What’s the memorable way in which you or someone you know has departed from a job?
When I was a wee lad detassling corn in the Midwest I had a boss who was a real dick. One day, after a chewing out, I told him, among other things, to go fuck himself. Needless to say, I didn’t bother showing up for work the next day.
Knew a guy who was unhappy at his job. He was in a meeting and his part was over. They said “you can leave now the meeting now” and he packed up and left, never went back.
When I was a teen, I worked for Schaper (the Cootie Company). I was working as a line supplier on the u-drive-it line. Making the exact same wage as everyone else for a screaming bitch of a supervisor who didn’t like to do anything but yell at people. I was expected to keep everyone supplied with parts and take their positions when they went to the can. And somehow, I was the one who got yelled at if they took too long in the can, NOT THEM, as if I had any mystical power to make them move faster.
That already po’d me enough, but then I got knocked back to wrapping the drive chains because I couldn’t make people stop dawdling in the can (silly me, I thought that was HER JOB.)
I was the fastest person on the entire team at wrapping the chains, but I couldn’t keep up with quota. So she kept me there, but yelled at me several times a day about it.
One day, I’d had enough, and I told her that, one way or another, she was replacing me in the position, because I was tired of being yelled at for being faster than everyone else, but not fast enough for her. Initially, she promised that she would replace me after lunch. After lunch, I asked about it, and was told to wait. About 1pm, I asked again and she told me flat out that she had lied to me and had no intention of replacing me or stopping yelling at me, so shut up and do the job.
I walked.
I got about 150 feet away when the courageous bitch started yelling after me about how I was fired and I’d better never set foot again on company property. Yeah, sure, whatever.
Ah, you want to hear about Marcy.
What a piece of work. She was hired at the movie theatre where I was an usher. She spent the entire time flirting with guys, and complaining about her boyfriend. (“He was so annoying when he was having sex with me last night. Hello, I was trying to watch TV!”) She complained because her daddy only gave her a $20,000/year allowance. (In those days that was a fair living.)
She rarely did any work. When she did, she managed to screw things up. One day I was cashiering. I had to go outside to do something so she took over for me. I counted my drawer before I left and was right on the money. When I came back 5 minutes later, it was short $5. In that time, only two customers had come in. No, Marcy didn’t steal the money. She wasn’t dishonest, just dumb as a bag of spatulas.
There was one day I was working alone, besides the manager. Marcy called and begged to work. She was totally bored and wanted something to do. We didn’t need her. She begged. Nope. She begged to the point of being annoying. The manager finally said fine, come in to work. She was there for ten minutes when she said “This sucks. I want to go home.”
Are you starting to get a picture? Keep in mind that she held her job for well over a year.
One night she was working and the manager asked her to please clean one of the drink machines. Poor abused Marcy started to, then said “Fuck this! I QUIT!” and flounced out.
A few days later she was bored so she begged for her job back. She didn’t get it.
I can’t even go into all the people I’ve worked with who have been fired or quit because they were actually required to do a very small amount of real work - usually much less than anyone else working with them.
Boo Freaking Hoo.
Heck, I’ve known people to quit because they were getting written up for being late and/or calling in sick all the time. The nerve of people to expect them to show up on time. Damned Chrono-fascists! (my new favorite word).
Probably not what you’re looking for, but it was a lot of cheekiness for me at the time.
I was working for a Big 3 automaker, and I knew I was quitting. The operation I worked for had a policy of never accepting advanced notice of a resignation, so I had slowly cleaned out my desk over the previous month.
I walked Friday morning with a big box of donuts. When asked what the occasion was, I said that I was celebrating my new job. Puzzled looks on the cow-orkers faces; I told the boss I was resigning, and walked out the door.
I heard later that I became a bit of a local legend as a way to quit with class.
Two stories:
A coworker I had gave notice. She spent the last two weeks working peacefully and the last day some of the attorneys (she was a legal secretary), took her out to lunch. She got drunk…really drunk.
Formerly she’d had a brief relationship with one of the company directors. He’d dumped her about six months earlier, then gotten engaged and married over the next six months.
She came in and in her inebriated state, told him EXACTLY what she thought of him…
(The reason I will NEVER date a coworker).
