They thought you took the ‘easy’ way out and quit without the good graces to give two weeks notice and forced everyone to scramble for several days to cover your shifts. After the third day you were probably listed as Job abandoned.
I did it for 6 before dropping out. Retaining some dignity, I waited until right before the meeting with the faculty that would throw me out, submitted a letter of withdrawal, then went across the road to the Ulster Museum to chill 
I’m kind of needed at my job. On the way into work last week I got a phone call, and I recognized the number as one from where I work.
“bbs2k?”
“Hi, what’s up?”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, what’s wrong?”
“Well, we were just wondering where you were.”
“I’m on my way in now. Why?”
“Because you were scheduled to be in almost an hour ago.”
“…”
:smack:
(I had misread the hour hand on my watch, oops)
One of the part-time kids that I supervise stopped coming in last year. She called in sick on a Monday and was scheduled to work five more times in the next two weeks. No more sick calls, she didn’t come in, nothing.
Eventually we called her to fire her over the phone and got the machine. Never saw her again, but my personal theory is that her parents shipped her off to rehab because she was very heavy into drugs.
If I was as little as a half hour late for work one time, my boss would hear about it. I open up a conference center every morning, and the earliest customers are doctors. They’ll complain if the muffin assortment is wrong.
Recent university graduates who are temping while looking for something long term are likely suspects not to turn up without warning here at the university. Especially in the office where I used to work, there was a high turn over of full time staff and a higher turn over of temps.
Small retail jobs (the kind where there is only one person in the store most of the time) suck for this reason. Did my share of this in college a number of times I got there at ten to open and ended up just staying until nine to close because the person who was supposed to work three to nine never showed up.
The system deals with it, but the person you screw most of the time is the person on shift before you.
I know a guy who did quit - left his resignation on the desk of our boss one afternoon and didn’t return. But our boss was not an organized or motivated man. And he didn’t get around to filing the HR paperwork. Since it was pretty obvious after a month or so that he was going to get in trouble having not filed the paperwork, and since he didn’t think it was fair for the guy to have “job abandonment” down on his HR record with the firm since he did quit, he called up former employee and asked for a new letter of resignation with next weeks date on it.
Wouldn’t your new job want a reference from your old one?
I used to work in a warehouse, and one day a guy just didn’t show up. He came in a few days later and the boss said, Where were you? Guy said At home. Boss said, OK, go back there now. Guy turned around and left. I think of this incident nearly every day of my working life.
Bruce McCulloch’s 2002 comedy album Drunk Baby Project has a piece called Hangover Chronicles in which a guy more or less forgets to go to work during a two-week hangover. Unfortunately, he actually did go into work at one point during the hangover, and things didn’t go well. It’s just he was so hungover, he forgot he went in.
Well, once I took a vacation day and somehow it wasn’t marked down on the calendar. I got a call on my cell phone wondering if something had happened to me – like I was in the hospital or faced with some major emergency.
I like my job.
I dated a guy who abandoned a job at a grocery store. They sent him out to collect the carts. While out there, he decided the job sucked, got in his car, and went home. He never collected his last paycheck and didn’t care.
This sort of thing was so common at the pizza shop a relative ran that he eventually sold the business. He said it was too hard to keep the place staffed - motivated people seldom make pizza delivery their life’s ambition.
If I was leaving legitimately looking for a new job, do you think I would have potential employers calling my old employer asking about me?
I did this. I took a three-week vacation to Australia starting over thanksgiving. No one noticed that I was gone and I wasn’t charged for vacation time. Now they wonder why I don’t think I’m appreciated. Of course, now they are going to pay me for my unused vacation.
We hired a guy who reported to me. He didn’t show up the first two days he was supposed to start work (Monday and Tuesday). He showed up Wednesday and Thursday and missed Friday.
He worked Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday the next week. Then he disappeared. I never saw him again. His step father called me a couple of weeks later to ask if I knew where he was.
We mailed his check to his home address, and the secretary said it was cashed.
My WAG is that he had/has a drinking problem.
Regards,
Shodan
At one company i worked for, one of the guys who was in my training group just went to lunch one day and never came back. A few weeks later we found out he was ok, he was just disgusted with the place. I don’t blame him. It was run like a weird religeous cult.
And this is exactly what I’d do (and have done) if someone didn’t show up for their assigned shift. I’d be afraid they’d been in accident, and I’d be very worried. For that reason, as well as what **Morelin ** said, it’s not really very cool to quit by abandonment.
And called you a little shit and wondered what the hell’s the matter with kids these days. At least that’s what we always did with the no-shows.
I’ve worked at a job where people went for lunch on their first day and never came back, too. Probably because of the office manager/co-owner - her nickname was Psycho Bitch From Hell.
I had a job I hated where I would just stop what I was doing and walk out of the building and go for a walk for a little bit when it got too much for me. I didn’t abandon the job, although I really, really wanted to some days.
If you tell them you’re looking while still holding down that job, no. That would get you fired.
As for job abandonment:
I’ve done some quality audits on staffing firms and this sort of thing is actually extremely common in entry-level jobs.
I mentioned this in another thread, but you just would not believe how chronically unemployable, how utterly lacking in life skills and self-respect, some people are. I once asked a customer what sort of standards he was looking for in the employees he was sending to a warehouse job and he sighed and said, “Rick, I’m happy if they show up on time and aren’t drunk and actually stay the whole day.”
I’m talking about people - not people with developmental disabilities, just people who are lazy and shiftless - who are 25 years old and have never held a job longer than three weeks and submit resumes that appear to have been written by orangutangs who lived in a zoo where the keepers didn’t speak English. I witnessed a man in his mid 20’s who was brought in by his mother, and who did most of the talking for him. I just sat there with my mouth agape. After they left I asked the guy who owned the firm if he’d ever seen anything like it before, and he said he gets it every month. They had a long list of one-time employees who would leave after an hour, or vanish for three hours on their first smoke break, or call in “sick” two out of every three days. There were also professional claimsmakers who would show up and either fake a back injury or make a harassment claim on the first day, if not within the first hour, but that’s another story.
This was a real eye opener for me, I gotta tell you. I think I was about thirteen when my parents started asking me when the hell I was getting a job.
This was not in some Appalachian bumpkin-ville; this is in large cities in southern Ontario where everyone, supposedly, goes to school. They get some decent people looking for work, too, and most of those people are placed almost instantly, but boy oh boy, the bottom of the barrel really is the bottom of the barrel.
Oh, dude.
I was a factory supervisor for four years, during which time over 100 people cycled through my team of 20. In four years, I never once got a real letter of resignation, let alone two weeks’ notice. Abandonment was the default method of quitting. After two consecutive days of no call/no show, it was assumed the person had quit and it was time to call the temp agency for a new employee.
Yes, it was every bit as soul crushing as it sounds.