let’s discuss final F-you’s to jobs or bosses you hated

by Alison Green on March 13, 2025

Most of the time when you leave a job you hated, you do it professionally — you give notice, you transition your work, you move on, even when there’s malice deep in your heart. But sometimes you get the opportunity to go out with a bit more verve — for example, the person who quit with two hours of notice the week before a big project was due … exactly the same way they treated him when he’d been demoted four months prior. And obviously we must never forget the person who spelled out “I quit” in cod.

Not all final F-you’s are so visible. Some are more discreet, perhaps known only to you. But all are satisfying.

Have you ever left with an F-you to a job or a boss, subtle or not-so-subtle? Or seen it done? We want to hear about it in the comment section.

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  1. CherryBlossom*

    Tomorrow’s my last day at a job that’s been absolutely miserable… I may or may not be here to take notes!

    1. Alan*

      Congratulations! Having left such a job in the recent past, it’s such an awesome feeling! Enjoy!

    2. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Hahaha, best of luck and congratulations!!! And of course fill us in if you do anything you learn about here!

    4. Distracted Librarian*

      Congrats! I always enjoy my notice period, because I no longer have to care about office drama (or, really, anything else except exiting gracefully).

  2. Anonychick*

    Not me, but someone my mom worked with: after their tiny company got bought out by a different, awful company, someone—who, like basically everyone else, had been tossed aside by the new bosses—made sure the last public document under the OldCompany name contained the words “F**k [NewCompany]” hidden somewhere within.

  3. Katydid*

    I worked for an insurance company call center and one of my co-workers just went to lunch on her last day and never came back. It was a small thing but we all thought she was a hero at the time.

    1. Clisby*

      I’m curious – would it really reflect poorly on *anyone* for leaving a call center job at the drop of a hat? Maybe it would if the employee tries to get a new call center job, anywhere else? Or maybe I’m an outlier in thinking working in a call center is the worst. Worse than retail, worse than restaurants, worse than grocery store cashier, etc.

      1. Brooklyn*

        I worked for a university call center one summer – calling alumni and asking them for money basically. The pay was awful, the hours terrible, and you just felt slimy the whole time. Everyone I know who worked there just walked out at the drop of a hat once they had enough. But I think there’s a difference between cold call sales call center and, like, customer support call center, where you sometimes feel like you did something productive.

        1. SprawledOut*

          Agreed. Having worked in a customer support call center for a couple years, I can say that I at least sometimes left that job feeling like I’d really helped someone (even if that was usually just making a lonely old person’s day by chatting with them for longer than I should have about the weather and their grandkid’s achievements in school).

          FWIW, I did give that call center two weeks notice, but it was still mostly because I got that job through a friend and wanted to reflect well on him even as I left.

        3. Jaydee*

          I also worked at a university foundation call center doing the same thing. I quit by leaving a voicemail shortly before my shift saying I wouldn’t be coming in that day. Or ever.

          No regrets. That job is the only thing that has ever made me want to take up smoking.

          I didn’t really mind calling “older” alums – people who graduated a decade ago, lapsed donors. Those were okay. But they had us start calling people who had just graduated the last couple years and it was awful trying to get someone who could barely afford rent and ramen to give money to the school.

          1. Anon for this one*

            I work in a development-adjacent position and I find myself routinely having to tell the older donors that No, It Is Not Okay to include a donation envelope in our graduation program.

            1. ChiliDog*

              My law school was shameless. They hit us up for donations before we even graduated. This was as the legal world was going to complete shambles and huge firms were either having massive layoffs or shutting down completely. The job market was flooded with experienced attorneys who would take anything to pay their bills. No one had jobs. My school had also hiked the tuition every year well beyond inflation.

              I should have just ignored the email but instead I politely pointed out the grads’ current financial situation. The Development office sent back a very snippy reply. That was 15 years ago and I have never donated.

          2. Zephy*

            I do still feel a *little* bad about being a *little* rude to the call center employee who hit me up for donations less than two years after I graduated. I said something along the lines of “I have loan payments to make – I’m still paying for this degree. When it starts paying for me, I’ll gladly cut you in. In the meantime, I’m not going to forget where I went to college, so don’t call me, I’ll call you.” To her credit, though, she did take me off the list and I haven’t gotten any more calls. I do still get paper mail from them (quarterly magazine, homecoming invites, and shakedowns for donations – for the last one they offered me a free gift of some ugly socks if I donated more than $50! ooh baby, fifty bucks for some crappy green socks, where’s my checkbook!)

            At this point I’ve paid off my loans (yay), but so far all the degree has done for me is allow me to answer “Yes” to the question “Do you have a bachelor’s degree?”, so the second part of the prophecy remains unfulfilled.

            1. Songbird*

              I had a very similar conversation with the last alumni donation student I talked to a number of years ago. The student was a major in my field, so I gave them some advice on some cool courses they might consider taking in the undergrad program there. They always have the students from the major call and talk about themselves a little first. Not a bad strategy overall, but doesn’t work as well when they are talking to the person that now teaches the classes that cover things like persuasion techniques. (I ended up as a college professor at a different school teaching those classes I recommended.) When they brought up the money bit I mentioned the amount of grad school debt I still had from attending their current school and that I had to wait to pay off my own degree before I could pay for the degrees of others. To their credit, similar to your caller, mine agreed that that made sense, and I haven’t gotten a call since.

              My loans are also now paid off, but I donate to the scholarship fund at the school I teach at instead of where I got my degree. I’m still salty about the fact that when they send me the alumni mailings they are sent to Ms. Songbird rather than Dr. Songbird. You’d think if anyone was going to recognize the degree it would the the university that granted said degree to me. I even asked the alumni association to correct that early on after I graduated, just kind of on principle. But they never fixed it, so now I’m grumpy about it and still won’t give them money.

              1. Oolie*

                After I submitted my marriage announcement to the alumni newsletter, all the mail from my alma mater started coming addressed to “Mr. HisFirstName HisLastName & Mrs. MyFirstName HisLastName”. I happen to have taken his last name, but I had not informed them of that, they just assumed. And they put his name first. My checkbook has remained closed ever since.

            2. CommanderBanana*

              I went to one – ONE – recent alumni event at the (small, private) college where I got my undergrad degree after I graduated. It was billed as a breakfast with the new university president. The new director of development got up in front of us and told us, I am not kidding here, that the new president wanted to be there but he couldn’t because he had to go golfing with a donor.

              I have never donated a cent and I never will.

            3. Hannah Lee*

              I used to do small donations to the university I went to, but I stopped after news came out about a long-time university *library* employee, who’d saved and saved and left $4 million USD to the school when he passed.

              The donation wasn’t the thing that got me, it’s how the school decided to spend it. The employee had specified at least $100,000 go to the library, but the rest should be unrestricted funds. The university decided to allocate nothing to academics (even though some quality programs were being cut due to loss of funding) and $2m to a career center (okay fine) … and $1 million on a new video scoreboard for their football stadium. After just spending $25 million of other on the stadium in the prior years. Like, there weren’t MORE compelling academic uses for the money? They had to instead spend 1/4 of the donation on, as someone put it “a trinket for the athletic department”?

              Yeah, no more money from me guys.

              1. Hell in a Handbasket*

                Ooh, I am familiar with that one. Especially galling given how underfunded that school is and how much other departments need that money.

                I stopped giving (token amounts) to my alma mater when I went to my first reunion, and they proudly showed off the new freshman dorms they had just built — which were like the Taj Mahal. Much nicer than anyplace I ever have lived or will live. Nope!

                1. Zephy*

                  At the risk of doxxing myself, when I graduated, my class made a “senior gift” (that I did not contribute toward) to the school that was used to build a monument on campus consisting of a dozen or so huge granite slabs. Just, like, in a pile. Purportedly, the monument was meant to represent the core values of the school, among which was (at the time) “diversity.” Ah, yes, what a diverse pile of identical granite slabs that were imported from several states away.

                  The office of something or other tried to drive engagement with the core values by giving every student a piece of chalk and encouraging them to write how they live the values on the rocks. They were, genuinely, shocked to their core when the pile was suddenly sporting a very diverse collection of pastel penis drawings.

          3. TeaCoziesRUs*

            I honestly think there should be some kind of moratorium for early career grads. The only reason to call a grad for the first 5 years after is to update the alum contact info, ask if they can volunteer time at something specific, or let them know of an alumni event in their area (i.e. we’re letting all of our State U fans in major metro center know that we are taking over Random Sports Bar to cheer on our team in March Madness / big rivalry game / insert fun alum event here). Don’t ask for money. Don’t even THINK about asking for money yet. You KNOW those loans aren’t paid off! Look at your donor records and figure out when the average time is when alumni start to donate, if ever. If you notice they start 8 years after, then start asking them 7 years after. Not one question before then – just staying in contact will be enough.

            1. Zephy*

              Maybe it’s the autism speaking but I don’t think anyone in a position to make a charitable donation to their alma mater needs to be reminded that’s a thing they can do? Do the NTs…forget where they went to college? I’m not not donating to my school because I forgot about them, I just don’t have any f***ing money.

              1. anon non-neurotypical school psych*

                Also AU and if I wanted to donate but didn’t know how (meaning, what number to call/web address to go to/etc.), it would be a barrier to doing so, as I’d feel like it was a really onerous task and feel anxious and guilty about it. So I could see myself being relieved if I wanted to donate and someone made it easy for me by calling, especially if I had an expectation of receiving such a call at some point (“Oh good, the call’s finally here, now I don’t have to feel anxious about how to figure this out for myself.”). My undergraduate degree is from almost 2 decades ago though and I still have loans to pay off.

              2. TeaCoziesRUs*

                It’s more that if the alum/nae has funds to contribute to charity, the school wants their hand in the pie. Kind of like how I added a donation to Colonial Williamsburg tickets a decade ago, and they STILL send me letters hitting me up for more donations (which is creepy because I’ve moved several times since then and never updated CW with the new address!).

          4. Mgguy*

            I’m a regular and fairly generous donor to one school to which I’m an alumnus. It’s a small school and going there quite literally changed my life, so I donate to pay back(to the point of initiating a scholarship in honor of the professor who had the biggest impact on me, and I am the sole direct funder of that $1K/year scholarship). I’ll also say that I REALLY ramped up giving when they hired the current president, who made me feel good about the direction of the school, and BTW I have an open line of communication with her about donations/fundraising.

            I am always incredibly polite when I get solicitation calls from current students, however I’ve perfected the polite “Don’t ask me for money, I’ll give as I’m able.” Fortunately I’ve backed that up by actually following through, and they haven’t called me in a few years.

            BigStateU where I went to graduate school tends to be a lot more…forceful…in their solicitation. I can’t bring myself to be rude especially to student workers, but there comes a point with them where I’ve just had to be rather forceful in saying “I wish you the best of luck, but you will not be getting any money from me today or in the near future, and please do not contact me again asking for money.” I haven’t heard from them in a couple of years, so I guess I finally made their list, but in the more distant past I’ve even had to hang up on a few people. I’ll mention too that when they were hitting me hardest, I was employed at that university in my first “professional” job-a valuable experience that paid me $14/hour to do high level technical work with an advanced hard science degree in 2016 dollars…and yes I was barely making it then.

          5. Nebula*

            Yes, I actually enjoyed doing the calling alumni for money thing as a student. There were a couple of things that made it worthwhile though: 1) it was really well-paid for what it was at my university and 2) we focused specifically on donating to support student bursaries and similar. We were also not encouraged to really push people who didn’t want to donate – for the people who had only graduated a couple of years ago, the aim of the calls was to keep them feeling connected to the institution so they might donate in future, rather than getting any money out of them there and then. So those calls were mostly just chatting about like, is this particular clubnight still going, is so and so still there etc. It was fine.

            One thing about it was that if you brought in more money, you then got given higher ranking prospects. This system wasn’t really that great because so much of it was luck. The first time I did it, I was just matched to people who’d done the same subject as me and uh… English grads don’t earn as much, generally, as engineers, for example. So I was mostly asking people who didn’t want to donate and it was awkward. The second time I did it, one of my first calls happened to be with someone who’d ended up as a producer for high-end nature documentaries – really fascinating person to talk to, and he had loads of money, so gave a ridiculous amount. So I got all the rich people from there on out for that stint, and it was super easy.

            I myself have opted out of all those calls though. I’m never giving money to my university, quite frankly they have plenty of it and if I want to support young people’s educations, there are much better ways for me to do it.

          6. Maggie*

            When I graduated and left my University call center job I gave myself the gift of deleting myself and my friend who worked there from their database! No fundraising calls for me as I struggle to pay back student loans.

          7. ProfessorTeapots*

            I did my MA and my Ph. D. at the same university: they used to call me asking for donations while I was still a student there, receiving scholarship money from the alumni fund. At one point I asked them what the point was when I was actively being paid from the same fund they were soliciting for – I might as well just avoid the middleman!

            … They still kept on calling me after that…

        4. goddessoftransitory*

          Yes. I work at the latter and have done for over a decade and a half–I don’t think I could last at the former for more than fifteen seconds.

        1. Bruce*

          Some exceptions: my sister works in customer service for a medical device company, she works from home, literally keeps people alive with customer support, and is well treated by her employer. It helps that she has a medical background, and being able to work remotely is good for her own physical disability.

          1. Joana*

            I worked for an LL Bean call center way back in the holiday season 2014 and actually really liked it. They treated us well, gave us plenty of perks (they ran a flu shot clinic right in the building a couple times, I probably wouldn’t have gotten one that year otherwise) and they let us hang up on rude customers.

            I miss that place.

      3. Names are Hard*

        I worked at a call center for 7 years, but I was not taking calls, I was in the back office doing reporting. People just walked out all the time. We had people on their first day just leave at break or lunch and never be heard from again. It was common that if you tried to give a notice that they wouldn’t schedule you anymore so most people quit with no notice.

        I don’t blame anyone for just quitting without notice there. They got what they deserved when they essentially let you go if you tried to give notice, and no, they did not offer pay in lieu of working the notice.

      4. Your former password resetter*

        I’ve had decent call center jobs. But those were government support desk jobs, with reasonable managers and a focus on actually helping people instead of making sales or pumping through as many calls as possible.

      5. NigelsMom*

        I has 2 jobs in a call center during college. One was an outbound collections-type role where people came and went all week—the company (a national bank) was so tired of it that they used only third-party temp agency employees to start, and each week, a supervisor came through the cube farm and asked everyone if they wanted a permanent job. He never made eye contact and I don’t think anyone ever said yes.

        The second place was an inbound call center for a national investment firm. It was a dream job: the company sponsored your professional licensing, we had a sushi bar in the cafeteria, and had our holiday party at the fanciest joint in town with an open bar. They were obsessed with making us feel loved. But the MINUTE you hinted you were resigning, you were escorted out, do not pass GO, no exit interview or transition-out time. Looking back on it, it was like the mafia. When they loved you it was the best job ever, but you can’t leave without being disowned if not worse.

        1. Always Tired*

          It’s not uncommon to not be able to serve out notice in the financial services field. Too much access to sensitive data. If you’re higher up the food chain, they usually pay you the two weeks as they escort you out.

          1. RunShaker*

            came here to say the same thing. If you have your series 6/7 brokerage license (and other financial services areas), it is very typical to not to finish your 2 week notice due to what @alwaystired said.

        2. Sweet Fancy Pancakes*

          I wonder if we worked for the same national investment firm; we didn’t have a sushi bar when I worked there, but everything else sounds familiar. They even provided massages and gift wrapping at the winter holidays to help alleviate stress. I worked the graveyard shift W-Saturday, and on Saturday nights was when all of our systems updated and we couldn’t access customer accounts, so we could easily go an hour or more between calls. We called it free-money Saturday.

        3. Curious*

          Well, hopefully, they didn’t invite you on a fishing trip or to take a ride on a boat that they’re thinking of buying on your last day. See Godfather II, Sopranos S2E13.

      6. Sharpie*

        I walked out of a cold calling company at lunch and didn’t go back. We were supposedly self-employed but using their equine their office keepiyrheir hours, and as far as I know, nobody was informed about how to pay taxes or anything. I’d been there maybe three months and it got to the point I’d had enough. Packed my stuff into my bag, went ‘to lunch’, got in my car and went home.

        Didn’t hurt me a bit, I’ve had other and much better jobs since

        1. Sharpie*

          …using their equipment.

          I promise I can type and proof-read. At least, most of the time I can!

          2. Festively Dressed Earl*

            Tbh a cold calling job might be more tolerable if you were making calls while ambling along on horseback on a nice day.

        2. allathian*

          The only job I quit without notice was a call center job. I’m in Finland and it’s the only “real” job I’ve ever had that didn’t have an employment contract. (I don’t count the casual babysitting jobs I did for my parents’ friends as a teen where I didn’t declare income tax, although I wouldn’t have been liable to pay anything because my accumulated pay for the year was too small). I just told the shift supervisor at the end of the day that it was my last day. NBD, because I was basically hired for every shift I showed up for.

      7. MigraineMonth*

        I had a friend who was incredibly embarrassed that her job after college was working retail at a mall. (I’m not sure why she thought I would judge her; I’d spent the last year making pizzas at a place that was one health inspection from being shut down.) She was really excited to apply for a job she considered much more prestigious… at a call center. *scratches head*

        1. Justme, The OG*

          Having worked retail… at least you can sit down in a call center when people are yelling at you.

          1. MigraineMonth*

            I’m sure there were advantages to the job she was applying to, I was just thrown by her presenting an entry-level call center job as really coming up in the world from her lowly start at working at a clothing store. I think it had something to do with the clothing store’s location being in a mall, and therefore… juvenile?

            1. And...uh...Abraham Lincoln*

              Plus? Retail pay SUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS. I haven’t worked retail in over a decade, but when I left my last retail job for my current company, I was making $9.25 an hour…after having been there almost 4 years. The hours are terrible and fluctuate wildly, benefits are basically nonexistant, customers are frequently mean and/or stupid, and it’s very demanding physically.

              I started at my current company in the call center (collections even!), making half again as much money, on a set schedule, with great benefits including paid time off, where I wasn’t on my feet all day. And in 11 years, I have been promoted several times (for the last 6 years in non-customer-facing roles), make more than four times as much as I did in retail, and have more paid time off than I know what to do with. So while I would not claim that my experience is universally true, I am definitely proof that working in a call center can ABSOLUTELY be a major step up.

      8. froodle*

        I go back and forth on whether call centre or fast food work is the worst, but they remain the two industries I would literally never consider going back to.

        I’ve waited tables, cleaned hotel rooms and office buldings, tended bar, worked on a production line, manned a cash register in various retail environments, and worked a variety of office jobs, and no other industry has ever sucked like those two.

        Individual jobs have been worse, but in terms of “this entire sector is a nightmare of low pay, poor treatment and shitty environments”, nothing gave me a worse experience than fast food and call centres.

        1. Old Bag*

          I was a very talented salesperson, especially at telemarketing. I could walk into a phone job and blow any metric they had out of the water. I also absolutely despised the work with every fiber of my being and felt wretched and gross doing it.

          Later, I was a sex worker (not a dancer, not a webcam performer, as in the kind who literally shows up with the intention of engaging in adult relations with a paying customer) and I am absolutely not being hyperbolic when I say I would go back to that in a heartbeat if it was either SW or telemarketing / sales. It wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops but I never felt as gross or had people be abusive to me doing *that* compared to telemarketing and sales.

          I don’t want to discount the many bad experiences people, especially women and transfolks, have had in sex work. Mine is not a typical experience necessarily — my experience was also not born out of desperation, addiction, homelessness, coercive control, or various other kinds of abuse. It wasn’t quite typical “high end” fare like seen in media representations but more like… the reality one might suspect inspires those sort of shows. Not as fancy, not as much money, not as sexy, not as much of a good time as the portrayals would have one believe — but not terrible either. I just wanted to nod along enthusiastically with your assessment of call centres (I’ve never done fast food other than a couple months at Burger King nearly 40 years ago when I was 15 that I don’t even remember).

    3. Violently Purple*

      I also worked for an insurance call center right out of college that was notoriously strict and had a reputation of moving the performance metrics every month so that you could never advance into higher roles. I only lasted a little over a year, and during my last week I purposely misused the off-phone “modes” so that I barely took any calls. I think I got called into my managers office like three times that week, but I didn’t care. I take a moment of gratitude every day that I no longer work there.

    4. Pool Noodle Barnacle Pen0s*

      I worked for a company years ago where this was so common we had a name for it – the “forever lunch.” It wasn’t a call center but it was a stressful, dysfunctional workplace.

    5. NotmyUsualName*

      I had a coworker in toxic office next to mine who went out to “grab something from her car” in the middle of the morning and then when she was in her car she texted a coworker to look on her desk where she had left her badge and key

      1. RunShaker*

        this was waayyy back in the day. I worked on banking side of inbound call center for a very popular bank, “C” known for their credit card and for suckering incoming college freshman back in mid to late 90s/ early 2000s. I was on bank side, not credit card side and ended up moving to an area in which you had to have your brokerage license. There is another awesome employer, “X” in town that had better everything which a lot of employees in brokerage area of company C would leave and go to Company X. It got to point of so many leaving, we had to sign a contract to repay company C for them paying for our brokerage licensing if we left less than 2 years from passing the licensing test. Company C (crappy bank) had multiple buildings on campus and due to number of people leaving to go to Company X, we ended up referring to Company X as building 4. I too left and went to Company X and I never repaid the cost of brokerage licensing. I spoke to an attorney and confirmed Company C wasn’t enforcing the repayment for most people so it would be easy for me to fight it and Company C found out I spoke to an attorney. They ended up making me work my 2 weeks and my manager told me if I didn’t finish my 2 weeks it could affect my future due to bad reference. It turned out to be total crap, managers weren’t allowed to gives references. All they would do was confirm employment dates and salary. I doubt most call centers would mark you for not giving 2 week notice.

    6. My cat is the employee of the month*

      I worked at a contract lab (science equivalent of a call center) and someone didn’t return after lunch on the first day of orientation. I worked at a sketchy biotech start up where someone left at lunch without telling anyone.

