Have you ever just wanted to...

In My Humble Opinion
1

Tell your boss off and just quit on the spot? If you ever wanted to but didn’t, why not? I would just love to walk in to work on Monday, throw my keys on my bosses desk and say “see ya’” right after I told him what I thought. The only problem with me is that, 1. I have NO guts. 2. I don’t have another job to go to, yet.

If you did just quit with no other job lined up, what did you do in the interim? I guess my biggest problem is that I have this total aversion to hunger and other such mundane stuff like that. Plus like I already said, I’m chicken. :smiley:

Thoughts?

2

I wanted to do that at my last job, but I didn’t. I wanted to have another job lined up before I quit. I can’t stand the thought of not being able to pay my rent or buy food or buy gas for my car… If I were you I would go job hunting and when you find another job, quit this one. Unless of course you have someone to support you. :wink:

3

I did once because my manager was screaming at me in front of everyone for agreeing with a customer that the meat wasn’t being wrapped properly and the blood was leaking everywhere. I was in tears and I went back out and he yelled, “Kathi, get in here!”
And I yelled back, “Leave me alone!” I walked out…and never went back.

4

I did it once. I used to work in a horsetrailer factory, and I carpooled with my aunt. Both of us were completely fed up with the plant manager and wanted to quit, and I admit my irresponsible aunt Susie was a horrible influence on me. So, one morning, we arrive at work and during our usual smoke in the car before going in to work routine, we decided that we weren’t going to work there anymore. So, we walked in, walked into Randy’s office, and quit and told him in excrutiating detail why.

My aunt told me she was incredibly proud of how I chewed that man a new asshole.

5

I once got really angry at my former boss (also a personal friend of mine) and threatened to quit. Actually, there was also another time he threatened to fire me, as well.

In both cases, we mutually cooled down and withdrew our respective threats. We both would have lost out pretty heavily–at the time, my resume and job skills weren’t nearly as decent as they are now, and as for my former boss, he wouldn’t have found an assistant as loyal to him as I was.

(The reason why he’s no longer my boss is because he left, and the company later collapsed)

Barring a really nasty disagreement, I can’t see leaving without having something lined up. Believe me, at my present job, once a year or so, I DO get worked up enough to want to leave. But by the time I get worked up enough to update my resume and figure out who to send it to, I’ve usually decided things aren’t so bad here.

cheezit–I do hope that things either work out for you, or that you do find a new job before you quit your old one. It’s easier to get a job when you already have one, as pretty much all the job finding manuals will tell you.

6

I did that just recently actually. I was ashamed to be working for the company I was working for. I was living in Atlanta where a guy like me could get 4 job offers walking down the street. I had just updated my resume and had sent it to the first company that I had my eye on that very morning.

I had been at work about an hour, I was doing internet tech support (when not listening to angry people who had been screwed out of there money buy one of the many company that resold the services of my employer) when I got a call. Seems all the toll free numbers had broken. That’s right, all the toll free numbers for tech support, customer service and the ones the customers relied upon to access some of our services. I told my supervisor. Put my phone on hold so it wouldn’t ring and was goofing around (98% of the calls we took came in via the toll free numbers) while I had no work to do. After about 15 minutes I walked away from my desk to talk to a coworker. My supervisor asked me why I wasn’t working, so I walk back to my desk and hit the button on the phone. Somebody made some comment about not pissing him off. My response was, “What’s the worse thing that can happen, I could get fired?” The supervisor had heard me say that line one too many times it seems, he told me to go home and come back the next day if I wanted to work. I immediately pulled out all my keys and badges and stuff and layed them on his desk. The company had a history of firing folks on the spot when they turned 2 week notices.

As for what I did while I was unemployed for a month and half, no ALARM CLOCKS! I played Diablo 2 alot. Tested the water at my old job and wouldn’t you know it, they hadn’t found a suitable replacement for me in the 9 months I had been gone and suddenly were willing to pay me what I deserved. I wouldn’t have done any of this if my financial situation hadn’t been so good. I knew I would have plenty of time before I went broke or hungry.

