For as miserable as you are in your day to day cube life, the one satisfaction you can always hold on to is the fact that your co-workers haven’t managed to find a way out either. That is, until one of them does and you have to go to a goddamn happy hour celebrating their escape.
It’s unclear where people go when they leave a job. I like to imagine they have a few weeks of fun, go broke and die as punishment for ever even dreaming they could get out from underneath the corporate thumb. Invariably, once one co-worker leaves, the trend is in the air, with one after the other flooding out of the building to better, higher-paying occupations that leave you looking like a stagnant fool as you train early to mid-twenty somethings on how to numb their minds.
Having a “career” is one of the great delusions fostered by Midtown. Constantly rising in title and salary is a trap. But the greater trap is the pressure put upon the person who chooses not to follow this path. The person who has been in the same position for five years. But it will all be worth it for him in the end, because the stagnant people are always the ones who get laid off.