    7. Jojo*

      I worked for a call center and a guy got into an argument with a rude customer on the phone, wrote down her phone number, logged out and called her from his cell phone to cuss her out, then went home, He knew he was going to be fired the minute he walked in the next day, so he brought a jar of crickets and released them on the floor. Crickets for months.

    8. Gabbyct*

      a former coworker managed some local convenience stores and on employee’s first day they went out for a smoke break and never came back

    9. Robberazi*

      Not me, but once when working at a smaller startup, I saw someone who got hired by a notoriously awful manager. She yelled at him in public within the first hour. At lunch I saw him talking on his phone, and by 2PM he handed in his pass at the front door and said he got his old job back. Myself and other junior members were awestruck.

      That manager took a month long leave of absence.

    10. Just wondering*

      I liked the story of the one who left her jacket and purse behind when she walked out (took her walker and phone) so it took them longer to realize she was actually GONE!

  4. Wounded, erratic stink bugs*

    I so wanted to give a big F-you to my last boss, but couldn’t afford to — it’s too small a field.
    My tiny F-you was to give the scantest two week’s notice possible (the following Friday when I gave notice on a Monday, and there was a holiday weekend in between). When I met with her to tell her I was leaving, I started by telling her when my last day would be, rather than announcing my exciting news that I had a new job I was looking forward to. She got to hear all about the place I was moving up to when she asked, but I had the tiny satisfaction of the look of surprise on her face when I told her I was leaving.
    So small an F-you that she probably didn’t even know that’s what it was, but I needed more than plausible deniability about it, so I snuck in what I could.

      1. Amy Purralta*

        I did this back in 2006, I had booked 3 weeks off over Christmas to house sit for my parents. I’d found a new job starting on 2 Jan. I sent my notice via postal mail to say I wasn’t returning.

        1. Grandma’s Gift*

          I had a horrifically toxic boss (think gaslighting, pitting employees against one another, sabotaging, pretty much as bad as you can imagine). I lasted at that job for just over a year. I gave my 2 weeks notice. Technically as a manager, I should have given 4, but there was no way I was going to do that). During my 2 week notice, my grandmother died. While I was sad about her death (she lived a good long life though) the timing worked out in my favor, as I was still eligible for bereavement leave. So in reality, I only had to suffer through 7 days of hell instead of 10. It was my Grandma’s last gift to me. I love you, Grandma!

      2. Nah*

        For me it was Thanksgiving eve-eve. The restaurant was closed on the holiday and the night before was the one day of the year they’d actually do a deep clean (yes, just as ew as it sounds) of the equipment and ingredients. Big enough they actually had more than 3 people and a manager closing the entire place, it was all hands on deck. I’d been there for two years and had been refused the raises they promised me when hired for a year and a half+ of said time, and was at that point the third or fourth most senior employee there (including the managers AND GMs).

        So my last day was the day before the deep clean and my only regrets were 1) not documenting all the health code violations I was taught to do, and 2) not knowing I could get workers comp for becoming permanently disabled there due to their safety violations. Actually probably three things, the last being a conglomeration of all the times I didn’t quit on the spot when mistreated, like the aforementioned raise refusals, or getting screamed at in front of customers by the GM when I had (what I would later learn) a *literal heart attack* on the line and was scrabbling to sign myself out to drive myself home.

        (to be fair I was a very timid and emotionally drained 18yo still rocking a nokia, but with the benefit of hindsight and a LOT of therapy, well…)

        1. Nah*

          *workers comp to cover the physical therapy, at least.

          also yes, this is a chain restaurant that I will not name but that parades around as this upscale healthy and ~totally fresh~ salad/sandwich shop with a bakery. They were neither of those things, and the only thing I will let my family buy from there is the bakery items, since those are the only fresh things in the building. No, not even the coffee. (It’s way too expensive anyway, lol)

            1. Nah*

              I can neither confirm nor deny (;v) but I can confirm they sell their Mac and cheese cups in supermarkets now, not frozen like they were in store, and they’re actually cheaper to buy a full from Walmart than a half size from the place itself lol.

              iirc Good Mythical Morning did a from-the-restaurant vs frozen-restaurant-brand comparison episode including said place and half the comments were former employees telling them everything they had was the exact same soup/etc and it came frozen to the store from their distributor in the exact same format to be microwaved.

  5. Amber Rose*

    My example is pretty boring overall. My boss blew her lid at me over a mistake in a document and demoted me on the spot. I sat at my desk and processed that for about an hour along with everything else, and then went down to her office and very politely and professionally said that it would be best if we parted ways and this was my two weeks notice.

    Then I called in sick for the next two weeks straight. In my defense, I was a little sick, since my roommate found me on the couch that first night and (glorious friend that he was) provided me with a substantial amount of alcohol.

    The more subtle part of this F-you was the other, more time sensitive document I’d also made a mistake on. I’d been thinking about how to fix it prior to demotion, but nah. I just sent it in like it was without telling anyone and opted to let them deal with the fallout.

    1. Amber Rose*

      I realize I’m making myself look a little bad here, like wow what’s with all the mistakes? But I had a good reason for being basically unable to concentrate and I wasn’t the only one struggling.

        2. Amber Rose*

          She had her reasons for being crazy too. I hated her, but I also pitied her. It was such a toxic vat of awful by the time I left.

          1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

            I get it. “I’m sorry you are in this awful place, but every day, you chose to make it worse.”

      4. So they all cheap-ass rolled over and one fell out*

        I assume (hard to know on the internet nowadays) you are a human being, and so occasionally make a mistake or two.

  6. Count von tshirt's phone*

    I (queer F) quit a job where the manager (M) kept making subtle religious misogynistic remarks. A meeting, I quietly picked up my things, went downstairs, dropped my equipment at HR and left.
    I had been home for two hours before I realized I’d left my lunch in my desk. Eggsalad.
    I probably could have messaged someone on the team, but hey, no one had the courage to stand up for me so…. yeah. I heard through the grapevine they found it two days later.

    2. Juicebox Hero*

      Sometimes, the universe just gives the jerks what they deserve. Accidental stinky egg salad sounds about right.

    5. Clisby*

      You might be a contender for the annual resigning by cod award. You cannot, of course, top the original, but it would be cool if like the annual bad boss competition, we had the annual badass resignation competition.

    9. CaseyJD*

      I once also accidentally left an egg salad sandwich at my last day of a job where they laid me off – must be some sort of subconscious revenge seeking in your brain when you’re making lunch!

    12. Crencestre*

      Your bigoted manager certainly deserved to have egg on his face! Looks like the yolk was on him…hope that this left him a shell of his former hard-boiled self…

      Here’s a toast to you!

  7. Katrine Fonsmark*

    I spent only 6 months at a job with the MOST horrible boss. The place was run terribly but I did have some great co-workers (I think everyone but one person has now left). I was professional, gave my 2 weeks, etc., but the Chief of Staff also hated my boss, so he hatched a plan whereby we went over my exit interview questions together in excruciating detail (nice to get them in advance). He knew exactly what I should say to paint her in the worst light – it was all the truth, but he knew what she’d been up to for years, so I emphasized certain things, including some pretty egregious stuff that the CEO didn’t know about. I had my exit interview on my last day, my boss tried to hug me on my way out (ew), then my co-workers and I headed to a nearby bar for a little farewell party (paid for by the Chief of Staff with the company card haha).

    I found out 3 months later that my boss was fired while we were at the bar.

    9. Sharp-dressed Boston Terrier*

      This was far less of a bridge-burning than a spectacularly organized controlled demolition. Well played!

  8. Kowalski! Options!*

    This is pretty small potatoes, relatively speaking, but back in the 90s in Toronto, when you could make enough money from temping to have a decent-sized apartment and decent holidays, I got placed with a highly dysfunctional three-person marketing firm staffed by a fifty-something guy who was getting very loudly divorced, a twenty-something hotshot who thought he was God’s gift to marketing, and the future divorcé’s neighbour’s daughter, who – I honestly don’t know what her deal was, but she had to have her cat with her at all times and had a minimum of two full-on meltdowns a day. No one had their eye on the ball at that joint, and I asked for a different assignment after about a month.

    On my last day, the neighbour’s daughter screamed at me for (I don’t remember exactly what) for fifteen minutes, so I slipped a marketing report (which was supposed to go out to a client the next week) waaaay under the laser printer and left for the day, never to return.

    Je ne regrette rien.

    4. Busy Middle Manager*

      I wonder if you watched Melrose Place at the time and how much the drama but also just the client work match what you lived through!

      1. Kowalski! Options!*

        Oddly enough, when I lived in Toronto, I didn’t have a TV or cable – I had a second job working in a theatre at night, so I only ever heard about TV plot lines from my coworkers!

    5. Heffalump*

      “Je ne regrette rien” was tugging at my memory. I had a hunch it was an Edith Piaf song, and a search engine tells me that it is.

  9. Yes, yes I am*

    I worked for a software company that unbeknown to me was run by religious zealots. I brought a huge customer to them, that they wouldn’t deal with due to it being a LGBT dating app. I
    left due to this and not making enough money.

    as I left, I said “right, I’m off, I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure, but you’re all wankers”

    and walked out.

      1. Education Mic*

        Lolol tomorrow is my last day at a job where my boss has been the WORST and this really resonated.

        1. pagooey*

          An IT guy at my first corporate office sent an email to everyone when he left that included the immortal line, “I will even miss some of you.”

          1. Cats Ate My Croissant*

            That made me think of the classic “I still miss my ex… but my aim is improving.”

            1. Macropodidae*

              I think it was Married With Children but I could be wrong.
              “Did you miss me?”
              “With every bullet so far.”

    4. Marzipan Shepherdess*

      They DESERVED to lose that huge (VERY lucrative!) customer! Hope you found a MUCH better job (one not staffed by religious zealots) and that the LGBT dating app made a more reasonable company a lot of money!

      1. Possum's mom*

        Off topic, but that reminded me of the time my sweet work friend, who was very timid , came to work one day in tears because the night before, upon meeting her fiance’s mother for the first time replied after dinner, “it’s been a real pressure to meet you”.

  10. Eggstra Anonymous*

    I haven’t done it yet- still looking for a new job- but my fantasy is to quit the day before a shipment of chickens.

    This year. When we’re selling chicks as fast as we can put them in boxes.

    1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      Alison, can we have a collection of the greatest single sentences ever composed in the comments?
      “When we’re selling chicks as fast as we can put them in boxes.”

      1. Rage*

        Honestly the “my fantasy is to quit the day before a shipment of chickens” is pretty epic as well – because we don’t know at that point if they chickens are going out or coming in.

        1. Irish Teacher.*

          And it leaves open the possibility that the person’s work doesn’t even relate to chickens but they just have random shipments of them show up at the office.

        2. Eggstra Anonymous*

          Technically, it’s both – the chickens arrive, we take them out of the shipping boxes, put them all in holding tanks, and then so far this season have been immediately taking them back out and boxing them up for customers.

            2. Distractinator*

              I remember when we used to talk about binders full of women, apparently things were much more organized then, now just toss the chicks in a box LOL

              1. Heffalump*

                I know I’m dating myself here, but I remember when I could refer to a woman as a “chick,” and no one would dopeslap me.

                1. IainC*

                  Given how dated the term now is, you probably could refer to broads as chicks and be taken as ironic rather than misogynistic by the dames.

              2. Heather*

                I was waiting for it… scrolling, knowing it was coming… and you DID NOT disappoint! Eggscellent. You clucking landed that joke right in the hen house, friend. Thank you.

        4. Southern Violet*

          I’m gonna use this when I cant say the unprintable words. Like around my grandmother.

          1. Heffalump*

            We’re egging you on!

            Napoleon said, “To make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.”

            George Orwell’s response to this was, “Show me the omelet.”

          2. Walk on the Left Side*

            You know what they say. Birds of a feather, and all that.

            I’m sure some thought there’d be a poultry supply of these fowl jokes, but the AAM commentariat isn’t bird brains…many of us live at the absolute beak of pun-based humor.

  11. Shove It*

    Way back around the turn of the century, I quit a call center job without notice, along with two of my coworkers (there would have been four of us, but one backed out at the last minute).

    We planned this for a week or two, slowing removing personal items from our cubicles (a couple items per day) so that we’d be ready to make a swift exit on our secretly planned last day. We hoped nobody would notice our cubicles and desks getting increasingly more bare. I don’t think anyone ever noticed.

    Right before we quietly dipped out, I left a note on my desk for my boss to find. The note outlined all the reasons I was quitting. I can’t remember everything I wrote, but at the bottom I signed off with “In the words of Johnny Paycheck, TAKE THIS JOB AND SHOVE IT!”

  12. Mouse named Anon*

    My example isn’t super thrilling but it felt good none the less. At my former company our senior leadership was changed. The new senior was awful. A tyrant, gas lighter and all around horrible boss. She had close to 8-9 staff quit from her departments in less than a year!

    Our team lead though was wonderful and we loved her. She couldn’t deal and quit. One by one we each quit leaving our dept completely empty within a matter of 2 months after she left. They were scrambling trying to find coverage. There were so many delays because of it. Everyone single one of cited our senior manager as the reason.

    6. Hannah Lee*

      This has kicked off a “quitting with style” version of the 12 Days of Christmas in my head.

      On the first day of quitting, what did the bad boss see?

      “I quit” written in cod

      On second day of quitting, what did the bad boss see?

      – 2 hours notice, and “I quit” written in cod

      On the third day of quitting, what did the bad boss see?

      – 3 jars of crickets, 2 hours notice, and “I quit” written in cod

      On the fourth day of quitting, what did the bad boss see?

      – 4 malicious compliances, 3 jars of crickets, 2 hours notice and “I quit” written in cod

      On the fifth day of quitting, what did the bad boss see?

      – 5 egg salad sandwiches …

      and so on and so on

      1. linger*

        I wrote one for the last quitting roundup.
        (With thanks to MsM and Dadjokesareforeveryone who set up the premise, and the many others whose stories served as inspiration)

        On my final day of notice, I gave my company:
        Twelve cod a-quitting,
        Eleven keys well hidden,
        Ten trails of glitter,
        Nine cancelled contracts,
        Eight random edits,
        Seven smiley stickers,
        Six screeds of email,
        Five board forwardings!
        Four shredded files,
        Three home truths,
        Two mowed words,
        And a flipped bird, ’cause I am free.

  14. Bird Lady*

    I worked for a “luxury brand” retailer and had the worst general manager ever. We reported him for multiple instances of sexual harassment and, during the investigation period, he retaliated against the assistant management staff. He would tell customers that I had went insane and was a danger to myself.

    I had already been planning a vacation with my family for some months, so I already had PTO scheduled. I had also agreed to work a specific shift for him when I returned. Before I left for vacation, I told him that my last day would be the day I had agreed to work for him. I would open and he would close.

    It was an awkward shift to say the least. And then a customer tried to pin me in the fitting room with him. I went to my manager, handed him my keys, and walked out without a bag-check. He was in the middle of a meal break and I was the only one on the sales floor. He told me I would never be able to work for the company again. It’s been over 15 years, and I haven’t even considered going back.

      1. Rage*

        It’s like when you’re breaking up with someone and they say “You’ll never find another person like me!” and you’re like, “Isn’t that the point?”

    2. Lurker*

      I think it’s hilarious that they think this is a credible threat. As if there are zero other places to work or we would ever want to go back.

    3. Slow Gin Lizz*

      “He told me I would never be able to work for the company again.” Don’t threaten me with a good time.

    5. Disappointed with the Staff*

      > told me I would never be able to work for the company again

      The funny thing is that for a lot of retail jobs this isn’t even true. Even if they have a centralised HR system those notes get lost or have to compete with the shortage of staff and all the rest.

    6. Just a decent human being*

      Reminds me of a boss I had that called me after I started my new job. He wanted me to help out with some IT stuff. I said I could perhaps look at it during my lunch. But he demanded that I do it immediately. Then he threatened me that I would never find another job again. Rather hollow when I already have a new job.

      Even more ironic is that I’m actually at the same job almost 20 years later so maybe he was right after all.

  15. Eric*

    I once worked with a boss that made my life hell. “Gaslighting me during live TV” kind of hell. So when I found a new job, I gave the requisite 2 weeks notice and worked on transitioning everything, trying to get a meeting with her to go over my work.

    My second-to-last day she pokes her head into my office and says “We’re going to meet today at 5PM.” ….okay. Then she follows up with “And did you just wash something in the sink? There’s water on the counter. Go clean it up, I’m not your mother.”

    I immediately marched into HR and informed them that actually today is my last day and actually I’m leaving right now. Then I left without saying a word to any of my coworkers.

      1. Mallory Janis Ian*

        At all, periodt. Every time I’ve left a job, I’ve had plans to meet coworkers at a bar immediately afterward and even if not for that, I wouldn’t stick around for a late, after-I’ve-already-quit meeting.

    3. Ialwaysforgetmyname*

      Many years ago I was relieved to be leaving a very stressful job and a boss who initially seemed sweet and caring but was actually nasty to work for. At 4:50pm on my last day, she came to my office and said “since it is your last day, why don’t you leave a little early?”

      Gosh, 10 whole minutes early? Thank you SO MUCH.

  16. Judge Judy and Executioner*

    My partner was fired by text message for missing 3 days due to a planned family reunion vacation. The week before this, there was an all-hands PLUS spouses meeting where the owners talked about how important family was and how they wanted to take everyone, including spouses and kids, on a European vacation. I took half a day from my own job to attend this meeting.

    While working there, my partner was illegally declared a 1099 contractor instead of an employee. He tried to address this with the owner but didn’t get any results. So, after the firing by text message, my partner reported them to the IRS for classifying him as a contractor instead of an employee. According to one of his former colleagues, the owner was angry and had to pay fines due to his illegal actions.

    1. Allornone*

      *so happy that I will never have to attend a meeting at my partner’s job, nor he mine.* That’s just bananacrackers.

    2. pretty purple unicorn*

      If her employer wants me at my spouse’s meeting, they can hire me. My rate for consulting at spousal meetings is $800 per hour.

      1. Judge Judy and Executioner*

        This was 10+ years ago, we were young and didn’t know how weird this was. I would never do that now!

    3. goddessoftransitory*

      Uh, what? Even if we didn’t work in the same place I am not attending a meeting FOR MY SPOUSE’S JOB.

  17. PDB*

    I used to be a staff recording engineer making music and records. One of the things I did was make master phonograph records, a process too complex to explain here. What used to happen was my boss would take the client’s raw work, give it to me to do, and then take credit for my finished work. As with all such arrangements the clients found out and encouraged me to go free lance, which I did and took all the studio’s clients with me. Not so unusual, you say? Get this:
    I was working in the same studio. I literally quit on Friday and came back Monday as a client because I was now buying time. It was very satisfying because I was there every day as a reminder of how badly my boss blew it.

    4. Anon for this*

      Years ago my office hired one of our interns to join us full-time. He was a great guy and we were all looking forward to having him on board in part because we were significantly understaffed. He took one look at the contract and said “not signing anything with a non-compete.” We knew he had other offers and admin actually listened to us and took the non-compete out of his contract. Which meant they had to take it out of ours as well but that’s not the point of the story.

      My boss was a rigid, bigoted jerk. He was also my grand-boss’s favorite so we never even tried to get any traction. New hire had two little kids and a wife with a completely inflexible job, so when the kids got sick, he stayed home. We had plenty of sick time but Boss thought this was inappropriate because 1) mothers should stay home with sick kids, not fathers and 2) it showed a lack of dedication to the job. Finally he called new hire into a meeting and told him he should hire a nanny.

      New hire gave notice the next day and opened his own office across the hall because he had no non-compete.

    6. WestsideStory*

      Ha, I did that once, gave my two weeks notice to my toxic boss at a TV production company, where I worked with five different producers who themselves were very nice.
      Left on a Friday, came back on Monday as a freelancer working for the nicest producer. At triple hourly rate from the previous week.
      Toxic boss refused to speak to me and now there was no one to set up the coffee in the morning, alas.

    8. Sharp-dressed Boston Terrier*

      Axiom: The best revenge is living well…

      The PDB Corollary: …right in front of that smug bastard’s face.

  18. Matt*

    In a former job I was working for a contractor to the US government and was a very high performing technical engineer in a niche field. There was another guy I worked with (I’ll call Jake) who was also good but was very quiet, shy, and afraid of conflict. At some point our old manager left and we got in a new manager (Tarzan) who I would describe as very macho-assertive. This new manager liked to bark orders and be short with people. This didn’t bother me because I knew I was indispensable but it did bother Jake and he tried to avoid Tarzan as much as possible.

    After a few months, I was lucky enough to score a conversion to civil servant and become a government employee directly, working in a different branch of the same agency. I had planned to notify the manager and his manager separately by email, but fate intervened. At our next weekly team stand-up, Tarzan was in a terrible mood and chose to leap on a small and inconsequential mistake Jake had made and gave Jake an over-the-top dressing down in front of us all, including “This is F–king unacceptable on my team”. In the awkward silence that followed, I simply said “I can’t work on this kind of team. I quit effective next Monday” and left the office.

    I filled in Tarzan’s manager more fully about the situation and he understood and congratulated me on the move but I heard from others who remained in the team meeting that Tarzan was truly shocked, and his apology to me later in the hallway made it clear that he spent a day or two wondering whether he was going to face repercussions for “driving me away”. Hopefully he reconsidered his approach in a more lasting way after that!

    3. HugeTractsofLand*

      Truly wonderful! You used your transition to stand up for a good coworker and call a bad one out, I love it.

    4. It's Marie - Not Maria*

      What is it with these awful managers on Government Contracts driving Top Performers away? And then being shocked when the Top Performer transfers or leaves? There needs to be a catchphrase, it happens so frequently.

      1. Thegs*

        There must be some way to combine, “People don’t quit their jobs, they quit their managers,” and, “Those who can leave, do.” “Those who can quit their managers, do”? Needs workshopping….

        1. Zombeyonce*

          Those on the manager side of this equation call it this eye-rolling phrase: “No one wants to work anymore.”

      2. goddessoftransitory*

        I could understand it intellectually if they were threatened or jealous, but yeah, the *shocked Pikachu face* when their terrible behavior catches up with them is so infuriating! What did you think was going to happen???

