I did that one summer for a couple weeks. A friend had signed up to run a paint crew, and hired me and some other neighborhood kids to be on his team. The problem was, he was terrible at bidding jobs. He severely underestimated the labor, so we were working lots of extra hours to get the work done and were barely making any money. I quit when I realized I could make more money at a minimum wage job like McDonalds.
Yeah, I tried that when I was 17 in 1964. Hot, humid Baltimore summer. No salary, strictly commission. I lasted two days. Didn’t make a cent.
Two months, in my case. But yeah, I quit after that.
It was a company culture issue. Everybody else lived for the gym. Lunchtimes were for playing squash or tennis, after work was for more tennis or workouts at the gym. Except for me, for whom lunch was for coffee and cigarettes, and after work was for beer and cigarettes.
And I heard about from my co-workers. I won’t get into what they said, but it wasn’t polite. After two months, I was fed up; I submitted my resignation, and left the same day.
Schadenfreude: That division of the company sank, and died six months after I left. All those gym rats/health fanatics/fitness fuckheads were out of a job. Meanwhile, I had found a job that paid better, where I could drink beer and coffee, and smoke cigarettes as much as I liked. Not in the office, of course, but anywhere else, sure.
.
I didn’t make it more than a few weeks working at a daycare when I was in high school. A friend worked there and recommended me, and I was hired on the spot. I was 16 and had never even babysat or held a baby before.
They put me in the infant room and I got 15 minutes of training before being left alone with 8 infants (double the number allowed by law). Somehow we all survived the next couple of weeks.
Then the person assigned to the preschoolers called in and I got moved to cover that class. Instructions were “oh by the way, Michael and Andrew have food allergies.” And they didn’t point out which kids were Michael or Andrew, or what their allergies were. So I didn’t give any of the kids a snack, parents were pissed their children were hungry when they picked them up. And I clocked out and never returned.
In hindsight, I wish I had reported the daycare for the many things that were going on but I was too intimidated as a kid to do it. Fortunately, they closed less than a year later.
I’ve quit jobs many times due to toxic management. But sometimes the jobs quit me (got fired).
I worked for an ambulance company and was fired almost immediately for using the wrong pen to fill out a Medicaid form. The owner was embezzling by changing the information on the last page of the 6 page carbon forms. He’d given us all Flair pens and mandated their use, since the soft tip didn’t go through to the last page. I screwed up a very profitable 150-mile transfer by using a regular ballpoint, and he forced me out of the ambulance and left me in a far-away city (I hitch-hiked home).
Eventually he was discovered, convicted, and sentenced to a short prison stay. While incarcerated, his wife took over the books and discovered he’d been funding a mistress and a long-term affair. She shot him when he was released.
This was my lesson to never, ever, work for a family business.
Shot as in killed, or shot as in wounded?
While I lived in St. Louis there were two local institutions, a sports bar chain and a beer / booze / cigs store chain, that had each been founded 20-30 years prior by then-young local couples and had gone on to major local success with many stores and lots of profit.
Until the late middle-aged divorces, the splitting up of the businesses, and the shootings. The two empires and their founders were unrelated. But their stories unfolded in uncanny parallel.
1 quit a temp job after 1 day.
The job involved testing Pitney Bowes postage meters. Basically I had to sit by myself in a big windowless room full of envelopes filled with paper in the bowels of one of their office parks. I was supposed to run as many of them through the postage meter for 4 hours, then lunch then 4 more hours.
I did it for one day then said “fuck this shit”.
Sorry for the late reply, been in the hinterlands for a few days, with phone issues (unable to post replies w the app).
Wounded. Shot in the hand/arm as he fled.
I thought of another really short job. Hired as programmer for Fortune 100 Corp. Manager was a toxic asshole, and I’d had enough experience to know the first rule of modern management is “We never make mistakes, all problems are employee failures”.
