I worked at McDonald’s for two hours and quit.
What’s the fastest you’ve ever quit a job? And by “quit” I mean it in the “quit” sense, not in the “discovered that I had other obligations, that I had time conflicts, etc” sense.
One shift. I guess it was about three hours. I was hired as waitress, showed up for my first shift to find out that “training” was working as a busboy until the manager decided you were trained enough to move up, and we didn’t get a share of the tip pool.
Also, door to door soliciting for a paint company, a few hours.
Doesn’t technically count as quitting, but I turned down the job right after the offer. I was on summer break in college and went to an interview for a generic-sounding company that ran an ad in the classifieds, something like American or Dynamic something or other. Turns out it was a group interview to sell Cutco knives with absolutely no leads – just prey on your family and friends! Because I could speak in public like a normal human and wore a tie, I survived the cullings of the first twenty minutes and was offered a job. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. It was a little fly-by-night office setup, and the people that ran the thing did it with a carnie-like slickness that comes with 10,000 repetitions.
One week, selling phone plans door-to-door. I did not sell any phone plans, so I decided to quit before I got fired.
My mother once quit a job at a bakery after just a couple of hours. The owner waltzed in, and instead of introducing himself to the new employees, he started upbraiding my mother for not assisting another employee in another task that was taking place in another area. Where my mother wasn’t trained yet. My mom asked a fellow employee if she would have to work with him often. She received an answer to the affirmative, took off her apron and told them thanks so much, but she was leaving.
I got tricked into going to a Cutco “interview” as well. For the record, I remember the bogus name they used in the ad – “Vector Marketing”. I was already familiar with the company, so it only took me a few minutes to realize what the deal was. I was sitting with about five other people watching some dork demonstrate the knives awesomenes, when I cut him off and said “Oh, ah, gotta go!”, and left quickly. Fuckers.
Less than an hour.
Got a job unloading trucks at a depot. The first job was to unload heavy wooden boxes of exceptionally sharp industrial guillotine blades. One of the boxes had a loose bottom, and five blades slammed into the floor of the truck next to my and my coworker’s feet. He and I refused to continue, so I was reassigned to undo the straps on another truck with tarp siding - and when I did so, a box at the very top of the truck fell onto the top of my head and gave me concussion. Though I was there for four hours, two of them were spent in the tea room recovering. I didn’t go back after lunch.
Well, It didn’t quit so much as not come back. Mom got me a job down the road at the Summer Camp doing janitorial stuff. Worked there for 10 hours and they wrote me a check for $70. I thought that was pretty good pay for the work. I was paid by the assistant director.
I got a call from the Director a day or so later and he said something like “hey, we can’t pay you that kinda money, the Assistant Director overstepped his bounds and hey, if you eat lunch here, it’s like We’re paying you for that, and hey, if you stay here, that’s like we’re paying you room and board and the best we can do is $2.20 an hour” (minimum wage was, like, $3.25):
I made it until lunchtime on one job. It was about 2 hours too long.
One week layin down basement walls. Basically consisted of carrying these 90lb. steel molds, tieing them to other similarly sized molds and filling them with concrete to create the walls of a basement. Lots of hammering and carrying too. It was backbreaking work in the middle of December in Kentucky, so think 35 degrees (Fahrenheit) and drizzling. We’d show up dressed in full winter gear and would leave covered in sweat and wearing nothing but a t-shirt and our pants. It was that physically intensive. But the thing that finally got me was my fear of heights. They wanted me to walk around 10’ in the air on the top of these parralel molds which were about a third as wide as my foot while hoisting these 90lb. pieces of steel from the outside of the basement to the inside of the basement. I’m 6’2", 170lbs., and can bench about 130lb. No way in hell I was going to dead lift 2/3 of my max benchpress, 10’ in the air, in the rain, on two railings that weren’t even as wide as my feet. I tried with one of the lighter forms (about 40lbs) and felt like a baby mountain goat taking it’s first steps. I was terrified. I begged the foreman to let me do something else (he was a great guy - a very efficient yet still compassionate / fun guy who was very good at what he did) and he said “Don’t worry…it took most of us a few days to get used to it. If you don’t want to do this, start picking up those 2x4s over there and we’ll try again tomorrow”. On my drive to work the next day, I took a left where I should’ve taken a right and went to see an old friend I hadn’t visited in a while. A week later, I was back working at my uncle’s printshop for the second time. He’d tease me about my hiatus doing manual labor, and I’d slip into a dream. For all it’s hearteach, sweat, blood and tears, I sure felt like a real winner for that one week, lifting steel and swinging a hammer in the cold December rain.
