It Happened To Me! I Got The Sweetest Revenge After I Was Fired From My Shitty Job
Plus! Jane promises not to cook for you this Thanksgiving IF you say hi in the comments. She is hovering there for the rest of the weekend and would love to thank you personally for being here.
Hi Turkeys! (I am not usually so on the nose or timely with my greetings, as you know, but I have loved that term of mockery and endearment since toddlerhood when my brothers and I first used it against each other in many of our actually-pretty-physical fights. And I get to see those brothers tomorrow, so I’m psyched to pull it back out and polish it up. Speaking of all that, and of family holidays, I am always curious about siblings who never fight, and I always wonder what traumatic unstable situation is happening with the parents to cause that. I am half kidding but let me know if you are someone who doesn’t fight with your brothers and sisters in the comments, because I would like to meet you…)
Anyway, a couple of things to be grateful for:
We gave one of you an orgasm. Yes, a lovely reader too shy to say it in comments wants to thank all of us for the great sex she had for the first time in five even-cuddle-free years after reading our sexed up comments about Scorpio season. Nothing could make me prouder. You’re welcome, sexy reader, and thank you all for your participation!
Another big thanks goes to you all for the great article submissions you have sent me at Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com this week alone. I check that email all the time and when there is a new story in there from one of you, I usually jump up and down and then drop everything to read it (I would not drop my infant like poor Britney almost did in favor of not spilling her waterglass that time, the image of which will forever make me feel better about my own often-equally-skewed life choices, but I would drop almost anything else). That’s what happened yesterday when I got this submission from brand new contributor Sara. It also said Thanksgiving to me for some unclear reason, not that it is about gratitude but, without giving too much away, it does involve food. So enjoy it and let’s all meet up in the comments.
Thank YOU!
Jane
PS I am going to admit that I am dozing off as I write this intro, so don’t take it too seriously and I won’t mind if you doze off while reading it. Dozing off is what this time of year is for, right?
PPS Thanks again, Sara! And welcome!
PPPS I am not a fan of the Substack limitation that you can only comment if you are a paid subscriber on posts like this, so a hack for that is about halfway through this piece, if you care to use it. xo
By Sara Knight Bidlack
If you don’t care about your future, be a bank teller.
Over a decade ago, I was going through something which I can only describe as raw. I was a giant mess– I had just quit school for the third time, my life trajectory was completely upended, and I was trying not to take a long walk off a short pier.
But capitalism persists and so do I, and that’s where the bank came in.
Could I go to work at the bank, flip some dirty 20’s through the cash counting machine, pay minimal attention to what I needed to do, and then go home and ignore it? Yeah? Ok, cool. Sign me up.
But after I’d worked there for a while, the news arrived that our small Jersey Shore bank was purchased by a larger bank. I mentioned capitalism, remember?
And knowing I wasn’t particularly great at my job and guessing that I probably wouldn’t be kept on once the new big bank owned our souls and having personally grown a bit during my bank tenure to know I wanted different things in life anyway, I started applying to other jobs.
Wouldn’t you know, I got one! They liked me! They really liked me! I was so excited to be done with mindlessly counting cash and tallying up checks from the high school marching band’s fruit sale fundraiser.
I was also really excited to be done with my supervisor. We’ll name her Bertha because that’s a fitting name for her.
Bertha didn’t like me because I was a) not a Trumper, b) fairly well-liked by everyone else in the workplace, and c) not a great bank teller but also not the worst either.
Bertha was the resident unpleasant person in the bank. Everyone knew it. Every workplace has one. Bertha was about twenty years older than me and miserable, and Bertha didn’t like me at all. Bertha didn’t like me because I was a) not a Trumper, b) fairly well-liked by everyone else in the workplace, and c) not a great bank teller but also not the worst either.
Bertha was a 45-year-old mean girl, you know? She talked poorly behind the backs of all the women in the bank and was generally nasty to be around and honestly, looking back on it, I think Bertha just needed to up her meds or something.
Poor Bertha.
When I put in my two weeks’ notice at the bank, Bertha seemed to take it personally that my life’s grand ambition was not to wait on the ancient local dentist who always filled out his deposit slip wrong. Bertha also didn’t like that I’d fallen on some ice recently so I had to miss a few days of work in the last couple months because I couldn’t, uh, walk. Medical issues must not get in the way of our very integral work at the bank, said Bertha.
With a week left until my new job started, there was a storm.
Jersey Shore streets often flood and the bank’s location sat just a few blocks from the beach. It wasn’t uncommon for my neighborhood streets to fill with salty seawater.
And on this day, with five days left at my bank job until I started a new career, a coastal storm pushed water into the streets during the high tide. Locals know you don’t risk ruining your car by driving through floodwaters unless you really have to, and the bank’s administration graciously decided to have a delayed opening.
Later in the day, however, Bertha was texting me about whether I could show up at work. I remember looking outside of my apartment and still seeing a bunch of water in the street, so I said no. The climate’s changing, whaddaya gonna do?
I was called into the manager’s office and told to go home. Bertha side-eyed me with an evil grin from the lobby as I left. She had gotten her way - I felt humiliated.
The next day, seaweed lay strewn across crosswalks, but the roads were passable. I drove to work, walked into the bank for one of my last few days there, and unlocked my teller drawer of cash from the safe. My coworkers filed in and did the same.
An hour later, I was called into the manager’s office and told to go home. I was told they would pay me out the remaining few days I had left on the schedule, and I needed to count my cash drawer and then leave.
Bertha side-eyed me with an evil grin from the bank lobby as I left the manager’s office. She had gotten her way: I felt humiliated, and that was the point for her.
My teller coworkers hugged me when I came back to my desk, telling me I didn’t deserve this treatment. To this day, I am angry that I didn’t dump my entire cash drawer on the floor for my manager to count instead. I can imagine the dimes and nickels rolling under desks and me quickly turning on my heel to leave, because what are they gonna do? Fire me?
But I didn’t do that. And two days later, it was really bothering me that I didn’t do that. I am someone who believes in justice.
Instead, I did something very silly.
About two blocks from the bank,
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