Working Up the Courage to Quit Can Be a Tough Job

Four employees at an Irvine insurance agency won the lottery last week. As if that weren’t enough to make the rest of us hate them on the spot, they really rubbed our noses in it by promptly quitting.

So much for the theory that we get fulfillment from our jobs.

The four women who split the jackpot will reportedly each take home a little more than $60,000 a year for the next 20 years, after taxes. Right now, they may be thinking they’ll never go back to work again, but I wonder.

How many of us would quit if we hit the lottery? Or, would we just ask for an enhanced vacation package?

Is it the prospect of not working that would fill us with pleasure, or would the real joy come from the act of telling your boss you’re quitting? Let’s face it, it may be the only time as an employee that you wield any power at all.

I haven’t had that many jobs, so my quitting technique still qualifies as a work in progress. But in looking back on the times I have quit, I can chart some progress.

The first job I quit was as a paperboy in Omaha in the early 1960s. I had a huge route of more than 200 papers. I loved folding the paper into thirds and tossing it onto people’s porches. I remember people like Mr. and Mrs. Applebee waving cheerily as I pedaled by on my bike and asking me if I’d like to come in for some freshly baked cherry pie before continuing my route. (I made up that whole last part about the Applebees, because my route was actually in a seedy area near downtown and I was scared to death most of the time.)

Anyway, I had the route for a week but decided to quit when my dad had to get up with me at 2 a.m. on Sunday to run me down to the paper so I could begin folding the massive Sunday edition. Even then, I wasn’t a 2-in-the-morning kind of guy, and, more to the point, neither was my dad, so I went in the next day and told my supervisor we were moving to Colorado. I was terrified that he would be able to tell I was lying and somehow prevent me from quitting. Besides, who was I, a lowly 12-year-old, to tell an important newspaper supervisor that I was quitting?

Miraculously, he allowed me to resign my position without making a stink. And let the record show that the lie was partially offset because I actually did move to Colorado, 15 years later.

The next job I quit was strictly based on cowardice. While in college, I worked Friday nights in the sports department of the Lincoln Star newspaper. I was in my second year and wanted to attend a concert on a Friday night that happened to fall on my birthday.

However, still fighting that fear-of-authority thing, I was too chicken to ask my boss for the night off. So I quit.

Please give me credit for at least not lying.

By my mid-30s, however, I hadn’t resigned in eight years and must have thought it was time to try it again. I took a walk in the moonlight one May evening in Denver and decided I wanted to quit and move to California. I had no job lined up but was filled with exhilaration over the notion of quitting.

I gave myself 24 hours to think it over, typed a letter of resignation to the editor, and never looked back. It remains one of the most intoxicating things I ever did. I gave the note to the editor’s secretary to give to him. To my way of thinking, I was doing it properly by avoiding bothering him, but a friend said my technique was awful: when you quit, he said, you tell the person directly.

My resignation skills have rusted again.

Perhaps it’s because I don’t hate going to work these days, and that leads me back to the four women who quit on the spot after winning the lottery.

After quitting in Denver and moving here, I didn’t work for about 18 months, other than as a free-lancer. That was by choice but after a few months of staying home, I started thinking the unthinkable: Do I really miss going into work ? Do I miss contact with other humans?

I began coming into The Times’ office more and more often. On days when I could have gone to the beach or just hung around the house--which I once thought was the perfect life--I found myself making up reasons to drive over to the office. When I started dropping in so I could get the tuna sandwich in The Times’ cafeteria, I knew I had some soul-searching to do.

I concluded that I missed the socializing that comes with work. I realized I was spending far too much time at home watching the same spider walk the same wall every day.

I’m now 6 1/2 years deep into full-time employment. I’d love to feel that exhilaration that quitting brings, but I have to ask myself, how long would it be before I started missing the tuna sandwiches again?