Second.
We fired a guy the day he walked in the the lojac for work release. He’d been convicted of embezzling from his previous employer.
Classic massacre brought on by a sexual harrassment claim. Came in to work one day to find “corporate” there and heard that VP and SVP had been whacked. We supervisors and department heads spent the rest of the day in interviews with the corporate big-wigs. All the shit came out that had been going on there for over a year. Later that week Head Supervisor whacked. Then slimy underlings that barely got away with their jobs “quit” in solidarity. (Well, that and the fact that their days of going “shopping” for pretty young things on the floor were over.)
It was awesome. All those hose-bags got what they deserved.
On an oil rig. In a straitjacket.
I hope a boat was involved.
At a job I had years ago, one new hire’s first duty, at 8 a.m. on her first day, was to fire someone.
The day before Christmas.
I had a Director who was fired. For grabbing his female boss’s breast during a meeting with her.
She pulled us all in a meeting to tell us he had been fired, refused to tell us why. We heard later. No wonder she refused to tell us.
At a place where I worked (and also Darryl Lict worked) we had a bulletin board where new job openings were posted starting a week before they were officially listed to the outside world. The idea was that employees could get first crack at the new jobs via internal transfer.
This one guy who had been convinced that he was about to be fired perused it one day to see a job offered that was exactly the same description as his. Sure that he was going to be canned, he walking into the shipping dock area and smashed a few brand new microscopes on the ground before walking out forever. As you have probably guessed, the job that was posted was for another tech for a totally different department than his.
Not really “spectacular”, per se, but dramatic and strange.
When I was 21 or so I got hired as a clerk at a convenience store. I arrived for my first shift to find a woman, in the store uniform, sobbing behind the counter and crying to another employee, “I need this job!” I realized that I had been hired to replace this woman, but the manager had waited until she showed up for work and put on her uniform, just minutes before I arrived, to fire her.
Over the next couple weeks I learned from other employees that the manager seemed to enjoy firing people, often for little or no reason.
One month after I started, an extremely embarrassed coworker pulled me aside when I showed up for my shift and informed me that the manager, on her way out of town had called to tell her to tell me I was fired. I was never given a reason because the coworker didn’t know, and I never saw the manager again to ask her.
I saw a guy work his way from senior lead maintenance technician to parts washer before he walked into the office of our plant’s vice president to complain that he had been passed over in three consecutive layoffs (Our company was handing out fairly nice severance packages in addition to the standard 60 days notice.)
The vice president said, “Well, I can take care of that!” and called security to escort him out the door. This stunt may have cost him the equivalent of six months to a year’s wages.
I used to work at a large public utility. The VP of one large organization and several directors who reported to him all vanished suddenly.
They’d gotten drunk and made a series of nasty phone calls to a woman in the same organization.
Same place, in our phone support center, the FBI came in and snagged a guy they’d been chasing. Management knew about it, they arranged to keep him on the phone so the agents would know exactly where to collar him.
I once overheard a boss tell someone “Well, you can’t come to work, but I’ll let you come to the Christmas party if you want!”
IT Project Leader fired after near felony level keying of her (recently ex-boyfriend) manager’s car in the parking lot. Almost directly under the video camera, less than 100 feet from the employee entrance.
I think this resignation is kind of awesome.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/15/resignation-letter-o.html
Working at IOA (Google that acronym if you must - I don’t want to disclose the employer in obvisity)
It was my day off and I was roaming around the park with some fellow friends/employees. My supervisor happens to run into us and tells me “Hey, we’re having a quick meeting, I need you to come with me. Just have your friends wait here, it’ll be about 10 minutes.” Thinking nothing of it I went along to this “meeting”.
So I walk with the Sup to a building on the property. He has me take a seat at a conference table in an empty room. I wait about 5 minutes and then he later arrives with single sheet of paper. “Just sign at the bottom and you’ll be good to go.”
The mother fucker trapped me. It actually was a notice of termination along with the reasoning’s behind the decision. It turns out that the tardies that my supervisor let slide were all but off-the-record and had somehow come back into the light.
After signing the paper I was given a security guard to aide me to my locker (to empty it) and then wheeled off of the property in a golf cart.
Great fucking employer right there.