In One Year, I'm Going to Fight My Boss

I’m new to my city. I moved here after I graduated college in May with a degree in a liberal arts discipline. When I graduated college I'd planned to go into sales. Maybe make a little extra as a freelance writer. That was the plan, and like most plans it ran right into the wall known as reality. If you’d told me I would end up working as a personal trainer/towel boy under a prick like my boss, I’d have told you you’re fucking crazy.

Unless you are one of those very lucky people in the world, you have a boss. Someone, at the very least, who tells you what to do and is the person you report to. If you’re lucky you have a good boss. Someone you respect and maybe even admire.

However, since 60% of the American public hate their jobs or wish they were doing something else, I’m guessing you have a boss like me: an arrogant control freak that is out of touch with reality and cares only about him or herself. You do the work. They take the credit. They screw something up. You get thrown under the bus. They show up late constantly. You get called out the day you come in five minutes late.

There is this huge part of you that just wants to tap them on the shoulder one Friday right before your typically meager ten minute lunch break and punch them as hard as you can in the face, isn’t there? Well, I’m going to do it. One year from today, I’m going to fight my boss, “Mr. MMA.”

I work as a personal trainer and group fitness instructor at a gym in a major city. In the gym we have a Martial Arts School. Mr. MMA is the owner of that Martial Arts School, and is also a part owner in the gym itself. He’s a 3rd degree black belt in an art that judges the winner by scoring points and not actually doing damage. An art he thinks is superior to everything else on the planet. He'll happily tell you so, as he smirks at the inferiority of all other Martial Arts.

He is almost six feet tall and 210+ pounds. Mr MMA holds a sizable reach, height and weight advantage over me. He's extremely quick for any person, let alone a man in his early 40’s. If the fight were tomorrow, there’s a 95% chance he’d win. He’s been training in his pansy ass martial art for decades. Point scoring or not, it's still far more than the two years of kickboxing I have under my belt.

That’s why I’m giving myself a year. A year to train. A year to watch and observe him, and to make enough inroads into the city I just moved to so I can move on without any repercussions from the ass whooping I am going to give Mr. MMA.

18 September 2009 Mr. MMA and I will fight. Hopefully, right around the time he thinks he’s leaving to eat lunch, and in just enough time for me to turn a long weekend into a permanent career change. That is, after he's out cold on the floor.

I do, in fairness to them, have other bosses. Frankly, they’re pretty cool. Yet, to me, Mr. MMA is just that bad. So in 364 days and a wake up, I’m going to do what the overwhelming majority of Americans want to do, but can’t. I’m going to step into the world of a person that I can’t stand and shatter it. I’m going to do what our forefathers used to be able to do, settle a matter with your fists and that be the end of it.

I'm going to fight my fucking boss.