        1. linger*

          Few people are terrible in their own minds.
          Generally, the ones that are self-consciously terrible, intend to be.
          And even they tend to believe everyone else would be equally terrible given the chance.

  19. former paralegal*

    When I was a paralegal my department experimented with hiring college-aged interns to help the overworked paralegals with basic admin tasks. We had two great interns and one terrible one. (He thought he was very intelligent, but he either was incorrect about that or allowed his arrogance to get in the way of actually doing the job, so we were constantly reiterating details that seemed tiny but that were actually crucial to our workflow, each of which he adamantly refused to either perform correctly or even admit he’d done incorrectly.)

    At the end of his internship the terrible intern sent the usual goodbye-and-thank-you email to people he’d worked with. But there was one sentence that made me think he’d hated being there as much as we hated having him: “This summer taught me a lot about what I want and don’t want in a job.”

    Having him had also taught us a lot about what we wanted or didn’t want in an intern.

    1. Paint N Drip*

      internships are about education after all, seems like you ALL had an educational summer

    2. XX*

      At my last engineering job, we had an intern one summer who was clearly a few rungs lower in talent than the other interns. They were all between their 2nd and 3rd years of college, which is when you finish the general engineering courses and get into your degree’s intensive courses. This intern was a good worker but just could not get into the hang of things. At the end of the summer she told us she was done with engineering altogether, and switched to CS even though she would lose most of two years’ worth of courses.

      1. Rainy*

        Sometimes it’s the right thing to do. I dropped out of college because I despised my major (my parents picked it, I was really good but found the people toxic and hateful), and when I went back I declared a different major and burned most of three semesters of courses as a result. The only courses that counted once I declared my new major were a couple of distros and the required history of the discipline courses. Worth it.

        1. golf carts are versatile*

          Same. I was one and a half semesters away from graduation and I just could not make it past the high level requirements (turns out chemistry is actually my worst subject). It was a struggle and I was miserable. Switched majors and went to a new school. While I was exempted from most of the general requirements because of past coursework, the entirety of my major work had to be done from scratch. Two years of five separate terms per year was rough, but it was so worth it.

        2. goddessoftransitory*

          Yeah, gotta agree with that–to keep chasing something that has declared itself Not For You is a smart course of actions. To keep piling up credits and sinking money into a course of study that you do not want to actually pursue is the definition of Sunk Cost Fallacy.

  20. Tall Broad*

    Not my boss, but the C-suite person two up from him in the hierarchy. I started looking for a new job once I found out that said C-suite person had said I wasn’t ready for a promotion after five years. (I didn’t hear this directly from him, but from my boss.) After I handed in my resignation, he called me to say that I’d be missed and ask why I’d chosen to leave. I told him that I’d been working hard to get promoted, and if I wasn’t able to be in five years, that meant I was a bad fit for the company, so I was leaving for a company that I hoped I would fit into better.

    I have no idea if he was planning on making any sort of counter-offer, because I mentioned I was going to work with someone who he’d fired before he could get to that. I wouldn’t have taken it anyway, because this wasn’t the only reason I was disillusioned by the company. And I wasn’t interested in a raise/promotion that only came due to me walking out the door.

  21. anonymous amateur programmer*

    I automated about 3 FTE worth of their business and wrote programs the quality team (such as it was) leaned on hard, and handed it all over as well as I could, with detailed documentation, knowing that I was the only person in the company who a) knew or b) understood the well known fact that Excel for MacOS and Excel for Windows have different default epoch dates, or how that interacted with the CEO’s (also well known) preference to use a Mac and have everyone else use a PC.

    1. Iranian yogurt*

      This got me to look up what default epoch dates are! I’ve been working on an experimental Excel workbook on my home computer (Mac) that could hopefully streamline the work I do on my office computer (PC) and knew there were some compatibility issues, but hadn’t looked at them in detail yet. Maybe I should.

      1. Hello, Nurse*

        No, that’s because of a bad choice on default values for fields that aren’t being used for the current case (apparently, there are multiple places for DOB).

        It was an especially bad design decision, since at the time SSA got their first computer in 1955, there were almost certainly people in the system for whom that 189whatever date was their actual DOB, meaning it was *designed* to corrupt data.

        2. Hannah Lee*

          It’s like the PPP loan program offered for businesses during the early COVID years.
          The online application stored the zip code field as a number instead of text.

          NBD because US postal codes are all numbers, right? Sure, except for the fact for that the much of the northeast, along with Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, zip codes all start with zero. Hartford CT 06120 became 6120 and the application was rejected.

          The banks my employer worked with in MA saw most of the loans they processed in the early days immediately rejected and it took a lot of back and forth to find out why, and get it fixed, delaying funds by months.

          Bad programming? Accidentally on purpose “mistake” to restrict funding to some “blue” areas? Who knows?

    3. Strive to Excel*

      That is diabolical and I salute you.

      Time & Date problems in Excel are particularly vicious beasties to detangle.

    4. Alan*

      As someone who has had to write software for this sort of stuff, there are a ridiculous number of epochs out there. I keep thinking that I’ve seen them all then another shows up.

      1. Disappointed with the Staff*

        The best part is when someone who doesn’t know imports data into a different system. Repeat that a few times and you have utter confusion in every date field.

        A US multinational I did some contract work for was going back to their original mainframe database and re-importing everything out of that into a shiny new database as the first step in a giant import-and-merge process across the whole company. Specifically because the dates in their current “data warehouse” were so terrible. I just worked on part of the merge, the date people were way above my level.

        OTOH I’m still traumatised by an Australian address table where the free-form “city” field contained more than 30 different spellings of Adelaide. All by people who claimed to live in that city.

          1. Disappointed with the Staff*

            We actually had a contest in the office and then an argument because some of what was in the database wasn’t very credible. I think the in-office winner was about 25.

            IIRC the real answer was just brute force every possible error in every possible combination. Start with Adalaide, add Adelade, Adellaide, Addelaide, Adelede, Adeleaide… add them up you get Addalledie? I dunno man, being at the bottom of the world’s longest open sewer does things to people’s brains.

            1. Part Lab Tech*

              Wow. I was thinking maybe random typos but ok.
              Yeah, the Eastern states really screw SA over for water. I always think of the way Perth and Adelaide traditionally clean drinking water as very good example types. Perth dam water was fairly clean and kept that way. As you said, the mighty Murray is a filthy trickle by the time it gets to Adelaide.
              These days, dam water is a much smaller percentage of Perth’s water so it’s not as clear an example.

        2. TM*

          I’m in the IDM space, and I continue to be amazed by people who can’t spell their own names – not just throwing in a nickname into the “legal name” field, or spaces after hyphens or obvious typos, but you name it.
          Also purported HR systems that don’t do basic sanitisation of extra spaces in name fields or non-alphabetic characters (plus hyphen, apostrophe and space). Even had a few with *digits* in them!
          One achievement I made in my last job was to create a lookup table of valid office locations, so at least we managed to get consistent office addresses (including state and town names) for all staff. It only took 5 years to implement…

      1. anonymous amateur programmer*

        I wasn’t like, trying to make it a f-you, but by the time I was done with all the other jobs my manager decided were super urgent for me to get done during my notice period, I had less than a day to hand over the codebase (to people who had never opened the code editor before and were shaky on IF statements) and trying to explain to anyone what the problem was or how to fix it when I wasn’t around to run maintenance was just Too Hard, so I just tidied up the documentation and let it go.

  22. Disillusionedentrepreneur*

    I’m the person who wrote a 7000 word letter to my c-suite team about why I was quitting. Alison and everyone on here told me not to, and i would have said the same to someone else. The situation was much more complicated than I discussed in the letter, but the important thing is that a year later I have no regrets. Some things need to be said, and gross disrespect and mistreatment of staff is one of those things. I was in the unique position to not need a reference from them (and yes, I know life is long, just trust me). So I said what I said!

    1. Employee of the Bearimy*

      I’ve been on the other side of one of these letters, and I can say that it was definitely not received the way the staff person hoped it would be. We were already in the process of managing them out at the time and it both reinforced the correctness of our decision and saved us the trouble of documenting their poor performance.

      1. Southern Violet*

        See, to me, that attitude reinforces why leaving is a good idea. A company that lets bad blood and behavior build up for so long that it takes 7,000 words to get through just isn’t a good company.

    2. Standing Ovation*

      My hero. By the time I left old job I had made it my mission to make plausible deniability impossible for anyone above me.

    3. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Which letter is that? If it’s the letter I’m thinking of, then I know you’re not that person because I am that person.

      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        In my case, they absolutely read it. It wasn’t 7000 words, but it was definitely read. And so many people there felt the same way I did and congratulated me on both getting out of there and having the courage to tell management why the person who was the reason I was leaving was dangerous (I had nothing left to lose, honestly – my boss and her now-retired boss knew she was a nightmare and both said they absolutely would give me good references in the future). It’s been almost a year but afaik she’s still at that org, making my former coworkers miserable. But since the CEO who hired her is still there, I’m not surprised he hasn’t made waves by getting rid of her. Oh well, their loss.

        1. Old Bag*

          I did one of those when leaving a call centre. The boss asked why I thought I wouldn’t get fired for taking a selfie with zero identifying information in it, since is was against company rules to do *any* photography in there because some people are dumb and will take a selfie with client account numbers in the background.

          I wrote him an email when I got home and opened with “I realize this was probably a rhetorical question, but I’m going to send this on the off chance you genuinely were curious why I thought I would not be fired.”

          It was fairly lengthy, but boiled down to “my numbers are off the chart and meanwhile in the last month you’ve kept someone here who was arrested for dealing weed in the parking lot during work hours, another someone who got into a fist fight with our supervisor and punched him in the face breaking his nose, and another who did a no call / no show up for two weeks straight. All of these people had shit metrics, and there was zero identifying info in my picture, so my question back to you is how on earth could you possibly think *I* could think I would be fired?!”

          (Note: that’s just a few examples. There were more egregious ones in my manifesto, but they would be far too identifying.)

          I added that if they seriously thought my selfie was a more fireable offense than all of the above, I didn’t want to work for them anyway, because any company with management that shitty was destined for bankruptcy. They’d been around for roughly 25 years at that point, so that was a pretty bold claim on my part.

          Six months later, they closed abruptly due to being so broke they could not even afford last paycheques for anyone. Broken Nose supervisor found me on facebook and told me I was absolutely *Legend* for that letter, and that Boss shared it with Broken Nose in a sense of defeat and said “she’s right, isn’t she?”

          Mwahahahahaha…..

  23. Bella*

    The “Senior Vice President” (even though he was the ONLY Vice President) would just complain that “everyone always leaves the water cooler empty” instead of refilling it himself. He also frequently left it empty when he used the last bit. So during my notice period, I used the last of the water and I purposely left it empty (which I never do) just to piss him off.

  24. Snarkus Aurelius*

    This is very petty, but I can be petty if pushed.

    I had a boss who always had to have someone to target. The person was always a woman. For two years, it was me. I couldn’t do anything right. If I said one thing, she said the opposite. She once blamed me for the weather. If I needed her to do something, I always advised her to do the opposite.

    This same boss always prided herself on being close and in touch with her employees’ personal lives.

    So when I got engaged, I told everyone but her. I invited everyone but her. (It was an office of 15 people.) I kept the whole thing secret, and everyone else was scared to tell her. My wedding occurred when she was on vacation. Everyone also knew I was moving to be with my husband after I got a job where he was. For at least three months, everyone knew all of this information except her.

    When she got back from vacation, I put in exactly two weeks. I told her I’d gotten married. The look of shock on her face was all the revenge I needed. Then, at the going away party I told her I didn’t want, I gave the staff a professionally framed picture of all of us at my wedding right in front of her.

    On my last day, my boss was out. She tried to call me, but I let it go to VM. She told everyone else, “I will never get over this. I can’t believe she did this.”

    I’m sure she did though. In the future, don’t ever tell me what you pride yourself on.

    3. soy katalina*

      I 100% hope that the “going away party [you] didn’t want” was another example of you telling her one thing so that she’d do the opposite. It’s beautiful that you orchestrated the party by manipulating her.

  25. AttyAtLarge*

    It was unintentional timing, but the day I put in my notice at a particularly odious law firm helmed by my notoriously cruel supervising partner, I was entirely unaware said tyrannical boss planned to be out that day for extensive dental surgery. There was no hiding my intention to leave until his return – having witnessed the sort of treatment other departing employees had received, I’d packed up my office completely the night prior to ensure I didn’t need to make a humiliating return trip to accept my personal effects.

    Needless to say, the cat got out of the bag that I was on my way out, and the news made its way to him in his dental chair, prompting him to make an unscheduled appearance that afternoon.
    When he showed up, his eyes were still teary, cheeks still packed with bloody gauze, and he was entirely unable to berate me at top volume – as was his typical custom. Instead, he attempted to scold me, sotto voice, lisping through the gauze, and I still don’t know to this day how I managed to keep a straight face. Here was the guy I’d had frequent nightmares about, the man who’d made me question my ability to practice law, and he was absolutely ridiculous.

    I am now thriving at a far superior law firm, working in the same highly specialized field of law, and five years in now I have more trial experience (and wins!) than this supposedly incredible trial lawyer had in his entire career. His firm folded a few years back due in no small part to his inability to retain associates, and he now works at a much less successful firm that he used to sarcastically refer to as “The Isle of Misfit Toys.”

    Life is good.

    4. Je ne sais what*

      It’s giving CJ Cregg’s unfortunate dental emergency in The West Wing. My favorite episode of all time.

      “Joshua! A seek-wet pwan to fight infwation?!”

      1. And...uh...Abraham Lincoln*

        “C.J., so help me, if you use the words ‘pwesident’ or ‘bwiefed’ again…”

        Also my personal favorite quote from that episode: “Have you fallen down? Have you fallen down and hit your head on something hard?”

        I love that show so much.

      4. Southern Violet*

        CJ: “Why are they in fwoggy bwottom?”
        Josh: “They’re not I just wanted to see if I could get you to say it”

    5. goddessoftransitory*

      Oh, Lord. I am picturing him leaping from the chair, paper bib fluttering in his indignant wake, as he tore back to whisper-berate you.

  26. animaniactoo*

    My dad’s story – centuries ago when there was no such thing as desktop publishing and he worked as a typesetter and fonts were stored on disks to be loaded when needed for printing….

    He was laid off but asked to wrap up projects. He knew the company had a history of shady dealings towards laid off employees… so, he made a copy of all the font disks and took them home. Then when he was told he would not be getting his final paycheck, he carefully inserted prepared slivers of magnets in all of the disk boxes on his way out the door.

    When they called him for help, he told them he just so happened to have his own copy of the font disks and he’d be happy to sell them… for the cost of his final paycheck.

      2. ICodeForFood*

        Is that Left Justified or Right Justified? I guess left, since animaniactoo*’s dad left the job… (Former typesetter here, too.)

  27. Bettyboop*

    ok I have to tell this one. I had been on long term sick due to a major incident at my workplace that badly damaged my health. finally I admitted to myself I couldn’t go back and arranged my last day to hand over everything. well my boss refused to tell anyone I was leaving. I got back and people were having a go at me for being behind on work that I had been signed off from doing my boss refused to put new people on the work! anyway I went to say goodbye to all my service users and they were so happy to see me and someone in my team had told them I was leaving and the service users had baked me a cake. maybe not a big eff you but it felt like such a win after everything I’d been through

  28. Mother of Corgis*

    Unfortunately, I was the innocent party caught in the crossfire for this one. Back in the olden days, McDonalds had a special day where you could get a hamburger for 20 cents, cheeseburger for 30 cents, limit of 20 each. One of my coworkers was fired the day before (he genuinely deserved it. He just wanted to collect a paycheck, and cursed out anyone who tried to force him to actually work. Being cursed at by a teenager surprisingly did not go over well with management). He came in and bought 20 hamburgers and 20 cheeseburgers and paid entirely in a bucket of change he brought in. I was the only cashier when he chose to do this. And because our managers were such sticklers about the drawers being right, I had to count up all the change to make sure the amount was correct.

    1. Juicebox Hero*

      That wasn’t even getting revenge on your manager, it was just being a jackass to an innocent coworker who had nothing to do with his firing. What a dillweed.

      1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

        Yeah, that piece of crap sure showed them!
        I only wish that, other than on this site, OP told nobody at the place that it happened.
        “ha ha, did you hear what I did to that place?”
        Nope.
        “Oh, Mother of Corgis didn’t tell you?”
        Nope.

        1. KateM*

          Yeah, it sure showed the manager when one of their customers (swearing coworker) had to wait longer than normal until all his change was counted! Mother of Corgis’ time was paid one way or another, it was actually the teenager who brought all that change whose time was wasted.

        2. Mother of Corgis*

          Oh, the manager knew without me telling them because they saw the line piling up behind the jerk. But they couldn’t be bothered to actually come up and open another register either. That place was awful even for a fast food place. He did get banned after that, for all the “punishment” that was for him.

          As a slight consolation, when I complained to my fellow marching band friends about it at school, they offered to mess with him in the hallways, trip him or something, but I didn’t want them getting in trouble too (he was definitely a dish it out but can’t take it type).

      2. JustaTech*

        I have a friend who worked in the tuition office of Big State U as a student who had another student pull this on the last day of the semester that tuition could be paid. The place is packed with anxious students trying to pay with checks or cash or cards, and then this one guy rolls in (literally) with a wheelbarrow full of pennies.

        Everyone starts glaring at this guy, who thinks he’s making some kind of statement. “You’ve got to take it, it’s legal tender!”

        Then one of the (non-student) senior staff comes out from the back office and says “No, actually, we don’t have to take that. Take it back to the bank and pay in cash.”

        I mean, what did that guy think was going to happen? All the other student would applaud, and not mind that they were not going to be allowed to stay enrolled because they’d missed the deadline because he wanted to be edgy?

        1. goddessoftransitory*

          The “starring in my own movie” types never seem to get that the rest of us are not their enthralled audience.

        2. Southern Violet*

          Actually, they might have been forced to had the fuy gone to court. Verizon was.

          But still a jerk ass move.

  29. Beth*

    In my last job, I managed to time my departure such that over half my team left in the same week. It went from a 7 person team to a 2.5 person team basically overnight. We served a core function that brought in over half of the company’s annual revenue. I’d been hunting and was leaving for a better offer, but most of the others were leaving with nothing lined up out of sheer frustration with leadership and how badly our team had been managed over the last year. It was so satisfying that my job hunt happened to pan out just in time to run off with everyone else and leave leadership to sleep in the bed they made.

  30. MM*

    I’m not the hero of this story, but back in college, I delivered pizzas, driving a rinky-dink Nissan which I did not maintain adequately. One night, as I barreled down a dark country road, my car threw a rod, severing the gas line and causing a fire to start under the hood. Panicked, I pulled into the nearest driveway and ran to the door to ask for help extinguishing the flames before the whole thing exploded. The residents were stoners gearing up to have a party, and they weren’t as anxious as I was about the whole predicament. The chick just stared at my shirt, which was branded with the logo of the pizza restaurant, then said, “Hey, my car blew up when I worked for that place! I don’t have my shirt anymore, though.” Then she laughed like a maniac, and I realized she was the actual stuff of legend: the still-celebrated former employee who, before my time, had one day rage-quit, stripping off her branded pizza shirt in the dining area, throwing it on the floor, stomping on it, and storming out the front door onto the street wearing just her bra and two big middle fingers, a Valkyrie with no regrets. I am sure they still tell her story there. As for me, I finally got the stoners to help put out the fire once they realized my car was in the way of the incoming keg delivery, and I kept on working for that pizza place for years. It’s still my favorite job I’ve ever had.

  31. WavyGravy*

    Very minor but I had a project that was due to an awful boss (who regularly screamed at me). I kept getting calls and emails from her and once I ignored her, HR, ensuring I would complete it.
    I said yes yes of course, I will turn it in by the time I leave. So I waited until 5p on the dot of my last day to send it and then immediately blocked her number from my cell. I also did a fairly meh job – it was technically fine and complete and honestly wasn’t terribly important since it was for internal use not something to be publicly filed, but it was nowhere near my usual standard and I heard she threw a fit once I left.

  32. had to do it to em*

    I worked in a restaurant that had a host of issues, as restaurants do: we had a mean dishwasher who hassled the women on staff, we had a line cook who not only frequently made mistakes during service but who also spit dip in the linen hamper and stunk to high heaven, and our pastry chef was slapped on the ass by another cook. Our FOH manager was serving out his notice because he’d gotten a job at a new restaurant opening across the square, but something happened and the company fired him before his two weeks’ were up.

    HR didn’t lock him out of his email before they fired him, though, so all the staff got an email about how if we wanted to work with people who didn’t sexually harass us and that would actually bathe and furthermore if we wanted to not get yelled at by dishwashers, he would be happy to see us over across the square at his new job. It was hilarious. He went over every piece of drama we’d had over the past week and I’m sure I am forgetting some other detail. He got banned from the property after that, but he would occasionally send someone over with a box of fried veal-stuffed olives. I do not miss anything about that city but I do think about those fried veal-stuffed olives sometime.

  34. Box of Rain*

    Not mine but one I participated in. My then-boyfriend, future-husband and I worked together at a TGIFriday’s-style restaurant in the late 1990s (so before pictures on social media might have confirmed what happened). We were both scheduled on a Sunday morning, and with the plan to drive to work together, I’d spent the night at his place (an apartment in his parent’s basement) on Saturday night.

    Around 8 am on Sunday, I stepped out of bed to start getting ready and, as I stepped down, my foot touched something wet. Something wet enough to soak my sock in about two seconds. Turns out the basement was flooded–and flooded BADLY. He called in, and the manager was really crappy to him, definitely assumed he was calling off due to being hungover, wanting the day off. etc. Now, my future-husband wasn’t a manger per se, but he was a keyholding floor supervisor (basically a fill-in if a manager wasn’t available to work), a trainer, and sometimes a fill-in book keeper for the restaurant–so not someone who casually calls off work.

