Sometimes "Enough is enough!" This is the thought that went through these former employees as they planned a very dramatic departure from a job they hate. The hatred stems from the actual work, and in some cases, the boss. See the lengths that these Redditors went to make their final exit as dramatic as possible. Content has been edited for clarity.
Ranch Milkshake
“I worked grill at a Del Taco. Half-way through my shift, a big beast of a woman came in furious that she didn’t get her shake. After 20 minutes of me trying to calm her down even after telling her I’d give her the shake for free, I got fed up with her (and customers in general), so I went in the back and filled a large cup with cold Ranch dressing gave it to her and immediately quit.”
Now That’s An Exit
“I’m a bartender at a country club. This one member is always a nuisance and just got under the skin of one of our servers so badly, who can’t handle pressure well to begin with, that the server just said something along the lines of ‘eat it, you old fart.’
He storms behind my bar, turns on the Shiner drink tap, dunks his head under, it takes a few big gulps, and then just leaves.
I haven’t heard from him since.”
“I Don’t Do Garbage”
“Back when I was a manager at McDonald’s, we hired this 16 year old girl.
On her first shift, we asked her to change the bags in the garbage can.
She replied ‘I don’t do garbage.’
She didn’t come back for a second shift.”
The One With Petty Revenge
“This one happened to me recently.
I started working at a local t-shirt shop last April. It was a small group of 4 people who kicked out thousands of shirts a month.
The first few months were great; I learned how to print from the senior printer. He was a real good guy and had been holding down the company for 5 years.
Summer was our busy time. We did a lot of summer camp stuff and we had been killing it and crushing our goals.
About two months in for me, the owner walks in the shop with his son-in-law. The guy training me sees this and his jaw hits the floor. The owner walks over to my trainer and tells him he is gonna hire his son-in-law back and asks if there is going to be a problem.
My trainer proceeds to tell me how irate he is at this. Apparently this guy worked there before and got into a big fight with the guy training me before going to jail for the 4th time. Everyone thought he was gone for good.
We had a huge order come in early for a collage – 10 thousand shirts, double printed. The senior printer set up the job and ran them all week-long, printing everything crooked and misaligned. He packed them all up and told the owner that was his last job. He quit because they were never supposed to bring the son-in-law back.
Words were exchanged back and forth and it ended badly, but he got the last laugh. Every single one of those shirts came back and the company had to take a 25 grand hit. To add fuel to the fire, the owner had to reprint all 10 thousand of them and half of them got rejected again because he didn’t know how to run the machine properly.
Moral of the story: be good to your employees, especially if you can’t do the job yourself.”
Where Did He Get The Ladder?
“I work at a pizza place in Tallahassee. The chef was real fed up with his pay and the heat. During the middle of a Friday night shift, he just went out to the back of the restaurant, pulled a ladder against a fence, and hopped over it without telling anyone. The waitresses thought he was on a smoke break for about a half hour.
He keeps up his vengeance by calling the restaurant a few times a month, ordering complex requests, and then never coming to pick them up.”
Fancy Fazoli’s
“Here’s a story about me in high school: I worked at a Fazoli’s in a small town where everyone considered it ‘fancy’ and half the customers were illiterate idiots raging on pills. This rude dude came in one night and ordered a pizza to go and demanded I ‘go ahead’ and give him his bread sticks to eat while waiting. Usually I would have, but he was being an awful person, and I was a passive-aggressive teen, so I told him I couldn’t and pointed to the sign on the menu that said bread sticks were not included with pizza. He yelled at me and demanded a manager, who came out and backed me up and told him he would have to buy some if he wanted some.
The next day, I found out that the dude had called back in the morning and lied about the incident, saying I cussed him out and laughed at him. The general manager gave him a free pizza and wrote me up saying that next time I would be fired. That was my first write-up in the two years I worked there. When she handed it to me to sign it, I wrote, ‘I quit :)’ instead and walked out.
The hag still gives me dirty looks when I see her around, SEVEN YEARS LATER.”
“I Ain’t No Punk”
“I worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant and we were all very relaxed.
I’d help prep and cook pizzas and I made myself lunch on long days.
