The Roger Rabbit principle

There are some acts that I simply cannot countenance. Wanton violence and mindless destruction, for instance, or those which inflict harm on others. There are a whole heap of crimes against humanity that I could list here, but shan't. But then there are those which fall into that well defined moral grey area. Say, for example, blackmail. Now in general I consider blackmail to be a bad thing. Unless of course I can use it to my own advantage...

There's a scene in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", that I'm sure you all remember, but which I'm going to recount for you anyway. It occurs when Roger and Eddie are trying to extricate themselves from the pair of handcuffs currently binding them together. Eddie tries to get Roger out of the way whilst he is sawing away, and in order to appease him, Roger slips out of the handcuffs and stands aside. Once Eddie realises what has happened, he ask Roger if he could have taken his hand out of the cuffs at any time. Rogers response is: "No! Not at any time. Only when it was funny!"

My principles, such as they are, run in a similar vein, especially when it comes to moral grey areas. In general, I won't (can't?) break any rules, and as point of fact I'll generally go out of my way to uphold them. It's just the way my personality seems to be built. Usually it manifests itself in benign but irritating ways - I'll always be the one watching the time when we're at lunch, for example, making sure we arrive back at the office on time. I just tend to follow rules. Unless of course, I can find good, solid, iron clad justification otherwise. Take my current situation at work. I'm resolved to leave there by mid to late summer. That much I've decided already. Now I know already what I'm likely to be assigned to for much if not all of that time. It's not very exciting work, in fact it's work I'd much rather avoid doing, but like I say, it's in my nature to follow the rules.

Although...

There is another project. When I started my current job, there were a lot of things I personally identified as being just plain wrong. And over the course of the last three years, I've had the opportunity to correct most of them. What pride I take in my work largely stems from that. In fact, out of all the things I've wanted to achieve, only one now remains outstanding, but with the way things are looking it's unlikely I'll ever get the chance to complete it. It's work that will be done at some point in the future, just not right now - and in my arrogance I know that if I don't do it, it won't get done properly. Or at least not as well as I'd do it (and I believe that hand on heart). This is where notion of blackmail comes into play. What if I were to threaten to resign?

I can justify this on the grounds that it's not a hollow threat. I really don't want to spend the next several months working on a project that I don't care for, and I genuinely believe the benefits to the company that derive from it will be of dubious worth. The idea of resigning recently has become increasingly tempting (not just for me, we're losing another developer next week. Down to four now), and one of the few things that would get me to stay would be to work on something more interesting. Plus there's the fact that I can see the benefits of the work I want to do - not in monetary terms (which doesn't help my case), but in terms of making life a heck of a lot easier for the people who currently use our products. All of this I can cite as moral justification for my scheme.

So I wonder if I can strike a bargain? Let me do the work I want to (work that still has to be done at some point), and I'll stay until it's complete, or else face losing me earlier. I don't believe for an moment that I'm irreplaceable, which hampers my bargaining position a little, but then given that there are only four developers remaining, we're probably all as near to being irreplaceable as it's possible get.

Oh well. It's idle speculation for the moment. Despite my fondness for the idea, it still doesn't sit completely at ease with me, so I don't think I'll be acting on it, tempting though it is.

However, I reserve the right to revisit my earlier thoughts should desperation set in...