    He pulled up a 4′ piece of dripping wet carpet, stuck it in a trash bag, and sent me to work with it. What followed became so iconic that when my cousin started working at the same restaurant more than 3 years later, it was still a story being told to new people. Luckily (for me, not them), the manager who was crappy on the phone was standing at the host stand as I walked in the front door. I dropped the huge, lawn-sized trash bag at their feet and said, “Mike thought you didn’t believe him when he called earlier. He wanted me to bring you this proof and to tell you he quits,” then walked away to clock in.

    Calls were made to Mike, and the resignation stuck. When the manager asked me to clean up the trash bag, I refused saying it was a gift for him, not me. Still not sure how I didn’t get fired for that.

    2. L_Rons_Cupboard*

      OK, that ‘gift for him, not me’ stinger made me snort-laugh at my desk. Well played.

  35. Chi*

    Oh wow, I have one. It’s not a mean one. I worked at a certain mall store that reeks of cologne in my early 20s. In addition to the strong cologne smell, the music was so loud and annoying. I heard the most annoying songs over and over. Finally I heard a song for the third time in less than 4 hours, and I just walked up to my manager and said, I am done. If I hear this song one more time, I will lose it. Handed her my badge and walked out. Have never set foot in that store again.

    1. ReallyBadPerson*

      Ha, if it’s the mall store I’m thinking of, I remember taking my then-tween daughter there to shop and lamenting the fact that they didn’t have a bin of hazmat suits and earplugs for the poor adults whose wallets were financing all that noise and perfume.

      1. Jay (no, the other one)*

        Oy. Yes. My husband is allergic to strong perfumes so I only took my daughter there once when she was a tween. I had to strip in the laundry room, wash my clothes twice, and shower because I reeked of the stuff. I refused to let her shop there with my money. She found a winter coat she LOVED and I let her order it online thinking it would come from a warehouse – and apparently they either shipped it from a store or they piped that horrible smell into the warehouse as well. Ugh.

    2. Not that song again!*

      When I was in college back in the paleolithic era, I had a sales job at Macy’s, by which I mean the original Macy’s store on 34th St in Manhattan. I worked 2 nights and all day Saturday, and for many weeks they played “I Left My Heart In San Francisco” pretty much non-stop all day on Saturday. It became excruciating, and I could barely listen to anything by Tony Bennett for a long time afterwards.

      Best part of that job: As an employee, I got to be a clown in the Macy’s Parade.

      Worst part (besides that song): My department was Women’s Petites and I was a not-petite female. The tiny clothes and tiny customers made me feel gigantic and ungainly even though I was an average size.

  36. Former Retail Lifer*

    My boss had it in for me after HR revealed EVERYTHING I told them in an investigation into him. I was a retail manager and we were preparing for the annual store inventory, which was to start when we closed at 6PM on a Sunday and generally took about 6 hours. I was in charge of preparing for it. I had detailed notes, a store map marked with what had been prepped and the schedule to finish it. One of the things HR was investigating were complaints that my boss didn’t do anything all day, and preparing for inventory was included. He took no interest in anything I was doing and I managed the process myself.

    One of the cashiers had left a roll of quarters out at the end of the night on my closing shift. My boss took that opportunity to immediately fire me for “unsecured funds” the next day. I left in tears. This was technically policy, but for $10, unlikely to be enforced unless someone had a grudge.

    One of my employees called me on my way home, as she noted I didn’t go in back to collect my things. In addition to the energy drink and my lunch in the fridge, I asked her to grab the inventory map and my notebook and erase a to do list on the whiteboard, which she happily did. There was no other record of what had been done and what needed to be done for the inventory, and since he had not participated in the prep work at all, my boss had NO IDEA what to do.

    The inventory went horribly. What normally took 6 hours took 11! I felt bad for the hourly employees who were there that long, but at least they got a nice paycheck and none were scheduled to open the next day. My boss was salary. He not only had to stay there for free until 5AM, he had to open the store at 7AM. Since they were short-handed due to losing me, he had to work his full 10 hour shift.

    1. Box of Rain*

      As someone who as planned for inventory in a large department store–I am in LOVE with this one!

  37. guy*

    When I left a very unpleasant job as a manager of a small store (only the two owners above me), I reported to Square that they were falsifying their transactions to make them appear legal under Square’s terms. This was a cannabis dispensary (at the time, very hard to work with banks for electronic transactions), and square thought we sold herbs and spices. One of many illegal and unethical things we did that led to me having a very bad relationship and eventually leaving.

    Within 2 days I saw a post on their instagram that they no longer took cards (huge selling point), and within a month they closed.

    1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      Genuine question: didn’t your customers know? When dispensaries opened here, that was the FIRST thing I checked because I had heard about all the trouble with dispensaries not being able to process credit cards.

        1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

          Apparently not- but I don’t know if there are repercussions on the customer end (ie: is it legal to buy cannabis products with a CC) and so I’m just not going to take that chance. To be fair, I don’t normally question the legality of most things when I shop- I assume the shop/business is doing things legally- but in that instance, I’d definitely side-eye it and question it.

          2. Artemesia*

            Given the world we are living in now, cash seems prudent since past transactions are being used to persecute people. Although it is legal where I am, the federal government is now going after people based on nonsense from their past — maybe not have a record of this in your name.

            1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

              I can’t speak to everywhere else, but in my state, when I went to the dispensary, they registered me with my driver’s license (presumably to verify my age and open an account) and then my purchase was linked to that. They only accept cash and everyone else went through the same process. The purchase information was printed on a label that was put on the product AND the receipt had all the same info on it, stapled to the bag. I’m not real worried about it, but it is highly regulated and I guess everyone could be rounded up based on purchases, but it’d be tough going, considering how popular it got pretty quickly.

              1. goddessoftransitory*

                The whole cash thing is leading to, among other things, big smash and grab robberies at cannabis shops. In my city there were two in one night–a crew literally ramming stolen cars into the store’s front doors to try to break in. In both cases they didn’t get anything, but the damage was insanely extensive–they still have the street blocked off around one, and for a few days thought they might have to tear down the entire building (which houses other businesses.)

            2. Southern Violet*

              Yeah this is why I hit up head shops for the stuff that’s legal everywhere. I can pay cash and they barely ever check my driver’s license for age. But then I live in a big metro area and can buy 3Chi etc many places.

        2. guy*

          Yeah, customers did not care. There really isn’t a chance of customers facing blowback – payment processers lean on vendors to ensure that transactions are being completed under the terms of their agreement.

    2. Strive to Excel*

      In the US specifically where it is still federally illegal but legal by state, it’s still very hard to get anything electronic for cannabis dispensaries. None of the federal banks will work with them directly.

      An amusing sidenote is that they also file taxes showing they gained income through illegal means, because that is in fact something you can indicate on your tax forms.

      1. Testing*

        Where I am, companies have to register a main sector. Many also choose to register the additional sector ”and all other legal business”, so that they don’t have to change anything if they later pivot into other activities.

        I always found it hilarious that you’d have to specify ”legal”, and hoped there would also be the category ”oh, and some illegal business, too” to pick.

      2. Raechem*

        Yes. Though one may not deduct work expenses on a USA tax return if the occupation is illegal. Prostitutes who work outside of Clark County in Nevada may deduct the cost of condoms and whatever else because their occupation is legal; sex workers in Las Vegas may not do so, because prostitution is illegal there.

    3. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

      I am fortunate to live in a state where I can enjoy legal weed on occasion, and I appreciate that, but there certainly are some questionable businesspeople operating in that space.

      1. DefinitiveAnn*

        In my state the restrictions under the 3% hemp exclusion are getting tighter and tighter. The plan is to legalize once any medical exclusive contracts are up but only to the cronies of the powers that be.

        I have no evidence of this. But I’m not wrong.

      2. JustaTech*

        My brother (not the brightest bulb) worked for an utterly sketchy cannabis farmer in a state where it’s legal. Among my brother’s many jobs there, he did all the bank runs to deposit all the cash (because, as above, not allowed to use credit cards).
        So he rolls up, presumably smelly, to the bank to make the weekly deposit. And the teller pulls out the “bad news” pen and starts checking the $100 bills. And they’re fake.

        My brother freaks out, but for once in his life has the sense to call my dad “what do I do? The Secret Service is coming!?!?!!?”
        “Be totally honest, you did nothing wrong.”

        The Secret Service agents are polite and professional and my brother heads back to work, which is also where he lives. (Like I said, not the brightest bulb.) His boss says “well, we’re $600 short, and that was your paycheck, but you still owe me rent.”

        Yes, *he* accepted counterfeit $100 bills, but somehow my brother was the one who wasn’t getting paid? And still had to pay rent?

      3. Southern Violet*

        That, and worker protection, is why we need to finish making it federally legal. Its like 75% the way there due to the 2016 farm bill. Plus the fact that cannabis is now worth billions so good luck shutting that down. We should just accept the inevitable.

      1. spuffyduds*

        Those little hand-held things that you can swipe your credit card thru. They’re, well, square.

        1. David*

          Yeah, you can search for “Square payment processor” (no quotes) or similar if you want to find more info on it.

      2. LadyVet*

        It’s a payment processing platform (I think they also host websites for business who use their services).

        If you’ve paid for something via credit card at a street fair or holiday market, the seller probably had a little Square device to read your card.

        Interestingly, I noticed that I didn’t get a lot of receipts by text this holiday market season, and I think it’s because I’ve been blocking a lot of political text senders.

  38. Peanut Hamper*

    My last job was at a small company run by an alcoholic nepo baby in his fifties who still asked his dad for advice on everything. He ran the full gamut from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde (or rather, Dr. Jekyll and Everyone Hide), and had tantrums, yelled and screamed, broke things, etc. He was also sleeping with one of my coworkers. (Both of them just happened to be married to other people at the time.)

    He and said coworker took a three-hour lunch on my last day. (Um…yeah.) I had about 50 business cards left, so I took those three hours as an opportunity to go all over that office and warehouse and tuck them into little places here and there, where I knew they would eventually find them. I figured they would spend about the next ten years before they uncover them all. I hope he thinks about how he let a good employee get away because he couldn’t act like a grown-ass responsible adult.

  39. an alleged professional*

    I don’t know if this really counts because the boss in question has never realized it, but…he had a verbal tic, a very distinctive way he started all public facing messages. He was and is a toxic hot mess who had to start his own company because after he was fired for sexual harassment/assault, he couldn’t get another gig as a CEO and felt he was too good to take anything else. I am a communications person who has spent the last twenty years using his quirky opener for any messages in which I want the readers to understand that the content is errant nonsense and I’m being paid to say it. Customers in our industry who used my product twenty years ago and are using my current product know exactly what’s going on and find it hilarious, even though this post is the first time I’ve ever publicly admitted that it’s intentional. While I am slightly ashamed of being this petty…I have a mortgage on a house that needs a new roof, and he has a paid for mansion and four cars because his firing came with a golden parachute, you know?

  40. Joeb*

    Back in the early 2000s, I worked at a hotel. Our hotel was negatively affected by 9-11 because of the decrease in travel. We were eventually foreclosed on by the bank and were owned and operated by the bank for 3 years until it was sold. The people that bought the hotel came in and let almost everybody go and staffed it with their family. They didn’t lay off the front desk manager yet because she had information they needed. The night we all got let go, I went over to the front desk manager’s house and she proceeded to log onto all of the hotel booking sites we sold rooms through- hotels.com, Expedia, Priceline, etc., and changed the rates to $1 per night and then called all of her friends and told them to book a room. The new owners got in the office the next morning and saw all the confirmations for the $1 rooms (the hotel had 400 rooms so probably 100+ were booked this way) and freaked out and started calling her, begging for the login information so they could get in and stop the bleeding. She didn’t answer the phone.

  41. Michael Was a Crap Boss*

    Boss that I hated actually quit himself before I found a new position. Some of our staff were Stockholm Syndrome loyalists and thought we needed multiple gifts and parties. I signed one card and wrote “WISHING YOU EVERYTHING YOU DESERVE”
    On the surface, well wishes, but in reality…

    1. Resume Please*

      I had a truly awful, evil coworker tht retired years ago, and I wish I wrote that in her card! Instead I wrote “Good luck in your retirement.”

    2. Jonathan MacKay*

      It’s the sort of phrase that most people won’t think about and take only at face value.

      And in some cases, it could very well be meant as a compliment!

    3. froodle*

      I once signed a retirement card that was doing the rounds, and noticed someone had written “may you have the retirement you deserve”.

      Not sure if it was intended to come off as threatening as I read it (the person leaving was generally well-liked as far as I know, was individual-contributor level so no hierarchical power to make other people’s lives miserable, and had a job where he worked alone and in the field most of the time) but I did blink when I saw it.

    4. WFH4VR*

      “I know half of you half as well as I would like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.” ~ Bilbo Baggins

    6. Csethiro Ceredin*

      I once wrote “it won’t be the same without you” in a retirement card.

      This was very, very accurate.

  42. ChurchOfDietCoke*

    In my last job I managed a small and very lovely team of trainers. We were THE experts in the company’s bespoke systems and processes, and we worked hard. Sadly, the company began to treat its employees badly – no pay rises at all, shitty and inflexible hybrid policies, dreadful IT systems, crappy hotdesking, got rid of the canteen and gym and stopped lots of benefits like bus season ticket discounts, and did I mention no pay rises AT ALL? Ugh…

    I resigned (giving three months notice, as per my contract – I’m in the UK) and moved to a new company the next town over to a pretty good pay increase to set up and lead a brand new Training and Learning department there. My FIRST task on Day 1 in my new job was to advertise for trainers to join my team.

    I BET you can’t guess where three of the four new team members I recruited came from, can you?

      1. ChurchOfDietCoke*

        Hell yeah. Easiest and best recruitment I ever did (and we all LOVE the new company!)

  43. mother_of_hedgehogs*

    I’ve got one. I worked for a smallish company and had three bosses with three different agendas (two owner/founders, one GM, all three micro micro managers). Every damned day there were three people on my ass all day about their pet project that I had to do, and why hadn’t I done it. Which of course was not really possible while managing several locations already.

    So, I had frustrated words with the GM. A few days later she called me into a meeting with the head of HR wanting me to sign something about my inappropriateness. I refused. We had a big event coming up, I knew they needed all hands on deck, so I stood my ground.

    After the big event, I was called back in to continue the meeting, and pressured to sign the thing.

    All I said was “Let’s have another conversation, and this conversation is called I don’t work here anymore”, with a big smile on my face. HR dude said “well, I’m not needed here”, and left. M, the annoyingly nit-picking GM was flushed. She didn’t see that coming at all (I had relocated for this job and I assume she thought I didn’t have options).

  44. yams*

    Once upon a time I had a terrible boss, she was a micromanager and a tyrant who had fired more than half of my department to hire her college buddies. After working 14/16 hour days for months on end I finally landed a new job and in my exit interview I provided HR with information on all the shady dealings I was able to gather as well as evidence of harassment she used as a tool to get people to quit. I didn’t really expect anything to change since HR in that company was notoriously ineffective, I just wanted to vent.

    An hour later I got a call from one of my colleagues asking me just what the heck I had said, since one of his friends in the management team was freaking the heck out about that exit interview. Turns out there was an open investigation into my boss and with the info I provided they were able to make a case to fire her. I had my exit interview on a Friday and on Monday morning she was walked out of the office by the security team after being fired.

    I know I shouldn’t laugh at others misfortune, but the mental image of her being perp-walked off into the sunset carrying her coffee machine in her arms is too damn funny.

  45. Sans Serif*

    A long time ago, I quit a job with a fully psychotic director. Mean, racist, spiteful, incompetent. I happened to have a good work relationship with one of the VPs and before I left, I met with him and gave him about 10 pages of examples of his actions, several of which could get the company sued. (One example, saying a certain Black manager “dressed white” as a compliment. He also complained about all the people on welfare his taxes supposedly paid for and that’s why he couldn’t afford another boat. Yeah, he was a treat.) I still remember the eyes of the VP get wider and wider as I spoke. About six months later he was fired. That was a satisfying feeling lol

  46. Jennifer K.*

    Oh I’ve got a good one. I worked as the only developer at this tiny startup for 4 months. The CEO treated me like trash and would constantly say things like “Airbnb does this all the time, how hard could it be?” Well Airbnb has hundreds of developers and you have just me and you are asking me to do this in under 2 weeks. At one point, she called a coworker to tell them how mean I was (I just told her that I was working on something else and needed to push a minor change to next week). And honestly a bunch of other just general crap. I finally cracked when she let me know that they hired another developer to work with me but told him that I “didn’t like her and also didn’t like the product” (if I didn’t like the product, why was I working hard for well below market rate for no equity? But whatever). The next day, I went in early, left my laptop completely wiped, left my keycard, and sent an email to the other cofounder saying to call me when they get in. Then I told her that, while I had done good work while I was there, I was done being treated this way and that she could consider this my resignation as of right now. They had all the passwords but I didn’t give a crap about anything else. If they cared, they maybe shouldn’t have mistreated the person who was keeping their application up and running.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      I was one of 4 people working at a start-up apart from the CEO. I got into grad school and told the CEO that I wouldn’t be available for further contracting in a month. Within that month, the other three people also quit, so I ended up being the last person to flee his sinking ship.

  47. SicktomyStomach*

    O I love this thread! I’ve got a good example. I got a job in a different industry than my normal environment, but I was desperate. The interviews had gone well and they definitely needed someone with my skillset. So I start the job and find out that our work space is a huge room with 150 to 200 people in it, all at little desks, all in the open. Horrible. My group of 5 sits in one corner of the room, in the back. Among the things I find out when I start working there is that all of them speak Russian to each other and make no effort to include me at all. So I’m sitting in a room full of people with team mates that talk around me. There is more, but I will spare y’all.

    So after 3 months, I get a fantastic job offer via a friend and professional connection. I come to the office with all my stuff and I wait until I get the signoff on my new job. Then I go up to the HR department and find a rep. I handed her my laptop and badge and told her this is my last day. The look of panic on her face is something that I relish to this day. She asked me to do an exit interview, so I proceeded to tell her ALL of the crap that these people put me through. She seemed a bit horrified, but I didn’t care anymore. I waltzed out of there and down to the subway. Sadly, I never made any contacts there so I don’t know if there was any blowback from my exit.

  48. Jane Bingley*

    My spouse worked a truly miserable job in parking enforcement. He and his supervisor were left in charge of a massive hot mess of a parkade. Any requests for help were met with “it’s fine, Spouse and Supervisor can handle it.”

    Upgrades for the finicky tech that required regular manual override? Nope, they know how to fix it by hand. New gates that didn’t risk damaging cars? No, they can just perform mechanical repairs to it regularly. PPE for cleaning up wildlife waste and pest control to prevent the problem? No way, they’ve cleaned it up before. Upgrading the automated POS to take card payments? Nah, they can take payments in person.

    Spouse and Supervisor became close friends in the trenches and both were looking for other work. One day, Spouse goes in and tells his supervisor that he’s gotten enough contracts to be self-employed full-time. Supervisor just had a promising job interview. So… they quit. Together. They give two weeks notice but the company spends that time trying to hire instead of having them train anyone else. The giant parkade was a hot mess for months afterward, enraging their daily customers, and eventually cost the company nearly a million dollars in overdue upgrades, repairs, and pest control. It’s now staffed by a team of three (so generous).

  49. Grumpy Elder Millennial*

    This doesn’t 100% fit, but it’s a fun story, so I’m telling it anyway.

    Years ago, I sold cellphones by the seashore. (In a mall that was close to the harbour in a city with lots of tourists). My coworkers were great, but the company sucked and the job itself was vaguely soul-crushing. The silver lining is that it was excellent motivation to study for the Graduate Record Exam and apply to grad school. When I got an offer and accepted, I gave my boss months of notice, since I would be moving across the country. He was a generally good dude. And I was correct in my assessment that there wasn’t any real risk in doing so.

    Still, I wanted to have a little fun when I left. At the time, I was also swing dancing a lot, so I decided to dance my way out of there, with a dozen of my friends. I arranged for my last day to have the opening shift and when the clock hit 6PM, my friends turned on the music – Bye Bye, Love by Ray Charles. I threw off the (horribly ugly, ill-fitting) uniform shirt (that I hated) and we started dancing. We were courteous and made sure we weren’t blocking the entrance.

    Fortunately, my boss was amused by this and security didn’t get involved.

      1. Grumpy Elder Millennial*

        Yup, a lot of them. This was in the early days of smartphones that were designed for non-business execs.

    3. Lynn*

      This is my favorite. Not the pettiness, not the most F-U. But it’s the one that put a huge smile on my face! :-D

  50. Meow Meow*

    This is small potatoes, and requires a bit of backstory.

    At the beginning of January one year, my boss put me on leave restriction, which meant that if I took sick leave, I needed a doctors note for anything, and if I took vacation time, I had to basically plead my case as to why this was necessary for me to take time off and hope he’d approve it. All because I’d supposedly taken too much time off in the THREE YEARS prior, and I was hired to be full time blah blah. Never mind that this time off calculation included 3 weeks of FMLA where I was in outpatient treatment for depression and anxiety. I’d also never been denied time off, nor had I dipped below zero on any of my leave balances. I still had over 200 hours banked when I got this notice.

    So I didn’t take any time off. For 5 months. I handed him my resignation stating my end date. He was literally speechless. Like what did you think would happen??? The best part was was that instead of allowing me to take time off and having that “paid” by the head company, they now had to pay me for all my time off from the local office’s funds! Over $15,000!!

    Also, they never hired a replacement for me when I left, even though that was supposedly part of the reason why I was placed on this restriction.

    1. Shiny Penny*

      This was not small potatoes! They treated you so badly it’s shocking. Talk about punching down, wow.
      But the perfection of their penalty flowing so directly from their own terrible behavior— this is the highest pinnacle of good training!
      I’m glad you got a win out of surviving that awful job.

