Sunday, April 24, 2016

Not JUST Quiting Your Job on YouTube: Nope, it's a whole lot more :)

In the last chapter I got into the marvelous case of a guy who quit his job by bringing a marching band into his workplace to accompany him as he confronted his boss and quit his job ((see:
Joey Quits (worker quits Renaissance ProvidenceHotel w/ marching band)). And probably that's about as stylish an act of severance as we're going to witness :) Still, the whole idea of engaging in a little theater of personal liberation  and recording and uploading it to YouTube for posterity, future reference, personal vindication, and inspiration for one's fellow humans fascinates me. And there are numerous such videos to be found online if one looks for them through the YouTube search engine.



 'Fuck it, I quit': CBS reporter Quits live on Air
At this point I need to present the reader with another example (above) and I'm not going to hold back on what I think is the best a example ever of a "Take this job and shove it!" video. And while you can find this one on YouTube,  it certainly wasn't produced as a YouTube piece. In fact, that's the whole point, this is a big time Television personality who decided that her glamour job was really not what she had hoped it would be. Full of disgust for what I guess she saw as the shallowness of her reporter's job and the news show that presented her efforts,  and high on the idea that she could regain some personal dignity through an act of self liberation in a most public forum, she decided to share her disdain and defiance on the air in what has come down to us as a clip that several folks have  posted online, drawing well over a million views. Here we have it to:   a) enjoy - b) marvel at - c) reflect on - d, stoke our inspiration with - e) all of the above... thanks to YouTube.

After several viewings I've found that the most interesting thing about this clip is the reaction of the anchor or host of the show.  The shocked, but 'the show must go on' look on her pretty face, I think, is priceless as she, upon the camera returning to focus on her,  instantly goes into "We apologize for that..." and then after a second or two of 'I have no idea what to say or do now' confusion, goes into the old standby 'We'll be right back'...

While these videos are fun, lots of fun, I sense that there's something important and profound about them, too. I think they are indicative of the true feelings so many of us have about our jobs and above all, our relation to them. We humans have only been part of an historical phenomenon that anthropologists call Civilization for a relatively short period of time. Often, the emergence of agriculture is attributed with the distinction as the spark that led to Civilization, and that occurred only roughly 12,000 years ago. It's hard to imagine that the nomadic herders and hunter gathers who lived before we humans reorganized ourselves into agricultural and industrial societies resented the way they had to earn their living. Think about it, if you had no choice but to scour the landscape daily, looking for roots, grubs, and the odd fruit or small animal to chow down on, with no way to keep your finds in quantity as they would certainly rot away within a few hours, and therefore no reason to indulge greed and engage in anti-social behavior to support it, then what was there to resent and rail against? The "I quit!" video is proof positive that we have taken a wrong turn in our societal evolution. At least that's the way I see it.

No "Take this job and shove it!"videos don't dominate the collective offerings of YouTube, but there are enough of them posted that I feel justified in calling them a bit of a genre. In fact, not only do they exist but they have been picked up and relayed by another genre, one I'll call the 'Top Ten' genre, a genre unto itself for which video producers simply curate and present bits and pieces of other video producers' videos. Here are a couple I'll mention in closing:



Extreme Quitters Leaving a Job and Making an Impression
https://youtu.be/aEfdMkaZnQA 


The 9 Best "I Quit" Videos on the Web The Most Epic Ways People Have Quit Their Jobs

https://youtu.be/KonQoIqOPBI



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