Steven Slater – The New Johnny Paycheck (Sans Guitar) – “Take This Job And Shove It”
Johnny Paycheck ("Take This Job And Shove It" by David Coe)
“Take This Job And Shove It” made a career for Johnny Paycheck in the recession of the Carter years. It looks like Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater may have found a similar niche. (If you’ve been on another planet, he’s the flight attendant, who after getting hit on the head with a nasty passenger’s carry-on, told the passenger off on the PA system, and then activated and slid down the plane’s emergency chute.)
Americans love someone who gets sick of it all with panache–such a welcome relief from people who get sick of it all with a gun. (See e.g. Omar Thornton, the Connecticut employee who shot himself and eight others at a disciplinary hearing. “Everybody’s got a breaking point”, Joanne Hannah, the mother of Thornton’s girlfriend, said of him.)
I can’t comment on Thornton’s state of mind, except to think it was truly broken.
Slater’s mood is a lot easier and more pleasant to try to read. Everyone has “been there” as it were, on a literal or figurative airplane where their head has been hit by someone else’s overbearing physical or psychic baggage one too many times.
Most people restrain themselves (and tend to be glad that they did.) Even so, there is something especially dramatic (tempting) about leaving or losing a job during difficult employment conditions: something that you can’t readily leave automatically feels confining (see e.g. prison.)
When you feel like you can’t just walk away, in other words, there’s an exhilaration in watching someone whoosh, beer in gesticulating hand.
(For a recording of Johnny Paycheck’s, “Take This Job And Shove It”, click here.)
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ManicDDaily 
August 13, 2010 at 1:45 am
I once ordered a meal at an Indian restaurant in Dover NH, and then waited and waited and waited. After about 90 minutes I got up, found someone and inquired about when I’d get my dinner. My order had never reached the kitchen. The waiter who took it had walk off the job before he got to the kitchen. (I have no reason to think my very simple little order pushed him over the edge.)
The food there was good, but the place didn’t last there very long.
August 13, 2010 at 9:43 am
Maybe the guy before you gave a huge tip! K.