So, I think I’m finally out of a contract job where the guy thought he ruled every second of my time and I could just drop it all for his company. As a student, this wasn’t working out so well. Thank God I’m free.
I’m interested to hear about other people’s stories–you don’t have to have left on bad terms, necessarily. When were you happy leaving a job?
Leaving the call center job I’d done for several years back in February was cathartic. I don’t care what I have to do from here on out, I will never do that kind of work again.
Earlier today I was chatting with another guy who used to work there and left about a month ago. He wants to be a writer. He was complaining that he hadn’t written a single word since he left there and was beating himself up over it. I pointed out that he needed a period of time to de-stress from it, he had a lot of other changes in his life (moving west, now prepping to move east) and he should relax, enjoy himself for a while, and not be so hard on himself about the writing.
When I run into people who still work there, I can see the stress of it on them.
My first job after I got out of the Navy was as a Veterans Advisor at a junior college. I helped veterans apply for the educational benefits they were entitled to use and even supervised a couple of work-study students. That was the good part.
The bad part was the boss. He was very political and arrogant. His management philosophy was along the lines of “Everyone is an average worker unless they prove otherwise.” At least, that’s how he justified my “average” performance rating. No discussion of what I’d done right or wrong, no goals, no nothing. Frankly, I think he was just too lazy to do real evaluations. Plus he pronounced the second month of the year as “FEBby-airy”… :rolleyes:
No matter. I left about a month before the spring semester when I accepted my first engineering position. I was so glad to leave “Mr. Average” behind. Unfortunately, my second boss in engineering had the same philoshphy, only more heinous - if you didn’t do things to make HIM look good, you were just a 3 on a scale of 5. I was re-orged out of his group in less than a year, and again, never looked back.
I was hired as part of a small team to fulfill a multi-year contract running a small regional data center. My company’s sales team had primed the client to have unrealistic expectations of the level of service they could demand. The local management mis-led the tech team with regard to the level of service they were expected to provide (e.g., I didn’t find out that my role was supposed to provide 24x7x365 on-call support until after I started work). The local manager lacked anything resembling a spine when it came to managing the disconnect between what the client thought they were getting and what we thought we were giving.
By the end of the contract, everyone on my side hated the client, and the client hated most of us. I hated most of the people on my team and most of the people working for the client. Nevertheless, the powers-that-be insisted that we submit a bid when the management contract came up for renewal. The local manager just about did a happy dance when we learned we hadn’t gotten the contract.
Honestly, I have never been so happy to find myself out of a job.
I worked in an aluminum foundry for a year. Smelly, dirty, and hot job. But for what it’s worth, I was very good at it. So it didn’t take long for TPTB to put me on the most sensitive, difficult castings. Of course some of those were the most frustrating fucking things, where half the castings ended up as scrap even in the hands of a good operator.
One day in the springs I was on break from making those accursed parts, and got to talking about how summer was coming up and how goddamn hot it got in the foundry. I mentioned that I wouldn’t be there for the next summer, and some guy bet me a coke that I still would.
On the next break I called a construction contractor I had worked for, and 3 days later I was working out in the sunshine heading a framing crew. It was beautiful.
I used to do tech support over the phone. It was pretty stressful all of the time, but certain customers created more stress than others. There was one guy that called me about once every two weeks or so. Nice guy, but his question was too hard. I had to do a shitload of research about it, which took up more time than I actually had. (It was for a product that we hadn’t sold in over a decade, and that I knew almost nothing about.)
I never did get it solved for him. And every time he called he asked specifically for me. I had no idea how I was going to solve it, and if this guy was going to be an albatross around me neck for the rest of my career there.
Then one day I quit. I had given my two weeks notice, had a better job lined up, all that jazz. On the day that I quit, I boxed up all of my belongings, said the appropriate goodbyes, and walked out.
As I was walking past someone’s cubicle, they held up their phone and said “It’s (that guy), he says that only you can help him.” Sorry, I no longer work here. 
(I do feel bad that I left him hanging, but seriously, Visual Basic 1.0? Dude, welcome to the 90s.)
