I Don’t Want To Be A ‘Free Jeans Friday’

Last week, somebody in my office died. Dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 55. To start off with, I didn’t know him. Couldn’t have pointed him out in a line up.

RIP Dave. I hope all the angels in heaven have gigantic boobs.

But now I’m obsessed with him. With his life, what he did. Did he have dreams? Regrets? Are people going to miss him now that he’s gone? Are they even going to know he’s gone? Or was he just another cubicle worker who’s going to disappear from existence like he never was?

Those thoughts were so depressing, it was almost enough to make me take up drinking. Then I realized I’m practically an alcoholic anyway and just continued drinking. I had a beer in his honor, then another, then 12 more.

As I was sitting on the couch with a buzz so heavy I couldn’t even concentrate on the plot line of ‘Two and a Half Men’, I was hit with a frightening thought. Was this his life? Was this what he did every night? Went home, after a shitty day at the office, getting yelled at by people he barely knew, trying to keep up with a workload that even an 8 year old Vietnamese kid in a Nike shop couldn’t handle, and drank until it was all blurry. Did he always tell himself he’d have more time? Take that vacation when he had more money. Start his own business when the economy got better. Tell his family he loved them tomorrow.

And then tomorrow never came.

Today my office put up a chalkboard next to his desk so people could write messages they didn’t mean to a dead man who would never read them. In honor of the occasion, our manager allowed us to wear jeans to work for free, rather than paying the $2 we usually have to. What a way to mark the end of a life. Being told we’re allowed to wear a garment that most of us would have worn anyway.

Next week, some new cubicle worker will be moved into his spot, the chalkboard will come down, and we’ll all have to pay $2 to wear jeans again. But that isn’t going to be Dave’s* only mark on the world.

I’m about 60 days away from getting fired. I’m not exaggerating. I’m not getting laid off. I’m getting fired and it’s happening because I am very bad at my job. Both I and my manager know I’ll never meet the standard and right now we’re simply going through the motions to please HR.

Now ask me if I’m afraid. It’s a bad economy. I’m in one of the most economically depressed states in the country, jobs are scarce and my salary would be impossible to match. The termination will be a black mark on my record that will probably forever bar me from working in the industry I’ve been working in for the past 8 years.

I’m not even a little bit scared. Why? Because failing at my jobs is like failing at masturbating. Sure, I could be good at it with practice, but it’s so much better when someone else is doing it.

There will be no more cubicles. There will be no more resumes talking about my ‘multi-tasking’ abilities and interviews that are really lying contests. Instead, when that termination day comes, I’m taking it as a sign that I wasn’t meant to live in a little blue box. I’m going full time with writing. I’m going to finish the sequel to my first book. Then I’m going to write another. I’m going to expand my freelancing business and when worst comes to worst, I will type out 100 SEO articles a day at some crappy content site to make ends meet. I’m going to live my life by my own terms and I will never, never, become someones “Free Jeans Friday”. The world is going to know I was here.

Thanks Dave.

*No silly pseudonyms tonight. His name was really Dave. I just think people should know that.