Most of us have had at least one terrible job that made us daydream about throwing our hands up in the air, walking out of work, and never returning. Maybe you've been in a job where you tried being upbeat despite actually being absolutely miserable. Or maybe you've broken your back to please a boss who never gave you the recognition you deserved. Whatever your situation, if you've ever had a job that made you want to scream, you likely fantasized about dramatically quitting with no notice. Well, there are some people who've turned that dream into a reality. Below, real people detail their stories of quitting on the spot.
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#1 People Like You
My boss went into a tirade about something that wasn’t my fault and yelled, “People like you are expendable pieces in this company and I can replace you tomorrow if I wanted to." About 80 percent of the engineers quit the next day. They simply didn’t show up. Including me. From what I know, the entire project folded because my now ex-boss couldn’t find people to replace us because no one wanted to do the kind of work he was looking for at the salary he was paying. Karma.
#2 Grocer's Last Stand
I had worked at a grocery store for about three years before moving from Courtesy Clerk (basically bagger and custodian) to Helper Clerk (stocker). The grocery department wanted to save costs on personnel, but they couldn't fire anyone or lay anyone off due to the union. So, they started cutting back hours and told us, "When someone quits, everyone else will get more hours." We were supposed to be 40-hour employees and they had us at 32 hours. Two people quit and we were down to 24 hours. A third person quit, and we were down to 16 hours. Eventually, we all quit.
#3 Family Affair
My company canceled all raises and bonuses for everyone except the CEO, his wife (who was HR), and his son (who was the utterly useless IT guy). They did this the year where we had record profits and brought in almost double the clients. On top of the canceled raises, they announced they weren't looking to hire more people when they were already overwhelmed. The good part about it was when the majority of us quit, they lost almost every single client shortly afterward to their competitors and the company is now defunct.
#4 Series Finale
Many years ago, in high school, I worked at a movie theater. The place was pretty poorly run from the moment I started there. We were never paid on time and management was basically a bunch of lazy guys who sat in the office talking all day and never actually did any managing. It would have been hard for things to have gotten any worse, but after a couple of months, they brought in new management who seemed to want to make it their personal mission to run the theater as poorly as possible.
They first decided to implement a new policy requiring all projectionists to wear ties, despite the fact that projectionists are never seen by the public. Management refused to reconsider the policy and every single projectionist quit as a result. They then decided that the door people (of which I was one), who were always scheduled seven days a week, would now only be scheduled on the weekends. As a result, almost every single door person quit, including me.
After that, they started imposing impossible cleanliness standards on concessions, like requiring them to scrape popcorn kernels out of the cracks in the trim behind the popcorn machines. Concessions was there until 5 a.m. every night trying to meet their standards. Most of the concession people quit as a result. By my count, the theater went from a staff of about fifty to a staff of about twelve in three weeks.
#5 Beat You To It
A few years ago, word slipped out at my company that the entire accounting department was being replaced. Of course, no one in accounting had any idea that they were being ousted until they caught word of it through the grapevine, so instead of waiting until they heard the news from management, the whole department decided to hand in their resignation letters all at once. Talk about a mass exodus.
#6 I Didn't Know This Was How That Worked
When I was 16, I worked in the concessions stand at a minor league baseball stadium. Minimum wage at the time was $5.15/hour and this job paid $8. My shifts were always in the evenings, so it was perfect work for a high school student. The only bad thing about the job was that our management was absolutely terrible. The main manager would throw toddler tantrums about once a shift over things like not ordering enough of a specific drink (she did the ordering) or running out of pre-cut lemons for tea.
One night, the stadium was running a promotion and it was incredibly busy. There was easily two or three times the normal volume of customers. We were all working our butts off handling multiple roles each with absolutely no downtime. Although we all cleaned as we worked, nobody had a chance to do thorough cleaning for the whole shift because of the never-ending hoard of hungry baseball fans. The manager showed up three to four hours late, as per usual, and threw the biggest tantrum ever over the unswept floor.