Alright, a bit of a different kind of story:
I once worked a job where I fell madly, passionately, yet chastely in love with a co-worker. It was mutual. Problematically, we were both married (hence the chasteness). I liked that job a lot, but after a few months, I had to quit. I can’t even describe the sense of relief I felt on leaving; nothing ever happened between us and I want to say nothing ever would have happened, but one drink to many at an office get together, one ride home together late at night… I don’t know. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a harmless crush at work, they’re fun, but this felt much more dangerous. Anyway, I was happy to leave that job.
I spent 6 years in a Pet Store (making minimum wage and literally getting shit on) and I loved it. Until we got a new owner and he systematically went through each of the employees treating us like dirt until we were forced to quit. He started with me because I was the best. Made me the manager of the fish room - which was my job, just without the title - but then told me he didn’t want me in there and gave my job to his buddy. Couldn’t afford to give me an hourly raise but hired that buddy with a salary. Cut my hours to 1 shift per week for no reason. I went from being happy to go to work every day to dreading it to the point I was physically ill. Even typing that paragraph and remembering the bullshit is making my stomach turn.
The day I left he said “Good luck” and it was all I could do to not tell him to go fuck himself.
Funny though, if I saw him again now I’d shake his hand because that was the “kick” I needed to go back to school and make something of myself - which I did and now I’m literally living the life I always dreamed of. The day I walked out of that store was the day my life began.
I have a few, but this one instantly came to mind.
Many years ago I took a job that I was a bad fit for - but they were a worse fit for me.
It was a web development job and although I love my life as a programmer, web development was never my interest. Still, I thought I’d make a go of it.
I never fit in. I dunno why. In almost all my jobs, I have made good lasting friendships. I’m usually the guy who organizes after-hours events, group lunches, etc. I still get regular calls from at least 3 of my old bosses. When my most current contract ended, the parting emails were very moving.
But these guys just didn’t take to me. I’d go through in the morning and no one would say good morning. No one chatted with me. No one wanted to do lunch.
They had me sitting at a desk that was on an incline. I had to keep my legs firmly planted to prevent my chair from rolling.
They never gave me a real assignment, just told me to teach myself HTML, which I spent some weeks on - but an experienced developer shouldn’t struggle too much with HTML and I was quickly bored.
One day someone was complaining that they didn’t have enough people to test the newest release. I mentioned that I didn’t really have much to do and I’d be happy to help. I told him to clear it with my boss (they were peers) but I didn’t think there would be a problem since I didn’t have a formal assignment.
The next day my boss called me into his office and chewed my ass. He said if I ever told anyone again that I didn’t have enough to do, “me and you are going to have real problems.” Who gets pissed at a worker because he wanted to do real work? If I had had an assignment, I could see it. In his shoes, at worst I would have given a mild admonishment that such requests should go through me first, so that I’m not blind-sided, but I wouldn’t have been as pissed as this guy was.
Two weeks later I had a new job and resigned. Within a year they went belly-up and I wasn’t surprised.
-Cable company: After one too many “No, the customer is not allowed to cancel accounts with you, and we’re not going to let you kick the call up to someone who can; just deal with it” I happily went to lunch and didn’t come back
-Printer Tech support for a major company: After a certifiable ‘lemon’ of a printer bios release, we had to support it even though there was no real fix for it. And lie, and string the customers along that nothing was wrong on OUR end. After 6 months of this, the company announced they were putting out a new printer in the spring; it was the same bios, same problems, just a new name.
I again went to lunch and didn’t come back.
Wasn’t happy to lose either job but holy shit I hate corporate greed and assininery.
I jumped into a consulting gig for the money. There was a lot of researching and and writing, which was right up my alley. However, my boss was brutal at communicating her wishes and went into passive/aggressive mode almost right away when I struggled to meet the demands of the job. Mostly, I was doing a poor job with client relations, but I had to sort of find that out for myself. She never actually pulled me aside and said, “I need you to take more meetings.”
