Having a job is crucial in a person's life. A job is a provides stability, helps someone develop their professional skills, and source of income. Without having an occupation, it can really hinder a person's life. When starting out in a new workspace, the employee will do everything in their power to make sure they're doing the best they can. But, what happens when they can't handle working there anymore? What if something so bad happens, it makes them snap and walk away in an instant?
People on Reddit shared the moment that made them quit their job. Content has been edited for clarity.
“He Told Me To Leave It”
“I was guarding at my local pool by myself with over 100 people in the pool. A little into my shift, a few patrons came up and complained about the chlorine being too strong. Not being able to get down from the chair for a fairly normal complaint, I radioed the front desk and asked them to send someone over when they could so I could walk them through the chemical testing. They were really busy (it was just after New Year’s) so they said it’d be about a half hour. Half a cookie being better than none, I didn’t push it.
In the next half hour, I had 3 more groups of people, 2 of which consisted of adults and the other a few of the swimmers on the pool’s team, complain about the same thing. One of the swimmers had a mild burn on her arm from the pool. I radioed the front desk again and said I needed a staff member now. They sent one over. I had to walk them through the process 4 times to be completely sure, since I couldn’t watch them do the chemicals. In that time, 3 more swimmers came up to me with mild burns.
All 4 tests resulted in a chlorine level of 12.3 ppm. That’s insanely high. Like, shut the pool down immediately high. To put it in perspective, we keep the hot tub, the most chlorinated water, at about a 5, and we urge people to not stay in for more than a half hour tops. I immediately called my boss, who was on call for the evening. He wasn’t off of on call duty for another 2 hours. He didn’t pick up. I had the front desk call him, and for half an hour they called him over and over again. When he finally picked up, they’d been calling him for over 45 minutes. He told me I couldn’t close the pool, and since he didn’t want to come in and fix it himself, told me to just leave it. He joked about telling them to shower after they were done.
I closed the pool immediately. I threw in the chlorine nullifier and clocked out. He called me at 5 in the morning the next day, a Monday. He was screaming at me and wanted him to know why I closed the pool.
I just told him, ‘Because I quit. Maximum patrons per guard is 25 per our pool’s policy, and 50 per the state. I was at over 100 by myself. Also, the chlorine was literally at poisonous levels, and you wouldn’t let me close. So I solved the problem by quitting. Have fun finding a guard to replace my 60 hour weeks.'”
Never Work With Friends
“I was working for a fabric shop owned by my friend. I was her first employee when she was just an online business, but when the bricks and mortar shop opened, I was made manager (without any pay increase) and had to train all the new employees. At the same time, the owners adopted a baby and were never around. They never had time to instill any processes on what do for returns, etc. Basically, communication was non-existent, and our friendship began to dwindle, too.
At some point, they decided they would offer kids’ baking classes and it was like $300 per kid for a comprehensive 6 week class.
Anyway, I was working solo one afternoon, and a woman comes in with her two kids and registers for the class and pays $600 with her credit card. As usual, I had very little information, so when she wanted to know if they needed to bring any materials to class, I called my boss to ask her.
My boss says, ‘Oh whoops. I forgot to tell you that we cancelled that class 2 weeks ago.’
So I get off the phone and explain the class was cancelled, and I went to refund her money. I swipe the return card, then it asks me for a PIN to initiate a return.
Uhhh…
I have no clue how to do this, because I never had to initiate a return here before. Meanwhile, there are 4 other people lined up at the register wanting fabrics to be cut. I call my boss back, and she doesn’t answer (I knew she was dodging my call). I call her husband, he doesn’t answer. I call the company that provided the card reader, and after 10 minutes of them trying to find the users manual for this particular model, they tell me the PIN is something that my bank will know. I didn’t even know who we did our banking through, nor did I have any account information. I couldn’t even give her cash because we didn’t keep $600 in the till.
She started to get upset and even said, ‘You took my $600 just 10 minutes ago and you have no way of giving it back to me?!’
Not to mention her kids who are visibly upset the class they wanted is no longer happening.
Finally, a customer who had been watching the whole thing go down suggests using ‘1111’ because she says she’s worked retail for a long time and the pin has always been 1111 in her experiences. Hallelujah it worked! I issue the return, apologize profusely, then work through the remaining customers.
Finally I am closing up, and my boss’s husband returns my call. I explain to him what happened in full detail, and tell him that we really need to have better communication since all of this would have been easily avoided had I known the class was cancelled two weeks earlier.
Then he becomes super corporate-sounding and says, ‘Part of this job is to be flexible and to be on your toes at all times.’
This was the final straw after months of stupidity. A few months earlier, an elderly woman had a stroke in our shop and died, and even though we were really shaken and upset by this, we were forced to stay open for the rest of the day. Also, fabric reps would come around a lot to meet with the owner and she would ‘forget’ (or blow them off) more than 50% of the time. This made me feel like a huge idiot when I had to explain I had no clue where she was, and I couldn’t get ahold of her on the phone.”
