Ask Lemmy

I worked at a company that helped people find the best loans for their situation.

Basically a price comparison site. No sponsored content or anything.

One day I was asked about setting up a payday loans option for the site and just said no.

I'd listened to some podcast about just how predatory the industry was, and even though our national regulations meant it couldn't get as bad as some places, it was still unacceptably predatory.

I showed the manager stats for repayment, interest and average income of a customer and said if he went forward with this I would not be participating.

And if he was going to ask me to participate regardless, I would hand him my notice on the spot.

They never did anything with payday loans after that. I think most people were pretty happy about it.

Good on you. An actual hero.

I used to have a job in IT, building PCs. It sounds fun, but building computers all day gets old fast. After about a year of working there I decided i'd like to try working in a different department, so I asked my boss about being moved. He told me that the specific department I had requested didn't need any help and the department I was currently in was his priority. That seemed fair.

A few months later, somebody in that department left for another job, so I saw an opportunity and I swooped in. I told my boss that if he was looking for someone to replace the guy who left, i'd really appreciate it if he kept me in mind. My boss told me that he appreciated and acknowledged that I had been working there for a long time and he would keep me in mind. About a week later he calls me into his office and tells me he's going to move me to the department I had requested.

9 months go by and I haven’t heard another word about being moved. 9 whole months.

At this point I was already thinking about quitting. Then I had a performance review which I was told would be one-to-one. But it wasn't. My boss and two of my department supervisors were there. My boss brings up an issue of which I was at fault, and shows me a spread sheet as evidence. I checked the date on the spreadsheet and it was from 3 months prior. If it was that much of an issue, why did he wait 3 months to tell me? Why not bring it up at the time? That's not helping anybody.

That was the final straw. I started looking for jobs when I got home that day. I got one and gave my boss 2 weeks notice.

Got told to go help someone and they got in my face yelling for looking at a piece of equipment they were having problems with. Next day I said I wouldn't work with them and got told that I can't pick who I work with. It turns out that you actually can pick who you work with.

I was a line cook for a hilton hotel restaurant. It was easy, and I'd been there for about a year. They had a position open up, night shift supervisor. Basically the same hours I was already working, just have to do a bit of admin on the side. I was the only one working there that had a degree instead of an arrest record, was just looking for a bit of extra money, so I applied thinking I'd be a shoe-in.

Well they wanted the night-shift supervisor to be able to spontaneously feed a hypothetical group bigwigs that would surely show up the second I was left in charge (This is not a nice hotel, btw, we never had big wigs.). So they brought in another candidate, and decided to have us do a cook-off with surprise ingredients. I was like, what? This is ridiculous, they wanted me to invent a new dish that wasn't on the menu (I made $10/hr). I lost the cooking challenge (I made tuna melts lol), but the guy who won declined the position (real smart of him).

So did they then offer it to the only internal candidate seeking the position? nope! just kept looking for someone else. Came into my next shift, and the waiters came back during a huge rush with like, 5-6 special off-menu orders they wanted me to accommodate (not related to allergies or anything). I got halfway through cooking the first one, and then just... crashed out. Said "nope! fuck this." clocked out, left.

They called me for the next few days trying to get me back. "But you promised you wouldn't be upset if we didn't give you the supervisor position!" yup, I did say that. I changed my mind. Fuck you and that hotel.

Found a better paying job the next week.

Got pulled off all of my R&D projects and told by the CEO in a meeting with all of the team leaders (who enthusiastically agreed) to focus entirely on this one project as it was critically important and mandatory whether we liked it or not before we could go to market with our product. Said OK, got it ready in record time, none of the managers wanted to approve testing. Got told a generic “We need more info.”

Fleshed out everything I could. Did all sorts of bench top testing with full reports, did thorough budget analysis for the entire thing, a complete gantt chart with every contingency accounted for.

Two years later I’m in the latest of god only knows how many approval meetings with management. I’ve dialed back how much I expect out of them and I’m just trying to get an official project initiation form signed so at least I have a record of them acknowledging the project’s existence. One of them asks, for the nth time, “Why do we need to do this again?”

Boss looks at me expectantly, like “Yes, why do we need to do this?” as if I was the one who put myself on the project. I said “I can forward you the email where you told me to drop everything and work on it. If you changed your mind I’m more than OK to drop it and work on something else, but I refuse to hold even one more meeting to get agreement that I should even be working on this.”