Finally, she announced, "Listen up, you lazy freaks! Minimal work gets minimal pay. Everybody is being paid minimum wage tonight because you slobs won't clean up anything." Both of our bartenders and the bar back quit on the spot, which caused a chain reaction. We all took off our aprons and hats to leave. She blocked the exit and was red in the face from screaming, so one of the cooks climbed out of one of the big serving windows where we served customers, so I did the same and most of the staff followed. This all happened in front of like 200 customers. Of course, my final paycheck "got lost" so I had to file a wage theft complaint.
#7 Nope, Not Happening
I was hired by the new owners to replace the existing manager, who I thought was moving on to another job. So, after about four days, I asked him where he was headed. He just looked blankly at me and said, "I'm not going anywhere. I'm just training you as the assistant manager, right?" The look I gave him must have been a great tip-off because he got up and walked into the new owner's office.
After about 30 seconds, they were screaming at each other. Then, he just stormed out of the office, grabbed his things, and left. Over the next few days, I tried to calm things down with the employees. They didn't blame me, but they had a very bad taste in their mouths about the new ownership. Over about a 10-day time period, my team shrank from 15 people down to three. I hobbled along with that the best I could while we tried to hire new people, but the new owners were offering such terrible pay that we had trouble finding people.
After three months or so of that, I started to get fed up and overwhelmed with my workload. Even with two new hires, we were still only a team of five people, but management expected the same output as a 15-person team. So after my third day in a row of being berated for missing a deadline that was impossible to make, I quit.
#8 Bonuses for No One
I worked at a company where we were all promised a bonus at the end of each year. One year, management told everyone they would not be giving out bonuses due to the low company performance. The company had a successful year. The boss was in the middle of building a multi-million dollar home and his brother-in-law manager just bought a nice home that year. They were clearly filling their pockets with our bonus money. I quit on the spot. Many others quit soon after.
#9 Mass Exodus x2
At my previous (and final) employer, they did a round of layoffs. Now, the company was in Europe, so you need a reason to fire people with a contract, and they said it was for economic reasons. So naturally, like rats on a ship, a massive exodus began. Everyone was looking for a new job. Management didn't expect this, so a month and a half later, they released their Christmas speech, calling for "fresh young talent," and asking people to "stick together like family" when they fired 30 people just six weeks ago. Come January, the second wave of the exodus was well underway.
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#10 Try to Ink Your Way Out Of This One
The owner of the tattoo shop that I worked at hired someone to ‘revamp’ the shop. I had been managing for three years at this point and he just expected me to teach him how to do my job so that he could replace me. That guy had no clue how to run a shop. Plus, the owner had been embezzling money and had blamed the longest-standing artist at the shop for lost revenue. She accused him of stealing. I did the books. No one was stealing. She was nuts. Anyway, all of the artists and I mutinied and left at the same time. With that idiot at the helm, the shop didn’t last a year after we all left.
#11 Fast Food Drama
I worked at a well-known fast food restaurant and one of the regional managers practically ran the place into the ground. Before he worked there, almost everyone liked their job as it was a good environment. A few months after the regional manager started, though, a couple of people quit because of him. One day, I came in just before my 9 a.m. shift to help open the store. When I parked my car, he came out to my car and told me, “Hey, I need you to start early because the three openers just quit on me." We managed to get the store open and had a number of people from other stores help run the place until the people from the next shift came in.
A couple of days later, I heard the full story of what happened from a coworker. The regional manager was supposed to be at the store at 7 a.m. or so, and the openers 30 minutes later. He didn’t actually show up until 8:30 a.m., so when the openers saw the regional manager roll in late, they knew it was going to be an awful shift. They all decided that they were done with him and just quit right there. So at least six people quit because of him by the time I left the place. Probably more left after me.
#12 No Coffee? No Workie.
We stopped providing free coffee for our employees and were so cheap that we actually sold our coffee maker. As a result, a couple of people bought their own coffee makers to put in their cubicles. That tripped the breakers several times so it was very disruptive since our computers would shut down. Management then said no coffee allowed in the office at all. We lost four very good engineers.