I put in a ton of extra time and took more meetings, but I could never gain her trust and they laid me off after six months. I returned to corporate work in a smaller company and I’ve never been happier. I’ve never really ‘failed’ at a job before, so it was very traumatic, but in retrospect, it was a poor fit for my personality and my boss wasn’t willing to put in the time to help me succeed. In the end, it was all for the best.
This is potentially the best username/post combo I’ve ever seen.
[I think I may have posted this in the “What was your worst job ever?” thread.]
Okay, so my first job out of college was a 3-day front desk job via the State Unemployment Office at a company that made electronic parts for military applications – from lighted switches for fighter plane cockpits to accurate-to-the-inch GPS units when only the military was allowed to have technology that was so accurate.
I got the job because the regular receptionist was taking “extra time” on maternity leave. Somehow my 3-day receptionist stint turned into a permanent position as a tech writer. We went through four more receptionists in a month after that, each one just not showing up the next Monday because they couldn’t handle the VP yelling at them for all kinds of reasons, real and imaginary. [When the executive secretary asked me later how I had gotten through that abuse, I said honestly, “Oh, that’s nothing. I had an older brother.”] Eventually, they just moved my tech-writing computer to the front desk and had me do both jobs (with no additional wages). My predecessor never did return.
Employees:
The company founders had split off from a similar company in a different part of the state. The VP would overhear me answering the phone and yell at me for using the old company name (“We’re not DT and they can sue us for using their name!”). The Prez would overhear me answering the phone and yell at me for using the new company name (“I hate that name. Answer the phones as DT instead!”)
The executive secretary was the most accomplished person in her family; she had an AA degree from a business college. The executives were horrible to her. The VP yelled at everyone, and B* was no exception, but the Prez reserved throwing pencils and small parts for B*'s office. One day she came to me after an incident and said, “I really wish that pencil hadn’t missed. Then I could sue the fuck of him and get the hell out of here.” [This was a woman who absolutely never cussed.]
A nearby business had a small chemical fire on their back lot, which led to the Fire Department evacuating all the businesses in a quarter-mile radius for three hours until the wind cleared the chemical smoke away. The VP was livid when she arrived late from her Soroptomists meeting and couldn’t park her Mercedes in ‘her own’ parking lot. When we were all allowed to return to our buildings at Noon, she shouted to the accountant, “I’m not paying these guys for those hours. That was an early lunch for them. They can burn vacation time for the extra two hours.”
One of the soldering team members accidentally dropped a pointy tool. It rolled across the table and fell into her lap, point-down, puncturing her thigh. When she returned from the nearby Ready-Med clinic, the VP fired her for slacking off during work hours. Her team-mates all spoke up against that, so the VP canceled the planned Christmas dinner (first and last ever, and it didn’t happen). The soldering team responded by calling in “sick” after lunch; they went to a nearby bar and spent the afternoon at their own little party. The VP threatened to fire the whole soldering team for that stunt; the machinists and QA guys said they’d walk as well. The Prez, who was a genius engineer who just wanted two things out of life – 1) to fly his little Cessna to amateur pilot conventions in various states, and 2)to be left alone to fiddle with electronics – reigned in the VP by recognizing the business would probably crash if all of the manufacturing team had to be rebuilt and trained at one time.
The company was closed between Christmas and New Years day. The VP was happy to tell me I had an extra week to play; she didn’t happen to mention that I wasn’t going to be paid for that time.
Customers:
There was some kind of commotion on Tuesday after a 3-day weekend. Later that afternoon, a locksmith gathered the VP, the Prez, his son, and a QA guy in the lobby. He showed them a part while explaining, “The guy didn’t quite know what he was doing. He missed these tumblers here by a millimeter, otherwise he would have drilled right through them and removed the core. Then he coulda spun the lock and walked away with your whole inventory.” For some reason, only the QA guy seemed surprised.
