Everyone has to deal with stressors at their place of work, but sometimes they become too much to handle. These employees finally decided they had had enough drama and quit.
Talking Trash
“I worked at a Dairy Queen when I was 17. It was lunch rush, and since it was Sunday we had a skeleton crew. There were 11 orders on the screen with more coming in, and I was absolutely flying around the kitchen making stuff.
My manager was standing in the doorway, literally just leaning up against the wall, talking trash like, ‘Wow you’re kinda slow today,’ or ‘I thought you were faster than this.’ I was still getting orders out in under 6 minutes, and she wasn’t even offering to help.
I was already sick of working there, but this pushed me over the edge. I asked if she was going to help and she said no. I asked if she thought she could do better than me, and she said ‘of course.’
I told her, ‘Okay then, have fun,’ dropped my hat/nametag on the counter, and walked out. She was yelling, ‘Get back in here!’ as I strolled through the back door. When I went back to get my final check later that week, she was there, but didn’t say a word to me. She just handed me the envelope and walked away.
It felt so good. I got a job two weeks later in a department store making more per hour, with no hot grease, and coworkers who weren’t terrible people.”
Rock On, Boss Man
“Back in my rocker days, I used to have really long hair, like almost down to my waist (I’m a dude). I worked in the kitchen for a hospital. I was a good employee, hard worker, did my work without complaining, and did it right.
I was never late, and I followed all the rules as expected. The manager always made it a point to remind me to net my hair or sweep it under my hat. His reminders were perfectly fine and expected; after all, it was his job to oversee and enforce food safety rules.
Then his son, also a long haired rocker, was hired. His son and I didn’t work the same shift. In two weeks time, he was late, stole food, and rarely netted his hair. One day, we end up on the same shift.
Like clockwork, boss man comes over and reminds me about my hair, which is no problem. Work begins, and I see his son with his hair out. I asked the boss man what the deal was, and he told me to stop complaining, saying that other employees weren’t my concern.
I clocked out that very second and never went back. I was off to basic training in a month’s time, and it was the best decision I’ve ever made.”
The Fun Stopper
“I was a teenager and desperate for some quick money, so I went to one of those placement companies. You know, the one that docks you like 30% of your pay for the privilege of putting you in a crummy job.
They had me working at a packaging plant, and our goal that day was to assemble brooms. You would get a pallet of handles and a pallet of brush heads, and you were supposed to put them together and set them on an empty pallet.
I struck up a conversation with a guy at the same table as me. We were enjoying ourselves and assembling brooms at a very fast rate—we had already done a few pallets while everyone else had only done one. It’s amazing how just having a good time can make you work harder, and make the time go by faster.
So, we took a break around 10, and when we came back, the floor manager sent us to different tables. As in, the furthest two tables that anyone could possibly inhabit. I asked him if we were doing things wrong or something.
He said, ‘No, you’re having too much fun and talking while you work.’ I excused myself to go to the bathroom a few minutes later, and simply drove away.”
Insanely Invasive
“My boss actually came to my house, demanded to my roommates to see me (who inexplicably let him in and pointed to my room), went into my bedroom where I was in bed reading (fully clothed, thank God), and proceeded to yell at me for 15 minutes about the status of the calendar display.
It was Christmas season, I managed a bookstore, and the calendar display was probably a mess because they were so hard to keep neat. Stunned that my boss came into my private bedroom on my time off, I simply did nothing. I didn’t know that was even a thing someone would consider doing.
My boss demanded I come in early the next morning, along with someone from corporate world, and I would be lectured on my calendar display and given lessons on how to set it up correctly. Then he left, slamming my door behind him.
I called my girlfriend at the time, and she convinced me to just quit, come see her (she lived 400 miles away) and stay for Christmas. I packed, got a train ticket, took my store keys off my keyring, and got some sleep.
The next morning, I walked into the store early, met my boss and the corporate guy, and handed him my key, only saying, ‘No hard feelings, but you shouldn’t have done that.’ I turned around, walked out of the store, and took a train to Cumberland. I spent Christmas with my girlfriend for a few weeks, came back to my place, and got another job within 2 weeks.
Leaving a store around Christmas time boned my boss, because he had to work my store, arrange for floaters to cover him, and take over all the paperwork, all while running the other stores in the district.
He probably had to work 80 hours weeks over Christmas and into New Years. According to my former employees, my boss was shocked and overwhelmed. He seemed completely bewildered about why I quit. When I told them, they were like, ‘Oh. Oh no, that’s not cool. That’s not cool at all.’