#13 Poor Business Model
I used to be in landscape construction. The cheap owner kept taking bigger and bigger projects on while never hiring more help. We were all overwhelmed, stressed, and anxious. One of our foremen quit and I followed suit a few days later. Two more guys quit the next day. He was down to three guys for the obscene amount of work he wanted to do. Of course, everything got way behind schedule but he was convinced it wasn't his fault at all. He went out of business less than a year later.
#14 If You Don't Like It, Get Out
I was working for a very large IT company and we had a meeting with our new director and the vice president. They were tired of people complaining about things that should be changed and about how they managed people. So, they sat 200 of us down and the director said that she no longer wanted to hear complaints about how she was running things and that if we didn't like it, then we could get out. She said there was no way that we'd leave such a great job. Well, a mass exodus ensued and close to 50 people left within two months.
#15 The Final Straw
New management took over at one of my old jobs and the person in charge was just absolutely awful. She stripped me of a promotion that the previous manager had given me that I worked really, really hard for and put trainees on shifts alone during the holiday season. We couldn't take it. About five or so of us got together, decided it was the last straw, and quit together.
#16 Unfair Restructuring
One of my old jobs restructured the way we were paid. What I used to do involved about 40 percent client interaction, 20 percent team/coworker interaction, and 40 percent paperwork and case coordination. Based on what we do, that means only 40 percent of our time is technically billable, and there are really sticky rules for what is and isn't billable. So, logically, we were being paid on a salary model. Then, management said we could only make money for time that is actually billable. A quarter of the department quit. Two of us on the same day.
#17 Vacation Free
The owners of a restaurant I worked at retired and they were literally the greatest people—both very sweet. They kept the place running like a well-oiled machine and they took pretty good care of us and their restaurant. When they left, they gave the restaurant over to their nephew who, at the time, was a busboy/waiter. He was kind of standoffish and didn’t really interact with us too much. He was a bit lazy at times, but for the most part, he did his job and went home. He seemed okay until he got the power of being the owner.
On the day he was left in charge, he fired four people, including two of the four cooks, and two of the three dishwashers. This was on a Friday night just before the dinner rush, all because he ‘didn’t like their attitude’. He refused to allow people to take vacation that they’d already requested and had confirmed by the original owners and would change the schedule randomly without telling anyone, then scream at people when they missed a shift or came in late because of it.
He refused to replenish the kitchen until we were already out of products, then take forever to put in the orders. He showed up randomly and would drink at the bar, for free because he was the owner, and then bring in all of his buddies to drink with him. Together, they’d get way out of hand and grab at women and try to start fights. Within the first month of him being the owner, over half the staff had quit, usually walking out in the middle of their shifts.
After the cook, this big dude who usually kept the kitchen laughing and running at a decent pace, started crying in the middle of his shift after the boss yelled at him for being to slow and making ‘slop’, the rest of us walked out. Four months later, the place was closed. His aunt and uncle were absolutely furious and devastated that he had run the business they’d built up for over 30 years into the ground.
#18 Do You See What I See?
I worked at a data company. The guys in the sales department messed around all day. They'd literally be in the parking lot fooling around all day. When it came to handling accounts and clients, they would frequently give away free accounts in order to retain customers (and make their own sales numbers look good). Somehow, they got away with it. Meanwhile, there were dozens of programmers and database guys working tirelessly behind the scenes to integrate a bunch of complicated data and make it easy to access via the website.
One year, the yearly holiday announcements came around and upper management decided to send the entire sales team to Hawaii for an all-expenses-paid vacation. When the furious developers asked why they were only taking the sales team, the confused CEO said, "Well, I guess we could ask the sales team to pick one person from each department who helped them the most this year and take them, too." The programmers, engineer, and database employees were absolutely livid and walked out. Gee, I wonder why the company tanked!
#19 You Want Me To Do What?
Several years ago, I worked in a mental health center. We worked primarily with kids. It was time for the center to renew their certification. Instead of keeping up with everything that needed to be done over the course of five years, the proper procedures were ignored. In the months before recertification, the administration made us sit through a ridiculous amount of training on things that would have been covered in training, such as laws, etc.