  51. Alf*

    A legendary story at the first restaurant I ever worked at was the kitchen manager who went out in a blaze of glory. There were all kinds of problems with that place – it had a tiny kitchen, it was understaffed, the hours were super-long, dishwashers and servers would frequently no-show, and the owner had no boundaries with her messy personal life – but for some reason this guy had gotten fixated on the smallest of irritants: customers who ordered egg whites during the brunch rush. Whenever that happened, he would have to get a little bowl and manually separate the eggs and yolks, and egg whites needed more attention so they didn’t get overcooked, so it messed with his flow. Over time, he got increasingly grouchy about this – grumbling and moaning to the other cooks, giving the servers a hard time when they brought orders with egg whites, ranting about it for half an hour after an order. Finally, one day during Sunday brunch, he decided he’d had enough. An order for egg whites came in, and he snatched the chit, marched out to the table, and slammed it down in front of the customer. “Buddy,” he said, “you can cook your own f&@$# egg whites!” He threw down his apron, walked out, and never came back. Weird flex, but okay.

    1. Strive to Excel*

      If it bugged him that badly, he should have added a couple quarts of Egg Beaters to his inventory order!

      1. Chauncy Gardener*

        Bwahahaha!
        Love me a “Northern Explosion” (as we always called it) reference.

  52. Bunny Watson*

    I was working retail in the 90’s. My boss was the absolute worst and constantly lied and played favorites and despite promising me more hours, I kept getting fewer and fewer. One day she yelled at me for something that I did not do, but her favorite claimed that I did. So, I told her to kiss my a$$ and walked out. That was a Thursday and by Monday I was working full time at another place. I only wish I had quit sooner.

  53. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

    I resigned from the job with the company that put me on a PIP for daring to have bad health (“you wouldn’t be disabled if you weren’t obese and you need to put in effort to lose weight. BTW we won’t pay you for any more days off ill”) after a major car crash.

    My boss called me the day after I left telling me that I hadn’t closed all the calls in my queue and therefore I had to come into the office and do that.

    So that’s how come I once said ‘fuck off’ to a manager and hung up.

    (Note: I knew I wasn’t going to get a good reference from that place after they treated me like dirt anyway)

    2. Grumpy Elder Millennial*

      They should be grateful you didn’t say anything worse, given how awful they were.

    3. I'm Not Phyllis*

      How awful. I had a past manager (not my manager, mind you) email me after I left telling me that I still had to finish up x project. I didn’t even respond – in hindsight I wish I had!

    4. goddessoftransitory*

      They said WHAT???? Out loud????

      Yeah, reference *this*, buddy *extremely obscene gesture*

  54. So Anon for This*

    I don’t know if this counts, but I had been working well above my pay grade doing analysis in a call center as a support lead (for the whole site, not a single team). My boss and her boss had been trying for quite a while to get me a promotion for a while without luck, and I had lined up a new position as an actual analyst in a different field. My exit interview was with the site manager, where she told me that she had been actively blocking attempts to get me a promotion because ‘everyone thought too highly of (my) work.’ Joke was on her though- without the analysis I was providing, site performance dropped and she was fired less than three months later. Her replacement called in during their first week and asked if I would consider coming back to the old position, doing the above pay grade work. That was a big nope!

    1. froodle*

      “My exit interview was with the site manager, where she told me that she had been actively blocking attempts to get me a promotion because ‘everyone thought too highly of (my) work.’”

      What on earth goes through the head of people like this?! “Oooh, this person is a really good worker, I’d better make them feel trapped and unhapp- wait where are you going?”

      Utter buffoonery.

      1. Glen*

        the manager was saying that they didn’t think that SAFT’s work was good, that others incorrectly had a high opinion of it, not that SAFT’s work was too good to reward them for. Still stupid and awful, but not, perhaps, quite as baffling.

      2. goddessoftransitory*

        It’s like nobody got books of Aesop’s fables or fairy tales when they were kids–look up “goose/golden eggs,” guys!

  55. Lorna*

    I was the only person with IT knowledge at the office, yet got treated like a dumb blonde, who apparently didn’t know her arse from her elbow ( original quote from the boss)

    Turns out I didn’t know my way around a computer, when he fired me 1 day before my probation time was over, because it’d be cheaper to hire his niece.

    Clumsy me changed the admin password to random gibberish, promptly forgot what it was and walked out the door. Oh well! ;)

    1. Hlao-roo*

      Haha! If you don’t know your arse from your elbow, how could you possibly know the admin password from random gibberish!?

      Good for you for giving the boss exactly what he deserved!

  56. a fever you can't sweat 0ut*

    not the biggest, but my boss was unhinged and the workplace was severely toxic. i had been bullied and yelled at by a coworker and was pretty much told to suck it up. On the day my bonus paid out i put in my one week notice. she told me i would be ineligible for rehire and i laughed. several years later they went under.

  57. fka Get Me Out of Here*

    This is pretty small potatoes: At my last job, the one with ToxicExBoss, I timed my resignation so my last day was the Friday before the Monday that the person who was ostensibly supposed to take over the bait-and-switch part of my role started – a year after I got bait-and-switched and eight months after I’d started complaining that I wasn’t doing what I was hired to do and was promised “help is coming soon.” Also ToxicExBoss was on vacation when I gave my notice and my grandboss was two time zones away on a business trip, so grandboss took my resignation over the phone. I was unemployed for two months, but have been at the subsequent job for 2.5 years and couldn’t be happier.

  58. Stuart Foote*

    This wasn’t really an “F you” because I left on good terms, but once during an exit interview I persuaded the HR rep to call my now former boss and tell him that she needed to discuss certain things I’d revealed during my exit interview with him immediately. However he had a similar sense of humor so he found it amusing.

  59. LTR FTW*

    I’ve told this one here before, but it’s so good. It happened like 15 years ago and I still think about it regularly.

    The best rage quit I ever witnessed: we had a weekly all-hands staff meeting with mandatory attendance. If you were on the road you were required to dial in. ‘Mike’ called in, and when it was his turn to speak he delivered a scathing tirade that was the stuff of quitting fantasies — absolutely A+ stuff. The big boss was so stunned he couldn’t respond at first… but then he pulled it together and hung up on Mike. But Mike was a step ahead — he’d dialed in on TWO lines, so he was STILL on the call, and got another couple of killer lines in before he got disconnected for good! Mike was a company hero for months after that.

    2. LabManagerGuy*

      These “person who is a company hero due to quitting spectacularly” stories are interesting to me: At my current job, someone who did something like what some folks described in this thread did would be remembered with bafflement or secondhand embarrassment, while at one of my former jobs, the reaction would have been highly mixed (some would consider it shameful while others would call it awesome). My current workplace is pretty much functional and professional, while the former workplace was at least moderately toxic. (Believe me, if my professional community was not so interconnected, I would have strongly considered doing something… bold… for the benefit of one particular snake of a manager when I left that job.) I wonder if that’s sort of a good mental test for how well your workplace operates: How positively would the rank-and-file take a grand, departing F-y’all gesture?

      1. LTR FTW*

        Well, in this particular case, all of Mike’s “constructive feedback” was absolutely on point. It was a terrible workplace and the big boss was a terrible person. Mike was saying all the things we ALL wanted to say, hence his heroism. Trust me when I say that not one person felt baffled or embarrassed, other than the boss.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        It’s absolutely a barometer of the workplace environment whether you would consider a coworker screaming “Fuck you, management!” to be bizarre and juvenile, or a justified action where someone is finally standing up and speaking truth to power.

      3. Southern Violet*

        I mean, if it is a functional place that fires toxic managers before it gets bad, they won’t have justified f-you gestures.

  60. Anonymouse*

    Since a group of employees at my work were being transferred to a new manager, I had my annual review with both my former manager and my new manager. While I was frustrated with the amount of support and compensation I received, my annual review was full of glowing comments from both of them.

    A month later, I was left without support on an urgent, last minute project. I shared my frustration with my new manager… and was surprised to be fired without notice shortly afterwards in a cloak-and-dagger fashion. I made sure to use all of the benefits I could before they expired, but what gave me the most satisfaction was what happened later.

    While the new manager kept targeting other employees to get them fired, HR had them complete a much longer process first. I’m hoping my EI claim, which stated I was fired without notice, was a factor. I felt very satisfied that the increased paperwork helped some of my friends leave on their own terms.

    And in the pettiest victory possible… later on I discovered a fork marked “Floor5” in our utensil drawer. The director of our department had been engraving the kitchen utensils in a vain attempt to keep them from disappearing and I had accidentally brought one home before I got fired.

    I’m still really satisfied when I use fork “Floor5”.

    2. MigraineMonth*

      Lol!

      I worked at a company that had branded pens. One would assume that was for advertising purposes, and one would be wrong. Apparently they were labeled so none of the 10,000 employees would accidentally take one. Our billionaire CEO spent a good chunk of an all-staff meeting ranting about the fact that employees kept stealing, losing or throwing away the pens, and did we realize that they cost nearly $1 each?? (My back-of-the envelope calculations say for the amount of time, number of staff and approximate salaries, that lecture cost the company about $10,000.)

  61. Orange Cat Energy*

    At my former employer, I gave notice during our busiest time of the year (Christmans and New Years). It was an online retailer. Granted, I gave 3 weeks notice, which is longer than the standard notice period. I was still leaving them in the lurch because a lot of my colleagues had resigned and left over the past few months and we were critical employees for keeping the website working. My employer actually tried to get me to extend my notice period by another 3 weeks because they wanted the coverage for the busy season and they wanted me to train the contractor they’d have to hire to replace me. No other incentive was offered. I said no.

  62. JohnnyBravo*

    They say the best revenge is a life well lived and it’s true. But if you can also screenshot their desktop, set the screenshot as the background, delete their desktop shortcuts, and hide their start bar before you leave that’s just a nice little bonus

    6. Normal Verdant Mushroom*

      LOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLL AHAHAHAHHAHAHA i’m saving this one like a squirrel saves a nut, simply amazing

    9. Gracias Por Nada*

      Lmao. It’s also fun to set their Word program to automatically replace the word “the” with “ye olde” or “yo mama”, etc.

    10. C*

      Don’t forget to switch the mouse buttons and change the keyboard to Dvorak while you’re at it.

  63. Jonathan MacKay*

    This was less quitting and more being fired, I think – because what happened that day was strange.

    We were unloading a container of its contents, and my supervisor kept asking me to grab the ‘two-stepper’ (which was literally just a two-step stool) and I didn’t understand what he was talking about, so in his frustration, he started aggressively throwing boxes around – not towards me, but he was clearly frustrated. I ended up commenting, matter of factly – “I’m starting to think that maybe I should start considering today to be my last day.”

    This was taken as an immediate resignation, to the point that I was asked to write a quick resignation letter…. AND TOLD WHAT TO PUT IN IT. I typed it honestly, and was told ‘Delete that – Say this.’

    I did so, because I just wanted out of there at that point.

    The weird thing is, I was packing my lunch that morning, and I was struck with the strangest feeling of “I’m not going to need this today”

    I was home by noon.

    Three months later, I land the job I’m at now – having been able to use it to fund a certificate in Human Resources management, membership in a professional organization, and I am due to write the first of two professional certification exams in May.

    The best revenge being a life well lived has never felt truer.

  64. ThatGirl*

    Just last month, we had a product engineer quit in somewhat dramatic fashion – he was totally fed up with how things were going, but waited till our annual bonuses were in our bank accounts on a Friday, left his laptop and badge on his desk, and on Monday morning called his supervisor to inform them that Friday had been his last day.

  65. itsupport*

    I left my job a few years ago, the new big boss was a jerk, told me my position was useless and unneeded.

    I was their entire IT support, btw.

    I knew he was going to fire me or push me out, so I found a new job and peaced out. I wanted to be nice about it, I offered to show me some basic IT things he’d need to know since he said he wasn’t replacing me because he could do everything I could (reader, he could not).

    One of the things I tried to insist on was a 2FA that was for a major software admin account, that was tied to my phone (we had to use an app, no choice). I explained that someone else needed to download the app and set it up before I left since the day I did, I was deleting my account/app. He declined (srsly, was like no it’s fine) and wouldn’t you know two days later he tried to get into something and was declined because I wasn’t there with my phone. He texted and called me about it and I just sent him a single email saying I was no longer an employee and had no access. Then I blocked his number and ingored all other attemps at communication. He didn’t need me after all, he could handle anything!

    I don’t feel bad one bit.

  66. Grasshopper Relocation LLC*

    I worked for a subtle bully for a year (examples include saying “You take no responsibility for your work” because I used passive voice in a scientific paper and saying he had expected I’d be better since I had an MSc).

    I also had a great colleague, who showed real management potential. Best employee in the team. He’s now my line manager at new company, because I sent him the listing when the job came up, and put him in direct contact with my skip level.

    And I know, for a fact, that he told my old boss that he was joining me at New Company when he resigned.

  67. Llama Manager*

    I once took a job as a level 1 with the explicit assurance that if I performed well in the first several months they would promote me to a level 2 within a year because I didn’t have specific experience in llama grooming (but had vast experience in alpaca grooming). I joined, and within three months my manager was talking about how impressed she was because not only was I llama grooming, I was also now handling Camels and Sheep as well (level 3 work). When I brought up the timeline to move to a level 2, she informed me that despite her advocacy, the toxic Director wouldn’t even consider promoting me to a Level 2 for at least 18 more months.

    So, I applied for another role in Llama Management (because I had previously managed Alpacas) within the same Department that reported directly to the VP and got it. This meant that in terms of reporting structure, I was above him. The best part, for several months he had to sit in meetings where we were treated as equals. This only lasted a couple of months though because that Director was fired shortly after.

  68. Definitely not me*

    Not super creative, but satisfying in the moment. Back in the mid-90s my spouse worked for a small, family-run insurance business whose owners paid low wages and had many weird ideas about things (e.g., when a coworker returned after a brief maternity leave and said she needed to pump, they said she couldn’t do that at work because it was gross). It was not the kind of organization that had written policies in place, either, but when their most experienced employee got fed up with some decision and told the owner he was done, she declared it was their policy that resignations had to be in writing. He leaned over her, grabbed a Post-it note off her desk, wrote “I QUIT” on it and walked out.

  69. Bugs*

    My wife’s good friend was asked to resign from the company they both worked at with 2 days notice and told that the two day notice was “policy”. So when my wife (who was the star performer) quit, she gave two days notice. Suddenly, that isnt the policy any more…

  70. Not Australian*

    Well, there was the time I booked my annual leave and then submitted my notice to end on the same day as my leave, therefore I clearly wasn’t coming back. I was heading off to the opposite hemisphere and I booked my flight, too, for the same day: finished work at lunchtime (I was mornings-only), got picked up from the office, changed my clothes and caught the train to the airport. I’d made my plans pretty clear to anyone who would listen, but it was really no surprise when my oblivious idiot of a boss turned up with a huge bunch of flowers and thrust them into my hands as I left. I later had the satisfaction of writing him a thank you note which included the words “I enjoyed them so much in the three quarters of an hour before I left for the airport” … and no, they weren’t wasted, my daughter-in-law inherited them. (In case anybody’s wondering, they were ridiculously short of work at the time and I’d been sitting around counting paperclips for weeks… replacing me definitely wouldn’t have been a problem!)

  71. anonymouse*

    This isn’t the hugest f-you but it felt like it, and it’s too bad I can’t include a photo here (because yes I absolutely took one) but when I left academia, I found a little old-fashioned “Will Return At” sign that had the hands pointing to the word NEVER at the top of the clock, and posted it on my office door.

    Funniest thing is that apparently they just left it there and quite a while later another professor was leaving the department and emailed and asked if she could move it to her office door.

  72. Veryanon*

    Mine is pretty boring, but personally satisfying. I left a toxic job by giving notice ON MY BIRTHDAY and then I basically peaced-out of there.

  73. No Coverage, Sorry*

    I worked for a nonprofit that provided recovery and intermediate housing that also included detox and pych units for incarcerated men. I was hired as a grant writer with my own office in a different building away from the clients and inmates (this matters). My office was given away and I was slowly edged out to a reception desk in a residential building. I ended up being given more tasks and ended up being a receptionist, personal assistant, and residential aide for one of the main dorms. They had me driving clients alone to medical appointments, saying I could take my laptop and work on grants from the waiting room, passing out medications without state certification, tried to leave me alone for twelve hours (a 25 year old woman) in an all male psych unit without guards because they didn’t have overnight staff. I was scheduled every weekend and holiday, denied time off, and if I called out sick one of the residence staff that lived near me would literally come to my door and check that I was sick.

    When I filed a complaint I was told I wasn’t bringing in enough grant money to justify my salary so I needed to “pick up slack” in other areas which was illegal. I was young and didn’t have the money for a lawyer and was also in a town where I didn’t have a lot of support. I bided my time, found another job closer to family and friends and I waited until a holiday weekend when I knew the residence director along with almost all the other staff had big plans for parties, weekends away, ect. There needs to be at least two employees in a residence but they didn’t care and left me alone all the time. I was by myself when I saw him come into his office for some last-minute thing. I stuck my head in, made small talk, handed him some paperwork and left.

    The paperwork was my resignation. With the help of some friends, my apartment had been packed up and shipped to my new place closer to home. I blocked every number that came up on my phone and hit the road to have a lovely weekend with my friends and family before I started my new job.

    2. MsM*

      Wow. I understand and respect just wanting the f out of there, but I feel like pissing off the person capable of sending an update to all their funders on the many violations taking place (and maybe a couple of reporters for good measure) was not a smart move on their part.

      1. This Would Never Happen*

        This would literally never happen. That residence director is responsible for all the problems that No Coverage Sorry describes. The residence director has zero motivation to tell funders and reporters about that long list of his own management failures – just the action of disclosing that information to external parties alone (especially funders, what on earth would that accomplish for him?) would be grounds for his immediate dismissal. The list of all the ways he’d failed to do his own job of managing the organization would seal the deal.

        1. Little Bobby Tables*

          I think MsM meant that the disgruntled grant writer would have had the contact info for all the funders.

  74. DPQ*

    A legal secretary at the Big Law firm I worked at knew she was going to be fired so the day before she went into a bunch of partners emails and sent their wives evidence of infidelity, printed out confidential employee evaluations/communications about bonuses/pay and left them in everyone’s desk, and then cleaned out the swag closet (company branded shirts/hats/bags etc) and dropped several thousands worth of merch with Law Firm’s name and logo off at a homeless encampment.

    4. SicktomyStomach*

      Whoa! That is impressive. And law firms do not generally go after someone for things like this because they don’t want the negative publicity.

    6. Walk on the Left Side*

      Donating the company swag is fantastic and absolutely priceless. Brilliant. Love it.

      1. And thanks for the coffee*

        To me that was the best part of the story, though the other parts would have caused more mischief.

  75. SpecialSpecialist*

    When I was 16, I worked at a local family-owned/operated restaurant in my tiny town that only paid in cash, so you know things were totally on the up-and-up. It was my second job ever, and it was a big ball of contradictions.

    If I stood at the counter and waited for the customers to come up to order, then I was yelled at to take orders at the tables. If I took orders at the tables, then I was yelled at because customers were supposed to come up to the counter to order.

    If I stood around waiting for a customer to need something, I got yelled at to sweep the dining room floor. If I was proactive and started sweeping, I got yelled at because customers were in the dining room.

    I never did anything right, even after I did the exact thing they just asked me to do.

    I probably wasn’t even there a whole month before my boss took me back to his desk in the back to berate me yet again. I was absolutely fed up.

    The last thing anybody could accuse teen-me of being was ballsy or rebellious, but I reached over, took my timesheet out of the holder, tore it up in front of his face, and walked out the door.

    My mom tried to get me to go back to get the money I was owed, and I tried to convince her it wasn’t worth it, but she did get my $20. :D

  76. Debby*

    Not me, but my Hubby (with planning done by me). He was working pest control for a company, as the only employee. They treated him badly, went back on their promise to provide insurance and PTO. They even asked him to decrease his pay-to which he said no way. He also had the pest control licenses needed.
    My Hubby subscribed to a pest control magazine, and one day I was reading the latest edition. In the back I noticed a Pest control business that was for sale-and it sure sounded like the one my Hubby was working for. We had been saving to start our own pest control business, so now seemed like a good time to do that-But, I told my Hubby to first collect his paycheck (along with his bonus) and go to their bank to cash it. Then he could go and quit (without notice).
    I wish I could have been there when he went back and told them he quit. They were shocked that he had beaten them to the punch! They were so surprised, they admitted it was their business they were selling and that yes, he was going to be let go. To this day, I hoped that they tried to put a stop payment on that last check of his (it is illegal, but they didn’t care). Then they would find that he had cashed it, not deposited it!
    Small win, but felt so good!

    1. Zephy*

      I was expecting the twist to be that you and your husband were the ones who bought the business. So when the boss revealed that they were planning to let him go if he hadn’t quit, he could pull an uno-reverse and say “well, actually, it’s my company now, so *you’re* fired.”

  77. Alianne*

    I may have told this story before. I worked in a little shop, the manager and five or six staff–helped it set up and open, then there for three months. The manager was a continuing frustration. Paychecks were consistently late, replenishment orders were put off and put off until we hardly had anything to sell. Their repeated catchphrase whenever we complained about issues was “Figure it out!”

    One Friday night it all came together in a massive clusterf***. Our shelves were practically bare and I was due a paycheck while still not having received the previous week’s. Manager and I were scheduled to close, and this time they were definitely absolutely 100% going to walk me through the closing process so I could look to becoming a keyholder. Around 6pm, a coworker arrived, and Manager immediately said “Oh, I’m going to go pick up some restock and get your paychecks, I’ll be back before closing,” and vanished in a puff of smoke. Coworker and I chugged along, doing our best. At 9:30pm, a half-hour to close, Coworker answered the phone, mmm-hmmed a lot, then hung up and said “Manager went to dinner with friends, says they’re not coming back tonight so it’s on you to close, figure it out.”

    I did my best with closing out the register–made a hash of it, I’m sure, but I was so angry I didn’t care–then went into the back room, where the schedule for the next two weeks (written in pencil on notebook paper) was pinned on a bulletin board. Apparently I was scheduled for one day off, then to work for ten days in a row, including two clopens. I pinned my nametag just below it, along with a note that said “I quit–figure it out!”, and walked out the door. It took three more weeks for me to get the last two paychecks I was owed, but I did get them. Never been back.

