Considering how jobs take up a decent chunk of one's life, they shouldn't be something they absolutely hate. Jobs should be in something people enjoy in regards to both the people and the work itself. But unfortunately, not every job will be enjoyable. For these people, their work was at least okay until something BIG happened making them hate everything. These are the stories from workers about events that made many people quit. All stories have been edited for clarity.
Do You Know Anything About Theaters?
“Many years ago in high school, I worked at a movie theater. The place was pretty poorly run from the moment I started there. We never got paid on time and management was basically a bunch of lazy dudes who sat in the office talking all day and never actually did any managing. It would have been hard for things to have gotten any worse but after a couple of months, they brought in new management who seemed to want to make it their personal mission to run the theater as poorly as possible.
They first decided to implement a new policy requiring all projectionists to wear ties, despite the fact that projectionists are never seen by the public, not to mention that tiny little detail that the projectionists worked around giant, rapidly spinning objects that a tie could get caught in. Management refused to reconsider the policy and every single projectionist quit as a result.
They then decided that the door people (of which I was one), who were always scheduled seven days a week, would now only be scheduled on the weekends, and refused to reassign any of us to concessions on the weekdays since we didn’t want to lose hours. As a result, almost every single door person quit, including me.
After that they started imposing impossible cleanliness standards on concessions, things like requiring them to scrape popcorn kernels out of the cracks in the trim behind the popcorn machines. Concessions was there until 5 AM every night trying to meet their standards. Most of the concession people quit as a result.
By my count, the theater went from a staff of about fifty to a staff of about twelve in three weeks. I swung by about a month after I quit and found out that entire management staff had been fired and replaced yet again by an entirely new one, ones who actually seemed to be running the theater properly. My best guess is that the previous management had been told to whip the theater into shape and they were idiots who had no idea how to effectively do that.”
I Thought I Was Replacing You
“I was hired by the new owners to replace the existing manager. I was under the impression that he was moving on to another job somewhere. So after about 4 days, I ask him where he’s headed and if he’s excited. He just looks blankly at me and says, ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m just training you as the assistant manager, right?’ The look I gave him must have been a great tip off because he got up and walked into one of the new owner’s office. After about 30 seconds, they were screaming at each other, then he just storms out of the office, grabs his stuff, gives me the finger, and leaves.
Over the next few days, I’m trying to calm things with the employees. They’re not faulting me, but now have a very bad taste in their mouths about the new ownership. Over about a 7-10 day time period, my team shrank from 15 people down to 3. I hobbled along with that the best I could while we tried to hire new people, but the new owners were offering so little we had trouble finding people. After 3 months or so of that, I started to get fed up and overwhelmed and when the owners started to get on me about missed deadlines, I was over it. We were still only at 5 people, 2 of whom were brand new and still training. They didn’t allow me to refuse work or push deadlines out, they expected the same output as a 15 person team. So after my third day in a row of being berated for missing a deadline that was impossible to make, I quit.”
We Did All The Work
“I worked at a data-company.
The guys in the sales department messed around all day. They’d literally be in the parking lot drinking and racing RC cars. When it came to handling accounts/clients, they frequently gave away free accounts in order to ‘retain’ customers (and make their own sales numbers look good), and somehow they got away with it.
Meanwhile, there were dozens of programmers and database nerds working tirelessly behind the scenes to integrate a bunch of complicated data and make it easy to access via the website.
Yearly holiday announcements come around, and upper management decides to send the entire sales team to Hawaii for an all-expense-paid vacation. When the furious developers asked why they were just taking the sales team, the confused CEO literally said, ‘Well.. I mean… I guess we could ask the sales team to pick one person from each department who helped them the most this year, and take them too…’
The programmers/engineers/database people were livid, and walked out in droves.
Gee, I wonder why the company tanked.”
Of Course We All Quit
“They tried to make us do a third straight 16 hour shift while telling us off because we were taking too long.
