I Shouldn’t Be Alive

Its been almost 2 months into my new job and I have enjoyed every day of it.
Although there hasn’t been single day when I have not compared it to my previous job,
it has not been the routine kind of comparison that one tends to make after a switch.
The comparisons have led me to mail my previous bosses and colleagues, thanking them for contributing towards my professional and personal growth.
(No, its not because I thought I should try insure myself against the economic meltdown and the obvious effects on the IT sector.)
So, here I was, having a sumptuous meal in the spacious eighth floor canteen with my team member and ex-team members and as is the natural order of things, after sometime, the conversation settled down on the obvious.
Now, all of us have some kinds of, to be a little technical, a hashmap, which defines a key, value pair. These hashmaps are numerous for all the kinds of experiences, people, relationships, "you-name-it-you-got-it", etc that we encounter, meet and have.
In the context of our professional experiences one of the maps we might have is the one describing the relationship between the designation a person has and the roles and responsibilities that need to be carried out.
Coming back to the obvious discussion that was in progress, all of us started dumping our hash maps w.r.t the one person that was in everyone’s map.
The key in this case was obviously the same in every case but the values were all pretty different. While some of them had a very philosophical view towards the value in their map and some of them had straight away attributed it to the I.Q, still others were blaming themselves for having had to insert such a key-value pair in the first place. I thought I was going a step further (or rather backwards) when I was querying as to who would have created such a key-values pair in the first place, when one of the ex-team member stumped all of us with what he had to offer.
Apparently, he did not stop at analyzing the value but went ahead and shared with us the effect of the key that he was experiencing. Towards the end of the meal, all we had for him was sympathy.
For the key-value pair that he had in his map, all he had to say was "I shouldn’t be alive".

And you think your boss makes your life miserable?