I personally believe that once in every person’s life they should quit a job on the spot and spend at least a month unemployed. Now that I got all the covered I guess I am ready for marriage.

Alantus

7

I have enough money so that I could pay my bills for about 6 months while I looked for another job. It is just that I am too darn chicken to take the BIG plunge and quit. The thing about it is that I enjoy the job that I do. I actually enjoy the place I work at. The problem is that my immediate boss is a “no nothin idiot” and his boss is the owner of the company. The owner of the company is at work maybe 2 hours a day and he doesn’t care much. To him, my immediate boss is “a warm body filling a position” and that is all that is necessary. So the option of me taking my objections to the “higher ups” doesn’t exist.

8

Every time I quit a job, I already had another one lined up. And I always made sure I was on good terms with company I left. Never know when you’ll meet up with them again.

9

gotta side with ** spooje ** Even in a job seekers job market, walking off the job without notice is something that makes any employer pause.

Part of my job is teaching employability classes to inmates at the county jail. One thing I tell them is that employers remember those who quit w/o notice ** forever**.

I don’t think any of us hasn’t had a time/boss that didn’t deserve this, there’s potential for future ramifications.

10

Did it. Pulled it off. Brag about it incessantly.

I was running the customer service and order processing department for a publishing house. Nice gig.

Our chair fires our president and plugs her son in (Lawyer, MBA, 40 years old, still living at home). He sucks terribly but he loves technology. He begins using me to get us new equipment (oh the hazards of knowing what you’re doing) and justifying it to his mother. He promotes me. She demotes me. He transfers me. Salary up. Salary down. Responsibilities up. Responsibilities down.

Fuck it. I quit. Even talked him into carrying my stuff down to my car for me. AND I talked him into 8 weeks of pay at my highest rate. Some people are BORN suckers.

Did this while married, with no warning to Mrs Chance, and with a mortgage. Thankfully she was supportive.

24 days later I had a new gig that paid better (though not as well as the 3 days I made big bucks previously) and more secure.

Balls out, my brothers!

11

The closest I’ve come to it is at my last job, where I quit with no notice, but not before unloading a torrent of profanity on the hapless manager on duty about how much I hated my job. The next day I started my new job, which I had already lined up, which was a trick considering that I worked with damn near all my friends. I applied and interviewed for the new job in total secrecy. My quitting screwed them up for three weeks, and they cursed my name daily, I’m told. They’re out of business now, and I’m still at the job I guit for, four years later.

If I had it to do over, I’d give myself a week off (at least) before starting the new job. At the time I lived at home and had no bills.

12

I did this at one of my jobs over the summer of 99. I worked at a bookstore, and when I was moving boxes of hardcovers, I sustained a badass back injury. My boss, with whom I had a cordial but not necessarily good relationship, told me I could either keep working or lose my job. I slammed my keys down on the counter and said “I quit, you crazy fucking bitch.”

It was the most exhillarating experience of my life. I felt incredibly powerful, and I was pretty goofy for the rest of the day. Everyone in the waiting room at the chiropractor’s office must have wondered what I was grinning about! :smiley:

Needless to say, I don’t list this job anywhere on my resume. What they don’t know won’t hurt me.

13

You could have had a monsterous lawsuit if you simply waited for her to fire you. With such a clear cut wrongful termination, lawyers would be lining up at your door.

14

I did quit with no “warning”, but I did give two weeks notice. But I would have walked out and never returned if the manager had wanted it that way.

I was working at a dead-end retail jpb. There was a lot of “dead wood” working there, so someone like me (who actually knew what they were doing) was not a dime-a-dozen. I actually had some value, and the customers liked me. Anyway, when I was originally hired, I made it very CLEAR that I could NOT work on Sundays. Ever. And I was hired with this provision. I worked there for several years, never working Sundays, never a problem.

But the new manager wanted me to work Sundays. She kept hammering away at it, making fun of my reasons for not wanting to work Sundays. (It wasn’t any of her business. She wasn’t entitled to an opinion about whether my reasons were “good enough”. I was hired with the provision that I would not work Sundays, end of story.) Well, after many attempts to get me to work Sundays, she just schedules me for Sunday one week. I politely tell her I cannot work Sundays. She breezily says that “this is retail”, that I HAVE to work Sundays, and walks out of the break room. I think about it for about 5 minutes, then go to her and tell her that I quit. I was really polite about it, but I quit.

