Confession of a Quiet Quitter
Who knew I was ahead of the zeitgeist?
Hello, your friendly, loquacious Senior Demon In Charge of Technology here.
Like most demons, I listen to newsradio on my commute. Yes, there are commutes in hell. Of course there are. And I was hearing about this “Quiet Quitting” phenomenon a few weeks ago and thought, “Huh. That doesn’t sound like quitting.” So when I read a couple of Medium articles today on the subject and read that the term really just stands for “Doing the job you are paid to do, during the hours you are paid to do it,” I had to scratch my horn. That’s literally what we demons do, all the time. I mean, isn’t this exactly what “work-life balance” meant for the last, I dunno, decade? Are people really getting excited about a neologism for something that has been touted every day on every lifestyle show in the world for, basically, ever?
Look, I’ll be honest, but don’t tell my boss I’m being honest, or I won’t hear the end of it: I’m a federally exempt worker. I haven’t seen a time card in over a decade. I have long since stopped counting my hours. The job gets done, my boss approves, and I largely do whatever I want while waiting for the next job to land in my lap.
For those of you who don’t know yet, “exempt” means “exempt from overtime pay.” Unlike the folks who work 40 and then get paid extra for extra hours that week, my employer is legally able to pay me nothing extra for any extra hours I might have to work. As you can imagine, this makes me very efficient at my work, because I don’t want to spend any additional time on a job than I have to.
I won’t go into all the arcane rules, but you can see them here: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title29/chapter8&edition=prelim or search up “exempt employee rules” if you don’t want your eyeballs bleeding from that legalese.
The important point is that I get paid, not based on the hours I stick around the office, but whether I did any work that day. And by “any,” the rules are quite specific: a-n-y. Read an email? Answer the phone? Walk in the door? I’m getting paid for that day. Oh, and if I am on vacation and have to do work? My employer has to give me that day as a work day, not as a vacation day, again, even if it is just to read an email.
This isn’t “work-life balance” or “quiet quitting.” This is following the law. This is basic Contracts 101, which, you know, as a demon, I kind of know a little about. Literally, I’ve been doing this pretty much all my life.
Now, I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I love my work. It’s my hobby and I get paid for it. How awesome is that? I am deeply invested in the success of my company (because I do like getting paid) but also in the success of our clients — because ultimately they are the ones who pay the company who pay my paycheck. I absolutely have had weeks where I put in well beyond 40 hours because the work needed to be done, then, there, and by competent people. But I have never had my boss say, “Demon, if you could just stay a bit longer and help with this new client, that’d be great.” No, and not just no, but “I’ve already got that scheduled and I’ll have the project done on time” no. It’s been that way for 21 years, even before I was the Senior Demon. So insofar as this is the new work fad, call me a trendsetter, but I suspect the demons before me have been doing this every generation.