This was years ago as a basic box mover in a courier company. They cut their staff in half and still expected us to do the same amount of work. It got bad enough the head office people came down to supervise us at the end of shift, we stopped taking any breaks and worked WELL past our hours without overtime. The second day they were there, our immediate supervisor of our team (about 10 of us) asked for the night off next week for us (Christmas Eve and most of us had family) and the bosses refused, we ALL quit.
Their entire workforce quit in less than ten minutes.
There were three people in the office that morning when the other 300 of us walked out. Most of the other workers were pretty disgusted in how they treated us, enough to pack in their jobs. They called within an hour and offered us all pay rises and actually hiring people to help with the workload. It didn’t help, they already effed themselves trying to save money on wages so they were never going to make their deliveries. A month earlier, it may have made a difference but a week before Christmas?
I was glad to leave.”
She’s Crazy
“It wasn’t that bad at first, until one of our night managers quit and was replaced with, well, lets call her… Becky.
So Becky seemed nice at first, but we all started to notice her changing a lot of things around the store. People on the night crew got moved to day, she gave people weird orders, and most of the time she wouldn’t even be at the front when we needed her.
She used to keep her phone on her all the time, like on a phone call constantly, so she was always on the phone with her partner, who happened to be a manager from a neighboring store.
One day someone stole a box of candy from the store and she literally went out there and got into a fist fight with them, which is a huge no-no, you’re not supposed to go after a customer like that even if they did steal.
So Becky comes in all bloodied in the face and we’re not really sure what to say or do, so we all just look away and get back to work.
After that, she acted really REALLY weird, throwing people under the bus and claiming we weren’t doing our jobs, which is funny cause she was never up front when we needed her.
She ended up making pretty much the whole night crew quit was when Becky started getting grabby with one of our younger cashiers, and the girl was already in a bad place and didn’t want to lose her job, so she tried to ignore it for a bit. But one day, Becky tried to get the cashier in her car to take her home since she didn’t have a ride, but the girl wasn’t comfortable with it and she ended up calling me to come get her.
She rejected Becky’s approaches, so Becky went on full petty mode and claimed the cashier had substances on her and told the cashier to go home. The next day the younger cashier was fired, so the younger cashier tried to tell our boss about it but he said there was nothing he could do.
This was the last straw for everyone and most of us quit within the month.”
No I Won’t Take A Gift Card
“I used to work in a telemarketing sales job. We were paid a base salary plus commission for sales goals. One day the company brought us all into a big conference room meeting (usually not a good sign at this type of job) and told us that our commission checks would no longer be paid as checks but would now would be paid on company issued gift cards.
Imagine how well that went over. Some people walked out that day. THEN the first day the money is supposed to be issued on the cards, we get called into another meeting and told that the cards have not yet arrived and were sent to another branch across town. Cool, have someone there get the boxes of cards together or whatever and bring them here, no problem right? So the cards finally show up a few days later. Of course everybody immediately goes to check the balance. $0 on each card. People quitting left and right, just gathering their stuff and walking out. Team Leaders and managers in full blown panic until they had to just shut the office down for the day. Class action lawsuit is filed and about 5-6 years later I get a settlement check int he mail for about $2k.”
I Can’t Believe You Would Allow That
“I was a lifeguard at the local YMCA pool for the summer. It was my second year working there, and most of the other guards were repeat workers too, some of them had been working there up to seven years. Abruptly, the aquatics director (boss) quit to work at a different YMCA.
The new aquatics directors were awful. One of the least knowledgeable and popular lifeguards got promoted to the role along with an administrator from a different YMCA, the two shared the position. Schedules were all messed up, paychecks were inaccurate, and nothing ever got ordered when it ran out. They scheduled one of my coworkers for a 55-hour week and flipped out because they didn’t want to pay her overtime. They also mysteriously dropped 20 hours off of my pay one week, I had to go over their heads to get it back, since they insisted they were right despite my time clock records and the schedule.
The last straw came in late August. One pool was closed for repairs, so we all didn’t have as many hours as usual, since there was one less pool to work at. The aquatics directors visited the closed pool after the workmen had left and didn’t lock it up. When the repairmen came back in the next morning, they found a beat-up body. It turns out that two homeless guys snuck in and one of them beat the other to death with a plank, according to the police report.