I could tell she was completely shocked and flummoxed. She obviously assumed that I would buckle under, that she could “manage” me. That my personal reasons for not working Sundays (and the fact that I was hired with that provision) were nothin’. Well, she had measured me up all wrong. And I could tell that she (and the other managers who had obviously cooked this plan up with her) were REALLY shocked at the outcome. They did not want to lose me, but lose me they did. I worked my two weeks, and they kept on asking me to work just a little longer, but I didn’t.

15

I did once quit a job as Info Systems Manager at a major symphony. It wasn’t a complete “fuck you” kind of resignation, but I made the decision on the spot, and for weeks up until that moment I’d lost all fear of consequences, despite planning to tough it out and keep the job. I got so fearless of the boss and of office politics in general that the Executive Director of the symphony never spoke to me again (actually she didn’t speak to me for the last three weeks of my time on the job). She definitely didn’t appreciate it at my farewell party when, asked for a speech by the general staff, I described the job as “my personal sleighride through Hell.” Got a big laugh from the staff, though.

I’d been working up to 105-hour work weeks (salaried, of course!), though by the end I’d generally gotten it down to a “cushy” 65 hours per week. There were some ten-week periods in which I didn’t have a day away from the office. The straw that broke the camel’s back was an emergency assignment that took me five straight days–at twenty-plus hours per day spanning a weekend. The deadline was a hard Monday noon; if I don’t get it done by then, we don’t get the ad in the paper and we don’t sell any tickets to a special concert. I got the job done with four hours to spare, and Jeezus, I was pleased. Then the Box Office Manager wanted a change made. “That would take an extra day,” I said. “That’s okay,” she said, “I lied about the deadline so this job would get priority. We don’t really need it until Thursday.” She actually smiled and thought I’d be amused.

I folded up my notes, walked into my boss’s office and quit then and there. I believe the words, “no fucking way in hell will I ever work for a non-profit arts organization again,” came into play. I did help them find my replacement, but in the interim I refused to accept any calls or assignments. Just collected two more paychecks for not much of anything. I did do some documentation–including notes for my replacement on who was an asshole and who wasn’t, and how to hit certain people’s hot-buttons. (The replacement found those notes MOST useful.)

No job waiting. Didn’t want one. I decided to take the summer off to bicycle and try my hand at writing some fiction. The summer came and went, and I still wasn’t in the mood to work. Ended up taking eighteen months off without a worry. That’s the great thing about working so much one has no opportunities to spend the pay.

16

I CANNOT believe this! What a TOTAL asshole and bitch! If I were in your place in that instance, some sort of violence or physical harm would have taken place!

17

I’ve walked off a job once, but it really had no personal ramifications for me. This is because most of the jobs I’ve had are “we need a body to fill this position now, it doesn’t matter who it is”. Anyway, this job was at a Peter Piper Pizza. (If you don’t know what that is, it’s a shitty pizza joint that only gets customers because they have a barrage of videogames and very cheap pizza.) I only took the job because I just needed any job that would hire me.

Thing is, I liked the job. All I did all day was make pizzas. I liked it. I made those pizzas good. Not that it was tough. Spread the sauce, spread the cheese, throw on the toppings. Be sure to spread them around now, we don’t want anybody to get a pizza with all the toppings in the middle. So I made pizzas and I made them well. Damn this work ethic instilled in me! Hell, my third day on the job I was the only one in the kitchen, preparing the pizzas and watching the oven. But still, I did it well.

Anyway, this place changed management more often than I changed my underwear. The final straw finally came. First off, all the cute girls that worked there quit. This dropped the atmosphere quite a bit, let me tell you. But it was this, the management treated their grunt workers so horribly that everybody who had worked there for any amount of time quit. That means that I was the only one working there who knew what he was doing. This also means that on a Saturday where they had booked not one, but several parties who wanted fifteen plus pizzas, I was the only one working who knew what he was doing. Not only the parties, but the people who came in with their kids on a Saturday night just wanting a nice night of pizza.

