Randomly, someone’s resignation letter

I used to study business, not cynicism. It’s only in the last decade that the subjects have somehow merged. From that background, I’d like to tell you a simple parable about voluntary severance, probably the only one ever recorded. Does anyone remember Jack Hargreaves? The story you are about to hear is absolutely true. Only the facts have been changed.

In the countryside days when they harvested the corn and burned the stubble, the fields on the edge of the estate were cut and lit first, the line of brushfire working ever inward. Various rabbits, mice and other assorted natural paraphernalia left the fields that were being cleared of corn stems and moved to the taller grasses, field by field, migrating ever inward. The final field with the shins of a standing crop was called the King Field and when that was ready to be cut and burned, the villagers gathered with nets, guns and snares to help themselves to all manner of creatures running away from the fire. The rabbits ran, the mice ran, the pigeons flew. Different and quite apart from all the other animals, the hare alone stops, turns, faces the flames and runs straight into the fire. And through.

Stubble fires are, or were (this is history), thin. A tight line of fast-burning straw. Just a measly, paper threat. When you’re through it… you’re free. Clear horizons await. You can always come back to that field when it’s in growth again, to start again here or perhaps somewhere different, having avoided those shots, those cuts. They’re all charred beyond recognition of course, in the pot, but there’s little a simple hare can do about that.

When I first started here, I was an analyst and did the operational finances and was also clearance officer, so never managed to take a lunch break. Nowadays, those are three separate jobs in all our other global offices, each one of them paying double the original salary. Under the transition, regional finance and shipping at this branch have become empty chairs in the organisation structure because they magically get done, but don’t worry; these things come full circle. My colleague [name redacted] will be asked to do all three jobs on top of her own and take a salary cut.

The organisation has a right to be proud of itself. We established and brought to market the world’s first chemical dampener for Covid, helped athletes to win gold medals with cunningly designed Olympic equipment, added supporting technology for the next generation of the internet, survived late shifts by drinking little aluminium cans of coffee that self-heated and tasted like creosote (sometimes they went off in cupboards when least expected) and even improved the engineering of [redacted], thus improving our international clientele’s capability for carrying out extrajudicial persuasion [That’s enough of that. Some people might be reading this — Ed].

Okay, I admit it. I’ve got a little wider over those eleven years, but when you think about it, I’m proportionally thinner when set amongst a generation who’ve spent the entire decade down at MacDonalds digging graves with their teeth. You can prove anything with statistics. The point is, you can go a long way with good digestion. For example, the average member of our Board chews their food thirty three times before swallowing, which is a very sensible and commendable notion, if you have absolutely nothing else in the world to do.

My wife wants me to be responsible, think long term and concentrate on the family, by snatching at a short-term carrot and becoming unemployed. “Ashe drifted in and out of consciousness, wishing he understood girls. Girls, in his opinion, were odd” (Wodehouse, 1915).

In line with the drive for cost-cutting, maybe I can design surveys to better adapt modern business to the high street? “Do you believe that your fellow consumers are dumbing down or dumbing up? Please complete this test of everything you know; it should take no more than 6 to 12 minutes.”

Two years from now, when the wolf is stuck to my door like a postage stamp and I’m allowed to apply for work at this place again because the graphs are heading down and you are desperate for skills and institutional knowledge, you might see me drift in for an interview. Either that or I’ll have become so successful that I won’t be in sight again, like the hare in the story.

Hmm. I suppose I’ll see you all in two years then.

Jacta alea est and all that.

[Name redacted]

PS

One man said to the Universe:

Master, I exist.

The trouble is, the Universe replied,

That fact has not aroused in me

Any sense of responsibility.