Rambi, with all due respect, I think you are missing the point.
I have not argued that one should make "rash" decisions, jeopardize one's family, etc., etc. And bear in mind that decisions that may LOOK sudden (or rash, to use your term) have usually been festering inside for a long time.
Full-time employees spend most of their lives on the job. If we are miserable there, it pollutes the rest of our lives. If we are forced to swallow too much s**t, it can make us sick. Not good.
The kind of people I am thinking of are not factory workers, part-time waitresses, etc., but highly qualified professional people, who too often are simply irrationally afraid of quitting, even when they reslly ought to, for their own emotional, spiritual, and physical health. They do not HAVE to grovel, or to knife their colleagues, for a living.
The specific situation I was involved in had to do with "reorganization" of a department. The boss lady wanted to get rid of a whole department, which was composed of highly-paid senior writers, all with their own offices, crammed with books, photos on the walls, etc. The office walls were all torn down, to create one big huge room, and the writers were all to sit at "pods" -- not even cubicles, but catty=cornered desks -- four people to a pod. No room for file cabinets, let alone bookshelves or photos. There was one gentleman there, over 70 years old, who had once occupied very "important" positions, and who had been given the most spacious office, with plenty of room for his mementoes. It was awful to see him evicted and demoted to podland so unceremoniously. And, like everyone else, he felt awful. He ended up retiring a year later, and most of the others also trickled away. That, of course, was the object of the whole enterprise.
I had been on loan to another department, and was ordered back, to take my place in the pod. I was told: "You WILL be here on the 20th." No way, Jose.
There was more crap coming down the pike, of course, but no need to elaborate any further. I can put up with miserable bosses, as long as they do not interfere with my work. But if I am not allowed to work in a professional fashion, if I am supposed to "wing it" without my scrupulously collected files and books and back newspapers, if I and my colleagues are addressed as if we were prison inmates, then forget it.
Nobody in my family would have thought of reproaching me for quitting.
Both of my (late) husbands were poor as church mice, and as independent as -- well, octopuses. They never grovelled -- and that is the real reason I loved them both. (I could never ever have married a bureaucrat, for example.) So, we lived one jump ahead of the bill collector, but we could call our souls our own.
(The kids were all duly fed, clothed, educated -- and loved -- in case you were wondering. And they absorbed, for better or worse, our "philosophy," if you can call it that.)
And I am too old to be a child of the 60's or the 70's. I am talking about preserving one's self-respect, not about
"doing one's own thing." I don't feel that some of you out there realize how difficult it can be to retain one's self-respect (or even one's "honor" -- evidently a quaint word, nowadays) in certain kinds of work situations, especially if one is ambitious, covetous of promotions, etc.
Joan |
