinate" by questioning the value of making you fill your time in the office with meaningless tasks. It helps if you tell your boss straight out that you're looking for another job (even if you're not) because they're going to hire somebody else who will be a poor schmuck and fill in those columns and stamp those papers and go to those meetings with charts and graphs. This is the easiest one to do, this is the smartest one to do, and let me tell you, dear reader: It worked for me.
