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How to avoid
the company
Xmas party

Once again, we're on a collision course with the holidays, and any pop psychologist with enough gas money to reach a CNN affiliate will get satellite time to rehash their "seasonal stress" material.

It's true Respectable People often find themselves on the brink this time of year, trying to meet work obligations without neglecting their families, tangling their cell-phone headsets in tinsel while decorating the Christmas tree.

But Digital Slobs know there are other unsung holiday heroes who get no press at all.

Facing the same Digital Age yuletide gut-check, they stare unblinkingly into grim reality and, without all the whining, do what needs to be done.

They quit.

That's right, a few brave souls kick off the Season of Giving by giving employers their two weeks' notice.

Job recruiters report being busy at the end of the year, filling spots left by former cogs in the corporate machine who use the holidays to both switch gears professionally and cozy up for extended fireplace festivities with their beloveds, assuming their beloveds allow them back in the house after they quit their jobs.

For those wanting to hit this year's stress-free holiday trifecta (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's), the resignation-letter deadline was last Thursday.

Those shooting for a twofer have until Dec. 10, but if you cut it that close you might be left holding your last-minute Dec. 24 gift purchases in one hand, and your box of office-related personal effects in the other. This could also create trunk-space issues at the mall that would have to be weighed on an individual basis.

You might think being purposely jobless would create its own, more painful form of stress. It will, but like a body in shock, the newly unemployed benefit from numbing endorphins that come from, well, not having to work. There will be a day of reckoning, but like credit card bills, weight-loss regimens and divorces, that's what January is for.

Still, impulsively quitting a job -- just because last year it made you three hours late for the Christmas party and you had to chug the eggnog like you were at a frat party just to catch up -- would be uniformly condemned, especially on CNN. Unfortunately, over the years many Slobs have suffered more than our fair share of eggnog brain freezes.

Yet reality bullies all but the bravest among us out of doing anything about it. While job-hunting Web sites like monster.com make you think your career's destiny is in your own hands as long as you remember your username and password, we know better.

But just because we don't mind avoiding our families, in principle, doesn't mean we shouldn't get more credit for doing it at the office during the holidays. Think about who has to work this time of year: tenure-lacking, short-end-of-the-stick Digital Slobs, and maybe a couple of astronauts on the space station -- and at least they get to wave to their families on a video linkup.

So, two-and-a-half times regular pay hardly seems equitable. A boisterous round of applause as we blow the hatches and exit our cubicles on Nov. 26, Dec. 26 and Jan. 2 would be more like it.

Make sure CNN is there, too.

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