Your "I can't do this anymore" moment at work

Parallel to the break-up thread, have you ever had a moment like that at work?

Mine, at my last job:
TPTB “temporarily suspended” (translation: permanently eliminated) our 3% annual cost of living increase on January 1. In early March, we all received letters spelling out exactly how tremendously proud of the staff they were and how grateful for our amazing work, and, oh, by the way, they’ve spent the last two months debating whether or not to give us what amounted to approximately a $ 0.23 per hour increase instead… presumably to show us exactly how much they value our work. They still hadn’t decided whether or not to actually do it, but they wanted us to know they were considering it.

I put in my resignation the next day.

At a trade show in Vegas I looked around at all my coworkers (whom I love) and watched them interacting with all these other people and I went outside to smoke and realized I had much more in common with the labor sitting outside loading trucks than the business people I was working with. It had always bothered me that I never finished college but I never realized just how much until that moment.

I quit my job and moved myself and my kids back in with my parents and am getting ready to finish a degree.

I was passed over for promotion. The site manager said that it was my performance wasn’t “noteworthy enough to get his attention”.

Said manager spent maybe five minutes in or near my department in an average week. Most of the time, he wandered aimlessly or sat in his office with the door closed. A co-worker and I were running the department - the job we had applied for - because the department manager was in the process of being fired. We were both declined promotion, even though we were functionally doing the job tasks of the position we applied for.

I took the first opportunity to leave. He was fired for gross incompetence shortly thereafter.

I had yet another BS session with my manager spewing a bunch of nonsense from pop business books. This is the same guy who spent most of his day alternating between travel sites on the internet and creating useless power points spewing nonsense from pop business books to send out to the rest of the managers.

He asked me to take the rest of the day off and think about what he was trying to accomplish. I went home, got online, and sent out my resume.

I’m moving out of state at the end of the month.

My former manager? They fired his ass a couple of weeks ago!

10 years ago I was making barely $20k. I asked my boss for a higher than normal raise considering my length of employment, my experience, and the quality of my work.

I was denied, based on revenue shortfalls and lack of profit, blah de blah.

She was the business manager, and we were putting together budget books for corporate. I suspect, but cannot prove, that she handed me these particular sheets for a reason…they were requests for higher than normal raises for two other employees.

To me, it was a slap in the face. I had been there longer than either of these two employees and handled a lot more responsibility than one of them.

I ended up finding this job about six months later, which paid more for less work.

At one job, I asked what it would take to get a raise instead of a bonus. They said I would have to be promoted, and laid out the steps it required to achieve it.

I worked really hard, and was even given a verbal test by my manager. I got the promotion after my manager had transferred. However, I did not get a raise!!! I got a very nice 8% bonus. :rolleyes: I marched into the new manager’s office, and slammed the door and raised all kinds of hell. “Nothing he could do” my ass.

I quit soon after that.

I worked at a restaurant with another young lady, who, while very charming, was possibly the worst employee in the world. She called in late, she called in sick, she left early, she went missing during the rush, she put her jobs onto other people, etc.

The restaurant was sold to another company and we were all told to just hang tight. No one was going to lose their jobs, but we shouldn’t expect any raises for a while.

A big shot from the new company came in one day when I was not there. He spent a couple of hours working with Princess Charming, and decided she merited a twenty-five-cent raise.

There was speculation that she’d given him a blow job, but I didn’t think so, because she hadn’t called me up asking me to finish it for her.

The ‘moment’ that did me in at work took about 18 months to unfold completely. It started with a reorganization wherein our corporate masters decided that there were more employees at my level in the hierarchy than they now deemed appropriate. Alas, I was not one of the people to survive the purge. I was granted the right to keep doing my old job at my new, lower (and lower-paid) level, while my managers negotiated with their bosses to restore my old title. “3acres, you just need to wait till this reorg settles down, you just need to wait till the corporation completes this merger, completes that merger, blah, blah, blah…be patient and we’ll fix this and we’ll even get you some help, because this is way too big a job for just one person.” Then they came and told me they’d been working on it: “yeah, we know what we said before, but this time we really meant it”, but, gee golly whiz, now they just didn’t have the budget: no help, no nothing.

