Once upon a time, your friendly neighborhood bartender quit his gig waiting tables at the shabby but quaint Dogwood Cafe in Jamaica Plain, MA, in order to seek out the good life. Holidays off, paid vacations, three day weekends, lunch breaks, working from home on occasion. Ah yes. Commuting on the train in the morning. A button up shirt and a pair of pressed trousers. Hair combed and ready. My armpits radiating a fresh swath of Old Spice.

Up to this point, I had worked in restaurants for my entire life. First as a dish dog, then doing a decent enough job to move to prep, then moving up the proverbial ladder to line cook. Eventually I became sous chef at the now infamous Five Spice Cafe in my hometown, Burlington, VT. In college, I had worked for a week at the audio video center and found the environment too stuffy compared to my many dish shifts at various restaurants around town where I watched madness occur on a nightly basis from the sidelines. Chefs and cooks were an interesting bunch back then. A bunch of derelicts and reprobates. Kitchens more like pirate ships. Me, just some skinny ass punk, high on weed, spraying down dishes and scrubbing pans, wide eyed, laughing to myself at the streams of filth issuing from the mouths of the polyester clad mercenaries as they did their dance on the line.

Gallows humor and obscenity was totally normal, and not just socially acceptable but required. This was the first eighteen years of my work experience. Many of my coworkers during those times had been in prison and it was common to witness seething outbursts of anger ending up in fights out by the dumpsters, or the cops showing up to haul someone away in cuffs. Black eyes from bar fights, a cook being late to work because he was still in the drunk tank, a crazed lover stopping by to let off a little steam in front of a howling audience. All routine. Oh, and the meltdowns. Beautiful, tension building meltdowns from chefs and kitchen managers where pots were thrown in fits of rage, plates broken against the wall, grown men reduced to quivering blobs of tears in front of us all.

At the office, I was put in charge of writing online copy for one of our biggest accounts, Lending Tree. I wrote and edited articles, mostly about the automotive world which I knew a good deal about and enjoyed. My desk overlooked the city of Boston. At noon I would simply get up, without telling anyone, and go walk around the downtown area and pick up lunch somewhere. I had the freedom to go get my haircut, or visit the dentist. If I ever felt the need, once a week I could stay home and work from my computer there.

What a life this was. If I called out sick I still got paid my full wages. The three day weekend was a real thing. All the federal holidays. I went out for beers with my team after work. All was good in the world.

One day I came into work and they told us we lost Lending Tree. Many of my team members got the axe immediately. They kept me, but I was transferred to a different team in charge of vacation and insurance accounts. Not such a big deal. I rolled with the punches, said my goodbyes.

Then I walked in one day and everything from my desk was gone. I asked my supervisor what happened and he told me, “Oh, we moved your desk to better suit you with your new team members.” My beautiful desk by the window where I had produced for over six months had been given away to some other schlub. The new location: facing the kitchen, watercooler, and coffee machine. Noisy. Not only did the fridge door open over and over throughout the day but people also used the area to talk about their inane social lives.

I scheduled a meeting with my superiors in order to see if I could get my old desk back. I missed that view. They told me how sorry they were, but I would have to stay at my new desk. I told them, “It isn’t so much that I was moved, but that no one said anything to me about it, that I came in one morning and felt violated.” “We’re sorry,” they said, “We’ll take that into account the next time we do it.”

The rows of fluorescent lights above me began to irritate my eyes as I sat, staring into my computer screen day after day. My buttocks growing in overall size and girth. It became harder to churn out the articles. I made more mistakes and often had to go to meetings where my editor in chief scolded me for being careless.

I arrived one snowy morning and they had moved my desk again without telling me. This time in the absolute worst spot in the office, directly behind the refrigerator. Even with music blasting in my earphones each slam of the door felt like a hammer strike upside my head, every gurgle of the watercooler, all the snickers as the other office workers giggled about one thing or another.

My lunch breaks grew longer, I started leaving on Fridays at 3, showing up at 9:30. My hands began to gravitate over to Craigslist, to the restaurant jobs section. Scanning, scanning. Sending emails and leaving voice messages to front of house managers and GMs for jobs. The rows of florescent lights grew in intensity, more foreboding and bright than ever, like being in a giant tanning bed. I swore I could hear them as they hummed their evil incantations.

When the axe came down, I had already secured a job at an Italian place in Dorchester closer to where I lived. They waited until 4:45 on Friday, at the end of the two week pay period. The guy they chose to sack me was just a kid. They had sent him in on a suicide mission. He bubbled and sobbed through the whole routine. I simply put my hand on his shoulder and consoled him. I’d fired many people myself and also been fired many times. A cycle of life. “Are you sure?” he said. “Yes,” I said. “Everything will be ok.”

I had a chaperon watch me as I cleaned out my desk. the thought did cross my mind to unleash some sort of outbreak, maybe hurl my desk. I simple gathered all of it and shoveled my mess into the side waste basket. My new team stayed fixed on their work. None of them even said goodbye.

The single strangest thing about working in the office, was listening to what went on in the men’s bathroom every morning. I’ve never quite heard such loud and obtrusive bowel movements, even in the multitudes of locker rooms throughout my entire life of which I have been very familiar. Something about those office guys and their watery dumps haunts me. Maybe it had something to do with sitting for eight hours a day, the stress, the bad coffee, but these guys all sounded like they were giving painful birth to hellspawn, groaning and straining, ripping massive farts that would drown out the brass section in an orchestra.