Unless you’re independently wealthy, still in school, or just incredibly lucky, you most likely have worked a shitty job. Odds are, you are reading this review furtively at that shitty job right 
now. (I am writing this from my day job, as it were.) If that is true, then this book is for you.
Please Fire Me was written by Adam Chromy and Jill Morris, the creators of pleasefireme.com, an online platform for those who want to anonymously vent about the job they hate but cannot quit. These include such gems as:
“Please fire me. A customer came in asking if we have any books on dinosaurs. After answering yes, they asked if there was a dinosaur called a thesaurus,”
and
“Please fire me. Before hiring me at this job, my boss insisted that I change my name because it was too close to another employee’s name. Now she’s asking me to legally change it.”
The book is a mash-up of such actual website postings from disgruntled employees with creative extrapolations and illustrations. It poses as a handbook to “the Revolution,” the means of escape from “malemployment.” Each chapter explores a theme through posts and interpretive riffs, be it sexual harassment or health insurance. (The “Women of the Revolution” chapter, formatted like an issue of “Bossmopolitan” (complete with articles and quizzes), has all posts about sexism in the workplace. For example, the horrifying “We were so busy with customers and a large catering order that I went my whole ten-hour shift without being able to make it to the bathroom to change my tampon,” inspired a fake plug for the new Tampax 24-hour tampon: “You’ll never put their business in the red again”).
It’s a fast and fun read, the kind of book you can rip through in a day and a half if you need diversion, or over a week and a half if you leave it in your bathroom. (This is the highest of compliments: few books are formatted to make them amenable to five-minute potty perusal.) A book based off a website of twitter-concise postings would intrinsically have a similar spirit of brevity. Yet, despite this superficially flippant appearance, I was impressed to find the book was quite clever beyond the easy jokes, and made several highbrow references, no doubt as a shout-out to all the under-employed and over-educated who haven’t used their intellect since college graduation. (Their “Parking Lot Oaths” are a play on the Tennis Court Oaths from the French Revolution… I had to dust off brain cobwebs to retrieve that one.) Kudos to the authors — the posts alone are entertaining enough, so it would have been easy to write a satisfactory book just half-assing the rest, yet the extra effort really makes it worth buying. I guess that’s what happens if you actually love your job — you do it well.
Though hilarious, at times, the book feels a little too familiar, and we cringe to know this all actually happened to real people. But that, too, is acknowledged by the authors: as much as the idea of “revolution” is tongue-in-cheek, they never lose sight of the fact that real human beings are being degraded on a daily basis, and if they had it their way, the Please Fire Me postings wouldn’t need to exist in the first place.
So read, commiserate, and hand it along to a friend, and maybe we will start to demand a little more respect from our bosses, and can help move the workforce from our current malemployment to a place of mutual understanding and esteem.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go move my mouse while doing Kegels to appear busy.
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Next time in The Grin Bin: “Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me” by Chelsea’s Family, Friends and Other Victims
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