He says “I think we just need more information.” I ask “Such as?” knowing full well there wasn’t a single more thing I could add. “We just need more information.” All of the team leaders just stared at me. So I quit on the spot and walked out.

Talked to a friend who still worked there and they still haven’t moved forward with that project years later, and the governing body still refuses to allow sale of the product until they do. It’s a 2 year timeline for testing so I have no idea what they are thinking. It’s only $100,000 too, they paid me more to try and get approval for two years than it would have cost to do it in the first place.

Got laid off from my career job in broadcasting and picked up work unloading trucks at Walmart at night. Hated it but needed the money. One night, when I was already at my wit’s end due to being treated like a child as seems to be the company’s SOP, I was unloading a row from the truck and it collapsed on me. Corner of a box hit me just below the eye and cut the skin. So I’m in the employee bathroom with a cold paper towel trying to get it to stop bleeding while cursing to myself. Not yelling but normal speaking volume. I guess it was audible through the door because I step out and a manager is there. The first thing they say isn’t asking if I’m ok, but rather chastising me for cursing telling me to stop. I look at her, say “like fuck I do,” take my name badge off and toss it at her feet and walk out.

I was told that I gave one of our young engineers a "crisis of conscience" for telling him about how a product we were developing needed some more work and testing because we didn't have enough data on it to release it for use.

Somehow management decided that I was poisoning the company and was toxic for not releasing a partially tested product that could either get people sick or set things on fire and then get people sick.

I was told to get on board and apologize to the young engineer for being a bad example or leave. I started polishing my resume, then turned in my resignation.

I spoke to the young engineer in a friendly and non-acusatory manner and he denied staying any of that to management, he claimed he understood what I was telling him and he agreed with my statements. We still keep in touch.

I was a freelancer for about a decade, and only ever walked off of one job site. It was because of safety concerns and one asshole. I was a stagehand, setting up lighting, decking, and audio gear for a musical in a local megachurch. I was in charge of a crew for this job, through a local labor company; Church hired the company to provide labor, who hired me as a subcontractor to make sure things went well, track workers’ time, etc... The load in was set to last three days, with them rehearsing in the evenings. Then they’d open that weekend.

I ended up attaching myself to the lighting crew for the first day, because decking and audio crews already had people who knew what they were doing. Plus if I’m in the catwalk, I can usually keep a pretty good eye on what is going on around the room. Some catwalks are easy to get to. They’re designed thoughtfully, with the expectation that crews will need to access them regularly. Other catwalks are… Not so easy. Maybe it was designed to be easy at one point, but then engineers added more structural beams, HVAC installers added air ducts, electricians added panels and conduit across doorways and walkways, architectural lighting got added in walkways, etc… Basically, the construction was a bunch of different crews, and none of them talked to each other to keep the catwalks accessible.

This church’s catwalk was unfortunately in the latter group. Getting to it involved a combination of a six-story-tall spiral staircase, army-crawling under an air duct, climbing over some electrical conduit, and squat-walking on a steel mesh grid to avoid some overhead beams. Needless to say, we made the trek up there once, and immediately decided that we weren’t going to be carrying our lights the same way we got up. Hell, lots of our lights wouldn’t even fit the same way we came up, due to the army-crawling section.

So we throw a rope down from the catwalk. Our lights are heavy, and it’s about a 7-story-tall lift to get from the audience to the catwalk. But many hands makes for light work, right? I ask who knows their knots, because we need someone on the ground to tie the lights onto the rope. One of the newbies (who I had never worked with before) raises his hand, so I send him down to act as ground support. His job is simple. We send the rope down from the catwalk, he ties the light to it, and then we haul the light up while he watches from the ground, making sure we don’t knock into anything or scratch the ceiling of the theater. Lather, rinse, repeat. This dude has the easiest job in the entire goddamned building, because all he has to do is tie a knot every few minutes, then watch the rest of us work.

So we send the rope down. A minute or so later, he calls back up that we’re good to lift. So we haul this light up. It’s heavy. It sucks. Many hands makes for light work, but we can only get a few hands on the rope due to the way we’re positioned in the catwalk. But we muscle this light up. One down, only 90 more to go.

But then as we set the light down on the catwalk, we realize that the “knot” we had lifted it with was basically just a bunch of loops with the tail pulled through. It fell apart as soon as the tension on the rope was released. Apparently our knot-tying ground support lied about being able to tie knots, and just went with the “if you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot” method. Except his “tie a lot” part wasn’t even safe, because he ended up just making a tension knot that completely fell apart as soon as the tension was gone. So I send someone else (who I have worked with before, and actually trust) down to the ground, and they send him back up.

