5 Employees Who Spectacularly Told Their Bosses to Take This Job and Shove It

The train company couldn’t figure out how to get a replacement driver there anytime soon. Two hours later, they did send a contingent of shuttle buses to collect the passengers and take them the rest of the way. The real mystery is how the absconding driver got to Madrid, or Santander, or wherever he’d rather be than at his post. Maybe he caught a train traveling in the other direction? 

1 Someone Drew a Salary from the ‘New Yorker’ for 30 Years Without Writing Anything

Joseph Mitchell wrote for the New Yorker in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. A lot of the stuff he wrote is still available on the site today, so you can go back and read his coverage of how a bar changed over the years or how this other bar changed over the years. Being a writer used to be awesome. 

It’s becoming increasingly rare, by the way, for publications to maintain such long memories. We ourselves are fortunate to be a site where you can still browse and stumble on articles from when the Steven Slater JetBlue story was brand new and something to riff on. 

In 1964, Mitchell submitted his last piece. He never published anything again. Still, he stayed employed at the New Yorker, and he went on getting paid as usual, for year after year, for the remaining three decades of his life. Again, being a writer used to be awesome.

However, Mitchell didn’t exactly spend those final 30 years of his life partying. He continued coming in to the office every day like everyone else. Co-workers, baffled by the absence of any output from him, used to sneak in there when he was out and look through the trash to see what he was writing, since he surely he had to be drafting something and just was failing to make it work. 

And really, when office people dream of quitting, they fantasize about leaving the office, not of ceasing all action. If you had the chance to trade your current fate for going to the office daily till you die and accomplishing nothing, maybe doing something productive with your life doesn’t sound so bad. 

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