“What?! Serious?” Paul says.
“Yes! Fuck I can’t stop grinning.” I reply.
“Three months?”
“Well… nearly four.”
“Nearly four?! HAVE A GOOD SUMMER MATE! What are you going to do?”
Paul cheers’s my pint, genuinely excited for me.
“I know right! I don’t know. Hang out in cafes, email people. Meet people. I want to spend the next bit of my life doing something I love.”
“Go to Google’s campus in Old Street. It’s a cafe where start ups go to work. People hang out there to get ‘picked up’. See who’s there. Also get into the Wayra incubator near Euston. If you’re gonna hang out in cafes, hang out in the right ones.”
“Yeah good idea. Can you fucking believe this!”
“This is your time. Don’t fuck it up!”
“I wanna go back to America too. Airbnb my flat and get back over there.” The excitement is overwhelming me. That dark tunnel I was in… now I’m in a field. Sunshine. 360 view. I’m back and I feel proud again.
Okay. Hang on. Let’s back up a bit.
ONE HOUR EARLIER…
My boss winces and leans forward.
“So. I’ve spoken to HR and you’ve got two options.”
I nod my head up and down and wince a bit too.
My job role changed recently so I asked my boss about redundancy. And I wanted to leave anyway.
“First option is we move you to the UX department. Which would be a great opportunity for you. If you did that for, I dunno, a year, who knows where it could lead?”
A year. Jesus Christ. Another year in this job. Like we’re talking about getting another coffee. No way. I want the pay off.
“Second option is, you’d leave…”
Here it comes.
“… with three months pay. Plus we’ll give you a couple of extra weeks, plus whatever holiday you have left. So you’ll walk away with nearly four months pay.”
Fuck me!
“Thing is, Simon. We don’t want you to leave, we’d much rather you take this new role…”
Fuck that.
“… How do you feel?”
Fucking great is how I feel. I’m laughing inside my head.
I pretend to weigh up my options. Carry on working for another year or get paid and not work. I mean…
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
“Which one?”
“I’ll leave.”