The icing on the cake was that, due to his scrambling, he forgot to file I had quit until mid-January, so I got paid for a month I didn’t work there, plus I got a store bonus since I had been there a full calendar year.”
Post Coasters
“I worked as a postman in Australia around 1990. We started work at 5:30 am, sorted the mail, and then walked out to deliver it. Once your mail was delivered, you were free to go home.
A lot of the guys were very lazy and their ‘beats’ were arranged to finish at the pub on the corner across from the post office. Then they would go in there and rack up overtime while claiming to be out delivering mail, when in fact they were getting trashed.
Sometimes the postmaster would try to sneak over to the pub to see if he could catch any of his blokes in there, but the barman would give them the alarm (because they had their backs to the door) and they would go hide in the toilets until he went away again.
Being young and interested in fitness at the time, I started jogging around my ‘walking beat’ to deliver mail. There were several times that I ‘finished’ for the day before 9 am and once at around 8 am, which meant all my houses got their mail early too. It made them very happy! I remember one woman complimenting me about it, because before they wouldn’t get it ’til the afternoon.
After a couple of months, the postmaster came and told me, ‘Because you’ve been finishing faster than the other guys, we’ve decided your run isn’t big enough, and we’re going to give you some of their streets.’
So you’re going to penalize your best worker (me) and reward the lazy blokes who are racking up fake overtime in the pub? No thanks. I was in his office while he was telling me this. Once he finished, I resigned immediately. He was still trying to talk me into staying as I walked out.
As it happened, my brother had gotten a job with a national retailer a year prior and had been asking me to join. I walked out of the old job and was in a new one by Friday. I wound up staying there for almost 13 years.”
Horrendous Hosts
“I once worked as an au pair in Sweden. I went to stay with the family for a week first to see if we got on. They were really nice, so I agreed to come back a couple of months later to start the job. But when I went back, things went wrong almost immediately.
They had promised to come and collect me from the airport but were nowhere to be found. When I phoned them, they said they’d gone to bed already and told me to get a taxi. The taxi got lost, and they refused to help. They said it was my own stupid fault for not checking the bus timetables, which was ridiculous because they said they’d pick me up.
They also badly underfed me. The parents and children would eat large quantities of expensive food, while all they’d give me was one scoop of rice and salad. If I ate anything out of the fridge, they screamed at me and told me I was wasting food.
The father and teenage boys kept walking into my room unannounced while I was getting dressed, and bursting in on me in the shower. I was supposed to get weekends and evenings off, but they never gave me any free time at all; I had to work all day and babysit evenings/weekends.
They made me do far more work than I was meant to. I ended up looking after not only their 3 kids, but all their friends as well. I was also made to spring clean the house from top to bottom, twice a week, and do the entire family’s laundry, which is not an au pair’s job. God forbid if there was even one shoe out of place when the parents got home. They would scream at me until I cried.
They were supposed to pay for me to take language classes and have a mobile phone/travelcard, but they didn’t do any of those things. They also didn’t give me my wages. If I dared to speak to the host father, my host mother would get angry and jealous and scream at me for ‘talking to (her) husband behind (her) back.’ I only ever spoke to him to confirm my chores for the day and ask for my unpaid wages, but the host mother couldn’t even handle that.
All this was just the tip of the iceberg. The final straw was when a friend of mine was going to be in town and I wanted to see her over the weekend, but even though I’d had no time off since I arrived, the family said no because they wanted me to babysit all weekend.
I snuck out of the house on Saturday morning before they woke up, and met up with my friend. I told her all of the things that had been happening, and it made me realize how awful it was there and that I should quit. I asked her to accompany me to the house because I was scared to face them alone.
When we got there, they were gone. I wanted to just run away, but they had hidden my suitcases when I arrived and I needed them. They had also tried to take my passport, but eventually relented and let me keep it when I said it was the only ID I had on me.
I phoned them, and they had gone away for the weekend. They’d left their pets (a dog, a cat, and a rabbit) unattended and without food. I told them a friend wanted to borrow my suitcases (I didn’t want to tell them I was leaving in case they rushed back) and asked where they were. My host father told me where they were, but warned me not to take them.
Of course, I took them anyway, packed up, fed the poor pets, wrote a note explaining why I was leaving, and bolted. As a final act of petty vengeance, I hid some prawns in the curtain rail and under the bath before I left. Hopefully, their house got stunk up and they couldn’t find where it was coming from.”
