"I've fallen back on this periodically, although I must say that getting out of the grocery business ranked right up there with getting out of the army as one of the happier experiences of my life"
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Eddings lands the punch by yoking two wildly different institutions - the army and the grocery business - under the same emotional headline: relief. The joke isn’t that retail is literally war; it’s that the sensation of escape is the same. That’s what makes the line work: it treats “normal life” as its own regimented system, full of petty rules, repetitive labor, and low-grade stress you’re expected to endure with a straight face.
The phrasing “fallen back on this periodically” has the weary cadence of someone who’s rehearsed the story for years, not because it’s his best anecdote, but because it reliably communicates a worldview: work, in many forms, is an apparatus that presses people into roles, and the happiest milestone is often walking away. “Ranked right up there” is mock-heroic bookkeeping, as if life’s triumphs can be scored like campaign medals. It undercuts any romantic notion of “service” or “honest work” with a cooler, more private metric: did it make you miserable, and did you get out?
Contextually, it also reads like a novelist’s origin story without the self-mythologizing. Instead of claiming inspiration struck like lightning, he points to lived drudgery as a reference library. The subtext is practical and faintly cynical: if you want to understand people under pressure, don’t just study battlefields. Watch a person eight hours into a shift, counting change, swallowing irritation, dreaming of the door.
The phrasing “fallen back on this periodically” has the weary cadence of someone who’s rehearsed the story for years, not because it’s his best anecdote, but because it reliably communicates a worldview: work, in many forms, is an apparatus that presses people into roles, and the happiest milestone is often walking away. “Ranked right up there” is mock-heroic bookkeeping, as if life’s triumphs can be scored like campaign medals. It undercuts any romantic notion of “service” or “honest work” with a cooler, more private metric: did it make you miserable, and did you get out?
Contextually, it also reads like a novelist’s origin story without the self-mythologizing. Instead of claiming inspiration struck like lightning, he points to lived drudgery as a reference library. The subtext is practical and faintly cynical: if you want to understand people under pressure, don’t just study battlefields. Watch a person eight hours into a shift, counting change, swallowing irritation, dreaming of the door.
Quote Details
| Topic | Quitting Job |
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