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BS: Work, quitting & other stories
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Subject: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Sandra in Sydney Date: 04 Sep 13 - 06:49 AM Store staff leave public note for abusive boss Employees at footwear and apparel chain Journeys at a mall in Rochester, New York, left a public, angry note of resignation for their manager after locking up the store in the middle of the day. A photo of the note, posted on Reddit, alleges that the district manager told an employee "cancer is not an excuse", along with other abusive treatment of staff. The note was attached to the security bars for the viewing enjoyment of all passersby in the middle of the busy Back to School season. ........................ On the weekend a friend who has just retired told me she hadn't just retired on her 60th birthday, but had left her very stressful executive job by suddenly standing up & saying "I'm sick, I'm not staying here any longer" & leaving. In the past few months she has sold her house, bought another house in a lovely village in the country & settled happily into retirement. Back in 1970 when I was in my first job after leaving school one of my colleagues suddenly stood up & grabbed his bag & left. I can't remember what he said, but I've never forgotten him grabbing his bag & storming out. any other stories? sandra |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Pete Jennings Date: 04 Sep 13 - 12:54 PM My brother-in-law was a big-wig in sales for GEC Australia (circa 1978), based in Sydney (!). He interviewed and appointed a new young accountant. On his first day, said accountant upped and went surfing and never came back (to work, that is). |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: ranger1 Date: 04 Sep 13 - 01:05 PM In the year that I took off between high school and college, I worked at a Pizza Hut to save money so that I could go to Europe and travel. I was putting in about 50 hours a week in the kitchen, I hated the job, but it was the means to my dream, so I put up with it. That stopped the day I worked an eleven hour shift without a single break and was yelled at for grabbing a five minute break in the back and then asked to stay late and work the closing shift. They heard me give my notice at the tables all the way in the front of the restaurant from the break room all the way in the back of the restaurant. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: wysiwyg Date: 04 Sep 13 - 01:07 PM Post lost. Was a great story! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Sandra in Sydney Date: 05 Sep 13 - 08:22 AM wot a shame! when you recover from the loss & can bear to re-tell the story, please do. sandra |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Dave the Gnome Date: 05 Sep 13 - 08:29 AM Bit crude I'm afraid but one of the best resignations I ever came across. A disabled man of my acquaintance, who could only stand supported and moved around on a wheelchair, was being told by the personal manager that he should not complain about being moved to a site with lack of disabled facilities as he could, in her words, stand up and pee anywhere. So he struggled out of his wheelchair with the support of her desk, unzipped his trousers and pee'd all over said desk. Funnily enough he got a decent pay off and she did not last much longer :-) Cheers DtG |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Sandra in Sydney Date: 06 Sep 13 - 01:47 AM more cheers from me, too. Anyone who behaved as the Manager did here under our Disability laws would also get what for & probably get fined or sued, too. And end up in the news! A colleague once wrote/drew his resignation letter in a very artistic spiral which the Regional Director turned around & around so he could read every word, & obediently signed in the designated space, too. But they were both good natured. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Jim Carroll Date: 06 Sep 13 - 04:25 AM A story from the South Wales mines during the making of the Radio Ballad 'The Big Hewer' A miner had been asked to take on an extremely dangerous job for a few pennies extra in pay; the mine foreman spent a great deal of time trying to persuade him what a wonderful job it was and how it was a great privilege to be offered it. The miner replied "If it is such a good job you wouldn't offer it to us, you'd keep it for yourself". I was once fired (the once and only time in my working life) from an electrical firm in one of the wealthiest areas of London for addressing a customer, a titled lady, as "Luv", (I was newly arrived in The Smoke from the North of England) She made a formal complaint in writing to me boss. I was glad to go and have worn the event as a badge of honour ever since. Jim Carroll |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Rapparee Date: 06 Sep 13 - 09:50 AM A chap out here in The Wilde Weste said angrily to his rather abusive boss, "I won't be in tomorrow!" At quitting time someone looked into his office and he was face-down, dead at his desk. Freaked out the whole place and no, I don't know if his office is haunted. The boss quit a few days later. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Amos Date: 06 Sep 13 - 10:05 AM An engineer during the hectic development days for the PDP 11 at DEC in Massachusetts was going half-barmy calculating millisecond interactions for ROM chips and buses and such. He disappeared one day, leaving a note which said "I am going to the hills of Vermont, where I will refuse to contemplate any period of time shorter than a season." (Reported by Tracy Kidder in "The Soul of a New machine"). I have always loved that line. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: ClaireBear Date: 06 Sep 13 - 01:51 PM This is only supremely funny if you know my nameless friend, whose biting wit, verbosity and unwillingness to suffer fools are widely known ... but anyway, he had about six months of employment as a systems analyst (at which he was brilliant), much of which was spent automating a cheesy mail order house's warehouse in frigid St Cloud, Minnesota in winter. (Side note: the only place to eat near where he was quartered was a dive called "Anton's Fish 'n' Whiskey." Get the picture?) After many frigid visits there from his home in sunny Berkeley, California, he had had enough. He told me he planned to resign. I expected to hear the shouting all the way from my house in Oakland. Instead, he simply left a letter of resignation on someone's desk and walked away, never to be heard from again. The letter (he showed me a copy after) was so elegantly and concisely understated that I still remember every word: "After much consideration I find that I do not wish to pursue a career in warehouse automation." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: GUEST,Eliza Date: 06 Sep 13 - 03:46 PM A young lassie who used to cut my hair told me she worked in the evenings for some Turks in a Kebab Takeaway joint. One of these Turks asked her to agree to marry his brother to get him into the UK. He offered her £10,000 if she'd agree. She very loudly told him where to stick his kebabs and his brother, and ran off home. She was only about eighteen at the time; I was proud of her! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Pete Jennings Date: 07 Sep 13 - 10:33 AM In the sixth form, I got a Saturday job at M&S which mainly consisted of me collecting the baskets from the check-out points and returning them to the pick up points. You'll never believe how dirty my hands used to get. After a few weeks the Personnel Manageress said I had to get my hair cut for hygienic reasons. I didn't go back. Got an evening job on a petrol station instead, in the days before self-service. Me and old Harry had a great laugh. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Stilly River Sage Date: 07 Sep 13 - 12:37 PM Sometimes you stumble into a place that is a black hole, the man-made equivalent of career "time out." In the mid-1980s I returned to Washington state from Texas to work for the summer at San Juan Islands National Historic Park. It didn't take long to realize that while the seasonal rangers were the only normal people there - all of the permanent staff had been assigned there by the regional HR office until they quit or retired. For starters, my immediate supervisor lived with a convicted molester of small children. Right before I arrived to start work the maintenance foreman burned down one of the shops because he left some hot tool turned on next to a fuel supply overnight. The superintendent was RIFfed (Reduction in Force) from the district "uniform" officer (apparently he had been responsible for negotiating with clothing manufacturers to make and sell uniform parts to rangers, and maintaining a uniform appearance). He had no common sense and acted like the parks were his own little fiefdom. Park rules (such as no open alcohol containers) didn't apply to him and I took many photos of him with open beers in the parks. He came into the headquarters office one day with a huge pressure bandage on his index finger. Those are used to stop bleeding and for broken bones. I asked if he'd cut or broken his finger? He answered "both." Being (I thought) silly, I casually asked him "what'd you do, stick it in a running lawnmower?" Why yes, he had! I was stunned by his stupidity and didn't say another word. Later that season he decided to have raw oysters for dinner. Unfortunately, he decided to eat the week-old mollusks in his refrigerator and wound up in the hospital for a week. His second in command, our chief of interpretation, was more tricky to figure out, but some park rangers from a state park on the far side of the island finally clued me in to his shtick - he as a pathological liar, and was very accomplished. When my state park friends told me about all of the wild stories the interp chief used to spin about the seasonal rangers (making up affairs, stories about our pasts, etc.) in the local bar, I decided it was time to get out of there. I was offered a job at the state park the next summer, but I decided that the island was too small to be cooped up with the NPS loonies. I'd originally agreed to stay till the end of the season (in late October) but instead I made up a new job offer and told them I had to leave on Labor Day (first week in September.) SRS |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Sandra in Sydney Date: 07 Sep 13 - 11:20 PM lots of good stories- keep 'em coming, folks! sandra |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: GUEST Date: 08 Sep 13 - 01:07 AM My friend stormed out of jis job imsulting his boss amd slamming the door, but returned sheepishly only ten minutes later because he'd forgotten his coat! