Breakout

The rooster crowed, and like a bell being rung in her head, Gabriella opened her eyes. She pulled herself to a sitting position, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness of the room. She had slept with the curtains dropped again. She looked with irritation at her still worn office clothes from the previous day. She had been too tired to take them off.

She turned-on the bed-side lamp and dragged herself off the bed, blindly shuffling her feet into her slippers. She reached for her phone and turned off the alarm before it even got the chance to ring. The rooster crowed again, and she went over to the window and opened the drape. She sighted it on the fence that demarcated her house from the neighbours who owned it. She sighed and shifted the curtains to let in more light.

Then she went to the kitchen to grab a glass of warm water. Flicking on the light switch in the dining area of her sitting room, she pulled out a chair and sat.

Ruining her morning routine for the first time in months.

Her days were a ritual, and boy had she grown to hate them. Nine months ago, when she got employed in Rexnum Digital Consults, she had felt the sky was the limit. She was fresh out of school, and hadn’t searched one week before she got called in for an interview. The six-figure paycheck was amazing, the work hours weren’t too flexible, but who was she to complain, half her set mates didn’t even have jobs, and would give an arm to work in the environment she was.

The first month was tolerable. It was a 9 to 5 job, five days a week. And then she started running offline assignments, and answering weekend calls, with orders to prepare sheets and arrange meetings, not previously stated in the contract, all which seemed complimentary to her at first, until it dawned on her that she was being exploited.

Then she got a promotion, a promotion with a customized label, one seemingly created with her as the spec in mind. Her 5 pm closing hours became 6 pm, and kept extending until she forgot what the weekdays looked like in the afternoon and evening hours.

Her friends, tired of dragging attention with her ‘precious’ job, went off and let her to it. So there she was, tired, lonely and spent.

She couldn’t think of another day locked in a glass cubicle, staring and punching away at the company’s keyboard, with just the thrumming sounds of the UPS, and kept sane by the receding voices of staffs passing by.

She was tired of preparing presentation she wasn’t going to make. Spending hours on a work, that could be in the bin in the snap of a finger; if it didn’t have the right ‘touch’ or ‘sound’ to it.

She was tired of sacrificing her youth and happiness for a job she no longer had the passion for.

She was tired of working clockwork, 24 hours a day, seven days a week -she was tired of being so damn predictable.

And so, with a fixed resolve to take control of her own life, Gabrielle reached and flipped open her Macbook, and began to type her resignation letter.

My entry to a contest initiated by @slhomestead

Photo credits: canva.com