Then came our paperwork. Our center encouraged us to do things that aren’t exactly covered by Medicaid or approved through certification. For example, taking kids to the park isn’t allowed, but guess where they instructed us to take these kids so that they didn’t disturb the therapists who were working? I had to go back and edit five months worth of documents to get rid of the evidence. The kicker was that bathrooms were supposed to have a log of when it was cleaned. An administrator perfectly forged the signatures of multiple employees. I don’t think they would have went through that trouble just for a bathroom log. What else were they forging our signatures on? The potential risk of being charged with Medicaid fraud was too high for me. I quit.
#20 Not The "Right Fit"
A school district I sometimes sub in had a big round of hiring. A bunch of building substitutes applied for the jobs, and only about half of them got interviews. Of the subs that got interviews (myself included), the only one who made it past the screening interview was a relative of a current employee. The rest of us subs weren't the "right fit." The real reason is that there's a substitute shortage and they don't want to lose any of us. Not a single sub (who isn't a relative) was hired for one of over a dozen teaching jobs. Many of the building subs aren't coming back next year.
#21 Gone On The Spot
I was working at a local restaurant that had recently changed owners. Multiple issues came up, like difficulty getting holidays for important things, hiring people to work in the kitchen who were bad at their job but cheap, buying cheaper ingredients, etc. Things were tense and after a few months, the employees were really just hanging in there because we liked each other. There one employee in particular who was a young mother. She waited tables there and really needed the job and could not afford to be between jobs.
One night, she got a call that her grandmother was not expected to make it through the night. She asked to have the rest of her shift off and start her three-hour drive to Dallas. The manager said of course but the owner said no. The manager and owner got into a verbal fight in the back and the waitress ended up pleading her case, crying. The manager said that if the owner wouldn't let her go, he was done. The owner ended up firing them both on the spot. Within the next 15 minutes, everyone ended up walking out of the building.
#22 Her Way Or The Highway
I used to work at a grocery store. We had a manager who was hired to run the store and when his numbers were satisfactory enough, they would let him franchise it. So a year later, this guy was doing everything he could to make the store run and look wonderful. Out of nowhere, he was told they were putting in a franchisee bid and told him that if he wants it, he can have it. He bid, but so did one of the District Managers sons, and he got it.
The original manager is, of course, distraught but accepted to stay as the grocery manager. Fast forward and the new franchisee gets fired for not following regulations. They do the franchisee bid a second time and tell the original manager the same thing: he can have it if he wants it. They gave the store to another person a second time! I felt bad for the guy because all of his hard work and how well he treated me. The store started going downhill, causing a lot of change and a lot of upset people. I was the first one to walk out as all of the hours were cut. I found out 14 more people quit within a month.
#23 What A Wild Ride
I’m the manager of a retail store and I had found out a cashier was stealing products by scamming reward card benefits. I came up with a detailed incident report to present to this employee and I was under the assumption that it was just her. After I confronted her, in a reasonable manner, she freaked out and got really angry and quit on the spot. She was using fake accounts instead of using a customers reward card to get herself points and redeem them for products and gift cards. So the customers weren’t getting the points they were owed, which is a headache for me if they notice and complain.
The next day, every other cashier called me and quit and after thinking what the heck just happened, I found out they were all in on it and were using this lady’s fake card on their shifts too. So I was down four cashiers and I had one left. This same day my last remaining cashier disappeared for twenty minutes. Turns out, she was in the bathroom with another employee doing the nasty. She quit because her dad is a police officer and didn't want to find out she got fired for this. The guy also quit because he "didn’t care and was moving anyway." I was down to literally managers only.
Unsplash/Two Paddles Axe and Leatherwork
#24 It's Getting Hot In Here
The owner of a company I worked for left his son in charge. This guy was an absolute moron. He decided that the company didn't make him enough money and started to implement cost-cutting measures that were extremely dangerous. To save money, he thought it was a good idea to completely turn off the A/C in the building. We were essentially working in a sauna. It was so hot that I thought about quitting multiple times.
