Silliest reason you’ve seen someone quit a job over

In My Humble Opinion
21

An acquaintance quit a 9-5 job when he discovered that he was expected at 9 a.m. every day. He talked about it like that was the most unreasonable expectation in the world. He went around the group of us he was talking to asking if we could do that, and he was flabbergasted to learn everyone already did this, and that this was a common work expectation. He seriously thought this was impossible and was visibly flustered to find it wasn’t.

And at Amazon, people quit over anything. I’ve seen people quit because they changed the vending machines, or discovered some of the books had swear words, or when they started requiring masks.

22

My sister basically quit her job working administration at a school district right when the pandemic started because she immediately claimed she had COVID-19 and since it was almost impossible to get a test in those early days they just gave her her “20 day paid COVID leave” no questions asked. Of course she didn’t actually have COVID she just wanted time off. So the 20 days off come and go and they expect her to go back to work, but she doesn’t claiming she still has “fever symptoms” so they allow her sick leave and she’s uses all 2 months of her sick leave. Now she’s all out of leave and expected to come back to work and she refused because she claimed she felt “unsafe” going to work. So they basically threaten to fire her, and there’s a massive back and forth for months where she still isn’t working or getting paid and eventually six months after this all started she goes back to work, except now she has significantly lower seniority because technically she had been fired and rehired.

And why did she do all this? Because her boyfriend got laid off because of COVID and she enjoyed being able to hangout in the afternoon drinking with him again like they did back in college.

23

Was he under the impression that the hotel hadn’t been telling the government all along how much he’d been making?

24

This story isn’t about quitting the job because the job/manager/company ticked them off…

I knew a guy who quit to run for local office (school board, I think?). He was in a very low level clerical job, so not a HUGE loss, in terms of employment. But the elected office likely wasn’t a full-time paying job. Anyway, he didn’t win. What a maroon.

25

Wouldn’t that violate bellhop-client privilege?

26

I quit a job to become a freelance writer. Twice.

Top that.

27

I’m glad none of my former work-mates post here. This thread would crash the server!

28

She may have been lying, but there was a woman who came to work for one of our agencies for a few months, and then quit. She probably just found it too stressful and didn’t want to say so. What she did say to HR was that she “thought the job would be good for her karma, but now [she] realized it wasn’t.”

29

Back in the mid-90s at a small (~50 people) software vendor, we were just getting on the web. One of the guys in engineering had thrown up a static web page served from the mainframe just so we had a web presence. Marketing finally woke up, wanted to put up a real website. I ran our DNS, so Sr. VP of Marketing comes by my office, asks me to change DNS entry. Sure, I change it, send email to IT manager, who was out of town (no cell phones, mobile email, text, remember–1990s).

Yon manager gets back the next day, and he’s PISSED. He comes in my office ranting and raving; I point out gently that a Sr. VP kind of outranks this kid who only inherited his role because his boss quit (there’s another story there, but it’ll keep), but he’s obdurate that somehow I overstepped my authority in making the change. It’s not like he was going to argue with the Sr. VP! Eventually he stomps out.

A few hours later I go to do something that requires privileges, and I’m locked out. Check a few more things, and yep, he’s pulled all my privileges.

Now, at this stage of the game, I’m the most senior member of the technical staff (I had the second-longest tenure of anyone there, behind the executive admin), and am supporting 40% of our revenue single-handedly–stable, mature products, so that’s not really that impressive, but is still something the company is kind of interested in continuing.

My manager is also the young idiot’s manager, so I fetch him and he calls the idiot into my office. Of course it was a much longer conversation, but the climax went like this:
Manager: Put back his privileges.
Idiot: I’ll walk out this door before I do that!
Manager: Bye then.

And that was it: he was gone.

Even weirder, we later found a stash of random hardware of no particular value that he had hidden in his IT storeroom. The most significant item was a case of parallel-port (or was it serial-port?) network cards. Yeah, those were a thing, but even at that point, were on their way out. Nobody had any idea why he would have had them, or why he had them stashed. Unless–and this just occurred to me this minute, more than a quarter-century later–he’d ordered them by mistake and was hiding them so he didn’t have to admit it.

Anyway, the whole incident was stupid and ugly and still makes me SMH. Ego over brains.

