I was a freshman in college in Panama, working for a translation company doing three-way live calls between English-speaking reps and their non-English-speaking customers. Minimum wage was $3. 25 an hour, with a possible bump to $5 if you took the intense calls. I didn’t want those.
But a couple weeks after I started taking calls solo, medical calls started showing up in my queue. I told my supervisor. She said she’d look into it. Then a nurse on the line flipped out when I told her I wasn’t qualified to take her call, and she reported me.
I got called in and told I had to take whatever came to me, and I was never to say I wasn’t qualified. A few days later, a man called 911 with a heart attack. He went into cardiac arrest on the phone and died while I was on the line with him. I sat there in shock, then shot up from my station, walked to my supervisor, said I quit, and walked out the building.
Untrained, minimum wage, handling emergency calls? Insane. I had a manager once who was a real piece of work. Rude, profit-obsessed, and he literally held our paychecks for four or five days every week before handing them over.
I was hired as a host but ended up doing everything short of running the kitchen. There was a small dining room at the entrance, and the servers worked upstairs. If anyone sat downstairs, they were my tables. One day I had three tables and a delivery came in.
I was the only one who could do deliveries, so I asked the manager to cover either the tables or the delivery. He huffed at me for bothering him. I grabbed one of the wait staff to cover my tables, took the delivery, got back, and the manager ripped the check out of my hand, yelled at me for leaving without telling him, and pocketed my tip. I lost it.
Told him I was sick of working with a sociopathic thief and walked out the front door. I had a new job that same day and was assistant manager within two months. I worked at a small legal research firm doing due diligence for big financial institutions. Cool job in theory.
The owner had watched The Boiler Room too many times and thought that was the way to run a business. A lot of what we did depended on court clerks. If one wasn’t having it, we were out of luck. One day he berated my coworker and made her call a clerk five plus times for a document.
She was crying, humiliated, in an open floor office. The court had a 24-hour policy for recently filed documents, so we would have gotten it the next day anyway. He was just being a schmuck. My final straw was when he called me the weakest link, in front of the whole office, for something so minor it had zero impact on anything.
I waited until he left for the day and left my resignation letter on his desk. I knew he’d fire me on the spot otherwise. Packed up the next day and practically skipped out. I quit a grocery stocking job in college because my manager was obsessed with metrics.
He staffed the store as minimally as possible and then slave-drove us, then wondered why everyone lasted about two months. The store had an obsession with facing. Everything had to look perfect at all times, which would be fine if we were staffed accordingly. We weren’t.
He pulled me into his office one day and told me my poor performance was getting my hours cut until I shaped up. My brother had told me that was a hidden way of pushing people out, and here it was, blatantly in my face. He didn’t care that I was worked to the bone. He expected me to stock the grocery section and face it two or three times every eight hours while also dealing with customers.
I kept fantasizing about an Office Space style exit. Then one day, fate poked me. The manager came up and told me my work partner wasn’t coming in, the dairy stocker hadn’t shown up, and I now had to cover grocery, dairy, and frozen foods. We were three people down.
I thought this was my chance to prove myself and get a full week. About four hours in, I realized I was horribly behind, and the evening rush had set me back further. There was no winning. So why play?
I was going back to school in a month anyway, where my cushy computer lab job waited. Air conditioning, peace, quiet, study time. Paradise. I took off my apron, folded it neatly, left it on the manager’s desk while he was in the back doing inventory, and clocked out.
No one said a word. He called fourteen times and left six voicemails. I never responded. I went drinking with friends that night.
Turns out when you staff three jobs with one person, sometimes that one person realizes they can just leave. I worked in a mental health clinic for about six years. My abusive senior manager pulled me into her office for a surprise mediated meeting she hadn’t told me about. We were supposed to talk openly and resolve issues.
After an hour and a half of going nowhere, and after I repeatedly asked if we could end the conversation and pick it up after the holidays, I snapped. I told her how unethical she was, that I didn’t understand why she worked in this field, that she could be seriously hurtful without effort, and that despite how much she claimed to care about staff, she hurt us the most. She asked why I was working for her if I felt that way. I said, “You’re right.
