Good on you. An actual hero.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.