  78. Happymarketer*

    I told a very persistent and irritating sales person that my boss was the one to speak to… and gave him her number.

  79. NCA*

    Two jobs back, the workplace I was in was obnoxious and terrible. My team was contracted employees, not in the independent contractor way, but in the ‘Company A hired Company B to pay their workers barely above minimum wage to do crucial ongoing support work for us’. The workplace was miserable and smelled like vomit, we were timed for every single bathroom break, they illegally withheld overtime payments because there were times we weren’t taking calls (wish I knew about ‘paid to wait’ and labor laws – they didn’t post those!), and we were routinely punished for things 100% out of our control. The only reason most of us stayed was a coveted full time offer with the parent company, which had /amazing/ benefits.

    A coworker got a better job and gave his two weeks – he was immediately and promptly walked out, unpaid. Word got around to be prepared for that.

    A handful of the coveted permanent spots opened up, and myself and the rest of my 2nd shift applied. We all got them, only to find out that these spots paid minimum wage exactly, because ‘benefits’. But we would /not/ get the benefits that the rest of the company got but a separate, significantly worse, benefits package with not-ACA-compliant healthcare, 3 whole annual days PTO, priority bidding on shift assignments to try for a single weekend day off, and usage of an unpredictably timed company feature at half price as a “perk”. Oh and it was take the permanent position or resign, we couldn’t “go back” to being a contractor. We had all been searching elsewhere on the side, and within the week we all had better jobs. And we knew that people who gave notice were walked out immediately. So we all resigned, one after another, in successive shifts, with no day notice. I was the last, and my swine of a manager was so dejected and worried about what they were going to do. They just “didn’t understand” why all of their best people had left in a week.

    It was amazing.

  80. No Longer Gig-less Data Analyst*

    I worked on contract for a small, dysfunctional wealth management firm for 6 months, owned and operated by two people who hated each other. One Friday when I came in, they announced that Owner 1 had bought out Owner 2 (my grandboss), fired every single person in my chain of command and made me sit there while everyone cleaned out their desks, most of them crying. I was the only one not let go. No one came to talk to me about who I would be reporting to, or how my job was going to change come Monday. The only communication was and email that I was not invited to the pizza party that the remaining managers and employees had that afternoon to celebrate the new structure.

    I somehow made it through the whole day mostly just pretending to work, totally numb. When no one had spoken a word to me by 4:30pm, I gathered every single personal item at my desk and left. From my car in the parking lot, I called my placement agency, told them what happened and that I would not be returning on Monday. It’s the only time in nearly 30 years of various jobs that I’ve ever quit with no notice.

    When my placement agency called them on Monday morning to say that I had quit, they were apparently shocked. SHOCKED, I tell you. The expectation apparently was that I was to pick up a 4 person department’s duties – some of which I had never done before! I’m honestly not sure what happened after that, because this was a company handling millions and millions of non-profit and small government funds, and being finance it was heavily regulated. Our department had tons of required deliverables every day that no one else knew how to do. Absolute madness.

    1. Busy Middle Manager*

      I quit a “real” job with no notice back in the day. The thing is, sometimes they burn the bridge first, so there is no bridge to burn when you walk away. I did what you did too, just sit there stewing all day waiting for someone to tell me anything about our reorg.

    2. Zipperhead*

      The whole thing is just egregiously rotten, but the bit about barring you from the pizza party is especially low.

      1. No Longer Gig-less Data Analyst*

        I mean, it wasn’t like I even wanted to go, but that kind of pettiness was rampant throughout my entire time there and it just felt rubbing salt in the wound. Owner 1 ran the sales side of things and Owner 2 oversaw the day to day banking/finance side, and they would often try to pit their teams again each other and discourage us from being friendly “across the aisle” so to speak. It was so immature and high-school drama for a company that did such high-level work. I have never seen anything like it in my career, but it was also the first time I’d worked for such a small business.

        1. linger*

          This bonkers reorg was sadly predictable once we know Owner1=Sales (bringing in clients) bought out Owner2=Banking/Finance (servicing those clients), when neither valued what the other side contributed. Probably both believed the other’s role could simply be contracted out (hence the move of retaining only the contracted worker). Thus the org was doomed even before you noped out, and you were wise to do so.

  81. Inflatable Unicorn*

    So, my contract is transferred to a new company. I like the work and I like the people, so I also transfer to the new company.

    Strike One: They tell me to tell my old company I’m leaving in the first week of a month. I say the old company won’t pay a month’s health insurance for less than a week’s work. Company insists it’s fine, I’ll be fine. Old company cuts me off at the end of the month and new company acts like it’s a HUGE favor that they’ll extend my health insurance to the beginning of the month I come to work for them.

    Strike Two: they didn’t honor the leave I’d negotiated and received in writing. It takes a few pay periods to realize this; when I figure this out and pull up my contract, my boss blurts “You should have said something sooner!” She acted like it was a HUGE imposition that I wouldn’t just let it go.

    Strike Three: Assuming that this dysfunction is the particular branch I’m working for, I try to transfer to a new branch of same company. The new boss told me a start date. My current boss acknowledged the start date. Me? I try to shift the start date because it was in the middle of a planned vacation. But new boss INSISTED I be there, I absolutely HAD to cancel that vacation, it was IMPORTANT…

    So I cancel the vacation. Current boss replaces me. I train my replacement. My move date comes… and goes. Not a single peep from new boss. When I call, she just says “Yeah, I’ll give you a new date.” Not a word before that I could go on my vacation. Not a word of apology.

    Now I’m job hunting in earnest and pulling in every connection I’ve ever made. I have a new offer in 2 weeks.

    But crappy company and its equally crappy bosses get exactly 2 days notice… just enough to make sure they’ve covered my health insurance for the rest of the month. Current boss threw a fit in the office that it was SO UNPROFESSIONAL to not give 2 week’s notice.

    I point out that by then she’d had an entire 12 weeks of notice and if we wanted to talk about being unprofessional, I had some news for her…

  82. Valerie Loves Me*

    Not my finest moment. But after being put through the ringer for a year — which included delaying my performance review for 6 months and then putting me on a PIP — I landed a great new job. Gave two weeks and just took care of whatever was in my inbox. When any email or task was completed I archived it on our server (this was about 10 years ago and storage was still a thing, so we sometimes had to archive old emails if you’re email was too full). The thing is most staff didn’t know how to archive — because it was a weird process using a different server. But, everyone had access to it. So I archived all my emails. After I left, they went looking through my emails and didn’t see any. And an old colleague reached out to ask where they were. I told them they were archived. But they didn’t take the extra step to ask IT how to access the server. Oh well.

  83. why me>-*

    i worked for a small law firm, wealthy ish clients. my one co-worker, Karen, was very toxic, along with Wendy the co owner and Nicole the office manager. I won’t go into all the toxic behavior, apart from this: i gave my notice, they convinced me to stay, then Nicole put me on a PIP the next week, citing my lack of work etc.
    AFTER the pandemic, when I chose to leave, I left googly eyes in odd places, put my screen saver and password for my work station as “i love ‘my name'”
    I returned the favour by not writing passwords down, just like they did to me. I had to ‘guess’ them, I had to call former employees at their new workplaces and find work arounds, even though the entire time Wendy could reset them.
    When I was called at home I explained I was never given them, and they could reset them or guess.
    not epic evil, but it was enough for me.

  84. AAMLurker*

    This is less a rage quit and more about karma. In the 2000’s, I (a “Yankee” female) was working at a mid-sized law firm in the Southern US for a real jerk of a partner (shocking I know). At one point, he told me that every time I spoke it made him angry (what lovely actionable feedback!). He also warned me not to “lose Jesus” when my very religious husband cheated on me and I got divorced (I am, and have always been, agnostic so Jesus’ whereabouts have never been concern to me). Essentially, I had the wrong genitalia to ever succeed at that place. So, after being deeply depressed and physically ill over work for months, I decided that my newly single self was going to quit. I ran the numbers, figured out exactly how much money I’d need to pay the mortgage and feed myself and the dog. I was the third female associate to quit in 3 month. When I gave notice, the partner asked if it was because he was an asshole. I said “yup.” Then, not one day later, 13 new plaintiff’s filed claims against our client in a large litigation I was handling for my boss. I was the only one who knew enough about the case to continue handling it without losing the firm tons of money. So the firm had to offer to pay me to continue working on the case as a contractor. I negotiated an amazing hourly rate, finished my two weeks notice, then worked on that case (at my leisure, from wherever I wanted, without having to speak to my boss) for a year. It paid all my bills and then some. I have since moved on and am very successful as an in-house attorney – where people don’t get angry when I speak (shocking). I wish that old man partner everything he deserves.

    1. Dr. KMnO4*

      “Jesus’ whereabouts have never been concern to me” is a fantastic line! And as a Yankee who also worked in the South for a short time while presenting as a woman, I feel your pain.

    2. Ms. Afleet Alex*

      This – “so Jesus’ whereabouts have never been concern to me” – beautiful! I love it!

  85. Sally*

    I worked in a toxic environment where the manager/owner micromanaged everyone and went through a weekly rotation of each employee to hyper-focus on, questioning their every task and action.

    Twice during my 2 years there, I had a snagged fingernail and whipped out my nail file to smooth it out. TWICE IN 2 YEARS. Both times the manager happened to pass by my office door, stop and stare and watch me in undisguised dismay. The second time she said, “You’re filing your nails. Again?” Months after the first “incident.” She assumed the worst of me, that I sat around all day filing my nails.

    I found another job and didn’t plan to give any notice. I took a black sharpie and wrote I QUIT on a big pink nail file, tucked it in an envelope addressed to the manager and left it out on my desk. I didn’t bother coming in the next day or ever again.

    I heard from a former coworker that the manager actually thought it was funny. Nice. Got a sense of humor AFTER I quit.

  86. Space Cadet*

    Classic rage quit, in the form of an email to HR detailing all of my grievances against my verbally abusive boss. I don’t think they cared — the company has a reputation for promoting abusive people into management positions — but it felt good to finally stick up for myself after 11 years.

    I decided I’d never kowtow to bullies in the workplace ever again, no matter the consequences. So far, I’ve kept that promise to myself.

  87. Becky S*

    I worked for a school district in a professional but non-teaching job. We got a new superintendent who after a couple months told me I was being let go and he wanted to hire someone without a degree for that position. He was probably right but then he told me I had to write a handbook about my job so they could ‘hire someone off the street to do that job’. Insulting, yes. I wrote the handbook but it would help no one understand the requirements. When he was hired he negotiated a 3 year contract. A few months into his second year the Board of Ed bought out his contract to get rid of him. I relocated 2 hours away and don’t know what happened to him after that but the consensus was that he was an arrogant jerk.

    1. Alan*

      Not a school district, engineering firm, but someone at my employer many years ago got the same idea, for everyone to document their job in a notebook so that any fresh-out engineer can come in and do any engineering job in the business. There was a huge rollout, everyone took training on how it would work, the day came for all notebooks to be done, no one had done anything, and it was never spoken of again.

      1. Edwina*

        Not a quitting story, but these two comments remind me of a time when my team of technical trainers was asked to write knowledge-base articles (how-to’s) for all of the common questions and issues that came up from end users. It became clear pretty quickly that they were going to replace us with a database. The insulting thing is they kept telling us it wouldn’t affect our jobs at all. Did they think we were stupid?! Of course the entire team got laid off.

        Fortunately, I was contacted by another department, which was a previously separate company that had just been acquired, and I transferred to that department and worked there for ten years.

  88. MsM*

    Not a boss, but one of the more pompous, aggravating board members I dealt with on a regular basis (and believe me, the competition was stiff) made the tactical error of offering on a professional listserv where he held court that if anyone had a problem with his opinions or attitude, he’d refrain from posting for a day in exchange for a certain level of financial contribution to the listserv hosts (who didn’t deserve the drama he invariably brought with him, either). As far as I know, no one had taken him up on it until I and a couple of other departing colleagues who’d had enough of having our contributions dismissed and weren’t going to need to stay in his good graces where we were headed pooled our resources and bought everyone a month of silence.

  89. Constance Lloyd*

    Maybe not quite an F you, but I worked at a non-profit that was part of a national network. We were located in a city with a high cost of living but were among the lowest paid in the country, despite being among the top performers. Every year, we were told about all the extra money in our budget and every year the board refused to issue raises greater than 1%. After a few years earning under $40k, I quit. I gave 4 weeks notice and made sure all of my cases were either closed or completely up to date with detailed transition notes for my coworkers. Then, during my exit interview with HR, I sang the organization’s praises. I heaped on sincere compliments about leadership, the mission, the dedication of my coworkers, and said unfortunately, I just couldn’t afford to keep working here. There had been above average turnover but this was during the height of the pandemic, so I think they had attributed it to that.

    Within a month, the board approved mid-year raises. I’m told they were significant.

    2. Alan*

      Yeah, my employer announced one year that everyone was overpaid, based on some report they commissioned, so they announced no raises. Critical people left. The next year, surprise!, they gave everyone a *huge* raise based on some *new* report they had commissioned. They simply couldn’t afford to lose any more people.

  90. SpatulaCity*

    I don’t recall if my co-worker quit, or was fired. while gathering up his things, he went to the shared computer in our lab, said he had some personal files he needed to copy before leaving. (it was around 2000, no user accounts/passwords, or centralized data storage, most things stored locally.) he was there a while, and left with a few floppys. we did other stuff while waiting for the computer to become available. after he left, another (older) coworker tried to find his project’s paperwork to print out, but it was missing. I was the young, just out of college recent hire, so the older coworker always asked me for computer help. Seems that the quit/fired coworker had spent his time deleting every work document off of the computer as his final F-you. but he forgot to empty the trash/recycling bin, so it was very easy for me to restore it. (after letting our supervisor and manager know what was done)

    1. Bruce*

      I’m glad you could recover the files, this one crossed the line from a personal “F-You” to sabotaging everyone’s work.

    2. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      Maybe he wanted to freak everyone out. Some people would think that was funny. “Guess what I did! I deleted everything. I didn’t empty the recycle bin. If they are too dumb to look there, oh well.”
      And he tells the story as a win. Or at least he did until he grew up.

  91. Notasecurityguard*

    Back when I WAS a security guard at a university there were 3 events that were always “Charlie Foxtrots.” By far the biggest of these was commencement day. My immediate supervisor liked to pretend we were in the military, had a loose understanding of labor and OSHA laws, and was just generally, to use the technical terms, a GAPING asshole. So when I found a job I handed in my 2 weeks notice, which had me leaving RIGHT before graduation. Told my boss my new job needed me right away, actually just wanted a month off

    1. Artemesia*

      I worked at a prestigious University and the entire commencement process was managed by a team of anal fussbudgets who spent a good deal of the year planning it. It went like clockwork every time, including every foreign student with a difficult to pronounce name having his or her name read more or less correctly as they were presented with their diploma. Everyone just showed up, faculty and students and without practice, knew exactly where to go (lines lead by well trained leaders, PhD grads had their names on the ground to line up for those ceremonies). It was truly impressive and a joy to be part of. It gave me a lifelong appreciation of fussbudgets who obsess with petty things.

  92. Tilly*

    Not super dramatic but 90% of our team quit within four months of getting a new manager. I inherited the majority of their work for what was supposed to be interim, but we know how that goes. Boss gave me minimal bonus bc I wasn’t being “engaged or innovative” enough rather than acknowledging I was doing four times my usual workload.

    I went on vacation. Told her upon my return I was giving my two weeks so I could spend the summer in Italy. She panicked and offered me a sabbatical option instead. I said no thanks because the thought of returning from a long vacation to her team was too depressing. It was an awkward two weeks.

  93. NameWithheld*

    Not me, but I know someone who bought one of those intermittent beeping devices and hid it in the ceiling of the tiny server room closet at their company.

    I also know someone who had setup a countdown that would execute if they didn’t log into a security system at least once a month, but I don’t remember what it did. I think it disabled all the door locks? He disabled it before he left though.

  94. Hyruseki*

    Back in the mid-90s I worked for an environmental firm. As a new hire, I was supposed to have 9-5 hours, but they were changed my third week in. I was now told to report at 5am to test buildings for environmental compliance because this was a big project and the client could not open doors every day without showing that they were following the rules.

    After a week of this, I talked to the big boss, was talked over, and told “this is how it is.” So I started interviewing, landed another job two weeks later and just…didn’t show up to the environmental firm. No notice, nothing. Apparently, the client called the firm FUMING because they couldn’t show they were in compliance that day and lost a ton of money. Environmental firm left a 5 minute rant on my answering machine about how they were going to ruin me and it turns out that they lost the client because no one else wanted to show up at 5am. The firm was out of business in under a year (not due to me, that was just one of the many things that was wrong with the place, but that’s a whole other story.)

  95. WonderCootie*

    Stuff of legend at my husband’s department: a low-level employee (think mail room or similar) sent a flaming email to EVERYONE in the agency (thousands of people). In the very long email, he described in excruciating detail exactly what he thought of the agency, the agency director, his manager, his job, and people in general. Let’s just say that it was less than complimentary and used a wide variety of four-letter words. He finished by saying he was resigning to become a pizza delivery driver.

  96. Carole from Accounts*

    I’m only a witness to the Quitter in this story but it’s too glorious not to share.

    I worked at a large multinational company that was a wholly owned subsidiary of a much larger international brand based in Japan. Our NA HQ had this gorgeous lobby that contained a zen garden, then you would go through the doors to the manufacturing facility and offices. We paid a Zen Master several hundred dollars each quarter to rake the zen garden before the big bosses from Japan came to visit.

    We had two systems that never talked to each other and never equaled each other, let’s say System 1 reported teapot contracts and pipeline, and System 2 reported teapot sales and costs. There were whole parts of the organization that just built reports around the two systems and there was a substantial percentage of management who didn’t understand why System 1 March contracts didn’t equal System 2 March sales. We answered questions about this constantly, and spent more time explaining the differences than actually doing any cost analysis. The effort to bridge the two systems was immense, and one of my coworkers was leading a project to automate the bridge files and improve reporting.

    At the grand presentation meeting for the Bridge Project, halfway through the presentation, a member of the C suite asked my coworker why she didn’t just make the numbers in System 1 match the numbers in System 2 instead of building this Bridge. Coworker attempted to explain they’ve tried everything, the bridge is the solution. C Suite insists she didn’t try hard enough. Coworker just calmly sets down the laser pointer, picks up her bag, announces that she’s quitting and walks out of the meeting room. Based on what we were told from the receptionist, she then walked out of the office area, into the lobby, opened the door to the zen garden and proceeded to make snow angels all over the freshly raked garden before security removed her from the premises.

    The zen angels remained for about 48 hours while panicked calls were made to the zen gardener to restore the zen before the big bosses arrived.

    The garden was fixed before the visit, Coworker could not be tempted to come back and finish the Bridge Project, it took another year to finish it without her technical expertise, and she was a legend for years after (I overheard someone telling a new employee about the angels five years later).

    3. Artemesia*

      If only everyone faced with a fool like that could have the means and guts to do that. Classic!!

    4. Sharpie*

      That is amazing!

      For some reason I’m picturing Coworker making zen garden snow angels while wearing a blouse, pencil skirt, and heels, for full F You effect. Please tell me she was wearing a blouse, pencil skirt, and heels!

    5. Seeking Second Childhood*

      I’ve been thinking about changing my user name and you have given me an idea to ponder.

  97. Clown Eradicator*

    YEARS ago, when I was in my early 20s, I worked an hourly + commission high end retail sales job. I cut down to weekends and holidays only, because I found a day job in an office, but the store still needed the coverage. I went in one day after a couple of weeks off to see that the manager at the time took a $20,000 sale from me. He was to finalize the sale while I was out, which was typical, but he assumed that since I was there sporadically, that I wouldn’t notice. That would have been a minimum of $300 commission, so yes, I noticed when it didn’t come, and that’s when I investigated.

    As soon as I saw that, I said to the manager “I quit, F— you, and don’t call me at Mother’s day or Xmas.” and flipped them off as I walked out. Stupid? Yes, probably. Vindicating? Absolutely.

    1. Yes And*

      A 1.5% commission? Forgive me, I’ve never worked on commission, but… is that normal? It seems awfully small to drive the kind of incentive that commissions are supposed to drive, especially at a place that does five figures of business in a single transaction.

      1. Bird names*

        For that kind of environment, yeah. Had similar experiences and then they still sometimes tried to find ways not to pay even that meager bonus.

  98. Marion the Librarian*

    I had been out of work for a bit after a move and accepted a job at a nonprofit that I thought I could stick out for two years and then move on. Unfortunately my boss turned out to be a walking harassment case and I started looking after 2 months.
    My boss treated my teammates pretty horribly (guilt tripping one of them for taking sick time to go to their chemo treatments, making comments to me and another colleague about how a pregnancy would never be welcomed news to her (we are both women of childbearing age). We finally made our cases to HR and things went from bad to worse as my boss retaliated against all of us.
    When I had started, I had negotiated a two week paid vacation as I had a family reunion planned about 4 months in (the company only gives 2 weeks accrued and it is use or lose). Well, I accepted a job offer the day before my vacation and waited to give my notice the day I returned. Given my boss’s volatile nature, I gave no notice and told HR I was done that day and what did I need to do to wrap things up. My boss never said a word to me and I’m told didn’t announcement my departure to the rest of the org because I had been “so f-king disrespectful.” Sure, Jan. I was the disrespectful one.

  99. not nice, don't care*

    Ah yes. Left my job by threatening to have my vile criminal boss deported back to Canada for her multiple schemes to defraud banks, insurance companies, customers and employees. She made the mistake of physically threatening me while attempting to fire me for informing a bullied coworker of her federal & state rights as an employee.

    It was so epically satisfying. I unloaded every last ounce of disgust for her as a person and an employer, loudly and emphatically. My parting shot was letting her cheated customers know how much she had stolen from them.

    Last I heard she had to close her business and was selling remaining stock (she was a fabric supplier to red-carpet-level clothing designers) out of her garage.