A week later, a parts buyer came to me and asked, “Did you take a serial number?” I had no idea what she meant. She warned me that the serial number stickers were for the GPS Units we were selling to the Navy and they had to be strictly accounted for. One seemed to be missing and, if I had just brushed across the roll and accidentally ruined one (dirtied up the stickiness so it wouldn’t stay on a GPS case), the log still had to show what happened to that particular number.
A few weeks after that, there was another break-in attempt – this one successful. The only things missing were some oscillators and test equipment, plus the rack-mounted GPS/Telemetry unit that the QA guy had just finished testing. Since it was military grade, it was worth multiple thousands of dollars. The owners filed an insurance claim, then started scouting for another business location.
We relocated over Thanksgiving weekend. Thursday and Friday we would all be off; Monday we’d all come back to work at a new address. On Wednesday afternoon, the VP was nice enough to let everyone go home early for the weekend. She encouraged me to take a couple warehouse shelves and some carpet mats home. I loaded those into my car and took some extra time to load the files and computer from the front desk into my car because I didn’t want to wait for the movers to set me up again when we returned from the break.
When I returned from the break, the VP let me know there had been several things stolen – probably by the movers – over the long weekend. Several computers and the QA guy’s new test equipment were gone. Naturally, the owners filed an insurance claim against “those crooked movers” – including for some warehouse shelves and office floor mats. For some reason, the VP seemed unhappy to see me setting up the reception desk with the computer, printer, and files I had taken home.
So for my second Winter Break with this company, I had made a point of saving up my money in advance – and hunting for some other jobs during the time off. By the time I returned to work, I had received an offer to teach English in Japan. I waited four weeks and gave two weeks notice, then spent the week chatting with the Prez and his son about flying small planes. I left at the end of the week. Before leaving the country, I made a point of visiting a little air field down by the border. In a remote hangar I found a Cessna painted like the one I had seen in the VP’s son’s office pictures. In the back seat I saw an oscillator and some other electronic testing equipment, plus some kind of rack-mounted electronic box about the size of a Blu-Ray player. Affixed to the back of the box was a little silver sticker with black numbers – just like the serial number that had disappeared…
One of the military contractors which subcontracted small parts jobs to DT was creating a pre-certification program. As part of their qualification process, they came by to ask all sorts of questions about the business owners practices.
Did we have regular personnel reviews? [COLOR=Red]No.
Did employees just get annual raises? In fact, everyone just got their annual raise last week. It will show up in their next paychecks. [Hey, accountant: Go adjust the payroll for next week’s checks. Give 'em an extra dollar a day – but take it back next period.]
Did the company have a 401K program? In fact, we’ve scheduled an investment rep to come and talk to us next month. [Hey, B* go schedule an investment seminar with a small bank.]
Do you have an employee suggestion box? We did, but someone spilled coffee on it. [During lunch, the VP wrapped a shipping box with construction paper and wrote SUGGESTIONS on the side with a black marker.]
Why does this suggestion box lack a way to retrieve the suggestions? Well, I never noticed! Actually everyone loves it here so much that they really just come and talk to VP whenever they wish.
What do you do to support employee morale? Nothing.
Nothing? Well, I’m an older person with an old 1950’s style of management.
There’s a reason the 1950’s style of management didn’t survive the 70’s![/COLOR]
So the contractor didn’t give DT Platinum, Gold, or even Silver certification. Instead, it created a Bronze category for them because, without DTs little patented connector, they’d have to redesign the cockpit indicators of the in-progress fighter jet and they didn’t have the time or money to go back to the drawing board on the pilot’s instrument panel.
My departure felt so good!
—G!
Well the Gov’ment bugged the mens’ room
At the local disco lounge
To keep the boys from sellin’
All the weapons they could scrounge
. --Don Henley
. All she wants to do is Dance
. Building the Perfect Beast
The last job I held before retiring. I was the quality control manager for a multi-million dollar project on an Air Force base. When the contractor hired me, the job was already three months behind, with almost no hope of getting back on schedule. Unfortunately, the Army Corps of Engineers was the boss hoss for this project and relentlessly harassed everybody on the site, even though they knew it would do zero good. At one point, the head asshole at the Corps called me and told me to report to his office in the morning. I told him that since I didn’t work for him, he could pretty much go fuck himself (not in those words). Nobody could do right, as far as the Corps was concerned, no matter how hard we tried to meet their demands. After eight months of nothing but stress, I turned in my notice. I was honestly worried about having a heart attack by then, and no amount of money was worth it. What a bunch of pricks those people are.