We got a new line cook. He was in his 50s and liked to refer to himself as a chef. The first day he says, ‘I never gave you permission to come onto my line’ when I go to grab something.
He took a similar attitude with everyone else.
He made the mistake of sauntering into the kitchen during the Friday night rush (he was off) when we were going crazy. He jumps right in the middle and starts trying to tell the kitchen manager that he’d be taking the next day off.
The head line cook tells him to get out his line before he bashed him in the head with a pan full of mussels.
The new guy responds by yelling ‘I ain’t no punk’ and wants to fight.
He was dragged out the back door and fired by the kitchen manager.
The owner came into to see what the commotion was. He kind of shrugged and sighed then left the kitchen.”
Wait, Are We Going To Work Out?
“I was taking a spin class at my gym and the spin instructor quit. 7 minutes into the ride, as she is setting her timer up for sprints, she says, ‘Sorry, I just can’t do this anymore.’
She got off the bike, stopped her music, and turned on all the lights in the dark room exclaiming that she just received an absurdly insulting email from the gym’s management company and she has decided that she no longer works there. She proceeded to grab her bag and stormed out of the room…leaving the 19 of us wide mouthed in awe. Never seen something like that before.”
“After One Day Of Training”
“The woman my mom’s boss hired to replace my mom spent her entire first day of training constantly arguing with my mom (who was training her). She argued about pretty much everything, including the policies the boss has for the business, the weather, and if it says ‘Sound Transit’ on the buses or not. Mom couldn’t say anything without this woman arguing with her.
Today was day two of her training and she doesn’t show up. She calls in 30 minutes late to say she can’t come in because she had a ‘bad reaction to the heat’ (it was only like 77 today and yesterday, and this woman has allegedly lived in the area enough that she should be used to the heat).
The craziest part is that the boss had a dream where she physically kicked – like, kicking with legs – the new hire out of the building. My mom was like ‘You should take that as a sign, this woman is no good.’ She also explained how this woman is constantly arguing about literally everything and anything. So she no longer works for this business, after one day of training.”
Poor Guy
“I was a server at a restaurant. A new server on his first day tripped and dropped an entire tray of food (probably 6 plates plus some refills). He even fell on his knees into the pile of dropped plates.
He sat there for a few seconds then stood up, took his apron off, threw it onto the pile and walked out. Never saw or heard from again, never picked up his check from his hours of training.”
That’s Your Best Excuse?
“Back in April 2014, I began work training to be a 911 dispatcher for a local law enforcement agency. Our ‘academy’ had 10 students. We would go through 10 weeks learning the basics in the classroom and another 12 weeks after that doing on the job training. The OJT was broken up into 4 phases of increasingly more responsibility until the final phase which was basically on your own, but a trainer is making sure you don’t mess up too bad.
One fellow student, I’ll call her Jenny was a 40-something mother of two who tried to look and act like a single 20-something. She was annoying, but she actually did a pretty good job in the classroom. When we transitioned to OJT, she slowly started to realize that she just wasn’t cut out for the job. Now, many times throughout training, we had been told by the training supervisor that if you realized this wasn’t for you, just say something, and they’ll look to see if there’s another position within the department they’d be better suited at. Most of us could see Jenny struggling, but when we asked her about it, she said she was doing just fine and was looking forward to a long career here.
Fast forward to the final phase of OJT: of the original 10 students, there were only 5 of us left. Jenny was working on a busy radio frequency. Her trainer was listening in from another console, but wasn’t supposed to intervene or take over unless things got really messed up. About 3 hours into the shift, Jenny asked her trainer if she would take over for a couple minutes. Her reason? she needed to get a tampon from her car. 5 minutes went by, then 10, then half an hour. We never saw Jenny again.
In the end, rather than swallowing pride and keeping a job, she decided to just ditch after 5 months of training and her best excuse was she needed a feminine hygiene product.”
“Probably My Most Embarrassing Moment”
“This is really embarrassing, probably my most embarrassing moment, but here we go.
I had quit a job to focus on school, so when summer came around, I decided to find another job. There was this place that I had heard a lot of people had worked at and mostly bad things about management, but it paid really well (compared to what I was used to) and decided to go for it. It was basically a call center for a big bank.