All of this was simply to say that we were already a little bit on edge regarding this lighting install, because if that “knot” had come undone midway through our lift, we would have dropped a thousand dollar ~120lb light onto the audience seats, from about 90 feet in the air. So I want you to keep that part in mind when I bring up this next part…

After we get thirty or forty lights lifted, we’re feeling the strain. These lights are heavy, and my guys are smoked. The catwalk is hot (because hot air rises, this is in Texas in the summertime on a sunny day, and we’re basically pressed against the roof,) and we’ve all soaked through our shirts with sweat. For every light, once we get to the edge of the catwalk, we basically have to manhandle it up and over the railing to avoid scratching the decorative ceiling panels that are below us.

In the meantime, the church’s audio guy has shown up. He is sitting in the audience, chatting with another church employee. He apparently brought his son to work today. His son was like 5 or 6, and was suddenly running around in the audience, directly underneath us as we’re lifting these damned lights. Again, we’re already worried about dropping one of these lights. Even if we have the best knots in the world, accidents happen. I have seen clamps, handles, and hard points break off of lights before. I have seen ropes break. I have seen steel cables break. So there’s always some measure of “this could all go wrong and there’s nothing we can do but watch it fall” in the back of your mind with every single hoist. We already watched a knot fall apart that morning. And now there’s a fucking child playing underneath us.

So I call down, something along the lines of “Hey, can someone get that kid out of the way? We’re working up here!”

The sound guy almost immediately shouts back “how about you parent your kids, and let me parent mine!”

Like I said, my guys were already needing a break. We had already told ourselves that we were going to take a water break soon. As soon as that dude’s response had stopped reverberating around the (now dead silent) auditorium, I called out “Okay {company name}! Make it safe, then tools down! Take 20, then meet me on the dock!” Simultaneously, all ~40 crew members got the exact same glint in their eyes as they realized what was going on, finished whatever they were doing, then walked away for a smoke break.

In that 20 minutes, I called the company owner (who I play board games with nearly every week), and let him know what was going on. This was ~90 minutes into an 8 hour day. But notably, the crew had a 5 hour minimum. Meaning they’d get paid for at least 5 hours regardless of how long they worked. The intent is to ensure every job is worth the drive; without a minimum, nobody would take a 30 minute job if they had to drive 45 minutes to get there. And he said I could give the crew a choice. They can stay for the full 8 hours, or they can take the minimum and walk away right now. Next, I talked to the church’s main point of contact, to let them know what had happened, and what I was about to tell the crew. And when my crew came back after their break, I gave them all that choice. Every single person on the ~40 man crew took the minimum and walked away for the day.

The show’s load in was delayed by a day, and the church’s sound guy wasn’t present for the rest of the week’s load in and setup.

that's incredible. thank you for being a genuinely awesome human being who cares enough about your community to do this.

I walked out on my last couple of jobs before I started working for myself.

At one, I had a coworker who was hyper competitive. She had two friends there who hated me even though we'd barely interacted. It got to the point where they started talking about beating and shooting me. The manager ignored it because he didn't like me for religious reasons. (He was a conservative Catholic who repeatedly accused me of sexual misconduct because I spoke to male coworkers "too often". He insisted that men and women speaking to each other unnecessarily is basically the same as sex.) I left and reported it to Security. There was a 3 month long investigation, run by the "Employee Satisfaction Dept.", which turned up no evidence, so I was told I had to report back to work. I did not. A month after I quit, the ringleader, who had been aggressively competing with me for years, quit also.

The job after that was less dramatic, but was frustrating. I spent 6 months trying to get the CEO and coworkers signed up for a business conference. I needed the CEO to decide who was going to which seminars, since she was paying. I emailed her the relevant info, and emailed it to her husband, and printed it out and gave it to her, all repeatedly, because she kept losing it. I also repeatedly texted her about it. The day after the deadline to sign up, she started to review the info. When a coworker pointed out that we'd missed the deadline, she accused me of misinforming her about when it was. The piece of paper she held up to show me the correct deadline was the original document I'd given her 6 months ago, and the deadline was written in my handwriting. She told me that since it was my screw up, I was going to call the people running the seminar and make them waive the late fee. While I was waiting to hear if the VP of that company would approve the waiver, she kept screaming down the hallway at me every few minutes to ask if it was done yet. I started thinking, you know, I could just get up and walk out of here... So I did. I left the keys on the desk and went to the park to watch some ducks.