  100. Vacation Gamer*

    Not so much an F-You but a way to play the system on my way out. I worked for a large organization for over 15 years. They restructured my department and received a new boss who was quite toxic. It became very apparent that I needed to find a new job. I was offered the perfect next step in my career two weeks before the end of our fiscal year. At this particular organization, vacation and sick time were granted at the beginning of every fiscal year not accrued through the year. New job told me to pick a start date so I waited until after the start of the fiscal year to give my two weeks. Walked out with a check for 4 weeks worth of vacation (all granted 3 weeks before my last day). Pretty sure it messed with his staffing budget…

    1. WFH4VR*

      This is one of the reasons my job changed the unused-vacation payout to ten days, maximum, no matter how much you’ve accrued.

      1. Pocket Mouse*

        If you haven’t already, check whether that’s legal in your state! Your employer may be required to pay out all unused vacation.

  101. Everything Bagel*

    Almost 20 years ago, my boss “Frank” bought a bar as a fun side business, shortly after starting to date “Mandy,” one of the bartenders there. As you might imagine, this was a bad idea, and within a couple months they had broken up pretty messily.

    Frank didn’t want to fire her because it would look bad so he took the chickenshit approach and just stopped scheduling for shifts in the hope that she would quit. She did, but….

    The way he learned this was that in the late afternoon on a Friday one of the other bartenders called him at the store and said “if you want the bar to be open this week you should probably come down here and run it,” because the entire staff was quitting alongside her.

  102. Lisa K.*

    My mom worked in an office that had grown very toxic —and she was the only person who knew how to adjust the thermostat (don’t ask!). Literally on the way out the door on the day she quit, she jacked it up all the way to 90.

  103. Momma Bear*

    I once had a temp job cleaning up the “f-you, I’m out” tantrum of an employee who was fired. He literally threw documents in the air and let them fall down scrambled, and destroyed most of the soft copies (some of which were on disks that he corrupted or mangled in various ways – yeah, that old). I spent the entire summer finding the pieces, filling in the gaps, and putting everything into new content management SW. It was such a mess I couldn’t fully fix it, even after weeks of FT effort. The company offered to keep me on but I wanted to finish my degree. One of the best summer jobs I ever had, though, so I guess thank you to whoever peaced out like that.

  104. nora*

    When I was in college, I worked at a movie theater. I sprained my ankle severely and had a doctor’s note ordering me to sit at work. I brought the note to the GM and he refused to honor it. I went home, dejected, and had a message on my answering machine (this was approximately a million years ago) offering me a job at a theater box office. All sitting. I turned around, hopped back on the bus, and went back to the theater. GM: “Oh what now?” Me: “I quit.” At the end of my last shift I scratched the eyes out of a photo of a manager I particularly disliked. He was ANGRY.

    Fast forward 6 years and I was in his wedding to my best friend. The world is a strange place. We remain cordial, but not friends, to this day.

      1. Hlao-roo*

        From the Wikipedia article:

        Since completing community service, Slater has moved to Los Angeles and kept a low public profile. “It’s a before and after. My life was completely transformed, for better or for worse, after that date,” he recalled. “I mean, it wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done but it sure felt great … I just hit like a crescendo of frustration.” He has since been able to recover from his drug and alcohol addictions. Despite some job interviews, he has had difficulty getting hired because of his history, which he does not hold against prospective employers. “If I’m going in for some sort of a customer service position, I’m kind of like your worst nightmare.”[37]

        37. Wang, Amy B (November 3, 2017). “He quit JetBlue by sliding out of a plane. Now he has advice for the rogue Twitter employee”. The Washington Post. Retrieved November 6, 2017.

        Sounds like as of 2017 he was doing OK.

  106. Generic Name*

    Mine was a more belated F-you. You know the saying, revenge is a dish best served cold. I used to work for a tiny consulting firm, and they thought they were The Shit. I had worked there for a long time, and I finally screwed up the courage to leave after years of being treated poorly. I got a job at a huge company that was a big client of tiny firm. The CEO of tiny firm was buds with a VP of big client, so I can only assume management of tiny firm thought that they had things locked in for continued business at big client. The thing is, that VP has no actual authority over the subsidiary and department I work for, and it’s actually me and people at my level who often make decisions on which consulting firms to bring on for jobs. So when a job came up for bid, my old tiny firm submitted a proposal, along with several others. I reviewed all the bids, and theirs was by far the highest, and quite frankly, missed the mark. I sent them an email letting them know that their bid was not successful and they asked for a debrief. So I responded with a high-level list of their deficiencies. The most satisfying deficiency I got to point out was in a discipline that I am a widely-known expert in (in my industry). They were just flat out wrong about a regulatory change I was heavily involved in. Best part was that the person who asked for the debrief is the same person who when I resigned said that they weren’t worried about my many years of industry knowledge leaving with me. I guess they needed my industry knowledge after all. :)

  107. Muskisarat*

    On my last day at a job I hated I created a series of Google calendar invitations scheduled for random times weeks and months out for a couple of coworkers who had been rude to me. The title for each was, “Discussion of Why (I used my real name) is Fantastic.”

    I heard from other coworkers who I liked and stayed in touch with that this had the desired impact.

  108. Zona the Great*

    YES! I had a terrible job as a bank teller in a gross drive-up only branch on the outskirts of town. It was in the parking lot of a nearly abandoned mall. They refused to hire enough people so I had to work split shifts with a break of 3 hours in the middle of the day. I lived 45 minutes away and the others lived down the street but I was still the one who had to make an 8 hour payday into a 12+ hour day. My boss couldn’t understand my anger about it and told me to go window shopping in the abandoned mall where two stores remained. FOR THREE HOURS EVERY DAY.

    Right before Christmas I suddenly lost all will and motivation. They had just hired a part-timer who was only scheduled in the morning. Not to help with lunches. I carefully gathered my things in a pile near the door over the course of the day and when I had enough courage, I ran over, grabbed my things, and shouted, “Hey Karen! I quit! Merry Christmas!” I can still hear the panic in her voice as she called after me. While I now think this was dramatic and silly, I can still feel how young me felt in that moment so I don’t really feel bad.

  109. Dancing Queen*

    I sang a chorus of Take This Job and Shove it in front of my manager and the entire team, with accompanying dance moves, on my last day right when I was leaving the office for the last time.

  110. T. Belsen,*

    As of March 1, my job of 18 years was eliminated. I don’t have it in me to be so upset to want to give them a big F you in a blaze of glory. I hope they find the crappy person that they deserve, though.

    1. T. Belsen,*

      Oh I know why I feel no need for a huge F you. I have enough to stay in power that I knew my time was limited with the company. I waited long enough until they finally decided that they didn’t want me around anymore and I am currently enjoying the nice severance package. If all goes smoothly I will have a good passive income for quite a while.

  111. Big Shrugs*

    I’d been asking for a raise for months at my last firm, mentioning that while I had no plans to leave, I was seeing recruiters in my inbox with comparable roles offering 20%-30% more than I was being paid. I was asked what more I would be taking on to justify a pay increase, but the conversation turned a bit when the quiet part got said out loud—there really wasn’t any more growth opportunity for me at the small company. I said “that’s a good point” and ended the call.

    The owner set a meeting for three weeks later to discuss a number for a raise (he spent about half his time vacationing and that always took precedence). In that time I found another job paying 30% more with lots of growth opportunity and new challenges to take on. At the raise meeting, the owner said after a lot of thought, he was happy to offer me a raise—to the bare minimum number I’d discussed. I got to say thanks but no thanks… I actually have another job lined up. And since we live in a state where accumulated PTO is paid out at your current salary, I wouldn’t want to take a raise when I’d be leaving so soon. The mic drop moment and the look on his face was so worth giving up that bump to my payout.

  112. Sparkles McFadden*

    I worked in a department in a job I loved for more than ten years. Over time, I became one of the go-to people in the department, and was even asked to serve on various ad-hoc corporate and industry committees. My boss didn’t like that and things went downhill very quickly. She was told she could not fire me, so she did everything possible to get me to quit. I stayed with the company but moved to another department. My boss tried her best to stop the other manager from hiring me. She tried to get me removed from my committees. She called business contacts outside of the company to tell them not to contact me because she had fired me. Eventually things settled down, but she stayed angry over the fact that I got another job before she could figure out how to fire me.

    That boss was let go five months after I changed jobs. It was dressed up as a voluntary departure, complete with a going away gathering in a conference room. It was not well attended, but one friend did go and called me to jokingly say “I went to her going away thing to see if you’d be there.” I replied that I had been there in spirit. I suggested that he go back to the conference room when it was empty and take a look behind the lowered projection screen. On the whiteboard behind the lowered screen, I had written GOOD RIDDANCE!!! in giant block letters.

    The best part was that my friend had raised the screen to expose my message, and no one erased it until someone need to use the whiteboard for a presentation about a week later. I guess I wasn’t alone in feeling the way I did.

  113. nerak*

    I worked for a bookstore chain at a mall over Christmas in the late ’90s, and they kept making me staff the little crappy pop-up stand by Santa’s Workshop. It was so boring, I’d maybe make one or two sales an hour, but there was NOTHING to do there. I was there for 8 hours, alone, and had to beg coworkers to come down so I could use the bathroom and take my lunch break.

    After this happened a bunch of shifts in a row, with no one else being made to work there nearly as often as I was, I just flat-out refused to go staff it again. The manager finally sent someone else to work the pop-up, and I had a great time working in the actual bookstore, but when it came time to clock out, the manager fired me for insubordination.

    I begged her not to fire me, and she reluctantly agreed to keep me on, but before my next shift a day or two later, I decided she was right and I should be fired. So I came in and let her know I was quitting, which left her short-staffed for the day, but I didn’t care.

    I know it wasn’t the most mature thing to do, but I was 23 and my grandmother was very sick and ended up passing away a few days before Christmas, so I regret nothing.

  114. Gingerbat*

    I left a toxic non-profit (IYKYK) job after a little less than a year. My boss was an incompetent (she once asked me to sort an excel sheet that had 2 names on it) petty tyrant who was rude and abrasive to everyone she deemed less than (which was everyone except the org president). I scheduled an email announcing my departure to hit her inbox after I had left for the day letting them know my last day would be when she was conveniently on a work trip. I also called in sick a few times so I only had to see her once more before leaving. When I did see her, I made sure to let her know I was leaving for a job that paid 50% more and that I would “never forget all that you taught me about management and human connections.”

  115. Lab snep*

    I used to do graphic and web design. We had a client which was a CHURCH and they stole images off the internet all the time.

    When they asked why I said it was no good, I looked at them and said “thou shalt not steal?”

    Anyway. The company I worked for wasn’t great and when exporting some images for the church site before I left, I noticed a setting would make them all 666 bytes in size.

    I did that. Nobody knew. It was cathartic.

    Shortly after I left I checked on the website and it was full of stolen images again.

    But all my 666 byte site images still existed.

  116. YesPhoebeWould*

    Back when I was a manager, I worked for an utterly incompetent Director and an even more incompetent VP. They made my life very difficult for several months. I gave my boss verbal notice of my quitting, and she was very snarky about needing it formally in writing via email. Knowing I would never return to this company, I complied fully with an email saying “As you know, for a long time it has been difficult dealing with your utter incompetence and lack of ability, and even more so with an intellectual dwarf like {VP}. So, as requested, I’m quitting effective [date] to get away from such a useless pair of inept micromanagers with the leadership skills of a trained chimp.”

    I “accidentally” sent it to the company-wide distribution email address, and just to make sure she got it, I printed it out and taped it on the wall next to her office. Got walked out the next day. :)

  117. Slightly petty*

    My former workplace was fairly toxic with a lot of power plays and bad feelings between different supervisors and higher ups that unfortunately trickled down to the rest of us. I stayed because it was well paying and couldn’t beat the work life balance (M-F day shift, no weekends or holidays). One day my supervisor called us in for a meeting to inform us we had to start working weekends and holidays (would work out to one weekend a month and 3-4 federal holidays a year). When we pushed back on the rationale for this (it was to cover an area of our company that we weren’t qualified or trained to run, and there were serious safety concerns with us suddenly being in charge of these significant duty changes), our supervisor said “if you don’t like it, you’re welcome to seek employment elsewhere.” So I did. A few months later in my exit interview when asked if there was anything that could have been changed or done differently that would have impacted my leaving, I took great pleasure in quoting him directly, along with sharing my concerns about the legality/liability associated with the shift change. I know multiple other people in my department left, and the people remaining are no longer being assigned to the weekends and holidays.

  118. Lemon*

    Took 1.5 weeks vacation and returned the week I intended to put in my 2 weeks.

    Also, acting with extreme professionalism towards an extremely unprofessional and juvenile employer is really satisfying to me.

  119. Sally Forth*

    I went back to school and started a new career at 35. My boss was horrible, well known in our local special libraries community for burning through her library assistants. After 18 months I had gone to HR twice for how she treated our volunteers.

    She had a day book where I had to enter the top 10 things I had done each day. She said it was to better communicate and eliminate duplicated effort but her feedback in the day book was often demeaning. Even the positive comments were of the cringeworthy “attagirl” variety.

    When I quit, I taped a bookmark in the day book with a quote from George Eliot “It’s never too late to be what you might have been” but I wrote her name in Sharpie after the quote.

    1. Caller 2*

      But what if you hadn’t done ten things that day? What if you’d spent a lot of time working on one thing?

  120. a perfectly normal-sized space bird*

    At a particularly horrible job* that I worked at for three years (and leave off my resume despite the certifications I got from that job being helpful in my job searches), I knew the writing was on the wall and took measures to protect myself and give a big ol’ fork you to the company.

    – I moved to a new address without updating HR and had all my mail forwarded to a PO box
    – I forwarded emails and made copies of all incriminating evidence for all the fraud they were engaged in
    – I submitted said evidence with reports to the SEC, IRS, HUD, and the relevant state offices
    – I took all the office supplies they never reimbursed me for, from toner cartridges to paperclips
    – In a fit of pettiness, I tilted everything framed about 12 degrees off center and rehung all the posters so the ridiculous motivational images were facing the wall

    I never really followed up with what eventually happened to the company, but the president was convicted of bank fraud and now he delivers vending machine candy and his stint as the president of a national company does not appear on his resume. A coworker who worked out of the satellite office said it was about eight months before someone noticed the wall decor and the posters still hadn’t been fixed by the time he left the company.

    *They were engaged in tax and insurance fraud, plus doing a lot of illegal and unethical things to elderly, disabled, and poor people, the discovery of which is why my boss went underground for a month and then showed up in the middle of the night at my house with a giant file folder of evidence he wanted me to have in case he and/or his copies disappeared. It was a weird time.

  121. Heffalump*

    After a week at my first summer job during my college years, I simply left at the end of my shift and never came back, never called to give notice, because of the abusive office manager. I should have told him off, but I was too much of a wimp. Not as dramatic a story as I’d like, but it is what it is.

    I’d gotten the job through the campus placement office. I told the nice lady at the placement office how the job had worked out, and she said, “Some offices are like that, and they have a lot of turnover.”

    Of course we remember the story of the flight attendant who hit the slide (which became a catchphrase) some years ago.

  122. Anon for this*

    Ooh, reading all these has just reminded me of when I was working for a city council in Yorkshire, many years ago.

    Our department had been going through a reorganisation, and our key IT person, “Hermione”, had been assigned to report to the Admin manager, “Dolores”, whom she loathed. She found a new job pretty quickly and prepared her f-you to Delores.

    Although it’s common in the UK to give at least a month’s notice (often more in the public sector if you are at a certain level), Hermione had plenty of holiday owed which would count towards her notice period.

    Hermione waited until Dolores was on leave and likely to be on a plane to her holiday destination before submitting her resignation, knowing that she would be gone before Dolores returned to the office. This was in the mid-noughties, before smartphones or the ability to log into work email remotely, so there’s a good chance that Dolores didn’t find out until she came back to work. Though well before Dolores left for her holiday, I suspect a good 80% of the 50 or so people in the department knew of Hermione’s plan.

  123. Alice*

    Here’s a dark one:
    Years ago, a friend of mine worked long term at a dysfunctional not-for-profit that had an important mission he cared about deeply, but that mismanaged everything and made my friend’s professional life extremely difficult and stressful. Then, while he was secretly planning to quit, he passed away suddenly.
    In his death announcement, his family requested donations to a different organization with a similar mission, as a deliberate final F-you to his employer.

  124. Clam Condor*

    About 10 years ago I was working at a grocery store deli. My boss wouldn’t let me take a HALF DAY for my only child’s 1st birthday because “it’s too close to Christmas and we’re busy” BS we had plenty of staff and it was 3 weeks before Christmas .

    Our cold meal case had an on/off switch that was really easy to knock with your knee if you weren’t paying attention. I made sure I knocked it with my knee before I walked out…

    At another job I had a brown nosing coworker that had a huge crush on our boss and was super jealous and possessive. He refused to do anything about her passive aggressive behavior so in my exit interview I made sure to DETAIL each conversation she had about him. Might as well make it awkward for them bwahaha

  125. Guest*

    One of the crappy retail gigs I worked after college was at a card and gift shop during the holidays. You haven’t lived until a customer walks up to you with 7 pairs of costume earrings and wants them all individually wrapped 20 minutes ago. My manager was always grumpy with me for no reason and I once heard her loudly trashing me to a friend on the phone. I wasn’t too upset when they didn’t keep me on after the season ended. Fast forward a few months to when I was working at a jewelry store – she came in and said she was desperate to leave the gift shop and were we hiring and could I please put it a good word for her? I smiled and said, sorry,we’re not hiring. After she left, my manager asked why I’d said that since we were about to advertise an opening. I told her how gift shop boss had acted at work and she understood.

  126. NotmyUsualName*

    I honestly had not intended to leave with a flourish, I had given my 2 weeks notice and was faithfully wrapping up my 2 weeks. Typically this company either walked you on notice, or you were expected to work until 5 pm on your last day.

    This was pre any sort of shared drive system. All during the last week I had been collecting documentation for things I was the primary person on, making good training documentation, writing status reports on all my last projects. The intention was to email them to my group on my last day once I had final project status.

    I came in at 8 am on my last day and the IT Bob who had always had it in for me came in at 8:15. At 8:16 access to my company email was abruptly terminated. I went down to check if he could turn it back on so I could send out a few last things and he said no, it had all been deleted.

    I wiped my hard drive of all the files and when they asked for the updates I said they had all been in my drafts folder in the email ready to be sent that day and they should ask IT Bob for help. Things did not go well for IT Bob.

    Unrelated I was not sad a year later when I learned he had been arrested and imprisoned for being a sexual predator. He had always given me the creeps and it turns out for good reason.

  127. SbucksAddict*

    It wasn’t me but when I was working for another firm, we were auditing a large client. They had me sitting in a room across from another woman who could help me if I needed any files or whatever. She had a happy meal looking Sponge Bob toy on her desk and I remember mentally chuckling about it because this was a very traditional and staid workplace where you didn’t even see photos on people’s desks.

    Middle of the audit, I come back from lunch to find an envelope on my desk chair. We weren’t allowed to leave papers when we left the room so I thought it was for Sponge Bob Lady and was given to me by accident. Figured I’d give it back to her after lunch. Hours went by and she never came back. Looked closer at the envelope to make sure it was hers and it had my name on it. Inside were some irregular invoices that I’d asked about but she couldn’t find.

    I went to thank her and noticed Sponge Bob was gone. She never came back to work – I think she gave me the invoices and dipped. I had no way to contact her to thank her but it definitely helped in the audit and I could go to my AM with evidence instead of “This just doesn’t feel right.” So thank you, Sponge Bob Lady!

    1. Your Oxford Comma*

      Apropos of nothing, I first misread your name as “ShucksAddict” and wondered if you’re addicted to shucking oysters. Or addicted to saying, “Shucks.”

      Carry on.

  128. Box of Rain*

    Weeks after starting a new job as a Teapot design Trainer, I quickly realized that the job description I was hired for was not the job they wanted me to do. I was being asked to be a Teapot Processes Technical Writer. My title was the same, but the job description with the posting was revised once I was hired. Luckily, I still had the job posting description saved because a copy of it was included with my offer letter.

    Around the end of the first month, I started to ask my boss for help with process documentation. I asked him for help in every 1:1 or status update meeting. I asked him for training so I could do what he wanted (even though it wasn’t what I was hired for). Training continued to be promised to me for the next two months, without him actually coming through on it. I had no team members to lean on either, and to top it off, I was completely by myself 95% of the day. As in literally alone in a desk in an all but abandoned area of the building, too. There were at least three times that I didn’t see another person for 3+ days.

    How do I know it was at least three times? I documented it. Initially, this wasn’t with the intention of quitting, but it became that after I called my state unemployment office several times to ask about the legality of the job description bait-and-switch. If I quit because of this, could I get unemployment? The answer was, “Maybe.”

    Fast-forward to about 8 AM when I receive a call that my 7 year old didn’t stop running in time and slammed head first into a concrete wall while playing at daycare that morning. The school was calling because they sent him ahead to school on the bus (WTH), and as soon as he got there the school nurse did a concussion check. I am still so new I don’t have any time off available, so I decide right then, while sitting in my car facing another completely miserable day alone doing a job I wasn’t qualified or trained for while my child needs me, that I am never coming back to this place.

    I went to my desk, grabbed anything I didn’t want left behind, including the documentation related to me asking for help 500 times, the bait-and-switch job descriptions, and some personal photos. I wasn’t prepared to do this, so I was carrying everything in my arms. I was sure someone would ask what was going on, but again, there was no one in this area of the building.

    I picked up my kid and took him to the doctors. Around 3 PM, I emailed by boss my resignation. No surprise he hadn’t noticed I was missing. The company initially protested my unemployment claim and called for a hearing, until I turned over the documentation I had going back two months of me asking for training/help and the job descriptions. The hearing was immediately cancelled, and I got my unemployment.

  129. ferrina*

    Way, way back when I was working at a daycare that was contracted to a corporate client. The daycare director was a non-entity to the point of awful. She let all kinds of things slide, and the center had some serious bullies among the teachers. I finally got sick of the bullying and quit. The head of the PTA had a kid in my class, and we had a strong rapport. When I told them I was leaving, the parent asked where I was going.