The interview went really well. The training schedule was extremely early, like 4:30 in the morning or something. I am in no way a morning person, so I went to bed really early the night before. I was feeling pretty good in the morning and drove the 45 or so minutes to my new job. My parents lived in the country, so everything’s a bit of a drive.
When I got there, we met at the door, a big group of us. There were probably a couple hundred of employees total and they required name badges with scanners to be able to be let in. We were then given a tour and ultimately led to a room full of computers where our training would be held. The room in question was the Moose Room.
For the first part of our training, the manager gave her introduction and what was expected of us. We then had to do sort of tests on the computers to learn the software. Then, we would have breaks and participate in the games the employees would have to boost morale. I can’t exactly remember, but I think tossing balls was part of it. By this time, I thought that it wouldn’t be so bad. Some things I remember is that we were told we couldn’t have pencils or pens at our desks, we couldn’t look up celebrities in the system, and basically a lot of security measures. Oh, and there was a limit on bathroom breaks, pregnant women had to have notes to have extra breaks, which I thought was a bit ridiculous.
Throughout the morning, we were in and out of the Moose Room. With all the computers and movement we were doing, I remember going from feeling extremely hot to freezing. Like a fever. I ended up telling the manager during one of the down times that I wasn’t feeling too hot, and she said I would be okay, trying to make me feel better, but didn’t really take me seriously.
After some training and breaks, she has us all sit in chairs facing the entrance of the room and some high level person came in to talk to us. He was like CEO or something. He started his talk and uncontrollably, I stood up and threw up all over the floor and partially on myself. To make matters worse, another trainee yelled out ‘oh my god, she just puked!’ I ran out of the room into the bathroom humiliated. The manager woman came in. She felt awful and brought me my purse and walked me out. I had to call my boyfriend to come pick me up and ended up puking again in my neighbors drive way. Needless to say, I didn’t show up for work the next day.”
Creative Disguise
“I worked at a small fast food restaurant for about 4 months. The manager there was bad and employees had a high turnover rate. One day, the manager stops by. He’s mad that a coworker (let’s call him Nip) didn’t take out the trash. Nip was the managers’ go-to punching bag because he was very quiet and would never fight back despite him being 6’2” and 250lbs. Eventually, the manager had enough fun torturing his punching bag and told him to head home early. At this point, Nip ran out of the store and drove off in his car.
My shift continued and my manager stayed in to fill in for Nip. I was in the back cleaning dishes while my boss was taking care of some customers. At this point, an hour had passed since Nip’s scolding when I hear the door slam open and my manager yelling ‘What do you think you’re doing? Do you plan on paying for that?’
I walk over to the front counter and I see a huge dude with a ski mask on. He politely requested that we empty the cash register and says ‘Thanks, have a good day.’
My manager never called the police. Due to the fact he referred to me by name, we assumed it was Nip. I haven’t talked to Nip since.”
Well, Were You Going To Tell Us?
“My family owns a restaurant and one time we hired a guy to be one of our cooks. He comes in on Wednesday and Thursday to just get a feel for everything. When he leaves Thursday night, he tells us he liked it here and he would be here tomorrow afternoon to actually start working.
Next day, he was supposed to show up at 2:00, but didn’t. I wait until 3:00 to see if he shows up before I call him. Finally, I give him a call and he answers. Turns out, sometime in the 16 hours between us talking, he decided to move to Alabama (I’m from Washington so it wasn’t a small move or anything).
To make it more complicated, he never told his girlfriend he was moving and she blamed us for him moving.”
Car Wash Fiasco
“I worked at a car wash when I was kid. This one dude and I happened to be the only people that showed up for work on the first sunny Monday of the last few months. The line was around the block for the car wash before we even opened for business.
We called our manager, ‘Hey, it’s just us and there are like 100 cars to wash.’
Manager says, ‘There’s two of you. Wash them.’ and hangs up.
Now, this is a full service automatic car wash in a really nice area. Each car gets a full scrubbing in the front of the machine, a full wipe-down when it comes out the other end, and about half of them pay for a few minutes at a hand wax station.
