If it wasn't for Schadenfreude...

...I wouldn't have any Freude!

Well, not really.

The psychological damage inflicted by my old employer is like a healing-over war wound. It's really pretty much all better now, but I'll be telling my grandchildren stories about the scars.

I "hear" that one of the other senior sales consultants recently quit. Since they fired "Karen," this leaves them only with the adorable and enthusiastic, but wildly disorganized "Suzi," and the 22-year-old cousin of the president and niece of the CEO, "Ginger."

It's hard to type while making wiggly exaggerated quotation mark gestures.

Rumor has it that when the most recent consultant quit, she told off the president so thoroughly that it made her cry: a nasty taste of her own nasty medicine for a nasty person, that. Additional goings-on there include the firing of the woman they hired to replace me, the firing of an account executive from Suzi's team, and the loss of four or five clients.

Oh yeah. And what happens when I think of all the 60-hour weeks I put in there, making $6K a year less than I am here? And how I was anxious to the point of terror much of the time? And how I couldn't sleep nights? And how I used to sit at my desk and cry? And how I now go home right at 5 every day and get to take lunches and breaks and don't have to sell anything and don't have evil malicious people to deal with and got yesterday off because it was San Jacinto Day?

I get Freude, that's what. Hell, I get Gemütlichkeit!