In March I started this job with a boss that drove me completely insane. She was old and snotty. She was an incredible control freak - required MY files to be organized by HER preference, at great personal inconvenience to me. She interrupted my work all the time to ask me to explain to her everything about the case so that she could waste my time with a bunch of stupid questions. One of the final straws is when she forbade me from asking my coworker work-related questions, because she needed to know at all times exactly what I knew. I have a Master’s degree and I couldn’t write a goddamn thank you letter to a client without her needing to approve all three drafts. She was terrible at running the organization, treated clients like shit by forcing them to go through embarrassing and time-consuming personal interrogations even though she knew we couldn’t help them, and she lived in the dark ages with regard to technology - we once worked late after taking three hours to generate a list of clients and their phone numbers… by pulling every single hard file, because why the fuck would we use Excel? :rolleyes:
To top it all off, it wasn’t even work I was enthusiastic about doing. Since organizational management is my passion, every single day at that job was just me mentally cataloging all the things that needed to change. I began to get very disturbed because I was wasting valuable time just stewing with hatred, and hatred’s not my thing.
Things kind of fell apart around the three month mark, and eventually we just had that mutual agreement to go our separate ways. (A conversation in which she told me, I shit you not, that I didn’t take enough initiative.) I was euphoric upon leaving and I remained euphoric until I got The Best Job in the World a month later.
The difference between my new boss and her is striking. He leaves me to my own devices for days at a time, doesn’t care how I organize my files and genuinely values my ideas. Most importantly, he trusts me, and has a great sense of humor.
I thought the bitterness might fade with time, but in retrospect I actually hate her more, and have come to appreciate the nuances of her shitty management. Good fucking riddance.
I got laid off from a job in 97. I was looking for work pretty hard and got a job offer from an SAP consulting firm. They were specifically looking for help with an SAP implementation that required French. I majored in French, but I had graduated from college in 1992, hadn’t used French at all AND I didn’t know much business French. Ask me to write a paper on the symbolism in Sartre’s The Wall and I might have struggled through. Asking me to translate stuff about supply chain management and I was hopeless.
After the interview, I told them I didn’t think I was a good fit for the job. They thought I was playing hardball (?) and offered me MORE money and MORE benefits and hell, I was unemployed so I finally said yes.
Awful, awful job. They sent me on site, with a ridiculously small per diem, no car of my own, to a team that didn’t really want me there. I got back to my hotel room and cried every night.
A lot of other bad stuff happened (like, our company was in a huge building with a big IKON sign at the top, clients were coming into town and my boss told me to get them rooms at a neighboring hotel and get the IKON discount - seriously).
One Friday, I walked in, picked up my last paycheck, turned in my laptop and quit. It felt GLORIOUS. My boyfriend at the time took me to lunch. When I got home, there was a message on the machine asking me if I wanted to fly to Seattle for an interview with Microsoft. I got that job and it was AWESOME.
I took a retail job during a period of unemployment where I was told we didn’t work for commission, yet after being hired I discovered our sales were scrutinized and we had to hit a certain mark weekly. I would never have taken a job like that if it hadn’t been sold to me as a “we need this certain retail skill you have which you can bring to the job- helping to sell all the add-on products which you have experience with.” Unfortunately the main product, the very expensive main product, was total shit. It used to be good 15 years ago before the independent company was bought out by a soulless global manufacturing company (i.e. everything now made in China out of cheap, substandard materials) yet we were supposed to recommend it with the same selling points that were used with the former product, just with certain omitted details that wouldn’t technically make it a bald-faced lie.