Thanks For The Help, Guys
“I worked for a large insurance company. My husband and I were adopting our son from China, and I told my boss that I would only be given about 3 weeks notice from the adoption agency regarding when I’d be traveling to China. Boss grumbled about it daily and would ask me, ‘Do you know when yet?’ Sometimes he’d ask me multiple times a day.
I finally got my travel dates, so my boss arranged for a temp to take over my files while I was gone. I gave my boss and the temp my work email so that they could access my stuff (the company was paperless and all the reports came in through email).
I return home from China with my son, and take a few more weeks off to bond with him. A few days before I’m due to return to the office, I check my work email from home and discover that I had over 1,000 emails in my inbox, all unread.
My boss and the temp said they ‘forgot’ to check my emails. It took weeks to get all my work caught up, some of which involved me working until midnight or later from home. My boss also griped about having me gone for a total of 6 weeks, even though women on maternity leave take 6 weeks off.
Apparently, since my son wasn’t biologically mine, I had no right to miss so much work. Plus, I had to utilize the Family and Medical Leave Act, because there’s no paid maternity leave for adoptions. I couldn’t believe the level of disrespect I’d been shown, so I quit about two months after I returned.”
Pizza Pinhead
“I worked at a pizza place in high school. It was a little family owned place, and it was my first job. I had been there for almost a year working in the kitchen. The owner was your classic entitled jerk boss. He would regularly harass every female that worked there, including the underaged girls, and his wife was usually there when he did it.
This particular day, I had to open, which meant I had 20 minutes to bike there after school got out, and it usually took 25. I got there on time, but my boss shows up 20 minutes late, and immediately starts yelling at me for being all sweaty.
I think, ‘Whatever, it’s just going to be one of those days,’ and brush it off. I did all my prep and got a couple pizza orders. One of the pies had half with tomatoes, so while I’m slicing them up, my boss walks up behind me and deliberately scares the heck out of me, which messed up my cut.
He then proceeded to start ranting about how I’m wasting his money by cutting tomatoes too thick (only one slice was off and it was his fault), grabs all the slices, throws them in the trash, and then threw the pizza on the floor as he storms out of the kitchen.
I didn’t even say anything to him or wait for him to come back. I took my apron off and threw it on the table. As I was walking out, my coworker was walking in and asked where I was going. I told him to tell our boss to shove it, hopped on my bike, and never looked back.”
Just Desserts
“I was on contract, and my boss asked me to ‘put in more effort,’ which took some explaining. What he really meant was, ‘I want you to put in more hours for free.’
This was in a ‘shape up or ship out’ speech following a lunch he’d had with my recruiter. What he didn’t realize was that I had spoken to my recruiter already, and knew he’d told him a bunch of lies, which I called him out on.
He was trying to explain things like, ‘Well, what I meant was…’ thinking my recruiter wouldn’t tell me. At one point, he wanted to keep running me down, but I didn’t want to hear it, so I told him that I would just pack my things and leave.
He proceeded to claim that I had to give him two weeks notice. From day one, this guy had been saying that no notice was necessary, and if he didn’t want me around anymore, I would be gone just like that. He’d also said it was a two-way street, and that if I wanted to quit, I could with ‘no questions asked.’
When the conversation ended, he said he needed to talk to his boss before I could leave. I told him that was fine, but he only had until I packed my things. I packed things up, waited about five minutes, then left. I called my recruiter and told him what happened.
This guy lasted a few more weeks but was fired. I like to think I helped with that, partly because he had been blaming me every time something went wrong, but I’d also been doing some work for the company’s CFO. The CFO liked that, but my boss didn’t, and still tried taking credit for my work, even though he knew nothing about it. When I left, I think it exposed a bunch of his other lies.”
Complete Chaos
“I worked at Best Buy for two weeks, because it was all I could handle. A lot of bogus stuff happened during that time frame. One time, I got barked at for taking a customer too close to a lift someone was using. The lift was in the middle of an aisle, and we turned around as soon as we rounded the corner and saw the thing blocking it.
I also got yelled at for cleaning extremely dusty shelves and TVs at 9 in the morning because ‘there are customers in the department.’ There was one, on the other side of the department, and my co-worker was already attending to them.
I was consistently sent to my 30-minute lunch 3 hours into my 8-hour shift. It was also the only break allowed.
