50 Ways to Leave Your Job

Today I was thinking about all the fine distinctions between ways of leaving a job. Near the bottom of the ladder, you just quit or get fired or throw down your dishtowel and walk out. Further up, you get terminated, or give notice, or inform your superiors that you were "offered another position" (like you hadn't been looking - like someone just beat down your door and offered it to you). And if you're really high up in the world, you don't get fired. You can only be asked to step down - or perhaps you can resign in protest.

It must be scary to leave a very high-profile job, especially over some furor that blew up at the last minute. What if you liked what you were doing? What will you do next? If that job was your life, which high-profile jobs must so often be, leaving it unexpectedly would feel like falling into a bottomless pit. Do CEOs ever get asked to step down - and say, "oh, no thanks, I think I'll stay on"? And do people who resign in protest really do it on a moment's notice, or have they been unhappy for months and are just waiting for an excuse to go? Why do they think they can make the situation better by leaving and relinquishing whatever control they had over it? It's not like they're going on strike, and if the situation changes, they'll reconsider and come back. It seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot.

I hate the way jobs so often consume your identity like some kind of creeping vine, the way people define you based on what you do. I never want my job to be that important in my life. Perhaps because I'm holding it at arm's length like that, I am never going to be offered a job that important. I'll stay firmly embedded in the ranks of peons, with termination or being "offered another position" my only ways out.