The next day, I started working for myself, and that went great until I retired.

Rage quitting is overrated. Just do nothing at work. Odds are, no one will notice. And you keep getting paid to do nothing.

At the last hospital I worked at, a nurse was badly injured on the job for something totally out of her control. Probably shouldn't give more details than that so I don't dox her or myself.

Instead of giving her worker's comp and helping her recover, the hospital fired her over some completely unrelated frivolous bullshit (along the lines of "a patient overheard you using profanity while talking to a co-worker). This was also like a couple months away from her becoming vested in their retirement program.

I'm just a tech, but it was abundantly clear that giving my time to that company would be an incredibly risky move - fuuuuck that. I put my notice in the next day.

I hope she sued the absolute fuck out of them.

This was years ago, I was working a supervisor position at a certain green mythical sea lady themed coffee chain. I was sitting in the parking lot before my shift enjoying a shitty chili dog from sonic way more than I should have been. Previously that day, I'd recieved a text from my manager asking me to go in early, I elected to ignore it, I'm off the clock I have no obligation to text back or even acknowledge the message. Back to the chili dog. So, I'm scrolling through my phone and I see a message in the group chat for my store where someone asked some kind of question, probably something was broken idk. I replied with an answer and immediately had a text from my manager that said something along the lines of "how you gon reply to that after ignoring me all day?"

I walked in and gave him a shaky nervous lecture (I have really bad anxiety and hate confrontation) about how he doesn't own me or my time when I'm off the clock, he has no authority over me when I'm off the clock, and it's bullshit that he'd be whining in my inbox about petty stuff like that when he could've talked to me in person about it five minutes later when my shift was scheduled to start. I ripped the key off my chain and threw it at the ground in front of him and said to "work the shift your fucking self".

Yeah, I was immature. There were a million better ways to handle it, but he happened to catch me in a critical time between being radicalized and learning emotional intelligence. Sorry dude, you got all my corporate rage in one go.

Whatever, left the worst job I ever got koolaided into enjoying that day.

I have rage quit two jobs.

A long time ago I worked in a supermarket as a personal shopper. It was a pretty decent job, early start (4am) but an early finish, so it felt that I had the whole day to do whatever I wanted, though I was tired.

Skip ahead to Christmas eve, where everybody apparently has left their huge shops until the very last minute. Not only through our online service, but also in person.

Imagine this: You are being pushed to complete orders as quickly as possible and being called out for being slow, not only that, but every aisle is so full of people that you literally cannot push your trolley through them. I literally couldn't move or do my job. I'm fairly embarrassed to say that I walked out, didn't even tell anybody, and to my surprise I never got called out for it (I think it was too busy to notice) and the way the system worked, one of my colleagues would have just got the order and completed it without me.

The first job I ever quit, I must have been 16 years old. I was working as a promoter for a bar in a small town, essentially walking around with a sign, hanging out flyers, etc. ironic that a 16 year old is advertising a place they wouldn't otherwise be allowed into, but it was cash in hand and pretty dodgy.

On my first night I was promised $50 for my work, but ended up being given $25 because they said it was a trial night. Suddenly my nightly salary is $25 and as a 16 year old, I'm a bit too scared of this dodgy guy in his car that was paying me to ask for the full amount.

Skip ahead a couple of weeks (I work maybe 3-4 nights a week, hours are like 10pm-5am) and tonight, it is pouring down with rain, I'm freezing cold, my uniform involves a t-shirt, and it is genuinely just a horrible experience.

I go to my boss, and tell him that I'm gonna go put my coat on and he says that's not part of my uniform. I get a bit ballsy and tell him I want the extra $25 for the night before, and he said he never promised me anymore money than $25. So I walk home, in the rain, feeling hard done by but also like I learnt a valuable lesson. I never worked for less than I was worth after that.

I worked for a pretty big university here in the U.S. Not a premier research school, but pretty big nonetheless.

About a week before classes start, I get a call from the department head. They're cancelling the classes in the specialization I teach due to low enrollment. He's shuffled my schedule (expected) but one of my classes will be one I've never taught before and have absolutely no business teaching.

Now, mind you, this university has been going down hill for a while. Tenure was eliminated in all but name. Funding slashed. Class sizes exploded. Pressure increased to get federal grants to "make up the funding losses" while the school gives you absolutely no support in navigating the federal grant maze. No raises for years, except one small boost to make our salaries match a "sister school" that really wasn't.

