100% Unemployment Successfully Attained

Following GB’s lead, I left The Job on December 19, 2006. Boy, I’m sure going to miss that paycheck showing up every two weeks in the checking account via electronic magic. Bye-bye, Nice Money. Bye-bye. On the other hand, there are a few things I don’t expect to miss:

1. Getting my sorry carcass out of bed at 4:45 every morning, the better to catch a workout before going to The Job.

2. The twice daily commute to The Job by bus - that is, when the bus ran.* No more getting panhandled on the bus by the person sitting next to me; trying to ignore the other passengers’ shouting matches; or enduring a 20-minute commute that once every two weeks for various reasons took an hour and half. Sweet.

3. Dealing with The Job’s client population. I often tried to take to heart Inspector Clouseau’s remark about “life’s rich pageant,” but it just got old for me, trying to interact politely with the occasional unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic, parole violator and Level II and III sex offenders, as well as the more typical individual who, regardless of age, education or economic level managed to combine an extremely high level of entitlement with a breathtaking lack of perspective and problem solving skills.

It was nice to have my cubicle next to a window, though.

As counterintuitive as it is to voluntarily leave such a well-paying job - with benefits, yet - it’s all for the best that I quit when I did. I’m not cut out for employment. My mood generally runs the gamut from surly, through curt and sarcastic, all the way to spiny. Imagine my surprise at the very nice send-off I received from not only my coworkers, my boss, and HQ - but also from a couple of professional colleagues our office and I had worked with over the years. Had I only known how nice everyone would be to me at the end, I would have been much more unpleasant to everyone all along. Gosh.

As it is now, I hope that my past as a put-upon, low level federal bureaucrat has prepared me well for dealing with all the put-upon, low level federal bureaucrats and harbormasters I will meet as we sail from port to port. Maybe GB and I will still be able to speak fluent Bureaucratese with them, even if we don’t have any other language in common.

* All I will say is, if a transit authority’s response to an intersection-blocking collision, a half inch of snow, an earthquake, or nuclear holocaust is the same - i.e., discontinuing service completely until someone else solves the problem, it’s not so much “a contingency plan” as it is “an unprofessional small-town passive-aggressive deferral of responsibility.” Fear the Seattle Metro.

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