I once got an earful from my supervisor after selling $3,500 worth of stuff to someone because I didn’t tack on an extra $1,000 of useless stuff, and was accused of, ‘selling from my own pocket’ (which basically meant selling based on what I could afford).
I was hammered daily about credit card signup goals. That’s all we heard. Every 30-60 minutes, an update on how close to the daily store goal we were. Know how many signups I saw in my two weeks there? None, and not for lack of trying.
Loss prevention guys would tell you over the walkie when someone walked into the department, which got annoying quick. We were expected to go to them ASAP, chat, and hand them a little folder about our products. That’s how management saw we were actually talking to people.
I worked retail 3 years before going to Best Buy. The way they ran things was just insane compared to what I had previously seen. I quit after just two weeks. Called up an hour or so before a shift and said, ‘Yeah, not coming in. Ever again.'”
Nice To Meet You, Boss
“I worked for a company of about 35 people for 9 years, and I was the 5th longest tenured employee. The owner would throw these really nice Christmas parties at really trendy places, and he would hand out bonuses during a super awkward ‘presentation.’
The presentation would take place after a couple of hours of drinking, at which point he would gather the entire company and begin calling up specific departments to talk about what they had accomplished during the past year.
He goes through the entire company and forgets 3 of us, and we’re all single person departments. He’s had quite a bit to drink and is about to finish up when the VP leans in and lets him know there are still 3 bonus checks.
He calls the other two up, talks about them, and then once again begins to finish his tipsy speech. VP leans over, he looks up and calls my name, says my job description, and hands me my check. That’s it.
Most of the other employees looked like they wanted to go crawl under a table for me. He had more to say about the warehouse guys that had only been employed for like 6 months.
The owner and I were never friends, but I never thought there was any animosity there. My bonus was half of what it was the previous couple of years, while everyone else’s had gone up. I later learned the owner thought I made too much money for my position and didn’t have the balls to talk about it.
I began looking for a new job in the new year and had one by March. When I told him I was quitting, he had a completely dumbfounded look on his face, and said okay. No questions, no comments, just okay.”
Lascivious Lush
“I was working at a bar in a popular family-oriented restaurant. A customer came in who had previously been permanently banned for harassing me and other employees. The night he was banned, he said something extremely inappropriate about me, and when asked to leave by the management, he became belligerent and started cussing and yelling in the middle of a busy restaurant on a Friday night.
This guy was a regular who would always make the female employees very uncomfortable, come in blackout wasted, and then pitch a fit when we refused to serve him. His ban was long overdue at that point.
The guy walks in one night and sits himself right down at the bar, about 2-3 weeks after being ‘permanently banned.’ I immediately turned to my boss who was standing right next to the bar, and asked him to deal with this guy.
My boss suddenly got all sheepish, and started saying he had a long conversation with him and he promised he would ‘be on his best behavior’ from here on out, and to ‘just go get him a drink.’ I gathered my belongings and walked out right then and there.
Turns out, this guy was friends with the owner, so the owner was fully aware of the situation and was fine with it. They had been letting him into the restaurant and serving him the whole time he was ‘banned’ on the condition he didn’t come when I was working because they knew I wouldn’t be ok with it, and they also couldn’t afford to lose me at the time. Jerks.”
Keep Your Hands On The Table!
“I used to be a blackjack dealer, which I planned on doing for quite a while before I quit to focus completely on filmmaking and acting (which are my only jobs now).
But after years of dealing with the worst people ever, the final nail was a guy touching himself at my table, in plain sight. I told my supervisor, who did nothing, and then when I told the guy to stop, I got suspended. I came back on a busy night, and after about an hour, I abruptly quit.”
Pet Threat
“I once worked retail for a pet store, where I was brought on as an assistant manager. The store manager always had plenty of staff on her shifts, while I always had a skeleton crew. She never worked on Saturday’s so that she could sit around and watch cartoons, and got mad because I took off Sundays.
I was constantly fighting with her over the health of the animals. She refused to listen to me and would do things her own way. She had no clue what she was doing. I would come into work during the afternoon to find that the animals hadn’t been fed or given water because she was walking around the store talking to people.
One night I just had enough. We had a fish that I was trying to get healthy, and she did the complete opposite of what she needed to do. The fish ended up dying. When I confronted her about it, she flipped out on me. I waited for her to leave for the night, went into the office, left my keys on the table, and walked out.”