Living well really is the best revenge

Time is the only irreplaceable thing we have.

I get reminded of that every time someone close to me dies.

I felt it most keenly in October, 2000, when my mother died. I was in a job that had ceased to be fun after 33 years. My newspaper, The Indianapolis News, had been merged with its sister paper, The Star, and we had been subjected to one management upheaval after another, requiring us to repeatedly re-apply for our jobs.

I was working in the Metro North Bureau in Carmel and therefore, thankfully, 15 miles away from the hell that the downtown newsroom had become. But I was tired of people with less experience and less intelligence telling us senior reporters how to do our jobs. I dreaded going to work every morning and had a growing sense that things were never going to get better now that Gannett was running its papers, including mine, into the ground. (If you doubt it, track the decline of Gannett stock over the past decade.)

I was miserable. I knew it, my coworkers knew it and Maria knew it. I wasted a lot of psychic energy trying to figure out a way to remedy my situation. The longer I chewed on the problem, the more obvious it became that there was no fixing it from the inside.

I kept hearing the lines from The Who's Quadrophenia - the song The Dirty Jobs:

My karma tells me
You've been screwed again.
If you let them do it to you
You've got yourself to blame.
It's you who feels the pain
It's you that feels ashamed.

 

But I was stuck and it took my mother's death to get me unstuck. Just five months earlier, Maria and I had successfully moved Mom out of her home where she had become a danger to herself and others, and got her settled into a very comfortable retirement community. I felt confident she still had several years left. I was completely unprepared when I got the call the evening of Oct. 5 telling me my mother had just died in her sleep.

She had run out of time. We're all running out of time. So why waste it doing something that doesn't make you happy?

So I quit. My first day back on the job after the funeral, I called Human Resources and cashed in my chips on the spot. I cleaned out my desk and was gone before lunch.

Everyone in the company was stunned. The managing editor and the city editor were livid. That was fine with me, since we all had them pegged for arrogant idiots. I like to think my actions were an inspiration for the exodus that followed. With two years, almost all of my coworkers at the Metro North Bureau were gone. The bureau chief took a job with Eli Lilly, Art Harris retired, Scott Miley quit to do public relations for a school corporation, and Diane Frederick just flat quit to devote herself to her painting.

It's been eight years now and I'm still waiting for the panic attack. I'm pretty sure it's never coming because I'm living life on my terms. I take jobs that interest me - like freelance writing for motorcycle or aviation publications, writing the occasional newspaper story or helping Maria's paper bridge the gap between photographers.

I've known lots of other people who finally got leverage on themselves and fired their employers for wasting their time. And every single one of them ended up happier and, in the case of those who went to new jobs, making more money.

If you let them do it to you, you've got yourself to blame.