Anyone remember that thing I wrote about the other day? Not the part about getting gross on wine plus beer plus champagne, but the other thing? The thing I couldn’t say?

Welllllll I couldn’t say at the time because I hadn’t mentioned it to my managers yet, and although I sincerely doubt any of them know who/where/what I am on the Internet or have any interest in finding out, I didn’t want to say this thing and have it sit there all weekend because just in case some shit went down, I’d rather have one day between me and my notice and not two or three.

So. The thing. The thing with the notice.

I guess I went and got a new job. The interviewing has been done, the salary has been approved, the paperwork has been signed and the background check has cleared (no secret Ambien sleep murdering for this lady!). My start date is August 11^th, which means I’ve got a couple of weeks to brush up on my dormant Excel skills, get used to wearing jeans to work again, and figuring out the bus route, because although this job is half the distance and can be reached by just one bus, I’m still weird like that and will absolutely be doing a dry run on the bus I’ll catch at the time of day I’ll be catching it.

Because, like I said, weird.

I got into work early today to tell my big boss, and because I’m not quitting completely out of hate or fear of having a complete mental breakdown (hey there, previous employer, destroy anyone else’s life lately?), I was incredibly nervous to the point where I felt like I might pee my pants. That’s what happens when I get nervous. I feel like I have to go to the bathroom really bad, even though the rest of me dehydrates so quickly that my lips stick to my gums. My feet and hands get super cold and sometimes (like today), I shake a little bit. Which probably helped, to be honest, because at least I didn’t seem smug or snide about it. Which I wasn’t, anyway, but I smirk when I smile so I can’t trust anything my asshole face does when I’m not looking.

I think I did a decent job of explaining why I was leaving. The technology gap at my current employer is so vast and, frankly, embarrassing, and I’m afraid that if I stay any longer, those parts of my brain will atrophy and I’ll be unemployable anywhere else. I routinely have to tell my co-workers how to save documents to their desktops. And these people make more than me! And their excuse is “I don’t have a degree for this.” For…what? For right-clicking? For dragging and dropping? Nobody has a degree for that, except maybe the suckers who paid to go to secretary school after 1979.

There are process gaps, as well, in that I work for a reactive – not a proactive – company whose “solutions” often amount to slapping a too-small square of duct tape onto the hull of leaking ocean liner. And because of the technology gap, it’s impossible to affect any positive change to this, because not only are people reluctant to document this information in a way that’s legible or properly stored (ahem, meaning probably not printed out and stuck in some random stack of paper on someone’s desk that looks like the bottom of a birdcage), but they’ve been stuck in this culture for so long that they’re clueless that it can be done in any other way. It’s so frustrating and worrying to me, and I got scared at the thought of staying mired in it for any longer.

It, um, also didn’t help that several of the people in my office can’t understand why they shouldn’t say “retarded” while on the phone to clients, or that they refer to people who speak primarily Spanish as “a Hispanic” or “he speaks Mexican.” Yeah. It’s pretty grim. But like I said, the culture is so antiquated and weird, and for the life of me, I couldn’t see a future in which that would change.

So I applied for a job I wasn’t sure I was qualified to get, and then I interviewed for it, and despite at least one interviewer being visibly distracted by the way I sometimes talk with my hands (I didn’t even get close to whacking her, jeez), I got offered the job and I took it. Obviously I’m a little bit scared to start something new and figure out a whole new social structure, but ultimately it will be good for me, and as long as the company doesn’t fold or lay me off in six months (hey there previous previous employer, that really sucked!), I’ll eventually get the hang of it enough to scrape by. And now I get to spend 30 minutes each way reading on the bus instead of an hour in my car, swearing at traffic.