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In 1977, an obscure, hard-drinking country crooner named Johnny Paycheck recorded a ditty that would become the classic ballad of workplace disenchantment.

But the song didn't so much celebrate telling off the boss as it lamented our unrequited desire to do so: "I'd give the shirt right off of my back / If I had the nerve to say / Take this job and shove it."

Many of us harbour the shove-it fantasy, in which we detonate the workplace power imbalance by telling the boss what's what and storm out of the office in a blaze of expletive-laden glory. How sweet it would be - if only we had the guts or the bank account. So we huff and we puff and we keep our mouths shut.

"As a result, we fester," says Lilit Marcus, co-founder of Savetheassistants.com, a site where workers rant about jobs. "So when we quit we want to do something big like burn the office down and write a Martin Luther-type list of all the ways we were wronged."

But, contrary to popular belief, experts say, we needn't lie back in our office chairs and take it: You can tell your boss to shove it.

"One isolated act of insolence usually isn't going to be grounds for dismissal," says David Harris, a Toronto employment lawyer.

According to labour law, employees can't be dismissed without good reason - and a single tirade directed at a useless boss doesn't count as good reason.

Courts generally recognize that employers have a prerogative to manage and workers have a duty to follow orders. Failing to do so could constitute insubordination, and insubordination could constitute getting canned.

But that's where the law hits a vast grey area that often leads to rulings in workers' favour.

In a 2004 court case, Gerald Henry, a former labourer at a Ford dealership in New Brunswick, argued that he'd been unjustly fired during an argument with his boss.

Mr. Henry was peeling decals from a car when his boss suggested that he was working too slowly.

"What's your fucking problem?" Mr. Henry said to his supervisor, according to court reports. "You've been on my fuckin' case all day and I'm fuckin' sick and tired of it."

The boss shot back: "If you don't like it, quit."

"I'm not going to quit. You want to fire me, go ahead and fire me."

"All right, you're fired."

Because his insolent act was an isolated, one-off outburst, Mr. Henry won the case.

Judges also weigh other factors such as seniority, workplace culture and whether other workers witnessed the squabble.

"There's no line between black and white," says Rose Keith, a Vancouver employment lawyer. "What's insubordination in one workplace might not be insubordination in another."

In one recent case, a worker argued he was going through tobacco withdrawal when his boss fired him for a cranky outburst. The ex-smoker won a hefty settlement.

Ironically, subtler methods of getting back at the boss may not be safer. Gossip, for example, could be just as risky as berating a supervisor.

Four civic employees in Hooksett, N.H., made headlines in May when they were fired for gossiping about the town's administrator.

"Any time employees say or do things that could undermine the authority of an employer, it's possible there will be cause for termination," says Bob Sawers of the law firm Sawers McFarlane, which specializes in the employee side of employment law. "We deal with these cases all the time."

If the mere risk of getting fired is enough of a deterrent, some workplace experts suggest more passive-aggressive methods of telling the boss to shove it.

In his peripatetic background working at newspapers and publishing companies, Jeffrey Yamaguchi realized that no job was beyond griping.

But rather than take the burden out on his boss, he devised some unique subversion techniques: Send the boss an anonymous flower bouquet on Secretary's Day; hold random cooking contests without HR's consent; have breath-holding contests during tedious meetings; and keep an ultra-clean cubicle to instill a false sense of total job commitment.

He also recommends establishing a tradition of sharing an on-the-job drink with friends.

"I'm not saying get rip-roaring drunk," says Mr. Yamaguchi, whose forthcoming book, Working for the Man, is a compendium of such crafty workplace solutions. "But we might as well acknowledge that we have close friends in the workplace."

Mr. Yamaguchi wrote the book after noticing a lack of career advice that encouraged levity as a way of wresting control over the workplace.

"In a sense, we're all spokes in a wheel," he says. "You might as well take a step back and have some fun with it."