Getting Canned

I guess I picked a good day to die. That woman last night was so fundamentally disrespectful that I mostly don’t regret calling her a bitch. If she had been a little less nasty, if I had been a little less angry, I might have come up some more elegant response, but I really was not able to sort through my options at that moment. I think I might like to have stood toe-to-toe with her and said something like, “Do you know how completely disrespectful you are being? This is totally unacceptable.” And then to have found some good way to respond to what she threw at me next.

As it was, I think I knew I was abut to blow from the extraordinarily hostile way she said, “Oh, so I get delayed because you screwed up”, so moved away from her quickly, dropping behind me as I went my typical sarcastic/harmless, “Thank you, have a nice day.” I really did not intend to have her hear my “bitch”, muttered under my breath, but she did.

She came over to the booth then, her aggressive tone undiminished. “What’s your name?” “John…you weren’t supposed to hear that.” (I don’t know what good I thought that might do.) Her following words were ok in themselves, it’s just that they were delivered with the same icy aggressiveness. “It’s not professional to call someone a bitch.” I might have gotten away with it all (she might have cooled off and not called HQ), had I not then said, “Sometimes it just fits.”

Like I said, I’m not going to second-guess myself. I did what I did, and mostly I’ll stand behind it. And I have known for the last few weeks that I was overdue to get out of here. The late nights play hell with my body and mind. And the repetition of the interactions has finally reached a point that I finally can’t find my way around it any more. So life helped me unhook.

Jim, my boss, was so nice about it: “It could have been any of us.” His boss had said to him, ‘I’ve been letting too much slide at your store. Not this time.” I expressed to Jim my primary concern about the loss of my good reference. He said, “Have them call me.”

Paul was totally understanding and playing to the light side, “You bad boy…I was lucky to slide through.” Really very nice connections with both of them. I meant it when I said that I will stay in touch. And I agree with Paul that, “When one door closes, another will open up.”

I liked saying to Jim – and even clearer to Paul - how nice it has been working with them, and what exceptional men I think they both are. Paul made it clear that he felt the same.
So, overall, I’m not feeling very bad, considering. I actually am glad to have gone out with a bang, not a whimper.