As soon as we found out that our bosses had allowed some hobo to kill someone in our pool, that was it. 31 out of 34 lifeguards quit that day, myself included. Both aquatics directors got canned shortly after according to one of the three who stayed. The senior lifeguard who stayed got promoted into the job. Since then, the pool has been back to normal, but people are still reluctant to work there. I’m talking paying-$18-per-hour-and-there-are-six-lifeguards, when the labor market for us was glutted with guards since we’d all left that job.”
Don’t Call Me That
“I worked for a nonprofit as part of a staff of about 12, where morale was pretty low because we had an incompetent CEO. Morale sunk even lower when we got a new program director because she was just simply awful.
One day, I was working on a time consuming project with her and she called me her slave. I kinda bristled and said I was uncomfortable with her saying that. (She was white, I’m black.) A few hours later, we finished up the project and I was walking out of her office. She said, ‘Thank you for being my slave today!’ The other director and the office manager heard it.
So I said, ‘That’s not the kind of thing you should say in a workplace!’
She came out of her office and said, ‘How about Santa’s little helper?’ I just kind of shook my head and started my next assignment.
A little context, she was one of those obnoxious people who touched my hair, asked weird questions about the very normal food I brought and just generally acted like she’d never met a black person. Once during a meeting with an important legislator, she infantilized me and asked if I had his phone number and other weird questions that this guy and I covered weeks before over the phone—almost as if she were trying to pull rank and make me seem dumb. Everyday, it was some new micro aggression and I was growing increasingly frustrated with it all.
So after the slave comment, I was just done. I went to the CEO (we didn’t have HR) and told her what was going on. The CEO said she would handle it. Her way of handling it was making the woman apologize after things cooled down. So, like two weeks later, she came into my office, sat across from me and basically said, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’ I was not at all pleased with her apology so I walked out of my office and marched straight into the CEO’s office and told her either she goes or I go. They decided to give me a ‘two-week vacation’ to think about if I really wanted to work there. That two week vacation turned into a six month severance package to stop me from filing a lawsuit.
That evening, my coworkers texted me that after I left that day, they argued with the CEO and office manager about what happened and they needed to bring me back into the office and apologize. The CEO told them that I wasn’t coming back and if they didn’t like it, they can leave. And so they did.”
After Everything She Did
“Years ago, I worked at a chain salon (my last ever I swear). There was about 14 of us plus my boss. Half of us were really good, very passionate about what we do, all booked with good clientele. Our boss was wonderful, didn’t micromanage, etc. She was a big reason that while it was a chain, it didn’t feel like one.
She got fired. The reason given was that she ‘cashed a check at work.’ She bought product, paid for it with a check, and added an extra $40 so she didn’t have to find an ATM before she went to the bar. She had worked for the company for 5 years, had pulled 3 shops into the highest ranking ones in the district, consistently had shops exceeding their numbers, etc. And just like that, she was fired, and even worse, when I came to work the next day, we weren’t allowed to talk about it. I texted her and she told me what happened.
We didn’t quit at once exactly, but over the next four months, the top stylists, who brought in 70%~ of the revenue, left. We took our clientele’s with us and all of us went to smaller, private salons. This was several years ago now but I still keep up with them. We’ve all found our niches in hair, make way more money, and are way happier for it, including my old boss. She’s about to buy the salon she works at. If the whole incident didn’t happen, I don’t know when I would have left which allowed me to discover I prefer barbering/men’s styling over women’s. It was a blessing in disguise at the very least.”
Dang It Karen
“I worked a really terrible law office in a small town while doing my articles. It had been recently thrown together by a retired CEO who decided to have a working retirement in a small town and so bought up all the retiring lawyers’ practices (we shall call him ‘the boss’). Everyone that worked there was great. Good lawyer, great assistants and good support staff.
Then there was Karen (not her real name but close enough), she had been brought on the team because she was the assistant to one of the retiring lawyers. She was old and nasty but sucked up to the boss enough that he trusted her. I was forced to work with Karen every day and she made my life awful for 3 months. She refused to answer questions, refused to train me after the first week, and gave me conflicting instructions. If I messed something up (I was learning after all), she would tell the boss whenever I wasn’t around. Whenever she messed anything up, she would blame it on me when I wasn’t around.