I quit. ” I slammed my badge on the desk and left. I worked as an over-the-phone interpreter for a while. Did great in training.
After a couple weeks on the floor, I ranked 60 out of 1,000 employees. I hated it. I did mostly medical and insurance calls, but we also got 911, court, Disneyland. I got written up because a doctor yelled at me, claiming I was making up words because he knew some Spanish.
They pulled the call and saw I’d done nothing wrong. Then I got a call from a court. I was terrified. I’d never been trained in legal terminology.
But I couldn’t refuse a call. I was so scared someone was listening that I didn’t tell the judge I wasn’t qualified. I completely choked, couldn’t even repeat the case number, and could hear the lawyer laughing at me. I pretended the call cut off, hung up, grabbed my stuff, and walked out.
A coworker from school said the manager kept asking where I was and tried calling. I blocked the number. Sixty plus calls a day, no time for a sip of water between. I’d sit in my car and cry before shifts.
Eleven fifty an hour for non-stop calls all day. Screw that. I was working the sauté station by myself on a holiday, along with the grill. Schools were out, and I told the manager we might need to call someone in because we were getting busy.
He kept saying, “Nah, it’s fine. I’ll come help if it gets too busy. ” Sure enough, we got slammed. Every time I asked for help, he was too busy with customers.
I had a fifteen top, a twelve, a two, and a ten all order at the same time. Thirty-seven orders on top of whatever else was flashing on my screen. I lost it. I stabbed my tongs through the computer monitor and walked out.
I went back and apologized to the GM. We agreed it could have been handled better by both sides. He didn’t make me pay for the monitor, though I offered. He was a good guy.
I worked in a deli at a big grocery chain for four years. My manager scheduled me for twenty-one shifts in a row, ten hours each. I told her that wasn’t exactly legal. She said it was if I got five days off in a row.
I wasn’t having it. She told me if I didn’t like it, there was the door. Three hours before my shift ended, I wrote a note: “I took the door. I quit.
” I left. Since I was the closer, nothing got shut down. I worked overnight at a McDonald’s for three years. Great crew until most of them left for better jobs.
I transferred to a new location under the same owner. This place was in the pits. The head manager had a policy change. Normally, we had about six-minute drive-thru times, which was actually ahead of the chain average.
We could park vehicles and pause Uber Eats with a three-man crew. The new policy removed that, demanded we cut our time in half, and added no extra staff. His new idea for training me for overnight manager was to bring in a problem manager to replace the current overnight manager who was switching to days. I was already planning to tough it out.
Then one morning after those conditions took effect, I blacked out off the side of the road on my way home from exhaustion. I told my overnight crew what happened on Facebook, brought a plastic bag with my uniforms to the front counter, and left. My boss told me he was willing to let the department crash and burn to send a message to the CEO. We were already close to massive layoffs.
Finding out he had no plan to fix things was when I checked out. I got hired to build a piece of software for a New York City business owner, a year-long contract. He was the most ridiculous remnant of the wild eighties scene. I spent three months building the back end and finally connected everything.
Then he told me he wanted to renegotiate the contract based on a second quote he’d gotten. I told him that’s not how contracts work. He leaned back and said, “This is New York. We have our own rules.
Take it or leave it. ” His payments were dragging, so I asked if he was aware of the contractual repercussions for the party that breaches. He said, “I don’t have time to read that crap. I pay people to do it for me.
” I told him I’d consider it if he was serious, but I needed it in writing. He started typing as he spoke: “Dear Mr. Redhead, your deal is no good and I don’t want any part of it unless you sharpen your pencil and come back with a proper number. ” He sent it.
My phone pinged. I took it out. “Okay, Google, read my last email. ” Ten or fifteen seconds of it got recited.
Then I said, “Okay, Google, what’s the biggest name of the industry company in New York? ” I called them immediately. Told them I was looking to offload some software their competitor ordered but couldn’t afford to finish. The back end was functional and already paid for.
They patched me through to legal and told me to come right over. I started packing. The owner thought I was faking it. Then his secretary opened the door and said the competitor’s legal advisor was on the phone for him.
Silence. I zipped my bag and walked out. The only time I said “Okay, Google” and felt cool about it. I worked a good corporate job for ten years until a new manager came in who couldn’t stay professional.
