Has anyone ever quit a job in under a month? I just did.
I went from a hybrid job that was 5 minutes from my house to a role with a 30 minute commute each way and 5 days in the office. I expected the commute/office to be the hardest adjustment, but it turned out the culture was the real issue.
The culture felt very corporate and off putting. We worked in low walled cubes with almost no privacy, and even checking your phone for a minute felt like you were doing something wrong because everyone could see you.
I’d get there around 8:05 and was like the last person arriving on my team, but when I left at 5:00 or shortly after, most people were still sitting there until 5:30pm. Manager sent emails out at 6:30am and was very much a micromanager. Early morning insignificant meetings set after 15 minutes when you arrived, etc.
We were scheduled to go through a major process upgrade later in the year, and I just knew with this particular manager it would be absolute hell to work with them.
I learned that other departments had more laxed rules and environment, so it just seemed like a bad luck of the draw for me.
Luckily, a job I interviewed for came through, and I was able to leave, but it still felt strange to quit so early and wish I would’ve stayed at my other job tbh.
Had it taken you 3 years to accept that the boss was a problem and the job would always suck, that’d have been the same lesson obtained at much greater cost.
Not counting leaving a scheduled stint as a security guard (summer job post-high school) before it started, my record shortest tenure at a job was 3 months.
It was a semi-automated hellhole of an AM station in Iowa City, working a 10 pm to 6 am shift, and few employees stayed for very long. This was a radio station where the boss/owner was colloquially known as The Big Guy and the sales manager was named Herb (a couple of years before “WKRP In Cincinnati” began to air).
I once quit a job at a radio station before I even started. It was an off-air position. I interviewed and was hired. No paperwork was signed at that point. I was given a tour. Every single person I met said something to the effect of “Are you coming back tomorrow?” Rampant negativity. It was an old building that smelled musty. Strongly so. When I got home my clothing smelled like mold. OSHA would have had a field day. It was obvious that no money was put into maintenance, yet the owner/general manager was driving a Jag. I decided then and there that I could not work there. However, I did feel bad about it, so I returned the next day and told the GM in person that I had decided not to take the job. She was furious…but so what. I left with a clear conscience.
I’ve never done it, but I admire those who can.
There are jobs I’ve worked for a year or more that I knew, well within the first month, were absolute hell.
Yes I have, and I can’t recommend it strongly enough. When you know, you know.
One of the regrets of my life is sticking with a job that was obviously not for me, for 4 months. I literally got PTSD from corporate and co-worker toxicity, and wish I had those 4 months back, plus the recovery time which was longer than that. The hell of it is, I knew on Day One.
Learned my lesson, though. The next job after that, I quit after 5 days. And the next job after that, I just hit my 10-year anniversary.
Taco Bell is one of the jobs I quit in well under a month, way back in my youth. It provided a lesson, though, that has stayed with me till this day.
A location was opening near my house, and they sent new hires to an existing Taco Bell for training. At one point we were instructed in the making of tacos, right down to the specific motions and which hand did what, etc. “Now this comes down right from Pepsi,” we were told, “so don’t let anyone tell you any different.” (The Pepsi Corporation owns Taco Bell.)
In the early days of the newly opened restaurant, a regional manager type had us gather in a group facing him and told us to use a different technique. Naive me opened my mouth to protest and got out only a syllable or two before realizing it was a bad idea. Too late. I pissed off the guy and soon found my shifts reduced to almost nothing. I left for a better menial job quite soon.
Since then I’ve found myself angry that workers (well, one worker anyway) got caught in a conflict between the big-wigs and suffered for it. And I’ve promised myself ever since that anybody working in my field would be shielded from that bullshit as much as I can manage.
I worked at a car wash as a teen and probably lasted about a month and a half. Brutal work for $1.75/hr and zero tips.
As an adult, I took a job selling RVs out of boredom. I’d been job-searching for about six months and was driving myself crazy at home. I actually enjoyed that job, but as fate would have it I got a job offer about three months in for a lot more money and jumped on it. $80k/yr vs commissions on sales is no contest, especially when commissions drop to near zero during winter months.
I had some sort of insurance data entry gig back in the late 90s that was usual cube farm style work. It just wasn’t clicking with me and I’d get a stack of errors back the next day. Not sure what the disconnect was but I figured that I could either cut bait (it’s not as though I was enjoying it) or wait until they fired me so I made the call myself.
I’ve quit many jobs after a brief time there. Usually because of highly critical and micromanaging supervisors. I grew up with that shit; I don’t tolerate it at work. A few times it was for ethical reasons. In all cases it was damaging my mental health to an extreme degree. As in, if I don’t quit this job I’m going to end up hospitalized.
I’ve been at my current job for ten years and I’ve matured a lot in those ten years, so sometimes I wonder if I would have tolerated those jobs better.
I feel some shame about the way things ended sometimes, but hindsight’s 20/20 and all that. I was doing the best I could at the time.
I quit a job after a couple of weeks. It was a terrible manufacturing job at a very small plant with unpleasant managers and coworkers who didn’t bother to learn each other’s names because they weren’t going to be there long. It was a mixture of permanent hires and temps but the long-term employees generally had tenures of a few months. By utter coincidence, my friend and I were hired as temps at the same time and I lasted several days longer than he did.
Y’all have me beat: my record for shortest job is 3 months.
I’d only been out of college for a few years, and I made a truly terrible decision – due to being young and stupid and listening to my father – that derailed what had been a hard-won and promising career in public affairs. That was the first and last time I quit a job without having another one lined up, and it took nearly two years to recover (I did a lot of crappy temp gigs). For a long time I regretted quitting the public affairs job*, but despite the resulting financial and psychological hardship I never regretted quitting the horrible job. I knew right away that I’d made the wrong decision, but I stuck it out for as long as I could.
*They liked me, but I couldn’t go back: I’d been a contract employee, which they generally didn’t do but they’d made an exception for me because I’d transferred from elsewhere in the agency. They couldn’t repeat the exception, and there were no “regular” (i.e., with benefits) jobs available that I qualified for.
I think my husband lasted 2 days at one job - he quit when he discovered his coworkers took long breaks to smoke pot. They were building utility trailers. I’m not sure how safe the products were, but he wasn’t going to hang around and find out.
I went through four jobs in one summer between semesters of college. One of them, an overnight shift at a gas station, I worked for only four nights before moving on.
I was working a job just out of high school, and before college delivering blueprints. We had a couple of small pickup trucks, and they were manual transmissions.
A guy came in to work for us, and I showed him where the trucks were. Apparently, he only could drive automatics so he just returned the keys without saying anything and just went home.
The funny thing was a couple of weeks later he became my Sunday school teacher. I was 18 and he was about 25 or so, and I had assumed he was an adult so I was shocked that an adult would do something like that.
