Freedom!!!!!

I fired my employer five years ago today.
I was working for The Indianapolis Star, which had been hijacked by idiots and fools, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that Managing Editor Tim F. and his fat flunky Chuck were wasting the time I was selling them. So I fired the bastards.
No two weeks' notice. No second chances. Fuck 'em.
I have three people to thank for making this bold act possible: my parents and Maria.
My widowed mother died on Oct. 5, 2000. Her funeral was on Monday, Oct. 9. I reviewed her finances the next day and on Wednesday, Oct. 11, I came to the conclusion that I had been handed a golden parachute.
As I drove to work that morning, I phoned Maria and told her what was on my mind.
"I think I'm going to quit today," I said.
"I dare you," she shot back.
That was all I needed to hear.
When I reached the Metro North Bureau of The Star in Carmel, Ind., I sat down at my desk, picked up the phone and called Human Resources.
"Cash me in today. I'm done," I told the HR woman.
"Well," she said, "since you turned 55 three months ago, you're eligible for early retirement with a reduced pension..."
"Okay, I'm retiring then."
"Do I suffer any kind of penalty for not giving two weeks' notice?" I asked.
"Well, do you think you'll ever need a recommendation from The Star?"
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
"No, I think 34 years pretty much speaks for itself," I said after I quit laughing.
By this time, everyone else in my office had stopped working and were listening to my end of the conversation, amazed by what they were hearing. It shouldn't have come as much of a surprise. I'd been thinking out loud about it for months.
I remember the startled, horrified look on Bureau Chief Dennis Royalty's face one evening when we were grousing about the way Fat Chuck was jerking us around and wasting our resources.
"You know, Dennis, we don't have to do this. We can walk out of here anytime and go do something else," I said.
At that time, Dennis' identity and entire self-image were based on being a newspaperman. It must have been an unthinkable, terrifying idea to abandon that concept of himself. I, on the other hand, was well-along in the process of disengagement.
Most of my career had been on a vastly superior, albeit financially less successful, sister paper - The Indianapolis News. Being the evening paper, we had been steadily losing reader for decades as more and more people turned to TV for their evening news. That forced us to work harder and do more with less staff. Since the only other daily paper in town was The Star, we worked hard at beating them to stories. And when they got the story first, we followed up with a version that was so much better that the readers forgot they saw it in The Star first.
For years, we told ourselves we were much more talented and professional than our opposite numbers at The Star. When the two papers were merged in 1995 and we found ourselveds working alongside Star reporters, we were astonished to discover that wasn't just empty bravado - we actually were better than them. Most, we discovered, were room temperature I.Q., marginally competent and generally lazy.
There were, of course, some notable exceptions, but they were few.
The merger actually hastened the demise of The News, since it now functioned with a further reduced staff and contained a lot of the same stories as The Star. I folded in the autumn of 1999.
For me, things became intolerable when Tim F. became managing editor and set about reinventing wheels that worked just fine before he got there.
I had high hopes when he showed up. But when he called us all together for a mass meeting in the ballroom of the Indianapolis Athletic Club and gave us his vision of what The Star could be, my heart sank. Maria and I stared at each other in horror when he used "effort" as a verb in response to a staffer's question - "We'll effort that..."
Naturally, we all had to re-apply for our jobs - something we'd had to do several times in the previous five years because all of our new leaders felt compelled to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Never in all the time I worked for The Star or The Indianapolis News did a managing editor ever take the time to learn the hidden strengths and interests of the staff. We had an office full of people with incredibly varied interests and knowledge that went untapped because management saw them as "units" to be used more or less interchangably. Somewhere along the line, we had stopped being a newspaper and were now a newspaper factory. Writing was no longer a craft worthy of personal pride; we were just laborers knocking out piece work.
When Gannett bought the paper in mid-2000, many of us older staffers hoped for a buy-out - some kind of early retirement incentive - but none was offered. There was no need to reduce the staff with such offers because people were already leaving in droves.
So I didn't have to think twice about using my golden parachute. I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life, but I sure as hell wasn't going to waste another day doing something I had grown to loathe.
I like to think I inspired some of my friends to leave.
Within a year, Dennis was gone to a corporate PR job, my longtime News friends Art Harris and Diane Frederick bailed out and a little later Scott Miley - one of the few Star people I admire - quit to take a school PR job.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some writing to do for Maria's paper - a medium-sized daily with a newsroom of quirky talented misfits who haven't forgotten how to have fun with newspapering.