January 18, 2002 | 9:40 AM

When I got back to work from being sick, Nancy T bought me a huge bouquet of pale pink tulips and threw her arms around me.

Yea!!! We are so glad you're back. The office was no fun without you.

When I got back to work Nancy K. gave me a humidifier for my office. She dug it out of her attic and gave it to me so that I would be more comfortable at work.

When I got back everyone in the department stopped by throughout the day and asked me how I was feeling and if they could get me anything.

Brilliant, considerate, strange, funny, kind individuals. That's who I spend my days with.

As opposed to the Marketing Research Slave Camp I used to pull 60+ hours a week at.

Working at Harvard gives me faith in the potential of humankind.

And although the job itself is not what I want to do with my life, I am so god damned blessed to work there.

I feel like a girl who has been in a long term relationship with an abusive obsessive asshole and after a messy break up with said loser is finally experiencing the joys of a non-dysfunctional romantic partnership for the very first time.

Working at Harvard has given me so many gifts: autonomy, a correct sense of my own boundaries, the ability to be honest when something is happening that I don't like, and fucking self esteem for crimminy sakes.

I am so luck that the Stupid Company laid me off. That was the only nice thing that assy place ever did for me.

Today I am on vacation. I have a month of vacation time. A month-- and that doesn't include sick days.

Two weeks from now I begin classes at Harvard Extension where I will obtain my degree for free.

But today I'm just going to putz around, drink a lot of chardonnay, maybe go to the gym...

Those are the freedoms that my job offers me.

If you hate your job, get out. GET OUT NOW. Before you get stuck there. And it becomes your life.