A Letter To Our Co-Worker Who’s Confused Quiet Quitting With Being An Asshole
Dear Janice,
We heard you talking with the guys in tech about how you are quiet quitting, and we just want to say holy shit!
We admit we weren’t familiar with the term, so we gritted our teeth and went on TikTok, hoping it meant you were slipping away in the middle of the workday, never to be heard from again. Sadly, it turned out you weren’t quitting, and worse than that, you didn’t even understand what “quiet quitting” actually is.
There are a lot of people whose work/life balance is too heavily tipped towards the “work” side. You, in the other hand, spend about 10% of any given day doing your actual job and the other 90% talking about what you do after work and on the weekends, much of which involves “brewski” induced debauchery. Do you really think we want to hear about your accidental nip slip at the karaoke bar while we’re fixing your billing errors?
The point of quiet quitting is to do the bare minimum. We’d be thrilled if you did that much!
And, how are you burned out? We’re all exhausted from the woes of the pandemic, but it’s no secret that you “worked from home” for two years playing Candy Crush and taking Zoom pottery classes while the rest of us scrambled to pick up the slack to meet Q4 deadlines. If our boss wasn’t also an indolent slob, he would have caught on when you gave everyone in the 200-employee company a handmade ceramic bong for Christmas, including those of us with young children. Megan’s daughter thought it was a chiminea for Mexican Barbie, and she had to stop her from taking it to school for show-and-tell.
We also heard you tell the tech guys that part of quiet quitting involves your asking for a raise. Seriously? Quiet quitting means asking to be compensated for extra work. Taking your turn to make the morning coffee (which you rarely do) isn’t the same as having mandatory overtime because someone (you) always manages to schedule a camping trip during deadline crunch. Honest to god, Janice, you spend more time in the woods than the Keebler elves.
You’ve also had the flu so many times this year you should be in a clinical study, as your viruses are sophisticated enough to know when you have actual tasks due, tasks that our own work is dependent upon. You put Dylan so far behind during your last bout, he had to miss his Disc Golf tournament, and his team lost for the first time in ten years. He also did not appreciate your minimizing it with the remark about “grown men prancing around with frisbees.”
Don’t get us wrong. We believe paid leave is important. Some of us have legitimate situations where we need to take time off, like an unexpected lice outbreak at the daycare. However, needing to replace your Coleman stove or taking a three hour lunch to glitter your acrylic toenails do not meet the criteria of an emergency. And what about the seven times you’ve taken bereavement leave for dead grandparents who were all in the ground before you were hired?
You are totally confusing “quiet quitting” with being a crappy co-worker. And we’re fed up with carrying your sorry ass.
If you spent half the energy you used lobbying for a nap room on doing what’s in your job description, maybe we’d hit a month-end quota once in a while. Or if you reduced your time watching llama videos by even a fraction… oh who are we kidding? You still wouldn’t get anything done!
So guess what? We are quiet quitting. You can do your own damn work from now on. We are also noisily saying, “If you’re not going to actually do your job, Janice, then quit.” For real. Please. Go be a burden on some other workplace. Find some other co-workers, email them pictures of your Xeroxed Betty Boop butt tattoo.
Shit. One of the tech guys just told us you got the raise. WTF? The boss told us there was no budget for any increases this year. Screw quiet quitting. And screw you, Janice. Great Resignation here we come!
Sincerely,
Your Former Co-Workers
