I quit my job at the Speakeasy

Today I quit my job working as a bouncer at a speakeasy. I never really worked as a bouncer. It was a joke I've shared with my daughter for the past 2 years. How would I explain to a cute little 2 year old girl what I do for a living? Would she, whose ideal entertainment had just progressed past the Teletubbies, be impressed by an artist-turned-programmer Web geek? Would she understand what a website is, what the internet is? and even so, it's not a very exciting job from a toddler perspective. Little girls want their fathers to have a cartoonish job like Fire Man, Police Man, Garbage Picker, Teacher. One day, dropping her off at day care, she asked. In all honesty, I had prepared an answer: Daddy works as a bouncer at a speakeasy. It wasn't a malicious lie. It was fun - and we turned it into a daily topic of conversation. "Who camed into your speakeasy today Daddy?" she'd ask, and every day I would invent a new crowd: one day it was pirates, the next it could be hockey players, dairy farmers, clowns, lawyers, or mimes. "What did they do?" - Every day would have a little adventure, usually describing what each group of people did, often culminating with Daddy the Bouncer throwing them all out of the speakeasy and shouting "... and DON'T COME BACK!" That daily game started to wane a few months ago. Longing for my back seat passenger to ask, I began prompting: "hey - wanna know who came into the speakeasy today?". Yesterday, I realized: my little toddler turned 4. She knows what the internet is (her favourite sites: nickjr.com and uptoten.com, starring Boowah and Kwala). She no longer needs to be misled by this caricaturish fantasy job. Without really thinking it over too much, I mentioned "I'm getting a promotion - leaving my job at the speakeasy" and explained what a "promotion" was, and why I decided to leave my job as a bouncer to go to another company to build websites. She doesn't know what a speakeasy is anyways, and I never really explained it to her. One day - this was back at the old apartment - she was in the laundry room with me and started picking the flaking paint off the underside of an exposed duct. She explianed that she was "doing her WORK", and that this was "Her Speakeasy". Understandably, the speakeasy became her word for what grownups do when they are away during the day. She believed me, trusted me, and I played up the lie for 2 years. My fantasy job was plausible. Maybe some day when she's a little older she'll wonder if I really did have a day job as a bouncer. In all probability she may forget about it entirely. So that's it. Now I have a regular job building websites. Was she disappointed? No. When I explained that it was my last day at the speakeasy, she produced a handful full of precious and colourful heart-shaped plastic beads (somehow she always has a pocket full of beads on her person, even when she's wearing a skirt with no pockets), pressed them into my hand, and said "Daddy - give these to your friends at the speakeasy when you say bye". What a sweetie.