Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng

I confessed to my friend Jason yesterday about an incident earlier in the day on Monday. Cosmically, it clued me in more than anything else that my time at that job was coming to an end.
Several months ago, I researched completing my master's degree in an attempt to be more marketable. I accidentally gave out my real cel phone number, too.
So. About 9am on Monday I got a call from a strange area code and answered it thinking it might be someone from far away wanting to hire me away from all this.
It wasn't. It was a guy from one of those online universities.
By the time we had established that, I had already made it outside for a private discussion.
"Our records show that you have a career in IT. You can get your Master's in Information Technology in about two years," he started.
"I can't commit to that, or anything at this time."
"Don't you think a Master's degree would be good for your career?" he persisted.
"I don't know what would be good for my career right now."
Slight pause.
"What do you mean?" he asked the question he never should have asked.
I unloaded. To paraphrase:
"Yeah only I'm really really questioning whether helping my career in IT is really something I want. Between you and me, I hate this crap. Whenever someone asks me what my career goals are all I can come up with is 'I'd like to continue living in a house and feeding my family'. If there were anything else I felt at all qualified to do I'd be doing that right now because between off-shoring and automation, the jobs seem to be getting crappier and crappier and the compensation gets worse and worse and there is no shortage of systems that get broken needlessly because of off-shoring and automation. Why would I want to do this better? This sucks, my friend. Being more qualified to do something I hate does not seem like the path to happiness, to me."
My breakdown was followed by another slight pause.
"How about an MBA? Every career benefits from an MBA."
A little embarrassed for having sobbed on a telemarketer, I asked to be placed on a list to be called back in a few months.