The saddest part was that our manager, who was a really nice, jovial guy, was one of the founding company members and who emigrated to the US years ago in order to help build a market for the product here. And he not only had to stand behind the new crap product, but he had to climb all over all of us if we weren’t selling enough of the crap product. The stress was making him ill and he started being very ineffective as a leader- he just couldn’t reconcile his values with what he was being asked to do.
So he got fired and this new manager showed up who was a lowdown dirty rat and who had zero problem snookering customers into buying the crap, and had zero problem with his motivate-by-disdain leadership style. I stayed as long as I could, but when the day came that I respectfully put in my 2-weeks notice (he could be a rat but I wasn’t going to), he told me I could clock out and leave the store keys on his desk.
I felt like a free bird and couldn’t get out of there fast enough! I learned a lesson at that job: I cannot in good conscience stand behind a crappy product, ever.
The one shining example of my career so far (warning; long):
In late 2010, I started at a job with amazing colleagues, a tight-knit work community, none-too-challenging but nevertheless interesting work and a feeling that I might be here for quite a while, since the online marketing department I was in had a lot of developing ahead and we felt we could really take it places. We were responsible for writing product descriptions for our online store (the none-too-challenging bit), but also for more creative work like coming up with taglines and other content on our store website.
Then, in March or April, our boss left on maternity leave and we got a new boss.
By September, the work community was more tight-knit than ever - in their hatred for the new boss. The colleagues were still amazing, but the work had gone from none-too-challenging to basically “copy what is written HERE, HERE”. All the actual creative aspects of the job (you know, as would be expected by a job title like “online copywriter”) were taken away from us one by one in order to free up more of our time for menial tasks like checking the laundry labels of clothes to find the materials they were made of, or measuring the lengths of the belts that were for sale in the online store - information which it would have been easy for buyers to enter for us in the previous stage of the process, but which for some reason they had decided was not their job.
The boss followed a “divide and conquer” mentality in her leadership, attempting to pit employees against each other and raising completely non-qualified employees to a higher status. She micromanaged her team leaders’ work, insisting that she be part of every decision, no matter how small. When our AD got approval from her team leader to go on three weeks’ vacation in December to coincide with her kids’ vacations from school (all pre-accumulated vacation time from the overtime she had been working all year), the boss steamrolled the team leader’s decision and informed the AD that instead of three weeks in December, she could take one week off, next week. She refused to back down on this, initially even after being informed that doing things like that isn’t really legal under Finnish labor law. I think HR got involved with that one. She also gave me a verbal warning because I had left work early for a doctor’s appointment; when I told her that I had been going to these appointments every week since February and that I had cleared it with the former boss, she told me not to lie to her and to be grateful that it was only a verbal warning. My two colleagues testifying that I had, indeed, gotten an ok from our former boss was dismissed as “a pathetic example of comradery” (I don’t even know).
The final straw came when we three online copywriters were called into a “meeting” to “get our opinions on our task division”. Upon arriving in the boss’ room, it became apparent that there was no intention to get our opinions on anything; rather, we were simply informed that the last vestige of our actual creative writing process was being moved over to two other copywriters so that we would have more time to check the laundry labels of clothes. When we protested strongly that taking copywriter tasks away from copywriters without negotiating with them beforehand didn’t seem fair, the boss’ answer was: “Well, honestly, if you think you should be doing creative work, then maybe you should have applied for work in a creative agency.”
I handed in my resignation a week later to go to work in a creative agency. I got a very toothy smile and “Well CONGRATULATIONS on finding work more suited for you”. When one of my colleagues handed in her resignation a week after me, her smile apparently was a bit more frozen. When the third one of us handed in hers two weeks after that, she apparently started to sweat a little.
I caught the CEO pouring his cold coffee back in the community pot, swirling it around and pouring himself a new cup. When he saw me standing slack-jawed, he wasn’t the least bit embarrassed. “See?” he chuckled proudly, “I get hot coffee without wasting any!”
Within a day everyone in the company was getting to the coffee pot early, before Boss Man had his coffee. The receptionist would even nod and whisper to employees, “You’re fine. He hasn’t had his yet.”