#25 That's Messed Up
I worked in construction. The chief engineer was upset that the job was taking slower than usual because of the safety procedures. He asked us to cut corners, and because of this, we had a few incidents. Just a week before, one guy was seriously hurt. Our chief engineer was still pretty mad about the delays, so he got everyone together in a room to say, "You're not here to do your jobs. You're here to do what I tell you to do." Twenty people quit on the spot.
#26 Sorry, We Were Just Kidding - Come Back
They tried to make us do three 16-hour shifts in a row. This was years ago when I was a basic box mover in a courier company. They cut their staff in half and still expected us to do the same amount of work. It got so bad that people from head office came down to supervise us at the end of each shift. We stopped taking any breaks and worked well past our hours without overtime.
The second day they were there, our immediate supervisor of our team (about 10 of us) asked for the night off next week (Christmas Eve as most of us had family) and the bosses refused. We all quit. Their entire workforce quit in less than ten minutes. There were three people in the office that morning when 300 of us walked out. Most of the other workers were pretty disgusted in how they treated us—enough to pack in their jobs. They called within an hour and offered us all pay raises.
#27 Poor Business Model
I worked at Sears when I was in high school and throughout my first years of college. I worked in a department that was commission-based. A new manager took over, and she'd been managing another department but they cut out our specific department manager and gave her this department as well. Everyone loved the old manager and hated the new one, but it is what it is, and she didn't spend a ton of time with us.
The line was crossed, though, when she started requiring us to come in on Sundays at 4 a.m. until open, twice a month (or whenever promos went on, which was usually two to three times a month) to write, print, and put up all of the promo tags and rearrange what needed to be moved. They had specific people to do this kind of thing for the whole store, but they asked commission-based employees to do it instead. It lasted about a month before people started quitting. I personally didn't mind it, the cool assistant manager brought donuts and let us blast music and I liked my co-workers, but for the people who did this job full time, it was a nightmare.
#28 Good Luck On Your Vacation
The company consistently outpaced competing firms and found itself emerging as one of the industry-leading agencies. This was also a California tech firm, so shorts, flip flops, and drinks at lunch were all rather common. But we were rapidly growing, and the atmosphere and location made us a hot ticket for talent. Anyway, the CFO and CMO cashed out and the CEO decided to totally remodel the company by making it far more corporate. On top of all of this, they implemented unattainable goals and removed our work from home policy. The final straw was when they removed our rather generous vacation policy and replaced it with "unlimited vacation," which was a facade for, "You can take as much vacation as you want if we approve it." Like 1/4th of the company quit and immediately landed better jobs. Also, profits tanked.
#29 Conflicting Policies
Our boss had a meeting and announced a new policy that all salaried employees had to work a minimum of 45 billable hours per week because of the increased project load we had. I pointed out to a few coworkers that our employment contracts specified 37.5 hours per week, and that I would be adhering to that policy. Well, about a week later I was laid off due to "lack of projects." I was happy to go, and at least two others left voluntarily within the week. The job I found next was much better, and wasn't run by someone quite so clueless about how to treat people.
#30 Remove The Lifeline
I worked at a deep underground mine. The mine had always had issues due to the geology wanting to collapse. Think lumps of rock falling the size of houses. The geotechnical engineers stated that the mine was not, in their opinion, safe. Management disagreed. At the same time, the mine had no serviceable rescue chambers (little steel boxes that are your lifeline when things go wrong). Then, mine rescue was abandoned (the only people who can get you out when the worst happens). Needless to say, not many employees stayed on after that.
#31 Shady Business
For me it wasn't what happened, but what didn't happen. We were making only about $2 above minimum wage to do tech support for a web-based startup. A college degree was required for the position, so we all had large amounts to pay off in student loans, but we weren't really making enough to pay them off and still pay for rent, groceries, and other life expenses. Four of us had other part-time jobs in addition to this full-time, 40-hour/week position because we couldn't survive otherwise.