I told my department chair I couldn't teach a course I knew nothing about. He relented and agreed to shuffle things around some more and put me in an old class I taught years back. I pulled out my old course materials, opened the textbook, started updating my old syllabus, and realized I just didn't care anymore.

I'd been repeatedly fucked over again and again by these people and I was done. Honestly, I broke down and cried on my spouse's shoulder for half an hour.

I called back the department chair and told him I quit. He said he didn't blame me and wished me luck.

The silver lining? I now run my own software business (SaaS), get up around 10 am, add features whenever I feel like it, and draw a modest paycheck. My stress is way, way down and I'm learning to love my boss (me).

My retail job at a Home Depot is the closest I've come to a rage quit. Since I've already read a dozen not actual rage quit stories, figured I'd share my own not actual rage quit story.

The management at the store I joined treated everyone below them like trash. Very unprofessional, very demotivating. At the time the pay was just barely above minimum wage, nothing to write home about. And, I didn't have a car at the time, neither did most of my friends, so it meant I had to walk to work and back each shift, the walk itself being about 45+ minutes.

Management knew all this, but would schedule me to close one day, open the next. When you close, you have to stick around an extra 1 - 2 hours after your scheduled shift to help get the store ready for open in the morning. Then to top it off, at least once a month, there'd be a mandatory 6 a.m. store-wide prep rally.

The final weekend I worked there, I closed Saturday night, had that 6 a.m. meeting Sunday morning, then had to stick around until 11 a.m. (or something like that) for the start of my actual work shift. I didn't get home until midnight, then woke up at 5 a.m. on Sunday and went to the prep rally where they basically convinced us that we were all shitty workers doing a shitty job, and then expected us to sing and dance in solidarity. I finally started working after all that, and my supervisor/manager was jumping on everyone of us that day. I looked at my coworker that sometimes gave me a ride, muttered an impotent "sorry but fuck this", walked home, and never returned.

And then everybody clapped and the president of Home Depot called me up and personally apologized to me, told me they fired the whole store, and offered to give me a unicorn, which I had to turn down because my dorm had a strict no pets policy. The end.

Less of a rage-quit and more of a rage-promotion. (it'll make sense, just keep reading.)

I am someone who keeps track of what I do, my productivity, and how much output I'm generating in my work. A company I used to work for decided they wanted to do back-door layoffs by handing out phony write-ups and putting people on performance improvement plans, and they targeted me.

Essentially, I went into a meeting with my boss thinking I was going to get promoted or at least an attaboy, because I knew I was the highest performer on the team.

Nope. It was a writeup. I told them straight up that I was doing more work than anyone on the team, I could prove it, and I wasn't signing. I fought the PIP with HR too, and the delicious thing was my bosses knew they fucked up, because I breezed right through it.

Ended up interviewing for an internal req that put me in a senior position on another team, and what galled me the most was the insistence of my boss on a going-away lunch, and I hated every second of it. I was gracious on my way out because I didn't want to burn bridges, but I honestly hope that person is rotting in Hell now, and am very pleased that that company got bought out and sold for parts, so hopefully they all got fired too.