The Cut Throat World Of Journalism
“As a young reporter, I was on a smoke break with a new hire who was awful at the job but a nice guy. He would smoke pot before work and get details wrong in his stories all the time. The complaints and demands for a correction would trickle in on average of twice a week. He’d gone to the managing editor’s alma mater, some private school back east, and we all assumed this was why he’d been hired and not yet fired.
One of us, I think it was me, mentioned something about the low pay and long hours, just jawing. He says, ‘Yeah, this really isn’t worth $7.50 an hour.’
I thought to myself, ‘$7.50? I’ve been here a year, win awards for some of my stories, have had only one correction in my time here and I get $7.35.’
I didn’t say a thing to the boss or the new guy. Instead, I applied for a job at a far larger paper the next morning for double the pay.
Turning in my two weeks’ notice to the boss and seeing the dread in his face that the new guy would have to do my job was the best revenge ever.”
Too Much Dignity To Be Treated Like That
“I worked as a bartender at an Italian restaurant. I’m used to a certain level of harassment as a woman working at a bar, but one night a customer got really handsy. He hit on me for about an hour straight while sitting at the bar getting progressively more wasted. I started with some light flirting but realized after about 10 minutes that was a bad idea, so I backed off and just took his orders and served his drinks. I took a smoke break and he followed me outside, pinned me against a wall and started trying to kiss me. I kneed him in the groin and ran inside, told my manager what happened, and he yelled at me for fighting back, told me I should have just done what he wanted and dealt with the consequences. I grabbed my tip jar, gave him the finger, and walked out the door.”
The Job Was Making Her Miserable
“I realized one day that I would spend an hour crying before going to work. I worked at a terrible bar from 6 pm to 5 am, no breaks, no sitting, with bad customers, worse coworkers, and truly terrible management. Plus, we had to split tips, so other servers would just ignore tables and make me take them, but still make the same amount of money as me (on a busy Friday night, we were lucky to make $40 for the whole 11 hours). I was in school full time and working 77 hours a week. Not to mention the sketchy Syrian owner kept trying to marry me and the other girls off to his relatives for citizenship and the manager constantly tried to get handsy with me. One day I woke up and realized the emotional toll it was taking on me and quit. Best decision I ever made.”
First Day Impressions Led To Second Day Quitting
“I worked for a courier service once. Got magnetic signs for my car, a nice little phone to get my dispatches on, polo shirts, the whole deal. So I go for my first day, and I run all over town. Not a big deal. It’s actually pretty fun, and it’s extremely easy. Right about 4:30, I get a call from the main office.
‘Hey, we’ve got something that needs to go to location. Do you want it?’
So I think to myself, this is a good moment for me to show I’m not afraid to work. I’ll handle this sudden issue, make myself look good, and get a little overtime to boot. So I get the dispatch, go make the pick-up and this little medical place (It was just files), and top off my tank. My dad was a long-haul trucker for a long time, so I call him up.
‘Hey, where’s this place? I’ve got to deliver something there,’ I ask him.
He thinks about it for a second and then goes, ‘Oh, yeah. I know that place. It’s about six hours away.’
So after losing my cool, I decide Whatever, I’ve already said I’d do it, now I have to.
So I hit the road. I get to this place at like 11:30 at night. I’m there for five minutes, and boom, headed home. I get back to my apartment at dawn. It’s almost six in the morning, and I’ve been on the job for a solid 22 hours. I get a shower, fall into bed, and get woken up twenty minutes later by the work phone. It’s another dispatch.
I call the office. ‘Dude, I’ve been home like…an hour. I drove all day yesterday, all night last night. I haven’t slept, and there is no way I can go out right now.’
I feel this is a reasonable answer.
He says, ‘Well, you signed up for the hours of 7:30 am to 5 pm. It’s 7:30. If you can’t be available during the hours you said you could, this is going to cause a problem. Not to mention it’s your second day.’
My brain ground to a screeching halt. Professionalism can get bent. I’m exhausted, angry, kinda hungry, and now being told I’m a bad employee for busting my butt.
So I tell him, ‘Give the dispatch to someone else. And don’t send me anymore. I’ll be right down, and we’re going to have a chat about being rude, you miserable freaking slug.’
I hang up, put my pants on, and drive half an hour to the office downtown. Maybe I looked insane. Maybe I looked scary. I don’t know. I do know that he wouldn’t open his office door. I slid the car magnets under the door vigorously, shouted at him that he was a coward, and left everything else in a pile in front of said door. Security didn’t officially take me out of the building, but a big dude with a taser and a baton did walk cautiously behind me as I left.
Forget that guy. Forget that company. Forget being a contract courier.”