Every other position in the company was being paid more, so we didn't exactly feel valued. We got sick of this and were talking with each other about how abysmal the pay was. We also didn't get any bonuses and there was pretty little momentum for moving up in the company. So at our next team meeting, we asked our supervisor if we could discuss our pay grade and the opportunity for a raise.
We had all started at the same time, during a very busy time of the company as it was undergoing a platform transition, and there were no higher members on our team aside from our supervisor. We felt like we had all put in good work and deserved equal recognition. Our supervisor flipped out at us, saying that we should never talk about our compensation with any coworkers, and that we could potentially get a raise in a year or so but that our inability to pay expenses wasn't the company's concern. So we all found other jobs and quit within the next two months, leaving them to start over with a brand new staff during the busiest season of the year.
#32 Becky
I worked at a discount store and it wasn' that bad at first, until one of our night managers quit and was replaced with, well, let's call her Becky. Becky seemed nice at first but then we all started to notice her changing a lot of things around the store. People on the night crew got moved to the day, she gave people weird orders, and most of the time she wouldn't even be at the front when we needed her. She used to keep her phone on her all the time and she was always on the phone with her partner, who happened to be a manager from a neighboring store.
One day, someone stole a box of candy from the store and she went out there and got into a fist fight with them. You're not supposed to go after a customer like that even if they did steal! So Becky came in and we weren't really sure what to say or do, so we all just looked away and went back to work. After that, she acted really weird. She claimed we were not doing our jobs. What ended up making pretty much the whole night crew quit was when Becky started getting grabby with one of our younger cashiers. She tried to ignore it for a bit, but one day Becky tried to get the cashier in her car to take her home since she didn't have a ride, and the girl wasn't comfortable with it. She ended up calling me to come get her. She rejected Becky's approaches, so Becky fired her. That was the last straw for everyone and most of us quit within the month.
#33 Intentional Misunderstanding
I used to work at a McDonald's, and we had a terrible manager who didn't like a lot of people working there. Everyone else disliked him too, but no one wanted to call him out or quit. I was the first to do it because I requested two weeks off in August of that year about three months in advance. When August came around, he had my schedule set up for all of August off except for those specific two weeks. There was no way that he could have misinterpreted my request. When I got my schedule, I stormed into the restaurant, called him out on everything and then quit on the spot. About two weeks after that, I heard from one of my work friends that five other people had enough and quit as well. I kind of felt good to be the first.
#34 Hug Free Zone
My girlfriend at the time was working at the same company that I was and got fired because she had given me a hug on my birthday and she was leaving for the day. The owners of the store spoke to us a couple of weeks prior to the incident about flirting in the store, but we listened to them and apologized and stopped the flirting. So she got fired and left and they called me to the back to talk to me about why they did it. I told them that they were in the wrong and that I wouldn't close the store that night. So I walked out and met up with her and another girl that worked there. The other girl's boyfriend was still on the clock and left for his lunch to meet up with the three of us. He called during his break and told them that he wasn't coming back and then his girlfriend did the same thing. It's a small store, but they lost their entire staff in the span of 30 minutes.
#35 Read The Fine Print
I worked in a call center for three months in the United Kingdom. It was alright but something was off. We were calling random places on the system, asking for their name, confirming the address of their company, and what type of establishment it was. We also noticed that the pay was lower than what was originally stated. Turns out they had hired us with the lie of full-time work but on the contracts, in very small print, it said that the job was an apprenticeship for public service, meaning they could pay us a lot less.
#36 Doesn't All Add Up
I worked at a very small nonprofit. It was the kind of place that doesn't pay a living wage but routinely asks all of the employees to donate and to invite their families and friends to fundraisers to have them donate. It got out that the executive director, who never showed up and falsified her time cards, was making almost $100,000 (10% of the entire annual budget) a year, and on top of that, had finagled a $10,000 annual car allowance. She drove a Lexus. She also hand-picked every board member and deemed the monthly meetings closed to the employees.