I worked for a company who always positioned themselves as way more important than they were and were hellbent on micromanaging everyone. It was all about image and corporate culture. I can play that game fairly well, but I wanted to minimize my time dealing with it. I was part of a small group of 3-5 subject matter experts who rank similarly to management, but didn't have to manage anyone. This tended to isolate us from the McJob environment as we worked things out between ourselves and all the bottom tier managers were nice to us because they wanted us to help their employees. We were salaried and unlike most jobs which use salary to make you work more hours, here salary meant I could bend my hours more than most employees and do 4x10hrs or 4x9+4hrs and leave early every Friday. Sometimes my boss would tell us to leave early for the day or take us to lunch. Sometimes we'd go out to lunch when our counterparts from a client company were around. It was an okay gig and my direct managers were okay. Covid happened and upper management could barely stand the idea of anyone working somewhere other than their watchful eye so they try to drag us SMEs back into an mostly empty office calling us "essential workers" despite us being 100% able to do our jobs from home and fully nonessential in every meaningful way. I needed the job, so I went. Around that time we got a new manager who was supposed to straighten the place out (instead doubling down on every reason the place was shit). When I arrived at our mostly empty office I let myself into the IT closet and grabbed 4-5 monitors to build myself a monitor wall. I showed up in sweatpants. I took frequent breaks. I played Tux Kart on my phone. I played songs like "take this job and shove it" over my PC speakers while I was working. We put on techno music and remixed snippets of angry customer calls to it. (QA was vibing to the tune of our rebellion!) I raced my rolling chair up and down the isles and generally acted a fool, but not enough to get fired. Our small group of SMEs was tight knit and after a few days of acting our wage, one lady quit because she had kids and there wasn't any childcare available yet because of Covid. Our manager basically forced her into it because he would not compromise. The governor was still telling everyone to stay home. This woman straight up rage quit telling our boss exactly where he could shove it and all of us were VERY clear with our boss that he would lose the rest of us if he didn't shape up. Of course he knew best. The bossman was a fucking self-important narcissist and tried to call our bluff only to find himself with 0 SMEs a week or two later. I went home that night and found a new job with a friend. To top it off, I was in the process of switching roles at the first company, so when I left, I imagine they felt an extra sting of having to restart that search. Their mission was "asses in seats" and they would hire anyone to meet headcount on their contracts, so whoever replaced us may not even have known how to properly turn on a computer much less fix one. One fellow SME followed a former colleague of ours who got him plugged in elsewhere. All of us found new jobs in record time. They had been driving us too hard to really document much, so when we left I assume everything collapsed back to the level of 0-experience newbies with no guidance or product knowledge at all. The company must have burned enough people because they moved most of their activity to a new city and some of it offshore where they continue their bullshit to this day. That's what you get when you piss off nearly every qualified individual in a market! My small team of SMEs was awesome and I would absolutely work with any of them again. The comradery was top notch.

I web searched our former boss and found him on a few job sites for "high earning professionals". He got fired a bit after we all left and I'd like to think he's working as a grease trap cleaner now. Then again, in America we fail up.

It took a bit but the impetus was when the stalker they leaked my home address to drugged and attacked me.

After university I was looking for any part time work I could find. This was in 2007-2008, so the job market wasn’t particularly good in the UK. Ended up at a company that did over the phone charity donations. I wasn’t working for a specific charity, it was a company hired by charities to make cold calls. Called a lady who said she was going through chemo and lost her job recently, although she really would love to help a children’s hospital, she couldn’t afford it. Asshole manager is listening in on the call, makes a hand motion and mouths to me “keep pushing, it’s just excuses”. I apologized for taking up the ladies time and said I hoped her treatment goes well. Hung up, took off the headset and walked out the door. One of the best decisions I’ve made in my life!

I work as a gameplay programmer in the games industry. A few years ago we were making a mix of top down PvP hero shooter and Counter Strike. The company got cought up in the crypto bubble and decided to pivot the game and company to become a crypto gaming company (and later an AI gaming company, just following the trends). Anyway, I didn't have to touch that shit for a while, but after some time I was asked to make NFT loot boxes. I handed in my resignation the next day.

The last job I quit our manager and his manager both got fired for doing some bullshit so I ended up being the defacto manager of our department handling the minor day to day customer issues while we were basically otherwise unsupervised. After like 4-5 months they transferred another manager to us from a separate location who immediately started gunning for me. He tried writing me up 3 times in a matter of like two weeks over little bullshit things. None of which stuck because it had to go through HR and when I explained my reasoning for doing those things they were like "wtf, no" and dropped it. The weekend after the third one I was talking to one of my brother's friends who's dad ran a shop about it and he called his dad and got me hired there the next monday (which was really cool of him because I didn't think we were that good of friends). Never went back to the other job or even told them I was quitting.

I was 10 minutes late one day and the boss started screaming in front of all other workers when I was everyday at work after my time to help the other workers (truck drivers), sometimes an hour.

When all the drivers left I rushed to the office and told him that I was leaving that same moment. "My own father doesn't scream to me, you are not gonna do it". And left in August from an ice cream business.

I waited until they left because they didn't have to pay for what the boss had done.

My boss had Narcissistic Personality Disorder, complete with face-melting off-the-record disapproval of my behavior, followed by "love-bombs" affirming my positive contribution to the workplace, mere days after. This resulted in not so much a rage-quit as taking my first opportunity to exit as fast as possible. And the cherry on top? An open invitation to come back mere weeks afterwards. The pattern was so textbook, that all I had to do was look up NPD romantic advice and search+replace "partner" for "boss" in most cases.

That said, I was pretty mad about how a great opportunity was ruined like this, let alone not as advertised. We've all heard "this meeting could have been an email", well there's also "this tirade could have been a counseling session."

