Normally I’m the model employee. I show up early. I work harder than everyone else. I’ve gotten promoted at every long term job I’ve had. I give at least two week’s notice when I’m moving on. That being said, I’ll quit at the drop of a hat if I don’t think I’m being treated fairly. I’ve quit two jobs.
The first was a server job at a chain restaurant, and it was the strangest work environment I’ve ever been in (and I’ve had quite a few jobs). The team of managers were adversarial and dickish and the whole place had this keep-your-head-down type of vibe. Employees didn’t laugh or joke around, wouldn’t be friendly with each other for fear of getting in trouble for talking, it was crazy. Any other restaurant or bar gig is usually a great time because of your coworkers. Anyway, when I got hired they guaranteed me X hours. They scheduled me less than that. I called one day and told them I wasn’t coming back. The manager I spoke to got all pissed about it, which I thought was weird because I figured he was trying to phase me out with the scheduling to begin with. Whatever. Didn’t lose any sleep over it. That place was crazy.
The second job was a bar gig where again they guaranteed me X hours and didn’t follow through. It was a brand new place and the management was completely incompetent. After a couple of months business started to slow. I’d show up to work only to get sent home an hour or two later. Shifts for everyone started to dry up. One day I showed up and they sent me home immediately. Why the hell didn’t you call me to stop me from driving in? After that I didn’t go back, didn’t call to let them know, just stopped going. Two weeks later they mailed me my last check. The week after that, one of the managers called to ask why I wasn’t at work that day because I was supposed to be there. I said, “Lady, you do realize I haven’t been there for the last three weeks, right?” She had not realized that. I did not lose any sleep over that one either.
First day on the job I was transferred to a different job that wasn’t the one I had applied or interviewed for. I quit the same day and told them I wasn’t coming back.
Other job I had been working at for about two months running a sandblaster machine. It was ergonomic hell and I’d requested many simple quality-of-work improvements such as a respirator that fit and didn’t have broken straps, a rubber floor mat instead of concrete, etc. I was starting to be in serious pain at the ends of the shifts, and the manager kept stalling on promises, so I called in one morning and said I wasn’t coming back.
I had an employee stop showing up without notice (in fact we were worried about her well-being) after being employed for a week and a few days. She seemed happy with the job and was doing well at it. Pay was every two weeks and my manager hadn’t completed her paperwork, so we had no address to send her pay and no number to call. She never stopped in for her pay.
A month later I got a phone call from a potential employer. She gave me as a reference! I laughed, thinking it was the punchline after a long set-up. I talked to the caller about what happened and told him I was just happy to hear she was ok.
Over the next month I got similar calls every few days, and told the story repeatedly (and likely illegally). Yet she continued to put me down as a reference. To this day I have no idea what the backstory was. We eventually used her pay for an office party.
ETA: to this day the only employees who have quit have had reasons, like moving away, going back to college, etc.
A recruiter said that I could travel and see the world. Be all I can be and get specialized training.
I said, Sign me up. They started yelling at me as soon as I got off the bus. Wanted to chop off my hair. Kept telling me telling me to move it. Now! :rolleyes: I asked them what happened to the kind recruiter and that he would straighten things out. They yelled at me again.
I crawled out a window late at night and hitched a ride back into town. Never looked back. Didn’t even ask for my pay.
just kidding. No I never quit a job without notice. I did quit a job at a grocery store and only gave a weeks notice. Boss said that was enough.
A guy I dated briefly years ago told me he walked out of his job once (law firm IT) on discovering that the partner he worked for was embezzling client escrow accounts. Left for lunch and never went back.
I had taken a part-time job at a department store, over the holiday rush.
I gave management my list of available times, and said I could work up to fifteen hours per week out of those times.
The department manager proceeded to schedule me for every single time I had listed as a possibility.
I told him that, no, that won’t work. He said it was MY fault for giving him a list of times I was available that added up to more than 15 hours a week! My fault for giving him options!