“I Suffered Under Her Torture For 2 Years”
“I was an administrative assistant at a small construction office. My bosses were wonderful generous people, and I adored working for them. The office manager, Lindsay, however was a complete nightmare. I suffered under her torture for 2 years. She did not get along with anyone but she had been with the company for 10 years. She would be sweet as pie when my bosses were in the office, but when they were out, she would treat me like trash.
She would throw things at me, snap her fingers at me, and would refuse to clean the office. Her desk was a complete mess and was above filing. When I did try to talk to her about how she treated me, she would cry to my bosses that I was mean to her. The last straw was when she threw a large box and hit me in the face. I interviewed for another job later on that day. I was offered the new job and put my notice in at the construction office the next day. I have been in my new job for about 6 months now and I couldn’t be happier.
I heard through old coworkers they have tried to hire someone to replace me but they still can’t. They have hired 3 people and they all quit after a month.”
Must Have Been Tough To Listen
“My first job out of college – I worked at a call center for a really large American appliance retailer. When I was hired, I got to choose between sales (which I hate) and assistance/troubleshooting. Sales paid great commissions, but troubleshooting paid more reliably.
Quickly I, and the rest of my training class, realized what the job really meant: people are going to call because their washer or dryer or dishwasher didn’t work, and our job was to troubleshoot it for them within 5 minutes. Not terrible at first. At least I got to help people. Of course, you quickly realize that anyone calling in is going to be mad as heck and rude, but I mean I can empathize with that.
But then we got deeper into it, and we realized that our incentives and bonuses were based not necessarily on how many problems we fixed but how many times we convinced a customer not to have [corporation] send out a repair vehicle. So, in many cases, this meant just simply convincing people their products weren’t broken.
In some cases, people’s stuff was really just broken. And that’s not always a huge deal – so maybe your dishwasher doesn’t work for a bit, we’ll get a truck out to you… never mind that, we could only schedule repair trucks a week or two weeks out, so your dishes will be hand washed for the next two weeks if you’re lucky.
But of course, this is a much bigger problem if, say, your refrigerator doesn’t work. Your food goes bad, and we’ll only refund you $100 in spoiled food (if you keep the spoiled food to show the repairman). Other things go bad too – like medicine. Especially insulin.
In the three months I worked there, and only two months on the call floor, I received many calls from people with medicine about to go bad. People crying. People who desperately pleaded to send someone out to help ensure their child wouldn’t get sick because we sold awful products. And the one that made me say ‘I don’t need this job’ was a woman who was pleading with me from the moment I answered the call to please not hang up on her. Because three other people had. Because those three people couldn’t troubleshoot the problem, and didn’t want to lower their ‘avoid’ rate by sending a truck. So I promised to help her.
But I couldn’t. Because even though immediately I knew I couldn’t fix the problem, we didn’t have any repair vans in the area for 6 weeks. And the woman, crying, couldn’t understand why we couldn’t send out a truck sooner. The truth is, we had trucks in the area the next three days, but the system wouldn’t let us authorize emergency repairs unless we had a supervisor’s permission. And for some bizarre reason, this woman didn’t qualify in my supervisor’s eyes. So the woman, sobbing and pleading, hung up on us. I’m a grown man (albeit I was 20 at the time), and I swear I teared up.
And my supervisor smiled, patted me on the back, and told me to take credit for the avoid. I am happy to have a job I love now, that validates me and helps people, and I will never work at a call center ever again – I will never suggest working at a call center to anyone, and to this day I refuse to buy from that corporation again.”
Floor Spice Ain’t All Nice
“My first job was at a Pizza Hut in Adelaide, Australia. It was one with the all you can eat pizza and ice cream. Cleaning the ice cream machine at 11 pm every day was bad enough… But the night I quit we’d spilled a whole 40 liter bucket of pizza sauce on the ground in the cool room. I cleaned it up. About an hour later, we spilled the second and only remaining bucket of sauce in the making area. The manager made me scoop it up with a dust pan and put it back in the bucket and pizzas were made and served using that floor sauce with shoe crud and hair and Christ knows what else in it. It was then that I thought, eff this I’m gone.”
That’s Not Rain
“I worked at a library in high school and I was planning on leaving the job soon for college, but I was going to stay another 3-4 weeks. I went to the back of the library to gather books from the book drop when I realized all the books were soaking wet. I thought to myself, ‘It’s not raining outside,’ but then the startling realization that the books also smelled a lot like urine set in. I was holding a copy of Killing Lincoln that was soaked in pee. I quit right after.”
“Constant Promises, But Nothing Ever Happened”
“I worked at Wal-Mart for a few months. Had an awful boss and we had a mutual hatred towards each other. He liked to force me to work in the cargo containers out back, these things were easily over 120 degrees. It was awful. I spoke with HR, told them I would move to literally any other position. Volunteered for a paycut. I requested electronics if it was open. HR promised to move me the moment a position opened. I ask multiple times over the next 2 months, with constant promises but nothing ever happening.