So I told my boss I thought I’d see if I could transfer, since most jobs at my new, lower level were way easier. I put in a request that morning and while I was at lunch, she got a call from the organization that wanted me. There was a limit on how long my old organization could refuse to release me, and they took it to the very last day. The day before the transfer became effective, I found out they’d split my job into two jobs: one at my old, higher level and one at the level at which I was transferring out. After I transferred, the old district manager called the new district manager and told him that this transfer was somehow something I was doing to defraud the company and he wanted the new organization to force me to go back. My new boss, his boss, and I all got called on the carpet; the new district manager, to his credit, escalated the matter to his boss and my old district manager was told to back off. The funny thing is that I was a good worker and always got excellent reviews.

A few years later, when the company suggested early retirement would be preferable to layoffs for middle-aged workers I jumped at it. I haven’t worked a minute since then.

I was working as a file clerk for a prominent insurance company (hi, Snoopy!). Around 15 minutes before leaving time, I had been filing some papers in a bottom draw. As I stood up, I hit the side of my head on the file drawer that my Boss had left opened.

I wiped off my bleeding and swelling head and showed it to the Boss, explaining what had happened. Her response? “It doesn’t look too bad. You still have about 7 minutes. Why don’t you file the rest of the papers?”

I left, put in an insurance claim, got three months disability, and never went back.

Post dated cheque. See ya!


Now I’m not the type to walk out in the middle of a shift or anything, but I knew it was time to leave another job when I became somewhat fixated on the exit. It seemed whenever I would casually glance around the room my eyes were magnetically drawn to the exit. At that very moment, each time, into my head would pop the idea; “I could go right out that door, not look back, and be home in under 10 minutes!” After it had happened a half dozen times or so, over the course of just a few days, I handed in my notice.

I think I told this story before.

Big project at work. Long hours - nights, weekends - because of scope creep. My manager couldn’t say No, and guess who bore the brunt of it.

So we finish the project, hit all our deadlines, blah blah. We start work on phase two. I said, “Look, I ain’t spending 70 hours a week for three months like last time. Before we start, we are going to create a hard list of what the system will do and won’t do, and we aren’t going to change either list until implementation. OK?”

OK, and we spent a week with the users nailing down the requirements, including the list of Stuff We Are Not Including in This Release, Dammit. So I go back to my cube and begin work on the first deliverable, which is a mock up of the system. Lots of pretty screens, but hardly any logic behind them - all hard coding, just to give the look-and-feel to the users.

They loved it. The flow was exactly what they wanted, everything looked just as they expected, all was well. Then the Head Asshole said, “Well, gee, since you seem to be pretty much done with the system, I won’t sign off on this deliverable until you agree to add back all the functions we agreed would not be part of this release.”

And my fuckwit manager agreed to it. And when I mentioned that there was no way in hell we could hit the deadlines with all that extra work, he told me, “Well, you will just have to type faster.”

I went back to my desk. My hands were shaking, I was so angry. At that moment, the phone rang. A head hunter was wondering if I was interested in exploring other opportunites. I said Yes before he had a chance to finish the sentence.

This was a Thursday. It took a week and a half to do the interviews, drug screening, online test and reference checks. I accepted the offer on the following Thursday, and gave my notice that Friday. The bastards made me work the full four weeks after my notice, but that brought about one of the most satisfying moments of my working career.

It’s about 5:30pm of my last day. I am sitting in this boring meeting doing QA on a system that I know will not be done in time. I’ve already done my handover, with complete documentation of what I have done and what remains to be done. Finally I had had enough. I stood up and said, “As of about twenty minutes ago, I don’t work here. Good luck with your turnover.” My manager said in a snippy voice, “Sit down - we’re not done here.”

And I looked him flat in the eye and said, “What are you going to do - fire me?” and walked out.

I heard later that they didn’t make their deadline.

Regards,
Shodan

Years ago, I worked for a med-waste collection company. The owner paid all of his personal expenses out of the company accounts and quite often (like when he bought a $700K house) would overdraw the bank accounts. When he was printing up his extensions list for his phone, he asked me how long I planned on staying with the company, I told him “until you bounce my paycheck.”

