As I watched "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" I was thinking that I should have sang this song as I left my last job.

I was thinking of "Saturday Night Live" when Molly Shannon's Mary Catherine Gallagher would break into song to express her feelings. So, I thought, "I'm not just a misfit, I'm not just a nitwit. You can't fire me, I quit, since I don't fit in." And I really didn't fit in.

I had a place to go, which happened to be anywhere except where I was.

I think we often settle for the comfortable, the routine, the familiar. I see that all the time, even though people hate where they are. They stay because it's convenient and are scared to leave, even though they feel it's better to stay where they are.

My leaving several months ago was so good for me but it's been difficult. Over the last month I have been in a battle with a couple clients to get them to give us what they owe us. We did a screensaver for a local company that has 800 employees. I figured they were good for the money, especially because they were a bank with 40 branches. But the nitwit we were working with kept telling us the check was in the mail.

It turns out that she never turned in the invoice we gave her in October for the $550 down payment. She told us in mid-November that the office in Utah had processed the invoice and had sent it out two weeks previous. She said she stopped payment on the check and resent our invoice. This past week my bookkeeper called the office in Utah, and they had never heard of us and had never processed the invoice. If I was a vengeful person I would go after this woman and report her to her boss (which I still might do).

To me it's been a good learning lesson to get a down payment before doing any work and to get the final payment before turning over the final product. I might be a misfit at times, but I'm not a nitwit.