So, I thought it over, tallied up what I was making, or could make from two of the part-time jobs (the real estate office owned by the World’s Tallest ADHD Child) and the Tiny Specialty Publishing Bidness – business in both cases seems to be picking up – accumulated another paying gig providing content for a San Antonio realtor who has a blog associated with his website which attracts plenty of hits but for which he is tired of producing content … considered that business at the Hellhole phone bank will doubtless fall off after Labor Day … and turned in my resignation. Yep, fourteen days notice required, and cannily, I cashed in some paid-time off on two of the days when I might otherwise have to have worked. Last Night At the Hellhole (sounds like some sort of arty sub-titled French auteur movie, where everyone droops around in fancy costumes and whispers improvised lines, and the camera focuses on all sorts of odd stuff, like cigarette butts in an ash tray) will be the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. If they don’t take away my employee badge at the security desk as I walk out – which is probably what they will do – I will bring it straight home and burn it in the fire pit. Maybe I’ll dance around the flames, sky-clad and drinking some very nice brandy straight from the bottle. Or maybe not. I have had jobs that I hated as much – and spent months and years plotting my escape from them, but this is the first job I ever had which I loathed from the moment I walked in and started on the very first day.

The immediate-supervisor types who know of this are eh-somewhat resigned and completely understanding. Of course, they know it’s a hellhole job, at which only a handful of people last even longer than six months, of course the employee turnover – even in hard economic times – is faster than the turnover of customers in a hot-bed hotel, but I fancy they are at least a little regretful at loosing someone who at least showed up as scheduled, never hung up on or cursed out a caller, grasped most of the sales and computer essentials fairly readily, and followed the dress code most of the time. (Weird – we couldn’t wear jeans. Why you couldn’t wear jeans, or even bother with a dress code when it was answering phones and never coming within two thousand miles of the public we were employed to serve … eh, another incomprehensible. Perhaps they were trying to start employees off on the right foot, get them used to the whole concept of having to dress professionally … oh, bugger it, most everyone working the phones was old enough to have a fair notion. It just seemed pretty pointless.)

And I’m working on the next book, and the Tea Party perks along. Blondie fears that of course, right at the very moment that I’ve given Hellhole Job the shove, all the other work will dry up – but one of the reasons that I didn’t go back to temping was the lack of reliable transportation. I couldn’t depend on the Pumpkin to transport me reliably back and forth to anything more than a couple of miles away, which limited my availability for temping pretty severely. The Acura is a life-saver in that regard. So, three more shifts at the Hellhole, over the next week and a half, and there I am, never to set foot in those drab grey corridors, in that huge windowless room with the sea of work-stations, ever again. I can hardly wait. Oh, and I’ll never, ever set a foot in any of the hotel properties that I took reservations for, or in Atlantic City. God is my witness – never. I may never even want to set foot in New Jersey again, either.