He mocked people, mimicked them, made personal attacks. One day, after a series of attacks on me, I looked him in the eye and said we were done, and if he ever talked to me with anything other than respect, he’d seriously regret it. He sat in silence and tried to explain he had anger issues. I told him he could go screw himself.
I walked out, founded my own company, and now I’m their number one competitor. I took a receptionist job at a real estate agency when I was pregnant and high risk. My doctor said I needed low stress. I was supposed to answer phones and transfer calls.
The owner screamed at everyone constantly. I put up with it until one day, during an important meeting with other agency owners, I told her I thought I was having a miscarriage. I was. I needed to leave for the hospital.
She threw her keys across the counter and told me to go wash her car before I left. I got up, walked out, drove myself to the hospital, and found out I’d lost another pregnancy. That was the only time I quit without notice. I had a party of thirteen show up five minutes before close on a Sunday.
We were out of items, but I did my best. They made a huge mess and stayed about forty-five minutes after finishing. When they finally left, I started cleaning and found a folded twenty-dollar bill and fifty-seven cents. The twenty turned out to be one of those fake church tracks.
I just walked out. I worked at Circuit City for a week. The week of Black Friday. On my last day, I was put on a register with no training.
The thing ran on what looked like a DOS prompt with commands I’d never been taught. The line was about seven people. I got through the first three fine. Number four was a return that seemed to need manager approval.
I called for the manager, and he didn’t show up for fifteen minutes. The line started erupting. A woman next in line screamed that she should have gone to Best Buy and called me stupid. The other adults joined in, all insulting a teenager.
I tried to explain I was new. They gave zero craps. I took off my shirt, tossed it to the manager as he finally came over, and told him I quit. I worked at a small grocery store in upstate New York for a week.
The town had become a weekend tourist spot for city folks. A guy came through my line and immediately said, “You didn’t even ask if I brought my own bags. ” I apologized, said I was new. He said it wasn’t rocket science, it was bagging.
Before I even finished scanning the last item, he started bagging his own stuff. I tried to joke, said I was a little slow. He agreed, very seriously. I gave him his change and receipt, smiled, said have a nice day, and started with my next customer.
He wasn’t done. He interrupted and said, “You’re not going to smile and say have a nice day? ” So I smiled and said it again. He laughed a little, got mad, and said, “So that’s who you really are.
” He threw the change at me and walked out. I quit that day. Never worked customer service again. I worked in a SuperTarget deli in 2011 and was severely sick, running a fever.
I was scheduled to close. I tried to call out. They denied it. I was young, so I went in.
I made it to 7:30 p. m. When I was prepping raw chickens, I wretched all over the prep sink and the floor, splashing toward the Starbucks area. I told the leader on duty.
He didn’t care. Told me to clean it up and that I couldn’t leave early because the deli was bigger than my problems. I took off my jacket and apron and quit on the spot, cussing him out as I walked. It was a Sunday, the busiest day.
I probably got a lot of people sick. I was a dishwasher at a diner inside a grocery store. The first shift worker was Lucy, around eighty years old. The customers loved her because she’d chat with them through their meals and do no real work.
I’d come in to eight hours of backed-up dishes piled across tables and sometimes the floor. I filed complaints with HR. I was told she couldn’t be removed due to age discrimination risk. I said, “Okay, well, there’s a good eight hours of crap to do and the dinner rush is coming.
Hopefully you find a replacement soon. ” I applied at a convenience store on the way home, got an instant interview in my work uniform, and was hired on the spot. My boss had a knack for starting drama. If you went to her with a serious issue, she’d call in the other person privately and say, “Guess what this person said about you.
” She picked sides based on who she liked more, then made the other person’s life hell. She also overworked us. It was a busy Starbucks with maybe four people per shift. The day I quit, she expected me to keep up with a ridiculously long line, maybe two drinks a minute.
The drip coffee machine was broken, no hot water, so we had to boil everything manually. She decided that was the perfect time to take her break. When she came back, it was still busy, and she was upset that the store was messy, even though it wasn’t my job. Screw that witch.
