Getting Fired on Purpose

So here is a scene where my Girlina character, Jacy Yates, in my Chick Lit novel gets fired. Because she wants to. Hope you enjoy it:

Where does bad luck come from?

Do we bring it on ourselves? Jacy wondered.

Why had Neville Ormonde Thornbridge (otherwise known as NOT) treated her SO badly?

And why had she been so stupid to take him back the three times they broke up? Never more thorn in my butt! she thought.

Stuck in purgatory and extremely pissed because NOT had dumped her, Jacy thus tried in vain to get fired so that she could collect unemployment and move back to her hometown. She was so over NYC. She was now working at this horrid shitty temp job that did some sort of Widgets R Us and had NOTHING to do with chocolate. (And she'd always worked with chocolate before.)

Argh! She was appalled that she was there in the first place. It was a sweatshop type of place.

How did I get here? she often wondered.

Oh! That's right, one of her recruiter "friends," Banna Maine had begged her to help with a short term project.

Jacy listed the ways that she could get fired, fantasized about them.

The problem was, this Widgety place was a horribly run company. People yelled non-stop all day long (and they were obviously dreadfully unhappy). It was manufacturing after all. And it smelled really bad. It smelled like mildewed cottage cheese and nobody except Jacy seemed to notice. The noise echoed throughout the day. The stenchy smells emanated and fixated themselves in crusty torrid nightmares under Jacy's nose all day.

Even though she got to wear jeans every day, and listen to the radio, she wasn’t allowed to check her personal email on the internet because they had a filter, and the systems were not run perfectly. So that really pissed her off bigtime.

She had the job of listing all the not-so-perfect parts on a long treacherously endless spreadsheet.

She was actually running out of room on this spreadsheet and realized that she would have to ask her head supervisor named Dena Dilpwater for help.

She was told that if you asked Dena for help that you would get axed.

But she wanted to get axed! But her immediate supervisor named Lorne Vorne Morne forbade her to even try to go to Dena Dilpwater's office. He had one of those wandering eyes and sat opposite from Jacy so she could never actually tell if he was really looking at her, and whenever Jacy got up from her desk, he would follow her.

Dena Dilpwater the head big cheese/supervisor, was slightly over 500 pounds and rarely left her office. Everyone was afraid to go into her office. Some people said that she actually lived in her office. There was an escape route by her desk in the floor and they had to lever her out at the end of the day every day because she was too fat to go through the door. She didn’t even have a chair but she did lay on this big couch-like thing and spoke slowly into a remote voice controlled activated computer to get her work done. It was rumored that she had once had a baby; it was further rumored that she had eaten her baby. Nobody ever went into her office that Jacy could tell. How Dena ever rose up through the ranks, Jacy couldn’t imagine. She was a very bad communicator. She grunted and grumbled from her office to cronies at their cubicles. She had an online sametime demanding things constantly. She was also constantly on speakerphone. Jacy had only seen her once in the interview. Dena Dilpwater looked like Jabba The Hut. Except uglier. And her favorite color was Pondwater Scum Green.

Sometimes people rumored that Dena was atropied and never actually left her office and that there was actually a body double that would be transported out of the office via this lever.

For fear of the wrath of Dena, people neglected to confront Dena when they had a problem. As such, there were a lot of problems at this Widget-ous company.

So instead of confronting Dena about the problem of running out of room on the spreadsheet, Jacy just stopped doing the spreadsheet.

Maybe she would finally get fired!

Maybe Dena would notice and fire her ASAP and then Jacy could get back to being In Misery from being dumped from NOT (her supercharged asshole ex-boyfriend) and think about finally moving back to her original hometown where all her friends were still. She missed her old life.

She looked out of the window, she doodled, she drank 13 cups of coffee everyday and spent 10 minutes making each cup. It had to be JUST the right color, with plenty of cream.

She sametimed or IM’d all of her friends back home.

She fixed the email filter problem and played on the internet and emailed her friends. She downloaded porn sites. She was rude on purpose to the IT guy so that he would discover the downloaded porn and help get her fired.

She ate beans straight one day and spent the bulk of the day farting the alphabet.

Nothing happened the first two days, other than Ella Meyers aerosal sprayed her cubicle and complained that someone or something was truly vile and had had too many onion hamburgers, or something wicked like that.

The third day, Jacy brought out the big guns: a People magazine she read blatantly at her cube and as she walked down the hall, and she brought out her big Crayons and started coloring in a coloring book.

She decided if this didn’t do the trick, she’d do some more things.

She brought a Playgirl the fourth day and wore her hot pink jammies AND brought her stuffed teddy bear named Bernard to work. She dubbed it "Bring Your Teddy Bear to Work Day." She made stickers and passed them out. They were of Jabba The Hut.