After three months, I was let go because Karen had made the boss so suspicious of me that he felt he couldn’t trust me to do any work. Turned out to be a huge blessing. I got a better articling position and got a good job. Success is the best revenge and all that.
I met up with one of the other lawyers that worked there a few years down the road. It turns out, after I left, Karen had no punching bag and so she started taking it out on one of the other clerks, driving her out of the firm. Then she did it to another one. Then all the other lawyers left except for the boss. Eventually the boss had to hire all new staff. They’re still struggling along but they have high turn over and I know why.”
You’re Supposed To Care For Them
“When I was in pre-school/kindergarten, the other teachers were always hanging around our place; like, all the time, they were a tribe. I was the only child in the crew, and my mom is a single mother, so I saw and heard everything. Now, being two decades away from the memories, I don’t remember the whole descent; however, I do remember that they worked in the lowest possible socioeconomic region of their I.S.D. (Dallas Area, NOT DISD). I also remember that for my entire life, they LOVED their principal (and being a-go figure-9th grade teacher now, I realize that loving a principal is truly a once in a millennium type of phenomenon).
Well, when I was in first grade, he left the school. He was replaced by a women who garnered IMMEDIATE hatred from the tribe. Every day, they all had new horror stories about this evil woman. In an effort to pick up her slack, they began going above and beyond to get their kids the bare necessities. All of our churches held school supply drives, I think my school (private) even had a fundraiser. The teachers worked themselves into the ground trying to create a positive educational atmosphere. Unfortunately, things continued to decline-rapidly.
In February (the 2nd most brutal month of any school year; October is 1st), they were reaching the end of their ropes. Loving your students can only go so far, and when you have an administration that actively subverts your efforts to appease state regulations (that intentionally target students whose first language is not English), on top of a menial pay check (much of which was going right back into their classrooms) and a general lack of respect for your profession, people started to lose it. Basically, they all felt that they had become unable to give their students what they needed, because the teachers had nothing left to give.
Cut to: The faculty meeting heard round the world.
When the new principal stood up to address their concerns, this woman had the gall to say (I could never forget this), ‘I don’t know why y’all care so much, or even try for these kids. They’re all going to end up working at McDonald’s anyways.’
35 teachers quit. On the spot. Most finished the school year (my mom included), but they all handed in a joint resignation.
The principal continued to work there for three years.
I know it may seem like they were abandoning their kids; but at the end of the day, you can’t bust your butt for a principal who thinks A) that working at McDonald’s is the ultimate rock bottom in life, B) that people who work at fast food restaurants don’t deserve an education and C) that your kids aren’t worth anything.
My mom kept in touch with many of her students, who have gone on to not only work in the service industry, but put themselves through higher education and trade schools. Many own successful businesses, and some are even gluttons for punishment-I mean fellow public school educators. One was even a well known model and activist in the early 2000s.
It’s my understanding that the school recovered, but I don’t know how that woman’s reputation ever could’ve.”
I Hate Sears
“At Sears, our department manager kept testing everybody for weeks…revoking days off, demanding people come in sick, miss their own graduation ceremonies, etc because the ‘suits’ were coming from corporate to see why our department was doing so badly. We spent more hours than any high school student should work making sure everything was perfect.
The day before they were too arrive one of the girls was so upset about being told that she would be fired if she needed off the next day, that she went sobbing to talk to the manager of another department about it (since it was our manager’s day off). A couple of us walked her over because she was really hysterical and needed her job.
After explaining everything to this other department manager, he got a confused and horrified look on his face. He flat out told us that the reason for the visit by the suits was because our department was outperforming every other store in the country and they wanted to find out what we were doing RIGHT.
Needless to say, the blatant lying and abuse we’d suffered was at an end because we all handed him our notice and walked that day. He freaked and tried to cajole us, but we weren’t having it. I hate Sears, they had terrible management and I am not surprised that they’re now dead.”