About 2 years into my employment, I got pregnant, and as a high-risk pregnancy, was put on part-time duties. Part-time there consisted of 35 hours (instead of my usual 55 - 60) at the office and I would take home between 10 - 20 hours worth of other stuff each week. Since I was working “part-time” the owner decided I should get paid hourly instead of salaried, and so I filled out time sheets and included the work I was taking home – so I ended up making more than I would have otherwise. One Friday, my bank (I banked at the same place as the company) told me that my paycheck would not be covered. Monday, the owner tried to ask me to justify the number of hours I’d listed on my time sheet. I told him that he knew full well how many hours I was working and that my paycheck had bounced. He went into a lecture about how he believed I was padding my hours since I knew I would be taking maternity leave soon and needed extra money.

That, and actually not the bounced check, was the final straw. I lost my shit and am pretty sure I created new cuss words when I went off on him. I walked out the door and before I’d even gotten to my car, he had called me 6 times begging me to come back. It’s been 9 years and he has called me occasionally (when I have listed him as a reference for a job) to ask if I will come back to work for him. The answer is always “not until you get therapy.” He had a lot of issues.

Two moments that coincided.

I worked as a tour guide for a ‘wild west town’ which, unbeknownst to me, treated it’s employees as disposable tissue. I started there as a projectionist, but they began to demand that I literally be in two places at once (rewinding the film in the back of the theater -and- giving a speech about the history of the nickelodeon to the people in the -front- of the theater). When I pointed out the impossibilities thereof, I literally got cursed at, then moved to working the saloon.
About a week later, we hit the hottest day of the summer, and the owners decided to put free water out for anyone who wanted it. They then told me it was my unfriendly attitude that made people buy less soda and beer. The next day, when profits were back up, they made a point of singling me out and asking what I’d done to get profits up, expecting I’d say I’d mended my ways or some-such. When I said, “I didn’t do anything different.” (And bit off saying, "I also didn’t put out free water) I got a big scowl.
The next few weeks, to the surprise of -only- me, they started scheduling me hours that I’d already placed on reserve for my college classes. After two weeks of this (and no paychecks due to it), I finally called my friend who worked there and handed in my resignation that way. I’ve since learned that’s kinda how they get rid of anyone who won’t simply do whatever they say, no matter how illogical.

:smiley:

The one I mistakenly posted after my relationship one in the other thread.

  1. I was ‘assistant LAN administrator’ in addition to my other duties. Cow-orker was LAN Administrator. I did most of the actual work. We handled our own LANs, despite some issues with Corporate over it. Then, six of the eight people in the Corp LAN support area quit, including the manager. They move cow-orker to that area.

Less than a month later, I’m at a user conference giving a big presentation to 25 to 30 regional office people. Another co-worker, friend of the cow-orker, interrupts and reams me about in front of everyone about some problem with a regional office LAN that I have no knowledge of, having been at the conference all day. Seems cow-orker laid the blame on my doorstep.

Turned out that cow-orker was too busy and so had given the supervisor password to one of the helpdesk people, who promptly trashed the server. Cow-orker attempted to blame me to hide her complicity and violation of security standards.

One week later, cow-orker’s boss asks me if I am aware of any security violations. I lay out what happened. MORON then forwards the entire thing to cow-orker, with no header on it. Cow-orker responds with 3 page sysm (pre e-mail mainframe e-mail package) threatening my life, my health, my car, my personal life, threatens to destroy me in every way possible, make my career a living hell and my personal life a nightmare. That’s IN WRITING, folks! I complain to my director, who is a radical feminist. She tells me to “take it like a man and just put up with it” and they all refuse to do a damned thing to cow-orker because they claim they can’t afford to fire her.