Got stuck as the charge nurse of acute psych almost every single night I worked for over a year. "But no one else can handle it like you" (I'm aware–acute is what I do) but I needed a fucking break. I told them 1/3 days I wanted to either be a floor nurse on med-psych or be the BERRT / consult nurse to the medsurg nurses for behavioral codes. They humored me one day a month for like three months then shoved my head right back under.

Then the supervisor came in to critique my morning reports twice in one week and honestly I didn't even snap I literally just said "OK understood can I finish report now" so she tried to corner me in a side room but I haven't survived ten years in acute psych without major injury by not being able to clock aggressive body language so I just walked right back into the nurses station to let everybody see her yell at me then handed her my badge and keys and left. Had a new job lined up within the week.

Current boss started out with the same sort of compliments like "oh you're so calm when people are threatening to murder you" etc like yeah, as I said, this is what I do, and once I was settled in, everybody got used to asking me for advice on the EMR, meds, they got me teaching the violence deescalation classes the supervisor was tired of... And I straight up told her I'll do all of this, you can enjoy my fun side projects I get up to when I'm bored–but if you make me charge nurse or let the house supers get shitty with me I'm out as soon as my contract is up.

So far she hasn't pushed it.

More funny than rage inducing.

Worked as a Senior DevOps engineer at a startup. They have no proper automation for deploying their code. Manually updating config in a GUI type situation. This takes a crazy amount of time, there are many errors, and it generally slows down development progress. There are 300 people working there, at least five dev teams, its hundreds of work hours every month wasted by this.

So I start writing a system to automate it - what is called Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery or CI/CD. Issue is, they have many projects, they are all a little different and managed by different people. No problem, I write the thing super configurable and write another system that will automatically deploy this thing to all the hundreds of repositories, taking into account their local config. We start rolling it out, when I suddenly get a new boss.

They are very smart but the kind of person that wants to do everything their way. So they did all the architecture and just delegated the most menial implementation details. At my previous company I pretty much rebuild every system from scratch. Yet now I was super bored and underutilized, while they were pretty overworked and stressed out. All while the company was held together with duct tape.

While this boss was really good in certain areas, I was more experienced in others, and they kept making errors that could have been easily avoided if they just asked me earlier. And they did not like when that was pointed out. Thing is, I was hired as a senior engineer. It is my entire job to be more experienced and point issues out, especially security related.

So this new boss is being super careful about this CI/CD system that I wrote. They are scared that deploying my system may break things - understandable. So the entire project grinds to a halt. I keep pushing for it but give up after a while.

Then, one day, my boss says "alright, today we deploy the CI/CD solution to ALL repos. By hand.". I'm a bit puzzled by this: has the reason for being careful suddenly disappeared? Why not use my automated system to deploy it? Doing it by hand is super repetitive and annoying. Also, if there is a bug in our solution, we would need to roll out the fix manually as well. That's why I wrote automation for that.

So I ask to clarify: " so you're sure we should deploy this to all repos now? You always wanted us to be careful about that". Answer: "are you incapable of reading?! New information > old information!". I laugh, think about it for 15 min and put in my resignation, suggesting they hire a Junior instead. Bit of a shame, the place was pretty cool. Just the boss was a dolt. Also they quit a month later.

Getting an average review while the client I worked for (and I was the only one full time assigned to them) gave us a 9/10. Colleagues and my direct supervisor were not asked either.

When I told my manager that I was leaving, she said "yeah, I thought so". 0 retention. HR was pretty damn apologetic and angry at the manager.

The whole HR department quit there same year from what I heard.

Early on in my career I got hired as a junior systems administrator. The job description was the usual responsibilities around sysadmin work and supporting our employees. And for the most part, it was. I was part of a team of 4 sysadmins and there were about 500 employees at this location. So not a particularly small outfit.

Anyway, they started asking stuff of my not in the description. I got asked to change a door knob, they justified it as appropriate because it was the IT closet.

Then I got asked to change out a security camera near the top of our warehouse. I refused (the ladder wasn't even rated for my weight), so my immediate boss did it.

A few lightbulbs here and there. Then, the final straw - they asked me to reinsulate the server room. Basically, lift one of the tiles and throw more insulation up there. Given no direction - I got myself a mask and nylon gloves and did it, wish I could say I didn't and I had quit right then and there, but no - I did it and gave them my 2 weeks the next day. They told me they didn't need 2 weeks from me. I was fine with that.

