How Not To Resign From a Job

A storm came through at 8:30 last evening, filling the sky with an eerie, creamy gold-yellow light. It poured through the dining room curtains onto the floor. As I pulled apart the curtains in the front window to take a closer look at the sky, Axel leaned forward and viewed the world with wide eyes and J worried about tornadoes.

I want to write about the ongoing wrap up of work at my current position, but every time I sit down to craft an entry I have find myself sputtering incoherently with rage. Exquisite, homicidal, ferocious rage. The kind of rage that compels me to mix up "there" and "their", (as J pointed out to me in response to one of my recent rant-filled email missives), grind my teeth and come home with splitting, stress-induced migraines.

I have spent the past five working days being jerked around by an ersatz* manager (REAL manager was out dealing with a family crisis) who decided that part of the process of wrapping up my duties was to compel my co-workers to take on the sundry non-testing tasks under my domain. As the departing party, I have ZERO authority to compel anyone to do anything. Naturally ersatz manager was too busy to take on any of the tasks.

Although ersatz manager was busy, s/he** was not busy enough to provide me with work and insisted that put in a full eight hours even though I had absolutely nothing to do for 4.5 of the past 5 working days. Until this afternoon, when s/he repeatedly indicated that s/he expected me to work a full, eight hour day tomorrow (my last day), even though s/he is not the (pardon my Old English) fucking manager.

The moral of this story (and there have been other, unwritten indignities I'm too much worked up to write about) is that I shall never give two weeks notice, ever again.

*ersatz: substitute, artificial and often inferior; using substitute components.
**Trying to avoid gender. Just to clarify, ersatz manager is the same one alluded to in a previous post who is carrying on a "special friendship" with manager.