Reminiscing and Hating

Since most of my posts revolve around my time spent in purgatory at the Company of Soul-sucking Hades, where I slaved for years for Cruella de Ville, Papa Smurf and lastly Mr. Panty Waist, today it's only fitting, for a change, that I talk about my escape from this life-sucking house of evil, three years ago this very week.

And I didn't even get a Ticker Tape parade.

I lost my job on a Tuesday. It was unexpected, yet...not, since I'd had practically nothing to do for about six months. Plus I worked for Mr. Panty Waist and I hated him and my hatred wasn't exactly a huge trade secret, unlike the reason I hadn't yet murdered him and fed his dismembered body to the pigeons.

The morning following my departure, I was giddy and high on life and the fact I no longer had to watch The Cobra yank boogers out of his nose daily, or field Mr. Panty Waist's excuses for just about everything.

I had hated that job with a rabid passion, and yes, I knew I needed to get out of there, before my brain rotted away to dust, but I hadn't actually expected to be going quite so soon. Still, with nothing going on, two of my three bosses were leaving while the other was a Significantly Giant Twat, which I do realize is an insult to respectable twats everywhere and I apologize.

So, I was "laid off". Really it was just a fancy way of saying "fired". The only difference is it came with a severance payment and I qualified for unemployment. I didn't feel any more bitter than usual - except at Panty Waist because hello - I'd been laid off, I hadn't bumped my head or anything.

Incidentally he was the one who told me I was no longer going to be working there. The whole time he was talking I leaned back on the back legs of my chair and grinned at him which I think put him off his stride a bit because he was fidgeting like Britney Spears in the Snack Cake aisle at Wal-Mart.

I went home and immediately signed him up for some very adult porn sites and felt a whole lot better. I did this because I am very mature and also because I knew they'd send him links he was stupid enough to click on then he could have a glorious meltdown when seventeen windows would open all at once showing ladies' (and men's!) naughty bits at varying angles having various things done to them with foreign objects and hopefully this would give him a heart attack.

A couple of days later, the old coot was out of town so I went back in to the office to collect my stuff and sign my redundancy statement that cleared my "generous" severance payment. Mr. Panty Waist had stressed over and over how "generous" it was. Because they liked me you see. Generous, generous, generous. It was ok. Standard. It didn't exactly make me Bill Gates but it wasn't bad.

Then I went to say goodbye to the handful of people there who I called friends and we bitched about company morale and management. When I left for good, I felt elated. Not sad. Not regretful. Well...that's not entirely true. I did have one regret - that I didn't swallow a box of Wheaties before going up there, so I could take an industrial sized dump on Panty Waist's chair, but hey, you can't expect me to remember everything!

So I collected my few bits and pieces and my plants. I’ve never been renowned for having a “green thumb” – in fact I’m infamous for draining the life out of anything that photosynthesizes within about an hour in my company – but my three office plants were rather dear to me and not just because, against all the odds they'd somehow survived multiple years of me.

One, a straggly viney type thing, I had fished out of the garbage about two years earlier, where someone had dumped it mercilessly in a fit of spring cleaning. I nursed it back to health and talked to it and it grew and grew until it took over the entire 6th floor of our building and required its own zip code. It routinely used to knock pencils off my desk and swallow chihuahuas! I have that plant to this day and it still won't die. I keep it away from the cats.

The second plant was a gift from the Soul-Sucking Company from Hades for some occasion about three years before. At the time I left, it had already “died” around 22 times but it always came back. It was sort of like the psycho masked guy from “Halloween”. Just when you think it's drawn its last breath, you come in next morning and it’s there in a frilly apron, making the coffee.

The third plant I liked to call “Pablo” for reasons that escape me now but that quite possibly involved alcohol in copious quantities. Pablo was exotic, large, spiky and forbidding and looked like he possibly speared then gobbled up small children for a mid-morning snack. He sported two big, red, desert type flowers and the attitude of a Hell’s Angel with a hangover. He was known in the office as "Killer". I used to hide behind Pablo and make lewd gestures when Panty Waist was annoying the bejeezus out of me, which was every two minutes.

Anyway, I loaded my plants into my “granny cart” – the sort we New Yorkers like to use for grocery shopping because we don't have new-fangled things like cars – and wheeled him home, three miles down Fifth Avenue, through throngs of stupefied tourists who were trying to figure out if I was a bag lady, a crazy person or a florist.

At least one of those things was correct.