I walked out the door that day. Should have sued.
Last IT Job, 2001: I was burned out. My company was going through monthy layoffs and everyone was being pressured to work 70+ hours a week to prove our worth. I noted that it wasn’t stopping them from laying anyone off. They sent someone they knew I had high regard for to tell me I needed to work more hours. They laid him off the next week. Yup, message recieved, and it isn’t the one you thought it was. In addition, my idiot manager had messed up a database design that I should have done, but he insisted on doing because it would look good on his resume, then overpromised delivery in three months when my estimate was about a year!

Then I had a major, stress related back injury. I was at my 39th birthday, laid up, high blood pressure, burned out, stressed out, freaked out. I knew that if I continued that path, I would be dead before my 40th birthday.

The week after my birthday, I only worked 35 hours because I had an MRI, a doctor’s appointment and two chiropractor appointments. I was in a lot of pain and on a lot of pain meds. I foolishly snapped at a co-worker who complained that I wasn’t working hard enough on one of the three major projects I was assigned.

I was told that I would not be allowed to go to the doctor anymore. That I would be required to work every single day, weekends and holidays included, until the end of the year. That I wouldn’t be allowed to take any vacation or sick time. I was given a bullshit written warning for snapping at my co-worker and for having gone home on the 4th of July “without telling anyone”, which was patently false. The written warning cost me my quarterly bonus of around $1500. Even the co-worker I had snapped at felt that they were using the situation as an excuse to get rid of me and that it didn’t warrant any kind of warning.

I said: “I can’t do this anymore. I’ll be dead.”

I put in a month’s notice in late July. My last day was August 21, 2001. About three weeks before 9-11. When I went to look for another job about six months later, there weren’t any. Then I went into the whole marriage to a psycho thing and well, seven years later my skills are antiquated and no one will touch me in IT.

I think it was the second week of being in Mexico City with no one that could speak spanish to translate for me. I put up with it for a while longer - just long enough to get back, get my resume out, have an interview, and accept a new job. I dropped off my PC in the office of the VP that said I would just have to deal with my job there & left. The look on his face was priceless.

My first post-college job involved working for attorneys to put out regular updates to these huge employee benefits manuals that the company produced. The work went in cycles, with a lot of overtime being required during update periods. I knew this going in, and was fine with it, but accepted the job based on being told that Saturday work would be very rare. Cut to six months later, when for the fifth week in a row I’m being told on Friday afternoon that I need to come in the next morning “for a few hours” to help get the update out. Fine, whatever. That wasn’t the last straw. The last straw was when the attorney who kicked up a fuss and made a huge deal about everyone being there exactly on time at 8:30 am so that we could get this thing out the door, because on previous weeks people had been late and she was really sick of that, so could everyone PLEASE make sure to be here ON TIME at 8:30 PRECISELY?.. Yeah, that attorney rolled through the door, with no explanation or apology whatsoever, at 11:00 that Saturday. I had hoped to be completely done by that point. I had afternoon plans with my boyfriend. I was pissed.

I went home that day and started surfing Monster.com looking for a new job, found one about a month later, and quit even though my boss pleaded with me to stay and offered me a $4/hr raise. I still don’t regret it. That place was a hellhole.

I had moved to a quite famous company, and was a manager on a project that was not going all that well. About 7 months after I started I went to my first performance appraisal meeting at this company. At my old company I was heavily involved in setting policy. In this one, the decisions were made without a lot of information, and most of the meeting (which went until 9 pm) was involved in selecting the one person sacrificed to the gods of evaluation with an unsatisfactory rating. I went immediately from there to the cube of the director of another group, looking for a transfer. When it was not allowed (which was against company policy) I was out the door, but I was heading that way in any case.

It was a good move - the project is a famous disaster, and no one on it profited.

I’ll let you know monday when my bipolar boss returns from vacation. It’s been so nice the past two weeks. I can tell she is already going to fly off the handle because she gave some confusing and conflicting instructions to her admin to give to me and now we don’t know if she wants us to have a meeting or not. Now in normal human being world, this would be resolved with a simple “no, go ahead and cancel it.” But in Crazyworld if there’s no meeting and she wanted one, she goes crazy. If there is a meeting and she didn’t want one, she goes crazy.
Anyway I’ve already been interviewing and doig lunches with my network so hopefully I’ll have something new soon.

Ahh - the Navy project, eh?