#37 Two Week Notice Effective Immediately
I worked at McDonald's back in high school. I was taking off for college at the end of the summer and put my two-week notice in so that I could get August off and actually enjoy it before I had to move away for school. The store manager decided to just not put me on the schedule anymore, which I discovered on the last weekend that I was in for work. So, instead of having those two weeks, I was just done.
I decided, at lunch rush that day, that if they weren't going to honor the notice, that I wasn't going to honor the eight-hour shift. At about noonish, right after the breakfast crew had left, I was done. The thing was, most of the crew that day were also going off to college and saw what the manager had done. So they left with me. In the middle of lunch rush, the store was down to the lady who worked drive-thru and the manager on duty. That's it. The rest of us walked out. Two cashiers and three grill workers.
#38 Nothing To See Here
ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) had contacted an in-house temp service, a company I was working closely with at the time, and questioned them about illegal workers in their organization. After the investigation, over 20 workers mysteriously disappeared at lunchtime. They just took their things and left. We thought they had all gone for good, but a couple of months later, most of the people who disappeared were back—with different names.
#39 Well, I Quit
At a company I used to work for, the owners sent out a letter every single week stating that they would be cutting everyone's pay. They said they would be dropping pay by $0.50, even though all of the employees had agreed to a higher amount in their contracts. The deal was simple: Sign the new contract or quit. There was no negotiating or speaking to management. So, we quit!
#40 Super Bowl Slaves
I worked at a well-known wing restaurant for a few years as a line cook. It was the type of work where you ask for a raise and they scoff and respond with a sarcastic comment. Anyway, I had been pretty dead set on quitting sooner or later. Our kitchen was very small and I didn't love my job. Most people ended up closing four to five days a week with double shifts on the weekends while still attending school full time as it was a college town.
On Super Bowl Sunday, a useless coworker who hid in the bathroom most of his shift finally stopped showing, and in response, the managerial staff delegated closing to my friend. He was a full-time student at the time and had been working since 4 p.m. that day. If he closed, he would have still been in the restaurant by 1:00 a.m. When he told them that he couldn't do it, they got really angry and said that they don’t have any more shifts for him. Immediately, me and one other cook walked to the office and quit on the spot. The restaurant lost four cooks on Super Bowl Sunday, leaving them with seven full-time students on the schedule.
#41 Camp's Over, Kids
I worked at a summer camp that was just an absolute nightmare. The lifeguard, both program coordinators, and I were new. Everyone else was a former camper that the director had hired out of blindness. Incidents that summer included: A camp counselor hitting a camper and getting fired; a camp counselor casually discussing inappropriate themes in front of small children; counselors stealing camp supplies. There was probably more that I'm forgetting. A few weeks in, after the first counselor got fired, both the program coordinators quit as they didn't want their names attached to that.
#42 No Way, San José
I was a volunteer at a sea turtle rescue in Costa Rica. One day, seemingly out of nowhere, an employee attacked three of our workers because of a love triangle within the company. Management didn't fire him. They didn't even acknowledge the incident. Instead, the company planned to send him back to work at our remote beach camp. All 10 of us packed up and left the day before his return.
#43 Nearly Retired
A company that I once worked for laid off half the company with no warning. No one saw it coming and I'm not even sure if what they did was legal. Dozens of people were fired, including a gentleman who was less than a year from retirement and had been at that company for more than 35 years. The company was shocked when half the remaining people abandoned ship shortly thereafter.
#44 Fast Food, Terrible Manager
I work at a fast food restaurant and we struggle to retain crew members because our manager is one of the most frustrating people to work with. He constantly verbally berates the crew members and other managers and goes out of his way to under schedule crew. A few months ago, like half of our crew quit because they couldn't take it and we had 9 non-managers left including me who were just out of high school and couldn't work much with college. We sort of recovered but we still run the store with the absolute bare minimum crew and with only two other managers besides the manager.
#45 New Manager? No Thank You
My sister took my job because I moved away and she needed one. Once she started working, she told me that they had hired a new manager and that she was absolutely useless. She would give herself weeks off at a time and give the employees no holidays. The trucks would never be unloaded on time and she would overwork everyone else. One day, everyone had enough and quit, including my sister.