Okay, picture this. The wait to get through the waiting line to order pizza (the waiting line!) took at least 45 minutes. To actually get your pizza took at least two hours. I was running around trying to get all these pizzas cooked in a decent amount of time, and no matter how fast I was these people would be pissed anyway. Which they were in all rights to be. So I leapt through this night of hell, actually working hard, getting things done and trying to tell all these stupid kids they hired how to do their jobs (which they failed to do in spectacular manner).

So I was pissed with it all and wanted a day off. I tried to call in sick the next day. They wouldn’t take my excuse and I simply didn’t show up. In fact, the only time I showed up again was to pick up my last paycheck. The assistant manager there didn’t care, he knew the deal. Funny thing is, before I got off my ass to get a new job the management at that restaraunt had changed again.

Anyway, if you have the time and you really want to tell off a boss, get a job at one of these child labor jobs. I mean “fast food joints”. You can experience the hell and then tell off your unholy boss as much as you want. Nobody will care. Actually, if you want to experience what life was like for an indentured servant, I recommend you get a job at one of these places anyway. They say the child labor laws are pretty stringent, but good God, these places are hell holes.

Ummm. Sorry for the rant. I’ll let you get back to your regular discussion.

18

I know, and in retrospect, that’s what I should have done. However, I’d been through a lot of mental anguish with this job (changes in management, understaffing, unreasonable job expectations) and the manager. The words that are truly descriptive of her are fit only for the Pit. (One of these days I’ll post the “motivational” flyers she handed out to the staff. I still carry one with me just to remind me of how glad I am that I never have to see her again.) When the incident occured, I was less than a week from returning to college out of state, and I was simply relieved to be out of the situation.

Still, I wish I’d sued. Not only would I have the satisfaction of having ruined the woman’s life, I wouldn’t be scrambling to make car payments now.

19

I had plenty of practice in self-restraint at that job.

Another time, I’d just gotten done overseeing a major upgrade/modification of our core business application (the symphony had been planning this upgrade for nearly two years, and it required months of hard prep-work before the vendor’s techs arrived from the east coast). I worked pretty much double-shifts seven days a week for two months until the mod was done and tested. When I finally could take the next day off, one of the fundraising people (Andrea) emailed me for help with an urgent project. Could I come in early (7am instead of 9am) to work it out? Problem was, to help Andrea out at 7am, I had to be in at 5am. I replied to her email that, yes, I’d help, but her group owed me BIG-TIME.

I showed up 5am the next morning and did the prep-work. 7am rolls around; no Andrea. 8am; no Andrea. She rolls in at 9am as I’m heading out for breakfast, and her explanation was that she never checked her email for a reply to her original query. And because she never saw my acceptance or refusal, she assumed the meeting was off.

Justifiable homicide? Maybe. But all I did was scream from a hundred feet away was, “FROM NOW ON, CHECK YOUR GODDAMNED EMAIL!” She waited until she got into the office to turn on the tear ducts for her supervisor and her supe bought it, hook, line and sinker. For raising my voice and making Andrea feel bad, I got turned into the villain in the whole episode.

The fundraising group never again got off-hours work from me. Not one second’s worth.

That was typical goings-on at the symphony. Sleighride through hell.

20

The earlier mentioned event (quitting that job) occured on July 28, 2000. A few hours ago I discovered that on October 27, 2000 the employees of said company showed up for work just like always. By 10:30 word had started to spread that the company and instant doom were on a fast collision course. At 11:00 they turned everything off and fired everybody.

While I am relieved I did not have to endure this treatment as an employee I am upset my former co-workers did. At this moment there are a few thousand customers of said company wondering why the services they are paying for suddenly stopped working. No notice was given to anyone, the phones are turned off, I called the toll free tech support number and got an error mesg (the one you get when the circuit is disabled) and I called the local phone number to the main office, busy signal.

When I get home from work in the morning I can call Mindspring and setup my new internet connection.

Seems I really should have been ashamed of the company I was working for. Still glad I did what I did.

Alantus