And I know, putting in my 2 weeks a day later isn't exactly a rage quit. But I'm a timid person and a pushover, or was at that time, so to me it certainly felt like it.

Another thing they did was write my up for clocking in while walking into the building. Pulled up the timesheet and the camera footage showing me clocking in a full 5 seconds before entering the building and said I was stealing from the company (basically they showed me the footage of me walking with my phone out and then the timestamp of when I clocked in vs when I entered the building).

The reason I did that was because it was more efficient. I had a set of daily tasks and checks to do and of I started that lost at the rear entrance I could get it done much faster without having to double back.

From that point on you can bet I got into work and took an immediate coffee break on company time before even starting that checklist. Never got written up for that either.

I also worked for an health insurance company, tho my experience was less extreme than yours it still sucked ass.

I worked the phones, and was hired together with a couple of other students through a student-oriented job agency. They lured us in with talks about how you can "really help people", and that pretty much every income call was "always positive", and naive young me believed it. I found out real quick that, surprise surprise, people don't call their insurance to tell them how happy they are with another out of pocket expense. And the helping people part was bullshit too. I couldn't waive fees, or approve insurance payouts, and when people wanted a payment plan I just filled in the form on the companies website for them. Wanted a payment plan that was different from the options on the site? Tough shit, either accept it or be prepared to be on hold for an hour while I transfer you to the department that might do it for you after grilling you for making, in their eyes, the bad financial decision of being alive.

I was lucky enough to never have been threatened on the phone, altho I couldn't say the same for my fellow student colleagues. When that was brought up with management they acted like it was the first time ever in the companies history, which I saw through immediately.

Since we were technically making financial decision for other people, we had to get certified. The process costed around 400 euro, but was refunded by the company on the condition that you worked there for at least a year. If you quit after 9 months you'd get 75% back, 6 months 50%.

I quit the day after being employed for 6 months, and have skipped past every call center job I have come across since.

they had mandatory overtime from october to december, with some mandatory sundays too, so working 7 days a week without a choice. so i left asap and never showed up for overtime. found another job in the same field within a week

Tweakers in the welding crew

Wow, after reading your story, my ragequit is peanuts in comparison. I almost don't feel like posting it!

Normally I'm a lot more humble than this, but you're all strangers on the Internet, so you'll just have to take my word for it, but... I had performed extremely well at my software development job. "Exceeds expectations" kind of performance review. I had led the architecture of several large efforts, and consistently delivered features.

Promotion time comes around, and I get a 3% raise. Eh, whatever. At least it meets inflation.

I find out a bit later that one of my coworkers (quite talented in her own right, don't get me wrong) got a title increase and a much more meaningful salary bump.

So I talk to my manager about why she was promoted and I wasn't. We both had similar performance reviews, had led similar projects, and so on. I was prepared to accept it if there was a good reason. There wasn't. There was only budget room for one promotion, and she had been hired at a more senior position than me, though I had been promoted to match soon after I started. That's it. No logical reason other than seniority.

I was butthurt, and started looking for a new job right away. Ended up snagging a great gig in a few weeks.

I keep in touch with my old co-workers quite regularly, and I guess some activist investor forced through policy changes and gutted the satellite office I worked at. I guess I dodged a bullet there.

A gas station chain as a client and the type of work that came with it. I was working as a help desk tech subcontractor and already had about 20 different clients. I've been doing this for a decade but because the new ones always messed up their work, we had tons of reminders and automated tasks in Teams. So I was already on edge because of the constant Teams notifications and all the triple checks.

Then they introduced this new client, a gas station chain, with hundreds of locations. I already worked in gas stations when I was a teenager and hated it. I hated the constant beeping for pumps to be unlocked when someone wants to buy gas. And I certainly didn't want to have stressed teenagers on the phone telling me it's super important that all their pumps are working on a Sunday afternoon while my instructions were to simply convince them to wait until the next business day if all we tried didn't work. Fuck cars. Fuck oil companies. I can usually tolerate working with Microsoft even if I hate it, but Microsoft + oil companies. Fuck no.

I still haven't found the will to get a new job, but my bank account is now starting to push me with insistance.

Public and employee bathrooms out of order. 3 hours before opening, no one has ordered portable toilets. Was told to "walk to the Starbucks" if I needed to go so bad. So I left and never went back. 3 years at that job.

The state ended up overturning the denial, and the insurance company was forced to pay for his pain treatments. It took me 9 months to find another 9-5 job, but it was worth it.

There are certainly heroes and champions among the common folk. You are one.