One day as I’m walking to my job area, I noticed my coworker Jeff is in electronics putting video games away.
I say ‘Jeff, what are you doing? We’re supposed to be in the back in like 5 minutes.’
He responds ‘Oh, I told HR our boss is a total prick and that I was quitting this instant if they didn’t move me somewhere else. They said they had an opening in electronics for a while, so here I am.’
I said, ‘That’s cool man, see ya later.’
I went back to my car and drove home.”
“I Learned A Hard Lesson About Workplace Politics”
“I worked at Home Depot at the Pro Desk, making $14.75 an hour. I spent a year going above and beyond, working my butt off. I was always taking the opportunity to learn skills for my surrounding departments, like rekeying locks, equipment operation, and so much more. I outsold the veteran Pro Desk guy that had been there for 8 years. I sold 17 commercial credit accounts in a district that averaged about 3.5 cards per Pro Desk associate. I had glowing performance reviews from my supervisor and customer reviews. I had also in a year established myself as the most knowledgeable associate at the desk, if not the entire store, with the proprietary software and new programs they were rolling out. My annual raise was 38 cents, or barely 2.5%.
So I approached my manager and asked him about a larger raise, as there were people in my position making $20/hour. He lied to me talking about seniority.
I countered with ‘It will take me 15 years of raises like this to even approach that kind of money, and by then they’d be way ahead of me. I should be paid based off of performance.’
He then said, ‘Well, we do have an off cycle raise policy for top performers. See me in 3 months when we rollover to the new year’s budget and we should be able to get you up to around $17-$18 an hour.’
In the meantime, the supervisor position opened up at the Pro Desk. This would be an automatic raise I could negotiate for, so I applied believing my excellent track record and experience would make me the obvious choice. I was passed up, though, for the idiot supervisor of lumber who’d run that department into the ground through his incompetence and mismanagement. He was on better terms with the our overseeing assistance manager, who was also an incompetent moron who spent more time socializing than working. It was then that I learned a hard lesson about workplace politics, and how much more valued socializing (butt-kissing) is than actual performance. Make no mistake kids: if you work hard and perform, you will only get more responsibilities. It’s better to be on good terms with the people that can get you what you want than to try and work for them.
So after being denied the promotion, I approached my store manager about the off-cycle raise, and suddenly his tune had changed.
He fed me a line of, ‘Well, we can only submit one request per month, and only one store per district (14 stores) has their request approved per month.’
He basically was bluffing to get me to stay on cheap, because the less they spend on payroll, the bigger management’s profit sharing is.
To this, I simply replied, ‘Okay then.’ Within 2 weeks I had a better paying job and gave them 1 day’s notice once my position was confirmed”
People Will Do Anything For Pizza
“I worked as a delivery driver for Domino’s. This one kid that had nothing better to do other than hang around the back of the shop kept harassing myself and other drivers for free pizza. Was nothing but verbal abuse at first, but eventually he started damaging our cars. Management refused to do anything about it, and the security camera at the back of the shop focused solely on the door so it never caught him doing anything. At first it was petty things like stealing dust caps so I ignored it, but one time he put bolts under my tires and I ended up with 4 flats. Domino’s refused to pay for, so I quit mid-shift.
I refused to return the uniform and hot bag that was still in my car as a form of petty vengeance against the company.
A month or so after I quit, a couple friend and I were driving late one night. We saw that kid in the street, threatened him and made him cry. Probably the sweetest moment of my life, which is a bit sad for me really.”
“My Boss Wouldn’t Listen”
“I was a 25 year old woman working as an administrative assistant and bookkeeper for a contracting company. The guy who ran the place was a world class moron and he had no idea what he was doing. He treated me like I was either a child, an idiot, or both.
One day I got a call from one of our employees who was at a worksite. He was on a break and he called the office asking me if I could print out the last six months worth of his pay stubs. He wanted them so he could use them in a loan application he was working on. I told him no problem and hung up. A few minutes later my boss called to check in, and I made the mistake of mentioning the last phone call.
He started screaming at me (literally screaming — I was holding the phone three feet from my ear and I could hear every word) that he wasn’t paying them to mess around and that they were all lazy and good for nothing. He went on this tangent for a good several minutes. Meanwhile, one of the senior employees is sitting across the room and he can hear my boss scream at me.
I tried explaining the situation but my boss wouldn’t listen. I couldn’t help it — I started to cry. Then he yelled at me for crying. Later he explained to me that he was trying to get me angry so I would turn around and be angry with the employee who had the nerve to ask for his paycheck stubs.
He gave some half-baked apology but it was too little too late. I gave my notice a few days later.”