He refused to change the schedule but said it would change the following week. Well, week 2 came around, and again, I was scheduled for 30 hours. I said something again, and again the manager refused to change the schedule, saying, “I don’t have anyone else.” To which I responded, “that’s a staffing issue, which is not my problem”. I told him I wasn’t coming back after my 15 hours for that week were worked. He didn’t change the schedule, so I didn’t come back after Wednesday.
I went back on Sunday (new week!) and the manager threatened to “write me up”. That’s when I told him that this was ridiculous, and I quit. And I walked out.
The store manager ended up calling me and asked me to reconsider quitting, but I said no.
Oh man, from the other perspective I’ve had literally dozens of people quit on me with no notice. :smack:
I spent four years in my twenties as a shipping foreman in a factory/warehouse. I had two teams of 15-20 people (day shift and night shift). With turnover being what it was, I probably went through 200 employees in those four years. They were about evenly split between Hispanics of questionable legal status, and whites of trailer park status. The Hispanics tended to be good, reliable employees (often working another full-time job in addition to working for me). The white kids would disappear on meth binges, or get arrested and, with nobody to bail them out, just sit in jail for a week, missing work with no call and no excuse.
Both types of employee would also occasionally quit at my company (vitamins/nutritional supplements) and go work at the other large factory/warehouse (Stouffer’s frozen foods) across town, which offered similar work and similar pay. They would do so because they were mad at me, at a co-worker, at the Big Boss, or just because they wanted a change, and they would invariably do it without notice (“Yeah I ain’t coming back on Monday. I’m starting at the Stouffers on Monday. Bye.”). They did this since they couldn’t be without a paycheck, and they feared, perhaps with reason, that if they gave notice they would be summarily dismissed.
Some of them did it repeatedly, going back and forth between our two companies, in a case of complete financial suicide (since they lost all tenure each time). I pointed out to one of them once that, instead of having five years’ seniority by simply staying put at one of the two factories, with attendant pay raises and vacation time, she was still making the same money she had been the first time I’d met her.
I did it several times when I was a teen because I was (and still am) completely incapable of eating shit from anyone and teen jobs just seem to require it. I settled down some in my 20s and learned to adapt better but still can’t take someone dressing me down for something that isn’t my fault.
The most memorable was a friend of my dad’s who hired me as his dental assistant. He sexually harassed me and was a total douche but it was my first real “big girl” job so I tried and tried to stick it out thinking it was worth it for the on the job training I was getting. One day we were doing an oral surgery and I set the room up for him- only he’d put the wrong procedure request in so I was set up for A and he needed the tools for B. He dressed me down in front of the patient, humiliated me and made me look like a complete jackass with a “can’t get good help” eye roll and all. I finished the surgery and morning appointments, went to lunch and never went back. I even made them mail my last check. The called my dad to see if I was OK when I didn’t return from lunch and he was like “Well, you probably pissed her off good…I’m surprised it took this long” and that was that.
I regret nothing and the dentist is dead now. I didn’t feel the least bit sorry when I heard.
Not long out of university, I was doing logging road layout on the west coast of British Columbia. Pretty rugged country. We were flown in by helicopter and left for a few days.
Finished a day early, we decided to fall some trees close to our camp and clear a pad for the helicopter so we wouldn’t have to carry our camping gear so far.
That afternoon, out boss hikes up to our camp and informs us that he wants to keep costs down and cancelled the helicopter. He needs us to carry all the gear out down to the nearest road.
My response? I’ll carry my own gear and that’s all. Then I’m catching the next flight back to town.
When we got back to camp, he was scheduled to fly out that afternoon, but was so pissed at me he wouldn’t get on the plane, so had to stay over night in the camp.
Within the next month, the entire rest of the crew had quit.