Got suckered into what turned out to be door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales. I went to the training session in the morning, and didn’t come back from lunch.
A few hours, maybe 3 or 4. It was a waiter job during a summer break of college. The place was really strange. The main thing – that they didn’t mention until I showed up there for my first shift – was that we weren’t able to keep our tips. Tips went to the restaurant. To make up for that, the base salary was quite a bit more than you’d make at other restaurants, but no where near enough to make up for not getting tips. It was a reasonably nice restaurant – not upscale, but hardly low rent either; entrees were in the $15-20 range, as I remember. Point being, I would have made far, far more in tips then the higher-than-standard-for-waiters-salary would have brought me. And I remember them being very specific on the point that we weren’t allowed to tell the diners that we weren’t getting the tips. Gee, I wonder why? It didn’t take long to realize I was being ripped off.
There were some other pieces of oddness that I can’t remember, but that was enough. Made it through the lunch shift, and decided to just bolt. I’d never done that before or since, but I knew I wasn’t going to last long anyway, so I figured just make a clean break of it. Plus, I really resented the fact that I was being so obviously ripped off on the tips, so I didn’t feel any guilt for just leaving them.
Tried to be a taxi driver once. Quit after 12 hours (and maybe $50 in gross earnings) after a pickup (African-American male) propositioned me, and then to add injury to insult stiffed me on the fare.
And here I thought I would be one of the shortest. It was one of my first jobs, a reporter at a small daily. I was warned it was a crappy paper and I thought, “hey I can stand anything for a year or so while my husband finishes school.” Oh God no. I knew the first day what a miserable outfit it was when I asked where the supplies were and the editor ripped the piece of paper off the pad he was writing on, and handed the rest to me.
I endured two weeks and fortunately, a nearby newspaper where I’d also applied called me. I interviewed, was offered the job and accepted. I turned in my two-weeks notice two weeks after I started, so I actually worked there a month. Add to the poorly run paper the fact that some of the members of the city council, which I covered, seemed to be certifiably insane. It was excruciating.
Supermarket cashier, after school when I was in high school in the late 1960s. I lasted about a week. The worst day was when they put me on the express lane (10 items or less). For me, making change was the most-time consuming part of each sale, and since you had to do so every few items on the express lane I soon had a line of 20 customers glaring at me. As soon as I had made enough money to afford the senior prom, I quit.
Quit a med tech trainee type gig after a half day. Summer after my freshman year in college, pre-med major at the time. The morning consisted of classes explaining to me precisely what a catheter was, and I was instructed to come back after lunch for practice inserting same. Um, yeah. Really no way in hell I was gonna actually do that. Had a new gig delivering pizza before the end of the day. Thus ended my medical aspirations.
Quit a temp job 4 hours in - even though I told them I would do NO telemarketing or associated tasks, they had me “verifying information” - fishing. Nope - I’d been on the receiving end of that crap before.
I worked at a Perkins for one week before deciding to give two weeks notice. I went in to my boss to quit and he offered me the night manager’s job. Guess they didn’t know I wasn’t happy!
One shift at Shoney’s. Besides the massive amount of flies in the kitchen due to the back door being left open, I ate lunch there and got food poisoning. Not only quit, but never went back to that location. It was over two years before I was willing to try any other location.
I quit a temp assignment after one hour and 22 minutes. It was just me and a man in a small office with one door and one window. The man sat between me and the door, and did no work and in fact, kept nodding off with his hand down the front of his pants.I began at 9 a.m. and shortly after 10 a.m. he sat bolt upright in his chair and pulled out his wallet and thrust a $20 at me. “The State Store is open now. Stop what you’re doing and go get me a fifth of vodka right away.”
I was 20 at the time, so I wasn’t buying alcohol, and he really didn’t seem like he needed more booze just then, in any case. I stopped in the building lobby, called my agency, told them that I felt unsafe and wouldn’t be staying. Then I called my mother who worked across the street. She came over with a coworker who was 6’7" and a large guy who bodyguarded me while I went up and gave the guy his $20 back and got my purse and things. The guy couldn’t fathom why I didn’t want to be locked alone in a 10’ x 10’ office with a man who was going to be drinking at 10 a.m.
My agency had a “4 hour minimum pay” rule, if you went out to a location in good faith you were supposed to be paid for 4 hours. Not only did I not get paid, I got blackballed by the agency. Later that year, the head of the agency got married; when I saw his wedding announcement in the newspaper, the drunk was listed as his best man.:smack: