The Mic Throw

It was a $20 error. I had taken a discount on my own line, which the store allowed, and the paperwork behind it was wrong. That was the whole offense.

The owner pulled me onto the stage at a company meeting in front of all three hundred salespeople and made an example of me. Not a conversation in an office. Not a note in a file. A stage, a microphone, and every person I worked with watching, because the point was never the twenty dollars. The point was the room.

I have never been able to sit still in front of something rigged, and I had known that about myself since I was eight years old and threw a deck of cards at my grandmom's table. So I took the microphone out of his hand. F*** you, I quit! Then I threw the mic against the back wall of that room and walked out of the building, and I did not slow down on the way to the door.

I am not going to dress that up. It was not strategy and it was not a plan, and I did not have another job lined up. It was a temper I have had my whole life going off in public, in front of three hundred people, over a number small enough to be a rounding error. A couple of years later that same owner called and offered me a management role at $500K a year. I was busy. I have never worked for another person since, and I have never once wondered whether I should have.