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Sandra in Sydney Date: 08 Sep 13 - 11:23 AM oops |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: GUEST,Paul the Strummer Date: 09 Sep 13 - 08:08 AM When I left school, my first job was working in a bank, in Central London (UK). It was an old building, and subject to all sorts of preservation orders, so the bank had to keep the appearence very original. The customer side of the counter was a long, narrow, space with a marble floor, and the front doors of the building were big wooden doors that shut with quite a noise. One day we were all working away in the offices, after the bank had closed to the public, when one of the young girls suddenly picked up a big pile of paper from her desk, threw it all up in the air, shouted "I can't do this any more", grabbed her coat of the back of her chair, and walked out. All work stopped, as we heard the commotion, watched the piles of paper fluttering down around the office, then heard her shoes clip-clopping across the marble hall of the banking hall, and finally the big clunk as the front door slammed behind her.... It was all of 35 years ago, but I remember it clearly! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: GUEST Date: 09 Sep 13 - 08:42 AM On the other side I was part of the opening staff of a large retail store - a record store. Lots of people - everyone was new - and no one knew anyone else. After three or four weeks an assistant manager noticed someone leaving at the end of the day that he'd not seen before. After investigating it was discovered that the guy was coming in every morning - clocking in - and leaving. He'd return at the end of the day and clocked out. He "earned" several paychecks that way. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: GUEST,Wesley S Date: 09 Sep 13 - 08:43 AM That was me- I guess I lost my cookie. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Bert Date: 09 Sep 13 - 12:51 PM work, other stories. When I was a boilermaker apprentice, my buddy and I were given the job of flanging ends. That is putting the knuckle radius on the dished ends of road tankers. The end was clamped to a former and we went at it with sledge hammers. They took an average of about fifteen minutes each. After several months of this we asked for a different job, we were supposed to be learning a trade, but were being used as cheap labor. The Foreman said, just finish this batch of 100. So we believed him and set to, with a will. Then we were given another 50; just finish this batch. Then another 80. And so it went on, every time we asked for different work we were given, just another batch. One day I said to Ray, I think that we are doing these too quickly and we agreed to slow down. We still kept getting more batches and slowing down. We finally got down to doing one an hour before we were moved. But we passed the truth along, if you do more that one an hour you will be stuck with the job for ever. Some honest guys didn't believe us at first and went to work with gusto in the hopes of moving on. Eventually everyone learned that to do more than one an hour was to be stuck with the job, and one an hour was the de-facto standard when I left the company about four years later. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Sandra in Sydney Date: 09 Sep 13 - 10:13 PM trainees passing on trade lore! and the other stories are great, too. sandra |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Mark Ross Date: 10 Sep 13 - 03:42 PM I retired when I was 17,I called in well. I said that I felt too good to come to work anymore. Mark Ross |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Bat Goddess Date: 10 Sep 13 - 05:31 PM Good story, Tami. I basically retired (took Social Security and left the dysfunctional job) last year when I discovered that Social Security would pay what I had been making (and the DM was constantly either cutting my hours and threatening to fire me or needing my experience because he'd fired someone else) without anywhere near the amount of aggro. A few months previous, he'd come close to firing me because Tom broke his ankle at a time inconvenient for USVision. Keep in mind, I called my manager at 9 pm before following the ambulance to the hospital. After giving me a week "off" -- unpaid administrative leave whereupon he would decide whether to fire me or not, I got a frantic call from another store's manager wanting to know when I could come in and work...he'd fired my manager (for a completely unrelated matter) and all of a sudden they needed me. This DM was comparatively new, but the first thing he had done when he took over the previous year was force out the manager who had hired and trained me (he was an ABO) and with whom I had worked very well for over three years. He had several reasons, as far as I could figure out, for trying to get rid of me. First, I was female and older than he is. I think he had a mommy problem. Second, I was making more money than most optechs (at $8.85/hr plus what they were no longer calling commission because they kept changing the rules so you earned less) and had no intention of becoming a manager (which would have been impossible because of Tom's health, blindness, and the fact that I actually have a life and want to be able to sing at The Press Room session and need Saturdays off as well for musical purposes). But I think the primary reason he wanted to get rid of me was that the manager Jeff H. had hired me, trained me, and I worked well with him until the DM forced him out. Ever want to wear a T-shirt that says, "Watch it, or you'll end up in my novel"? Ya just gotta think of it all as fiction fodder or you'll slit your wrists...and there's no future in that. Linn |
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Subject: RE: BS: Work, quitting & other stories From: Bat Goddess Date: 10 Sep 13 - 05:33 PM Oh, it's called "Illness and Fatigue"...Sick and tired of working! Linn |
