7: Quitting
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What will make you change? For most of us, it is not. Self-help books, courses of the Learning Annex. We are immune to any number of long, sincere talks with our friends about the problems that do not go away. We are immune to resolutions made at the last minute of the last hour of each December 31st. Consider the story of Evan Harris. She didn't like her job, she wanted to leave her boyfriend. She was living in a city she didn't like. I was well entrenched in my life and pretty much sleepwalking. And weeks went by and months went by. And then one day she and a co-worker were in the mail room at the extremely low level office jobs that they held, and they were amongst the envelopes, stacks of envelopes everywhere. They started talking. And that's where it happened to Evan Harris. You know, how sometimes the smallest thing can end up changing your entire life. You know, a casual comment by somebody you barely know. An ad, you happen to spot in the newspaper, a chance encounter, one little moment. And later when you look back, you realize, "Oh, that, that was it. That was the moment. That was the pivot point around which my entire life turned and spun and went into a totally different direction." And you know, you don't get to choose. You do not get to choose this pivotal moment. And sometimes, as anybody over a certain age can tell you, the pivotal moment can be kind of, it can be kind of stupid. In Evan Harris's case, it was about as unlikely as they come. We were doing some sort of menial labor. She was doing a mailing, and I was putting some stuff in alphabetical order, and I said to her, "Shouldn't the letter Q be further toward the back of the alphabet?" That's it. With the utterance of those words, let me just play this back for you, because these are words which changed an adult human life. Here we go. Shouldn't the letter Q be further toward the back of the alphabet? With those words, Evan Harris's life took a 180 degree turn. Welcome WBEZ Chicago. This is your Radio Playhouse. I'm out of glass. Today on our program, quitting, stories of people who quit everything in their lives that they hated, and what happened to them afterwards. Coming up, writers Sandra Singwell, Lisa Buscani, and others, stay with us. Evan Harris and her friend and co-worker, Shelly Ross, were at this job, and they started talking about the letter Q, and it was the kind of conversation you can only really have at a job that does not require total concentration, so you're sorting mail, you're frying burgers, you're doing whatever, and so they're talking about the letter Q, and again remember, this is the pivotal conversation in a person's life. They're talking about the letter Q, and they get to talking about where it should be in the alphabet.
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