After an hour or so of exhausting running back and forth, servicing cars at each station, taking money, running cards, and explaining why the wax station is only getting about 40 seconds of love per car, the line was so long we couldn’t even see the end of it. This was normal for a day like this, and tough, hot work for the normal crew of 6.
We called for help again. Manager turned her phone off. She knew what was up.
We both said whatever, took off our car wash-employee-monkey-suits right there in front of everybody, put the big machine on ‘GO’ and walked away.
We wandered by a few hours later; the line was still there. We laughed.
In hindsight, that job paid extremely well for what it was and where I was in my life at the time. Sometimes I kinda wish I had stuck it out that day.”
“Sashays Out The Door”
“One time we went for breakfast at this little restaurant and seated in front of us was a biker guy who kept harassing the clearly gay waiter.
The waiter was going out of his way to be polite to this dirt bag who had returned his food three times, once just because his toast hadn’t been buttered. It was mostly just to irk the server.
Finally, it happened. The biker guy makes a comment about ‘Why are you swinging like a girl?! You’re NOT a girl! Let me take you out back in the alley and I’ll show you how to act like a real man!’
I gasped and couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
Suddenly, the waiter, who was carrying a tray of water glasses and pitcher to another table, takes the pitcher of water and dumps it on the biker guys head.
The biker jumps up and throws his breakfast plate full of food at the waiter, hitting him with eggs in the face.
The waiter guy then takes the whole tray of water glasses and throws it at the biker and the biker gives chase. The waiter runs into the kitchen using his arm to knock anything handy into the biker’s path (ketchup bottles, silverware tray, napkin holders etc) with the biker slipping and sliding, but still on the waiter’s heels.
Suddenly, the front door opens and in walk five cops. They grab the biker dude and handcuff him. During this time, the waiter comes out flaying his hands in the air with great theatrics screaming ‘I QUIT!!! YOU CAN’T FIRE ME!! HE STARTED IT!! I’M FROM NY YOU’LL BE HEARING FROM MY ATTORNEYS!!! YOU ALL SAW HIM DIDN’T YOU (pointing to all of us) HE STARTED IT, BUT THEY FIRE ME!! I DON’T THINK SO!!! (as he bobs his head and snaps his fingers in the air à la RuPaul) NO, NO I THINK NOT!!’
Then with great drama, he yanks off his apron and flings it toward the kitchen and sashays out the door.
I’d gave anything to have had a camera, but this was before cell phones.”
Just Admit It
“A coworker told me this about the person I replaced.
I work customer service/reception at a small family business. My coworker is family friend of the owners.
A new girl starts working there, gets trained, and starts using the database. She makes a few mistakes. Instead of owning up to it or asking for help to fix them, she decides to try to frame coworker for it.
Coworker finds the errors, reports them to owners so that they can fix them, and also because they are under her login…on days she didn’t work.
Owners talk to both of them. New girl blames coworker instead of admitting it. Owners say they can prove coworker is innocent.
New girl loses it. Starts absolutely screaming that the bosses don’t like her, that they always take coworkers side, knocks items off the desk, and walks out.
She only worked there a month.”
Pure Ingenuity
“I worked at a planetarium with stringent rules. No kids under 4, not recommended for kids under 7, be there early, no late entry, no food and drink, etc.
This dude decided to get fired by giving AS WRONG information as he could. No, you don’t need to get a pass, unless you have a 2-year old; they need a pass. The show is 2/3 finished, but you can just walk in if you want. It’s kind of long show; maybe you should take some chips in with you. He just left stanchions and doors open. He also built stanchion lines that led nowhere.
He directed people to the most distant parts of the building from where they needed to be. It was a nightmare to be his coworker that day, but we were all really impressed at his ingenuity at devising SO MANY ways of messing with us and the guests.”
“Genius”
“Back in the early 2000s. It involved a screensaver.
Remember the bouncing word screensaver? The one where a word or sentence would bounce around the screen only to be buffered by the sides of the screen?
Anyway, here is what happened: this dude got into an argument with the boss. The dude went to lunch. 3 hours later, dude hasn’t come back.
There is a bit of a fumble about how to locate him until someone noticed his screensaver: it was the bouncing words that said ‘I quit.’
Genius.”