Work-at-Home Mom Spoofs the 'I Quit!' Dance Video Meme
Marina Shifrin was a young gainfully employed person working for Taiwanese company Next Media Animation until she became disenchanted with her managerial mandate of "make deadlines, not art" and decided to quit rather publicly, in a YouTube selfie of her dancing to Kanye West's "Gone."
Passed around as a righteous kiss-off, the clip has since racked up 8.8 million views and caused the LA Times to peg her resignation to a larger story about Taiwan's inhumane work conditions, "which sometimes mean taking a cot to the office and have even led to death from fatigue." Such characterizations led her hiring boss Mark Simon to write us here at Gawker in an effort to dispute formally that association, earnestly answering questions in our comments section and frankly talking about the specifics of Marina's job. "Look, we do news animations," he emailed. "We are not investigative reporters." (Shifrin has a stand-up comedy sideline, so a few observers suggested her resignation was a self-serving millennial reflex.)
In any case, Shifrin's clip has since been posted on more than 300 sites and inspired a few video responses, including one from Shifrin's former NMA co-workers, who handled the whole thing with as much grace as possible, considering one of their friends just threw them under the bus using their own tools:
Another response video came from Brenna Jennings, a New England-based work-at-home mother who told the Huffington Post, where she also blogs, that she related to Marina and wished she'd hang enough gumption to quit her first bad job like this. (Brenna is also someone I used to work with, though she insists that our shared employment wasn't the place she wishes she'd left dramatically.) Her parody isn't a dismissal of Shifrin's naivete—I'm sure your job making Justin Bieber vomit videos was tough, but try motherhood—but a homage and a silly riff on the nagging responsibilities of a parent working from home. Via Facebook, she wrote:
Work-at-homers know that the truth is regardless of having a "real" job with all its commitments, we still feel compelled "because we're home" to keep house. [My husband] is totally 50/50 with me around here, but he can't come home on lunchbreak to collect wet towels. While a document is loading, I throw in a few dishes. Between conference calls, I make a bed. You'd like to quit it, but the reality is you won't, and can't.
In the last 24 hours, Jennings' video has shown up all over the place, including Good Morning America:
"Also, yes, I am wearing my boots on the bed," she added. "My dogs sleep in my bed—those boots are the least of my sheets' worries."
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