30

I have no idea. I guess he must have. It was one of those things you don’t forget hearing.

31

I kinda want to know what he thought about W2s.

32

Aren’t those German Warplanes from WWII?

33

I did have a neighbor who was losing his house. I didn’t really like him too much, he’d get drunk and wander over and want to talk, often while I had friends or other company over.

So, he’s losing his house, and he’s upset that it’s not fair that he lost his job. The reason that he lost his job is that he liked going to concerts rather than work, and he didn’t understand why they didn’t understand that.

34

I was at a company that was forever stuck in a turbulent transition period, having merged multiple major players from related industries together into a big…mess. Every 6 months we’d have a new set of VPs and the CEO position changed hands about 3 times within 5 years. My group lost about 80% of its engineers one dark day (the day after a holiday celebration, where they were all present and had no idea of their fate).

Two or three of my colleagues either quit or were fired under various circumstances. I think the most interesting was a guy who was openly fighting (more like loudly arguing) with another manager, in front of the sales team and customer partners, at a sales conference. This guy was always bad mouthing others, sure his was the smarter / better way to do things. Ultimately he and the company did not agree. Although he left under “silly” circumstances, everybody else, and I mean everybody I knew there, also had to leave, and each had their own special circumstances.

I’d like to hear more about this. From what I’ve learned, there are two “classes” of Amazon employees: The very highly paid, highly stressed white collar types, and the underpaid, highly stressed warehouse worker / driver types. Who is doing the quitting?

35

My guess is that he was used to getting a paper check and cashing it, perhaps a lien on his bank account. Or unbanked by choice, trying to avoid outstanding judgements. It’s not as much the government knows how much I’m making vs the government can get their hands on my money

36

I had a friend in college who worked for Hooters for one day and then quit. The reason? She only wanted the tank top shirt they wear, and working there was the only way to get one

37

Don’t they sell the Hooters shirts? It does take all kinds

38

Well, it’s kept for a while. Spill! Pretty please.

39

I’ve known quite a lot of developers who have quit because a project they were going to work on required them to work in another development language or even just an API.
And I don’t mean moving to an obsolete language, nor do I mean needing to switch forever.

I think part of it was trying to pressure the organization to switch to their preferred language / API, but regardless, they followed through on it.

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If I’m honest with myself, I’ve probably quit over “embarrassment”, or lost face, more than once.
Like, if a colleague criticizes me in front of others, and I don’t defend myself well enough in the moment (as is often the case, because such attacks usually come when your guard is down), it weighs heavy on my mind. Especially if the criticism was unwarranted.

I’m better at handling it than I used to be. Nowadays at the least I will ask the person back for a one-on-one chat later. Because even if I didn’t respond well in the moment, I can still take the opportunity to explain what they may be wrong about and why they shouldn’t have drawn attention in that way.

40

Here in Canada, all beer bottles and cans carry a deposit, to ensure they are returned. And indeed, most are. Everybody pays the deposit, from the average consumer to the corner bar to the fancy restaurant. And they get it refunded, when they return their bottles and cans. Bottles are returned to the brewer, where they are washed, sterilized, and refilled by the brewer.

I worked in a warehouse, which was actually a clearing house, where we sorted bottles of various shapes and labelling, to return to the brewer that they belonged to. Mostly, these came from pubs and restaurants, where the bar staff would throw any empty bottle into a case; then, when it was full, move on to the next empty case. These cases full of various empties would be brought to us, to be sorted, and moved to their respective brewer.

The warehouse ran two shifts: day (0630 to 1500), and night (1530 to midnight). I was on night. We moved about 10,000 cases a night. Bottles were sorted by about three or four women, then put on a conveyor, where three guys would take them off and stack them on the appropriate pallet. I was one of these guys, stacking between 3000 to 3500 cases a night. If you do the math, at 16 lbs per case of empties (yep, that’s what a case of 24 empty beer bottles weighs), it indicates that I physically handled 24 tons of bottles per night. I was in the best shape of my life, working that job. Great exercise.

But apparently not for everybody. One of the stackers that was hired the same time as I was, quit after a week. Why? The job interfered with his attendance at the gym every evening. He couldn’t get his daily workout in!

Um, buddy? This job is a workout, and they pay you to do it. Why would you go to a gym for a workout, when you can get a workout at … well, work?