I worked at a Starbucks and a Chipotle at the same time. They were connected in the same building. My Starbucks GM came back from vacation and started yelling at me on the floor, in front of customers and crew, about how I shouldn’t work two jobs, that I was stressing myself out. I was in tears, completely embarrassed.
I was one of their best employees. I walked over to Chipotle instead of clocking in and asked if I could have full-time hours. They said yes gladly. I never went back to tell Starbucks.
Five days later, the second-in-charge manager called, begging me to come in and close. I said, “Duh, I haven’t shown up for a shift in five days. I thought you got the hint. ” She said they had my shifts covered but they still needed me.
I did not close. I worked at a small used car dealership. The owner changed commission schedules, withheld pay details, altered time cards, and lied constantly. I decided the only thing left was to arm the employees with their rights and help them find new jobs.
They started demanding what was owed. Then he told me to lie about the books to the state and the IRS. No thanks. Have a nice day.
All the managers and half the staff left, explaining his cheating was the cause. I quit my supermarket job a few days ago. My manager got mad at me for not knowing how to do something after only a few weeks. He liked using derogatory nicknames for fun.
I got no real training and was expected to learn on the job. I just handed in all my shirts and aprons to the store manager and walked out. I worked at Best Buy in high school. A new GM came in, abrasive and a bully.
He made a remark about his approach, it got ratted out, and I got called into a meeting and reprimanded. I’d had serious stuff happen outside of work that day and wasn’t in the mood. I quit on the spot. The liberating feeling after walking out was magnificent.
I was seventeen and didn’t need that job. I was walking back to my computer from the restroom when my boss gave me a look. It scared me. He pinned me to the wall and started touching my face.
I’m a tall guy and could probably have overpowered him, but I was so scared I couldn’t move. He stopped after a bit and went to his office. I grabbed my things, left, and went straight to the police. They never did anything about it.
They didn’t even go to the office as far as I know. First week at a new kitchen job, the guy training me said, “I’d leave as soon as you get the chance. ” Then I noticed mold forming in the cooler racks where tubs of sauce and soup sat without lids. End-of-day cleaning was ridiculously lazy.
The owner paid well and gave me hours, but I couldn’t work under those conditions. Should have talked to the owner about it. But what’s done is done. I was a shift manager at a pizza chain.
The closing driver called off, and I couldn’t find anyone, so a newbie had to close. The opening manager said he’d be fine because he’d delivered at tons of other places. Alarm bells. If he was so experienced, why was he here?
Every customer he delivered to called to complain. I couldn’t handle my closing responsibilities because I was stuck managing complaints. He didn’t do his closing duties either, so my cleaning was double. I didn’t get out until close to three in the morning.
I’d been thinking about turning in my two weeks anyway. That was the last straw. I taped my key to a letter, left it on the manager’s desk, locked up, and left. Didn’t even stay the two weeks.
I got a job at Pizza Hut and felt it was the only job I could get after being verbally abused and punched in the face once at my old place. We got a new GM and things looked up, until she brought in an absolute schmuck of a shift manager. Five twelve-hour days in a row, no breaks, no acknowledgment of my work, and the shift manager kept throwing away my food, which I then refused to pay for. On a busy Friday night, she tried blaming me for a mistake she made.
I finished my shift, said goodbye to the good friends I’d made, and walked out. An executive told me he was losing sleep over a project we were working on together. He made six figures with maximum benefits. I made sixteen an hour, and the company refused to acknowledge I was full-time so they wouldn’t have to pay for health insurance.
I didn’t care that he couldn’t sleep while I was scraping by. I worked at an animal shelter for about a year. I thought we only euthanized animals who had no quality of life. My favorite dog, Scooby, a Great Dane pit bull mix, was marked to be put down because he didn’t settle down long enough for them to test his behavior.
They scheduled me for euthanasia that day and added him to the list last second. After helping him pass away peacefully, I adopted a kitten marked for being too aggressive and basically told them to go screw themselves. Eight months later, I work at a fantastic animal clinic, and that aggressive kitten is the sweetest boy I’ve ever had. My friend and I were both supervisors at a fast food joint.
I was kitchen supervisor, he was front supervisor. He let his stoner friends in after closing and chatted while we waited for him to finish mopping every night. He’d come back and start ordering around my staff, these confused fifteen and sixteen-year-old kids, after I’d already given them their jobs. I brought it up with him and the manager many times.
