I Quit My Job at 50 to Reinvent Myself. Pro Tip: Don't Do This.
My fantasy was to escape from the corporate grind. After a taste of freedom and months of hare-brained schemes, I begged to be captured again.
Happy New Year, Narratively fam! If you loved reading Ivy Eisenberg’s recent story “A Freak Accident Brought Me Closer to My Domineering Dad” (or listening to the awesome podcast version) we think you’ll also enjoy this hilarious Narratively Classic from Ivy. (For the record, we totally endorse quitting your job to reinvent yourself, but thought you’d enjoy this funny quitting-fail in this high season of resolutions and renewal.)
It’s 2003 and I am stuck in the bowels of Verizon’s IT department, in a g-d-awful boring job. I’ve been working for various IT departments in Corporate America for 20 years and writing jokes for imaginary stage performances on the side. With a house, a husband, and two millennial children who need to be fed a constant diet of pizza, smoothies, and games for their Xboxes, Game Boys and PlayStations, I am resigned to staying put. October marks my 47th birthday. I only have 20 more years of this corporate drudgery, I reason. I am coming down the home stretch.
One morning, I come up with a phenomenal business idea, which will propel me out of Verizon and make me rich and famous: I’m going to start my own line of custom corporate fortune cookies. I will write up work-appropriate fortunes and stuff them into homemade fortune cookies, to be handed out as party favors. But, here’s my brilliant spin: On the back, instead of “Speak Chinese” it will say “Speak Yiddish.” I call my new enterprise “Work Favors the Fortune-ate.” Instead of the morning marathon of packing the kids’ backpacks, getting myself out the door to work by 8:03 a.m., and applying my makeup in the car at each red light, I will sleep in, then waltz out at 10 in sweatpants for coffee. Instead of shopping at supermarket sales, I will luxuriate in Balducci’s, buying cantaloupe-sized grapefruits and grapefruit-sized oranges. I will get a driver to take me all over the city to lunches, dinners and galas in my honor. I will visit production plants across the country, speak about my rags-to-riches endeavor on the morning shows, and take a real family vacation to the Fiji Islands and Japan, not just a quick road trip to Cape Cod. Most important, I will buy a whole GameStop store for the kids, so that they will shut up about what they “need” next.
I arrange a prototype run by scheduling a mandatory team-meeting-slash-luncheon-slash-dessert-swap for the week before the December holidays. There are 22 people on my team, so I create my first line of 24 Verizon IT-friendly fortunes.
I type up the fortunes, using the same rose-colored font and style of type used in Chinese fortune cookies, and print the fortunes, front and back, on my color printer. I cut them into little strips of paper, and they look perfect. For example, one says, “HTTP 404: Not Found.” And on the back, it says, “Schmear: A spread or a bribe.” Another says, “Talk is cheap. Often cheaper on nights and weekends.” On the back: “Chutzpa: Nerve.”
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