But she noticed that Lorne Vorne Morne was suddenly on vacation, so nobody really noticed her with the Playgirl magazine. She also noticed that the other girls in the surrounding cubicles started wearing THEIR jammies to work AND bringing THEIR stuffed animals.

All of a sudden it was: stuffed bears, stuffed birds, stuffed Beanie Babies, stuffed dolls, stuffed lions, stuffed zebras, stuffed Panda bears, and even a stuffed monkey.

The IT guy developed a crush on her and never told anyone about her downloaded porn.

The fifth day she’d brought her vibrator and hung out in the bathroom for the bulk of the day, moaning loudly and wearing her short short hot turquoise and hot pink Victoria Secret jammies. She even brought her colored candified pacifier (also from Vicky's Secret) and sucked on it worse than a babboon sucking three-year-old sucking a lolly pop. She made obtrusively loud sucking noises.

The next day the girls in the office brought their own loudly sucked lolly pops and hoards of candy.

It suddenly became a nice happy place to work.

One girl was stuck in the bathroom for 30 minutes and came out looked quite relaxed and happy. (Jacy heard her later asking the IT guy if he knew where anymore batteries were.)

The sixth day was like Halloween: she dressed in Black Asshole Goth princess mode and did matching blackish killjoy Goth makeup. She got several complements from the ladies in the office. Even some of the men in the office wolf whistled her.

People were having so much fun that nobody told Dena what was happening.

But nobody told on Jacy to Dena!

But everyone watched Jacy when she would slink by Dena's office. They did NOT want Jacy to leave. They did NOT allow Jacy to talk to Dena.

This sixth day she was doing all this cheesy crap to get fired, they noticed that she wasn’t actually doing her work. They took the spreadsheet away from her and gave her something even worse and more boring to do. She had to now log the phone calls in an even more nightmarish screwed up spreadsheet.

The lady training her, Elvertal Myrtle, told her that it would be less challenging work and that she could doodle or play on the internet in between logging the phone calls. "We know how creative you are, Jacy," she told her.

She decided that she wouldn't do THAT logging spreadsheet either. It was like there was no way out, no matter how hard she tried!

But they did send a memo saying that candy was allowed and stuffed animals were a plus. They wanted a better comfort level for their employees.

Very much like House Arrest! Jacy just could not believe it!

After the seventh day of THIS, Jacy, in her Superwoman cape outfit with a mask, tried to get fired again. She suddenly had a case of the runs and let everyone know. She would get up in mid-conversation with a customer and go to the bathroom. And she ran.

Later that afternoon a sign magically appeared that said: No Running Please.

She thought the War of the Job was over when she actually squirted ketchup down her leg and left a big stain in the chair, pretending to have her period. When they didn't even complain about this to her she pointed to the sign that said “No Running” and that she could not get to the bathroom in time. They simply murmured their sympathetic responses. Most of them were women, after all.

But surely this latest disgusting fake period thing would creep out Lorne Vorne Morne when he returned?!!!

She still fantasized that whenever Lorne Vorne Morne returned from his vacation he would say:

You are out of here! And I don’t have to get Dena’s permission to get rid of ya this time!

Finally! Freedom! Jacy would ring Banna and ecstatically tell her what happened.

You win, Banna would say. I’ll try to get you something OTHER than accounting for god’s sake. You told me it was not the right fit for you anymore and you were right! So what about sales?

But that didn't happen. Jacy stayed for another month longer.

She continued to bring fake blackbirds to work and fake black crows and would place them on her computer screen.

When she was rude to people they said she had her period again.

When she was supersweet over-the-top annoying to people they said she was probably overworked and they would lighten her load.

She continued to drink tons of coffee and eat tons of beans and fart the alphabet.

Everyone started bringing potpouri to the office, they even started selling it.

Some of them sweetly brought Jacy presents of perfume and deodorant and sweet smelling candles.

One girl brought her Beeno to control her flatulence. "My husband has the SAME problem, honey! Don't worry! This should help you."

She wrote her entire erotica porn novella at work. She caught two girls at work looking over her shoulder, laughing hysterically. "Oh Jacy, you ought to re-write our training manual!" One of them giggled. "You have such a way with words!"

She finally started attending meetings and would start insulting everyone in the meetings. For some reason, they seemed to think she knew what she was doing. "You sure are assertive and such a go-getter, Jacy! We might put you up for a management trainee position! Maybe you aren't being challenged enough?"

It was only until she burned the popcorn in the microwave that she got let go.

The smell of burnt popcorn is the worst smell ever.

It had set her free! And she was filled with glee!