Yes, I walked out of a job once. I was hired on a temporary basis for a simple clerical job. The advertised job entailed typing, shorthand, correspondence, telephones and filing, and if I worked out, I’d be hired direct. They liked my work, and did hire me direct, but on the first day of direct work I discovered what they really wanted. They wanted a bookkeeper-type person who would do very complex construction accounting. They were just testing me to see if I was a reliable employee before they tried to push me into this different position. That way, they could pay low-level secretary wages instead of the wages of an experienced bookkeeper/accountant.
I’m a dolt with math and numbers, and this was precisely the type of work I hate and suck at. So I went home to lunch and just didn’t go back.
I walked out of a job once. I was a telemarketer for an awful company. They treated their workers extremely bad and I had just broken my neck in a car accident. They refused to give me time off to heal, despite suffering significant head trauma and minor memory loss from hitting my head. They had treated me really badly in the past (despite the fact that I was top 10 highest stats on the call floor), so I took off my badge, calmly handed it to my Supervisor, grabbed my things, and walked out.
I quit one job after one day. I had just returned from my first stint in Thailand and was cooling my heels in Albuquerque while applying to grad school in Hawaii. That was going to take a few months, so I needed a job to pay rent and stuff. Since I had worked in a convenience store in West Texas, I applied at one located across from the UNM campus. I was hired, and the manager of that store was a real horror. When it came to troublesome customers, he would belligerently throw them out. He kept a club underneath the counter and would threaten them with it. He seemed to recognize some of them from before, had apparently told them never to come back again. Told me if anyone gave me any trouble I should not hesitate to bash their brains in with the club.
I did not go back for a second day and felt no guilt whatsoever. Not wanting to have any further interaction with that manager, I stopped by for my measly one-day paycheck one night, knowing he would not be there. But the clerk told me the manager would not release it until he had talked to me. I contacted the state employment commission, and the people there told me he could not do that, and they got my check for me.
I’ve posted my Kirby vacuum experience before, after 2 weeks of trying to peddle overpriced vacuums to people who couldn’t afford them, I walked into the managers office and quit. He was surprised because I’d had some success. So skeezy.
The other time was more spectacular. I was hired by a canoe/kayak company to haul boats and customers to a dam, then pick them up at the end of the route. It was a pretty fun job when the boss wasn’t around. He and his wife both had day jobs with an investment bank and this was their side business. He was often verbally abusive, especially to his wife. He once stole a commission from me when I had spent hours with the customer. Finally, we got in an argumen about the boats/customers going to the dam in a busy Sat morning. He started screaming at me in front of the customers, so I flipped him off, hopped in my car, did a burnout in the parking lot and was gone!
He called me Monday looking for his keys and I made him send me my last check first. Amazingly, he did.
I was a line cook in a fairly popular restaurant in my home town. I thought I was a very good one too, and apparently management thought so as well.
There was a convention in town and I noticed that the let out time for the schedule posted in the break room was 4:00. I asked the manager on duty to call in more people, because we would be getting hit about quarter after 4:00. The manager did manage to get a full compliment of dining room staff, so I was hopefully that the dish washer and a second line cook would be coming soon. (The 2 - 10 shift usually worked alone in the kitchen from 2 - 5).
Right on time, the orders started coming in. I had all the grills up and running and was keeping up with the food orders. I had the window stacked with plates for delivery and still more orders coming in. Dishes were starting to back up because I had no time to do dishes and cook. I don’t know how long I lasted alone, it felt like an eternity, but still no help in the kitchen area.
Then the worst thing to happen, happened. I ran out of plates. So I ran over to try to get some cleaned, and got called back to the line and chewed out for not being on the line when we were so busy. I asked how much longer until help arrived, and she said she hadn’t called any help in for the kitchen. At this point I left. Yes I felt bad, I was in tears, and I still regret walking out to this day.
Nonsense! No need for you to feel any guilt at all.
They deserved everything you did plus a whole lot more. They stuck you into a maelstrom where you were sure to get hurt and they must have known that. But they didn’t care.