Going Doooooown In a Blaze of Glory... Until the Parachute Engaged

Was talking about "Blaze of Glory"-style quitting and realised I'd never shared this story on the blog, as I wasn't all technological like that back in the day...

Mine was an aborted blaze of glory, but here goes...

I was in the annual meeting about our goals for the next year. My boss's boss's boss is doing the presentation and he's talking about how there are four kinds of employees - terrorists, politicians, losers and winners.

winners - work hard, positive attitude
loseres - slack, bad attitude
politicans - great attitude, slackers
terrorists - work hard, bad attitude

So, already, seeing as we are in the UK and in banking AND there are numerous Irish people working for us, this is a bad, bad call on the presentation. People are already looking annoyed by the term terrorist. Beyond which, we all peg ourselves in that group.

Then he starts giving details and using a well-known example of each group - can't recall them all, but for example, Branson is the winner.

So, he gets to the loser bit. He talks about how there was this Canadian kid called Terry Fox who went off to university and dropped out. Then he decided he was going to run across the entire country, but he didn't finish that either.

I am the only Canadian in the room and the only person with any idea who Terry Fox is and I lost.my.shit. Spectacularly. Long rant about how Terry Fox was a Canadian hero, that he dropped out of university because he had cancer and didn't finish the marathon because he died. I swore a lot. And at the bossman himself. Then I stormed out.

Turns out that the dude was about to lead into how you need all the facts before you peg people into a certain group. He apparently didn't expect any Canadians to be there. However, by this point I had complained loud and long and the whole building had heard about it. A woman whose son was very sick at the time with cancer was also irrate. I had handed in my notice and had to be talked out of quitting by having the man himself come and apologise.

And then I worked there for about another 6 months. Which kinda kills the blaze of glory bit.