Things have been fairly tumultuous at work lately. We just launched a site– the big project that we’ve been slogging through for the last two months or so. Some corporate standards crap for Visa– about the blandest topic this site of, I don’t know… government stats or something like that. And I’ve just about had it with my employer.

I’ve been asked several times to come in after hours– not just an hour here or there, but rather “work late every night this week. Then work the weekend too.” I’ve done this here and there, and I’m confident that I’ve put in more than my share of effort on the project. I’m not doing anything fancy, just formatting content pages in basic HTML (this adds to the blandness– I’m doing little I didn’t already know how to do ten years ago). The problems, however, were numerous: first of all, there was a lot of stuff to plow through. Secondly, the client sucks (horrible directions, feedback written by people whose grasp of the English language is rather approximate and endless nitpicking and revisions). And to top it off, my project manager fancies herself queen of the yuppies.

There’s never a “please” or “thank you”. And when it comes time to make sure I’m “on board” to work a 60-hour week, the inconvenience isn’t acknowledged. So I’ve got a totally ungrateful snobby piece of work telling me “jump” and expecting me to grinningly shoot back a totally professional / corporate / pathetic “how high.” Any way I look at it, it makes me depressed.

This isn’t a place I need to be. And as always, misery at work threatens to infect everything else around it. Lisa’s tired of hearing about it. My bandmates keep asking “why the fuck haven’t you quit yet?” Meanwhile, it’s hard not to consume the better part of a six-pack every night when I get home from work. That’s one of the more obvious unhealthy aspects.

So I made a resolution to be less of a doormat. After all, regardless of how poorly the deadlines have been set– I have obligations besides work. Band practices. Shows. Hanging out with my girlfriend on the one or two evenings a week where our work schedules allow time to, you know, hang out together. With these things in mind, I started saying “no” to the project manager. And I got grief for it. Believe me, it was fun to see her hold back her outrage when I told her I wasn’t sticking around for the night (while she drank champagne in the office and chatted with the brown-noser employee of the month).

The pinnacle came on Wednesday, two days before site launch, and the one “lull” I’d had in the schedule in a few weeks. Then, at 4:45pm, the PM sends out an “emergency” email to a dozen people telling everyone to attend a meeting immediately. Fuck. Here we go again. Another late night solving some problem nobody bothered to prepare for. I wanted so very badly to go hide in the bathroom, or anything to get me away from what this meeting could mean. But I convinced myself that maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. I walked up the stairs.

Seated around the conference table was a smattering of people: graphic designers, copywriters, other project managers. Way-too-fucking-happy-guy turns to the Queen Bitch PM and says with “look at all these people! It’s everyone that loves you, ______.” I felt like puking.

She announces that the 14gb of downloadable assets we needed to push to the production server weren’t transferring properly. The uploads were failing and would need to be broken up into small pieces and baby sat continuously– day and night– for the next five days. The people sitting around the table, us, would be doing the babysitting. Or, more specifically, the non-technical people could babysit– and us “technologists” (my department) would also need to be on hand to make sure the non-techs wouldn’t louse it up when things needed to be restarted. We’d be signing for six-hour overnight / early morning shifts through the weekend. I wanted to scream.

The opportunists struck first, pouncing on the more agreeable shifts. I, on the other hand, didn’t want to say a word. Volunteering would be the last fucking straw. Midnight to six a.m. watching progress bars? I couldn’t imagine a more pointless, offensively fucked task to ask of me at this point in the site launch process. It was almost my turn to speak up, and sign my backbone’s death warrant.

So I stood up and walked out the door. I went back to my cube, grabbed my bike and made a bee-line for the elevator.