I was facing at least a year of enduring this hostile jerk before transfer was allowed, so I turned in my 2-weeks notice on Monday of the third week, and left after exactly a month. Quickly found another job, but I had to move 1000 miles to the new city. I still think moving is less stressful than daily torture from toxic managers though.
I quit a job after 8 months, but would have quit a lot sooner if I could have. Unfortunately I had to hang on because I needed to find another job first.
What led me to quit was finding out that two of us who were hired at the same time to do the same job, with pretty much identical credentials, had wildly different packages: I was paid $16k, no health benefits, and he was paid $24k with a full care package.
When I went to the boss to complain about the discrepancy, his response was, “Well, you’re a married woman, you have a husband who is responsible for supporting you financially and provide you with health insurance. The person I am paying more than you is a man, so he needs to obtain a decent income and health insurance on his own." (The other guy happened to be unmarried; I shudder to think what the salary disparity might have been if he’d been married!)
I’d have filed a complaint with the EEOC, but this was during the Reagan era and stories were rampant about a huge backlog in cases as the Commission had been cut to the bone. Plus, I was very young and I knew it would be a huge red flag if I left a job after less than a year without a new one, and it was found out that I sued my previous employer.
Two part-time jobs in my youth come to mind. These were summer jobs while I was in school.
One was in a laundry facility. I don’t remember exactly what my duties were supposed to be but I do remember a lot of dirty laundry. I lasted about an hour. Just walked out the door.
Another was in a brewery, moving around cases of empties. It was a great place, very clean, and the work was easy. And I loved the free beer with lunch. Sadly, there was a layoff only about a month into my job, and as one of the newest part-time hires, I was the first to go. I would happily have stayed there the whole summer.
Eyes upcoming three year employment anniversary…
I love what I do, but hate everything about how this company does it.
On the other hand, it’s brilliant on a CV and for my career in general and it’s definitely not minimum wage.
Nevermind, I gave a preview of this one earlier.
I quit a job on the first day. I was supposed to be a counter clerk at a dry-cleaning place. I had done this before. Typically you take payments from customers, give them their finished clothes back, put certain tags on clothes (that tell cleaners what to do), and do light housekeeping tasks around the building - sweeping, dusting.
The owner told me that she would also be opening a coffee shop and a consignment shop/thrift shop, in two empty store spaces nearby. I would be working in all three, but “Don’t worry, the cash register will be the same at each place!”
Maybe I could have dealt with a dry-cleaning counter job + consignment/thrift store, even if I didn’t like how the owner surprised me. However, being surprised with both of those jobs and a coffee shop, with a large menu of drinks and snacks, was a bit much.
I quit a job after 1 day. On my first day, they switched me to a position that I didn’t interview for at all. I was interviewed and hired to do electronics repair, replacement, tech stuff at a medical equipment supplier. They instead switched me into chemical waste processing of nasty used x-ray photo developer chemicals. I quit and walked out after lunch on the first day.
I admire you for staying through lunch!
I always want to leave a job after 3 years for some reason. The “newness” of everything wears off and you are really invested into your job at this point. People drop the facade and you start to realize things in the company that really irritate you.
If college jobs count, I quit a job where you’d phone people, even in California at 6AM on the weekends and ask them stupid questions like, "Did you watch Dallas last night? Did you like the Bill Cosby Puddin’ Pops commercial? More than once, they were somewhat displeased yet more than once people would yield valuable marketing info.
But what really got to me was either the US govt / Dow / Monsanto doing telephone polls about Agent Orange. I think there were a lot of veterans with class action and singular lawsuits and they wanted to gauge the general feeling towards defoliating forests and poisoning American Soldiers. Many didn’t know or care. Many liked Dow Chemical corp.
Too bad it was before REM had a song “Orange Crush”
Do you like REM?
Well, you just woke me up at 6:30 in the morning, so yes
No I meant Orange Crush
Well, usually I’m a Fanta guy. Wait, why am I talking to you and who are you calling on behalf of? click