Congratulations on Telling Off Your Boss!

Offices are dark and terrible places, filled with people who have long since abandoned their dreams. Yours is no different.

You work for a small drug development company, developing a drug tentatively called “The Silver Bullet.” It isn’t, as you might hope, a product aimed at eradicating some especially terrible form of cancer or terminal illness, but instead is a compound intended to dissolve fat by forcing the body to release large stores of lactic acid in improper ways.

The resulting process, at present, causes complete muscle and tissue degeneration is targeted areas, but your bosses are hoping that, with a little work it could become a miracle weight-loss drug and become their meal ticket for the next forty to sixty years.

Since they’re standard drug-development people with few or no morals and an eye for how to squeeze as much money as possible out of venture capital companies they’ll have relatively little sympathy for the people who have died testing their product (currently 100% of your test group, with a 0% fatality rate in your controls) but they’ll have a great eye for profit margins and how to twist data to make it seem their drug will turn a profit instead of murdering everyone who comes into contact with it. They’ll also have an incredibly low opinion of support staff and researchers in general.

As a research coordinator, in charge of compiling and performing an initial assessment of the data, you’re barely a step above the receptionist in the company, so they’ll look at you like you are, at best, a tool to be sent to fetch coffee and occasionally yell at when the numbers don’t squeeze just right.

But you’ll know more about your drug and how it works, thanks to your bachelor’s in biology and functioning brain, than almost anyone else in the company. You know that if it ever works it’ll be because of statistical anomalies rather than science and that even the current volunteer testing is incredibly illegal.

Your drug is criminally bad for the people who use it, and it serves no practical purpose. This is in the forefront of your mind whenever you’re being chewed out by your supervisor, who happens to also be your CFO and your VP (it’s a very small company). A close second in your head is the remaining balance on your student loans.

But the voice of reason in your mind has been getting quieter and quieter of late, and it won’t be long before it finally falls silent and you cave and start screaming at your asshole boss that he’s a murderer, and that an NDA can be violated if you see crimes being committed, which you most certainly do at present.

This thought process will reach critical mass tomorrow. Your boss will call you into his office to chew you out for no particular reason. It’ll mostly be because of his increasingly severe erectile dysfunction, but it’ll come out as you miscalculating the margin of error on some of your data, which you didn’t do.

You’ll know this. You’ll also know that he’s a small, insignificant man, even within the company which he holds such high esteem, and that he’s clinging on to life by his fingernails. You’ll know that this is the only real power he has, the power to chew you out. He can’t even fire you; your CEO would need to be involved for that to happen.

You’ll know all these facts and suddenly you’ll snap. You’ll tell him to go fuck himself. You’ll tell him that you’re sick of dealing with his shit and covering his bullshit. You’ll tell him that he can take this position and give it to another fresh undergrad with no ambition and a burning desire to avoid graduate school for another year.

Then you’ll turn around and leave him at his desk, red faced and sputtering. He’ll be dialing the CEO, rather than walking the fifteen feet to his desk, but he won’t be able to remember his extension, so he’ll start shouting the receptionist’s name.

You’ll smile as you walk away and pack your shit into your messenger bag, slipping knick knacks and desk clutter, along with a healthy portion of pens, into a pouch to put them to good use as you search for new work.

As your final action at this desk you’ll slip in a photocopy you made earlier this week of the statistical projections for the drug’s success/mortality rates. Then you’ll turn on your heel and walk out the door.

You’ll know you’ve opened a can of worms, that you’re going to be living rough for a few weeks at best and a few months at worst, but you won’t care. You’ll know that you’ll be involved in a long, taxing legal process when you mail the evidence in, along with a brief testimony describing the company’s internal processes and that you’ll have to fight for a good long while before you see any results.

But you won’t care. You’ll have done what you know is right, and you’ll feel free. For the first time in twenty-five years, you’ll free. So congratulations on telling off your boss. You might’ve lost your recommendation, but it was easily the best decision you’ve ever made.