The manager would talk to him, it would be fine for a while, then the manager quit and all hell broke loose. There was a chore chart for opening and closing jobs, and everyone who finished had to sign a sheet. Every shift I split the chores evenly. That way nobody picked easy jobs and they knew I’d do my part.
My friend would come in and give them different, nonsensical jobs in the middle of a shift. After weeks of arguing, I had a closing shift with him. I asked a staff member to do dishes and restock an hour before close. He came in and ordered the kid to mop the kitchen floor instead, so they could get out at a decent time.
I came out of the freezer and saw the kid mopping. We still had an hour and had to drain the chicken fryers, which always makes a mess. The other supervisor told him to. I went up front and found him sitting with his buddies eating apple pies instead of doing his own closing duties.
I’d had enough. Four years at this place, and he’d been a pain for the last one. I went to the back office, wrote an acting manager a letter explaining why I was doing what I was about to do, and apologized for the craziness that would follow. I went back to the kitchen and told the kid to keep mopping and then go home.
Then I walked over to the burger station and put mayo on every single ingredient of a burger, bun, patty, lettuce, pickles, cheese, bacon, and threw them up at the roof, where they stuck. Then I sat there and refused to work. He came into the back and started yelling at me. At that exact moment, a slice of cheese fell and landed in the mop bucket.
He slowly looked up, voice high and squeaky, and yelled, “Who did this? ” I looked him straight in the eye and told him if he’d been supervising instead of visiting with his friends, he’d know that I quit, and I didn’t care how he planned to clean that crap up. I walked out and never went back. My long-distance boyfriend was in town for a week.
We’d been together four years, long distance for the last one. It was the first time we were in the same city in over a year. I worked at a clothing store and couldn’t get time off because it was Christmas season. It wasn’t even busy.
I was just waiting for someone to mess up a sweater so I could refold it. Then it hit me: this is a waste of my life. I asked my boss to come to the back room, said I quit, grabbed my purse, and left. Four years of retail had finally gotten to me.
A coworker of my mom’s was on vacation when she got word her mother passed. She called her boss. Instead of condolences, she got, “You’ll be back Monday, right? Your vacation ends on such and such date.
We need you here. Your family can handle the arrangements, right? ” The complete lack of compassion made her quit on the spot. In college, I waited tables at a Japanese restaurant owned by two schmuck brothers with no management experience.
I was fed up with the job and the smell of fried rice that sank into my skin. The only reason I stayed was a crush on one of the chefs. One day, a customer asked for extra wasabi. I went to the sushi station, but one of the brothers was blocking it, yelling at a waitress who was sobbing.
I tapped his shoulder and politely asked if I could grab something. He yelled, “Can’t you see I’m talking to someone? Leave me alone. ” I came back five minutes later, tapped his shoulder again.
He yelled, “What did I just tell you? ” I snapped and told him I was just trying to do my job and he needed to show me some respect instead of yelling at me like I was his slave. He said I could leave if I didn’t like it. I said, “Fine.
You can take this job and shove it. ” I threw down my apron, grabbed my cap, and left mid-shift. My crush texted me later to ask what happened. We ended up dating for three years.
He still worked there for a while and was such a star that eventually I could come back and get free food whenever I wanted. Quit the toxic job, kept the chef, and still got free food. Solid exit package. I was a stay-at-home mom in a new small town and started working as a cashier at the grocery store to meet people.
At the interview, I told the owner I could work Monday through Friday from 5:30 to close, and one day on the weekend. I ran a home daycare during the week and needed one full weekend day off for my kids and husband and housework. He agreed to give me Saturdays off. For three months, he’d give me Saturdays off for two weeks, then schedule me anyway.
I’d remind him of the agreement, and he’d take me off for a couple weeks, then put me back on. Claimed he forgot. We just bought tickets to a big zoo event with friends. When I got to work, he’d scheduled me for Saturday.
New schedules posted on Fridays. As I left Friday night, I handed in my smock and told my manager I wouldn’t be back. If you didn’t want to give me a weekend day off, you should have said so and let me go in a merry way.