    “I don’t have anything lined up.” I said. An entire silent conversation happened with eyebrows.

    Apparently that had been the final straw for the PTA head. She had a list of grievances against the director and rallied the PTA. They had the leverage to threaten the corporate contract, and the director was forced out.

  130. Sabrina*

    My old office was a dysfunctional disaster of cronyism, my groups managers wouldn’t put me on projects unless they had too because one manager hated me. To be fair I had made him look like an idiot, he had publicly accused me of doing something fireable that was so easy to disprove I did so. In an office wide email.

    Anyway, after that the only way I’d get projects from my mangers was when every other person was unavailable or my coworkers had all screwed up enough that the clients refused to work with them anymore. (Shockingly that happened! Multiple times!) The way that job worked was I needed to stay billable or I’d be made part time and loss my benefits. However I had a network of excellent people in other offices and outside my immediate group who wanted to work with me. This worked out great for my managers, they didn’t have to piss off the one angry guy by giving me projects and I made their numbers look good by having more billable hours then the rest of the group. By the time I was ready to leave I was the only person being managed by them working full time, everyone else had been made part time due to lack of billable hours. My managers also weren’t winning more work or keeping clients, can’t imagine why.

    Once my new job had a start date I gave 24 hour notice, which I felt bad about but they needed me to start immediately to get into a training class. My manager, suddenly realizing she was about to lose the only person who was reliably billable, told me she needed a list of all my projects so she could reassign them. I got to tell her that I’d already found coverage for every single one. In other offices. The new job had a very slow process to get me start date and I knew better then to give notice without one. So I’d spent a month calling people I’d worked with and finding out if they had time and the right experience, then contacting managers all over the country with cheerful emails explaining I wouldn’t be able to work with them in the future, but I knew someone who was perfect in another office who would be happy to take over. I even reached out to people who had yearly work I’d help with that was way out to tell them who to contact, not an hour of work went to my old group.

    Funny thing was at the time I didn’t think of this as a F you. I really did like these projects and I wanted the best people possible to take them over. Sadly that wasn’t anyone in my office. But when I saw my managers reaction I realized exactly how much this was going to screw her over. Also as I type this out I’m realizing that not one person contacted my office and warned them I was leaving. Feel all warm and fuzzy knowing they had my back!

  131. JAnon*

    I knew something was up at the agency I had been working at where I essentially operated as a one person traffic team with a background in design. My boss was odd that day, he kept wanting to talk, was asking about some projects. My assumption was that with the loss of a client, we were letting the designer who worked solely on that client go so I was being very diligent about moving work around and seeing what I could take on to have everything happen seamlessly the next week and show my strengths. I saw the designer be let go and then my boss came to get me, and I was ready to tell him we were good for the next week. Until HR was in the office also. When I went back to my computer afterwards to pack up my things, the schedule for the next week was open. It’s a small thing, but I deleted it. If they didn’t want me there, they could figure it out themselves. It didn’t create a ton of havoc for them, but I sure wasn’t giving them any help for that next week!

  132. soontoberetired*

    this question reminds me of my former co-worker DB. DB was working on some technical infrastructure with a vendor, and that vendor kept insulting DB. DB’s complaints to management went nowhere. One day, the vendor said something particularly bad, and DB went back to his desk, filled out the retirement paperwork (DB was old enough to “retire” from the company and get his pension), set the date to be immediate, sent the paper work to management and HR and walkd out the door.

    The infrastructure project was delayed 8 months. They needed DB. DB had a lot of money saved, and the last I knew, never worked again. DB was 52 at the time.

  133. Fenella Lorch*

    Served in the Navy with an officer kicked out for performance reasons. On his last day, all the officers gathered to give him the traditional sendoff given to a departing shipmate.

    As one does, he wore his uniform. But he put on gym shorts and a rock band t-shirt under his uniform. He left with a backpack secretly containing a ballcap and set of flip-flops.

    The officers gathered and saw him off. Departing the ship for the last time, he stopped at the foot of the gangplank and stripped off his uniform, boots and all. He slipped in to flip-flops and his baseball cap and strode off down the pier to his car, leaving his uniform in a heap at the foot of the gangplank.

  134. Anon for this*

    I wrote a very nice resignation letter. Except the first letter of each sentence spelled out F–K YOU B—H. Each word was a different paragraph. Absolutely petty, and I don’t think anyone ever noticed.

    My terrible boss told me it was the nicest resignation letter she’d ever received.

    3. WS*

      Are you the poet Gwen Harwood? Back in 1961, she got so frustrated with an Australian magazine (the Bulletin) publishing poor quality male poets rather than her much better poems that she did this:

      “In 1961, the poet Gwen Harwood sent two sonnets into the Bulletin, under the name of Walter Lehmann, an ‘apple orchardist in the Huon Valley in Tasmania, and husband and father’. Horne published the poems, to his later embarrassment when it was revealed that, read acrostically, the sonnets read ‘So Long Bulletin’ and ‘Fuck All Editors’. Harwood believed that the sonnets were ‘poetical rubbish and [would] show up the incompetence of anyone who publishe[d] them ‘.”

  135. Lentils*

    A few jobs ago, I worked with a team that provided onsite parking for corporate employees of [major online retailer with significant physical presence in my nearby metropolitan area]. We were all laid off kind of abruptly, because Retailer decided they wanted to switch to a cheaper parking lottery system.

    Background: the system we used to assign parking worked on sometimes months- or years-long wait lists to get parking in an employee’s chosen buildings, with less secure “temporary” spaces also available at less optimal garages. Parkers were supposed to reach out to us with issues they encountered with their access fobs. One of the people using a temp garage, “Percy,” wrote us silly poems about his access woes whenever he had to reach out, and quickly endeared himself to the entire team that way. He happened to be on a wait list for a building that was notoriously slow-moving and difficult to get parking access in, but he was always upbeat and kind in his emails, which was a nice break from the usual for us. He became legendary in our office even though we were only there about a year and a half.

    On our last day, a couple coworkers and I realized that because all our emails/inboxes were getting deleted, nobody would get in trouble if we just… gave Percy parking access to his preferred garage. So together the three of us penned a little thank you note to him for always brightening our days and got his new access fob sent out before we left. I hope if he’s still there, he’s loving his parking access.

  136. Saint Elmo*

    Not the most interesting or dramatic, but it was certainly satisfying to me. I worked as a Team Lead under a horrible micro-manager at my last retail job at a clothing store, and one of the things she was incredibly nitpicky about was the radio station that we played.

    For whatever reason she always kept it on this station that was essentially all children versions of popular music. Think Kidz-Bop, but even younger children. So rather than customers hearing the top 40s in the store, they were instead greeted by the shrill voices of children doing their best to compare to Ariana Grande. (Where she found this station I do not know, but it must have been broadcast from the third circle of hell or something).

    Needless to say, this was awful and whenever she was away from the store we would change it to a regular station. Finally after two years I was leaving to go on a study abroad, and I wanted to get the slightest bit back at her. On my final day, I was one of the closers and I knew she was opening the next morning. So before leaving I turned up the radio to the top 40s we would usually listen to when she was away, so that when she started it in the morning she would be greeted with regular-people music instead of her shrill little angels.

    i never got to see her reaction, but I do imagine it when i need some cheering up.

  137. Kim Z.*

    At my previous academic position, my department had been shoved into an entirely unrelated and completely dysfunctional department.

    When I quit to take my current job, I went into a faculty meeting, said “I have an announcement. I’m leaving. And I’m leaving because of you people. I have never worked with a group of such unprofessional people. You are awful.” And I stood up and walked out of the meeting. According to a colleague who I am close with, the stunned silence was beautiful.

    I also apparently wrote a scorching resignation letter to the Provost. A few years ago, I found her response to my resignation, calling me unprofessional in what I wrote. I don’t actually remember what I said in the letter, but clearly it did not make her happy. :)

  138. Lady Ann*

    I left my last job because my boss, to put it simply, was mean to me (and not to anyone else she managed, she just disliked me for no good reason that I could tell). The company published a weekly email newsletter, and a common thing to do for folks that left on good terms was to send in a goodbye note to be included. I sent in a note thanking all the people that had supported me and helped me grow over my more than 15 years there, including peers, support staff, and other supervisors I had had over the years, omitting of course my current boss. It was dumb, and petty, but satisfying.

  139. Enaj*

    I took a second part-time job at a deli; the manager said she could schedule me around my other job so I gave her my hours there. I trained for 2 days and then was put on the schedule with NO regard to my scheduling request/needs. So on my first official day of work I walked in holding my work shirt with a note pinned to it saying “I quit.”

  140. Jojo*

    I was not the main player in this story, but I did get to add the icing to the cake.

    I had worked a retail job for 5 years when a store manager position came open. I applied, as did this very unsettling guy who did not pass the vibe check. When I found out, I mentioned some concerns I had about him to the district manager. Because I was competing for the job, she blew me off assuming it was just sour grapes. He got the job.

    By the time the holiday season rolled around I realized I was never going to move up and put in my two week notice. On my second to last day, the regional director was touring stores with the district manager. They show up first thing at odd guy’s store to find the gates closed and the lights out. As they are standing there, odd guy and his assistant manager show up; announce they are a couple; and hand over the keys and quit on the spot. Hey, I warned the district manager, but what did I know?

    I mention it was the start of the holiday season, and they were now down a store manager and an assistant manager. The district manager called me at my store, gave a very brief summary of what happened, and then offered me the store manager job…on my second to last day. I was so done with retail at that point that I just apologized, rejected the offer, and reminder her that it was my second to last day. I don’t know what the fallout was for the district manager, but I can assure you I enjoyed not working on Black Friday forever after.

    There really was something off about the guy and I sometimes wonder what happened to his assistant manager when they started dating. She was pretty inexperienced with dating, and I’m afraid he may have manipulated her. But who knows, maybe they ended up having a wonderful long term relationship; just like my receiving clerk and I have had. (It was retail, what can I say?)

  141. A Tired Queer*

    About 6 years ago, I left a job that had over the course of two years morphed from manager to personal assistant to a pair of very demanding professors. I gave them the required 2 weeks notice, I sat down with them in person to hand in my resignation, I left behind a detailed guide to do what I did… but only for the duties that had actually been in my job description. None of the sneaky undercover scheduling, none of the sleight of hand travel arrangements, and certainly none of the borderline illegal use of grant money for “work related” (actually personal) purchases. They sent me panicked emails for two months afterwards asking how to do all those things, and I placidly informed them that they should go through the department admins… just like they should have done when I was still there. It was a very mild F You, but I found it immensely satisfying!

  142. Sigh.*

    Towards the end of my time at a famously red and khaki/jeans retail big box store, we got a Store Team Lead (STL) who was just the definition of the C-word. She was condescending, rigid in her direction, and prone to scathing emails to the whole leader team where she would nastily insult whoever her wrath was turned to. We had to email her at the end of every shift with a detailed list of everything we did, what our team did, etc etc. This was 2020, so height of the pandemic – but she didn’t want to hear ANY pandemic excuses as to why, for instance, I wasn’t paying attention to bed/bath (where no one was shopping) and helping food/household (where EVERYONE WAS SHOPPING in insane fashion). She was only there for three months, and she lost four leads in that time – the overnight lead quit with nothing lined up, the guest service exec decided her dream of going to grad school was going to happen like right now, and another team lead took a month-long leave of absence, whose end just happened to coincide with her retirement date. I was the fourth to leave.

    Once she arrived and proved herself to be impossible to work for, I began obsessively searching for a new job. In the midst of the search, I got put on a PIP essentially, and doubled my efforts – at one point I was putting in 30 applications a day, no joke. I landed a job with a financial advisor firm, and got my offer the week I was on a final warning. I put in my two weeks, and brought up my email, where I had a scathing email from the STL asking why something wasn’t done – despite me having spelled out in my end of day email that I would be working with another team lead to come up with a solution that very night. With my two weeks in the system and no fear, I literally was able to say “PER MY LAST EMAIL, I detailed how I plan to do X with person Y for these reasons. Thanks!”

    She never spoke to me again that whole week, and when my direct supervisor came back from vacation, she let me take the rest of my vacation and leave early. Later I found out she left the company the week after I did, because “headquarters didn’t value leadership at the store level.” Honey, you lost four leads in three months! YOU didn’t value leadership at the store level! Anyway, wherever you are, Mandee – I hope your pillow is always warm and your coffee is always cold.

    1. Secret Poet*

      After an abrupt and clearly unplanned re-org of my division in a very large company, I read the writing on the wall and sought greener pastures. I’m not the sort to burn bridges, but I was so frustrated by the dysfunction that I left a very special goodbye email: an acrostic, such that the first letter of every sentence spelled out “ABANDON SHIP”.

      Nobody ever called me on it, despite the stilted wording necessary to make it work. I just wish more of my colleagues had taken my secret advice- following my departure that entire wing of the company was sold off, and much of it scuttled once the buyer understood what a mess they’d inherited.

  143. Kupo*

    I worked as a store manager for a well known nationwide small footprint retailer. Every year was a BATTLE to be allowed to leave the store in the capable hands of my “has family local” staff to be able to get my 2.5 hour trip with a new baby in tow to see all of our extended family for Christmas Eve. Upper management insisted I had to stay until 6pm which ruined our holiday and put STRESS on my marriage.

    When I left I had the new job lined up to start on December 27th, giving me time off to actually spend with family for the first time in years. I put my last day as December 23rd, ensuring I got my holiday evening! It felt GREAT.

    It was even better when they failed to get the manger transition store-wide inventory before I left. Upper management called me on December 28th asking where I was, they were about to start the inventory. My dude, my last day was the 23rd, I’m in another state training for my new job. Have fun with the inventory!

  144. cactus lady*

    When I left a job due to harassment from my boss (it was being investigated by the company and I heard later they were demoted, though I’m surprised they weren’t fired), I gave my notice to my boss’s boss. I didn’t think that was going to be a big f-you based on what had been going on, but boss LOST IT and yelled at me. “I am your boss, not Bob! How dare you!” It really cemented that leaving was a better choice than taking the promotion in a different department id been offered.

  145. Caffeine Monkey*

    This one is from a coworker…

    Back in the 80s, he worked at a major industrial site that had just opened a new building on the same campus. Now, back in those days, there was very little standardisation in IT. Different providers had their own protocols. The provider for their IT said that running the same system across the two buildings would cost upwards of £100,000. And this was the 80s.

    So one of the IT Bobs had a think and poke, and ended up making two little boxes with amplifier chips, stringing some telephone cable between them, and getting the system working perfectly, thus saving the company £100,000 (especially as the chips were his own).

    The company had a financial rewards programme. If somebody saved the company a substantial amount, they got a hefty reward. Bob sat back and waited for his reward. Trouble was, as many IT people can attest, nobody understood just how important his work was. Bob got nothing.

    So Bob quit. On his last day, he went to the boxes, took out his chips, and went home.

    He ended up receiving a substantial contractor fee to come and replace the chips. Enough to buy a house. (Admittedly, back then, you could buy a house for £20 and a bag of crisps.)

  146. A Significant Tree*

    When I got notice that I was being laid off, I made it widely known. We were subject to the WARN act so I had two months to wrap things up, job hunt, whatever, and I just cheerfully went about my business. It was 90% a front to make sure that the senior manager, who personally picked me to be laid off, didn’t get an ounce of satisfaction from it. This is the person who directly told me he wouldn’t have hired me (subtext: a highly educated woman) for my job. Because I was so open about it, people had a long time to process it. I had senior colleagues plead my case, other people openly said it made no sense (due to my role and longstanding excellent reputation), and it made him look petty and incompetent.

    My direct manager, a walking limp sponge, asked me if I wanted the traditional going-away cake and ‘party’ during work hours (none of the other soon-to-be-laid-off people wanted that for themselves, which I understood). But I was driven by spite so I said yes, yes I do, chocolate cake please. I had a great big piece of cake while colleagues said wonderful things about me and dug up some photos of my time there for a slideshow and it was all very bittersweet. There was also a happy hour for the handful of us being laid off and it was very well attended. I know being laid off was hard on some of the others and it was pretty rough on me too, but I made damn sure the managers got zero satisfaction.

  147. It's Marie - Not Maria*

    I had a good one, and I didn’t even have to do it myself!

    My manager was an incompetent nepotism hire, who constantly tried to micromanage me. She did not understand the demographic of our Team Members, and insisted on dealing the mostly blue-collar Team like high level senior management. She changed I created Trainings from fun and targeted for the audience they were being presented to, to extremely boring, high level HR Trainings that would put people to sleep. She tried to implement policies and rules which were impossible to enforce in the work environment (which was in a very remote area.) The straw that broke the camel’s back came the day she told me it wasn’t my job to protect people – IT LITERALLY WAS A MAJOR PART OF MY JOB TO PROTECT PEOPLE. I submitted my notice to her Manager, the overall Director of the Program, outlining all the things this person was doing to harm our Government Funded Program. I made sure to copy her.

    Fast forward to an All Hands Zoom Meeting for the program, about two days before my last day with the organization. During this Zoom, the CEO of the organization shared with the entire Team (about 300 people) that the Federal Director of the Program we were working with had specifically told him what a great job I had been doing, and the CEO personally gave me a shout out for my hard work. Micromanaging nepotism hire manager had to listen to the CEO say this, all while knowing she was the reason I was leaving. It was truly glorious!

    I heard from friends within the program she suddenly transferred to a different segment within the organization a short time later. The Rumor Mill had it that this was not a voluntary transfer.

  148. Spurs*

    When I worked at a grocery store we had a worker who was still in high school get fired for missing too many shifts. He seemed to take it well, but when he went to turn in his uniform, he passed through the condiment aisle and took every third jar of pickles and smashed them on the ground. That aisle smelled like pickles for at least a month afterwards.

  149. Red5*

    It was my very first grown-up, post-college job. I was a military spouse at the time and was working on a military base for a military organization. I was working in the field I’d gotten my degree in, and had worked there for a couple of years when they hired New Guy. Not too long after New Guy started, I found a list of employees and salaries someone had printed out and left on the printer. I saw that New Guy made a decent amount more than me, despite me having more experience plus a degree. So I brought it to my supervisor, and said, “Hey, I know this wasn’t meant for my eyes, but I’ve seen it and I can’t unsee it. Given my experience and education compared to New Guy, can we look at bringing my salary more in line with his?” Supervisor’s response was, “No. New Guy has a family he has to support and you’re just working for shopping money.” (Which, yes, I know now is illegal; please see “first grown-up job.”) So I started job hunting and ended up getting an offer that paid a good bit more than New Guy was being paid. Supervisor was SHOCKED AND UPSET! when I gave my notice and asked why I would want to leave this wonderful job I had. I deadpanned, “They offered me more shopping money.”

  150. Diana like the Princess*

    Not my story but my Dad’s. Dad was one of the last people, along with one other guy, left without an assignment after his stint at Officer’s Candidate School while he was in the Army during the late sixties. He and the other guy spent their days riding the bus around camp while they waited, attempting to avoid the higher ups, who would immediately put them to work doing terrible jobs if they were seen. Well, they got caught one day, and a higher-ranking officer gave them the job of re-flooring the mess hall with vinyl tiles. They were both annoyed, hot in the Missouri summer, on their knees scraping and gluing for several days. Dad and his companion played the long game with a subtle yet literal “F-You” to the Army by spelling it out in dimes in the glue under the vinyl. They figured that the message would be revealed by wear long after they were gone. We always wondered if it actually worked!

  151. ThespianAccountant*

    I was laid off from my bookstore job as a shift manager, along with about a third of the staff nationwide, right at the beginning of the pandemic. I was notified *on my 6 year anniversary with the company* (this was my first job out of college and I truly thought would be where I retired from.

    So I packed up a big bag of every single company shirt I had and dropped it on the desk when I came in to get my stuff. Only I knew I was commenting about how long I’d been there, but it helped a little.

  152. Hush42*

    Not me but I work for a company that services copiers. The way our service contracts are structured clients are billed based on the number of pages they print. So the more things they print/ copy the more they pay each month. We had one client call in years ago stating that their bill had to be wrong because they never make anywhere near as many pages as they were billed for. They called back a few days later and let us know that they had figured out what had happened. An angry employee who was leaving the company came into the office the day before she was quitting, after everyone else had left, and just printed off hundreds of pages (If I recall correctly she went through more than one ream of paper) just to run their bill up.

  153. Groundhog Trainer*

    I took a job at a well-respected animal shelter to be closer to family. I knew shelters can be stressful, but it turns out that the respect was not deserved, and I was not prepared for the toxicity. I could write multiple letters about it, but it boils down to their euthanasia policy was not what was advertised and they treated animal care staff poorly. After five months I put in my two weeks, and the only reason I gave notice at all was out of respect for the rest of my team.

    I was halfway through my first week and newly frustrated because I realized that I was actually getting paid less for working a holiday the day before than if I’d not worked it, I ran into our team lead, who asked how I was doing, and when she asked “why” to my “eh”, I just said I didn’t really want to be there. Well, within the hour I was in the director’s office, along with my manager and the new assistant manager (literally her first day). Apparently they’d heard I was going around saying I didn’t want to be there (implying it was multiple times), and since that wasn’t helpful this could be my last day and I could be paid out for the rest of my notice. I of course accepted.

    They then had the audacity to say they appreciated all I’d done, to which I replied it didn’t feel like that, that they had serious morale issues, and if they didn’t fix them they would lose more people (wonder how that new assistant manager felt hearing that). The director then escorted me out like I was being fired. She asked what I had lined up next.

    “Nothing,” I replied.

    “Oh, well, nothing can be nice sometimes.”

    I looked her in the eye and said, “No, I need you to understand that I would rather be unemployed than continue working here.”

    That shut her up, and we walked out in silence. Good riddance to that place.

    (I felt vindicated when two more people quit within the next few weeks. I did tell them.)

  154. Not The Earliest Bird*

    We had a manager quit by driving his company car to the office parking lot on a Sunday afternoon, and then throwing his keys over the wall into our back lot. His computer and all other company issued materials were in the car’s trunk, in a box, and on the top of the box he wrote “I QUIT. LOVE BOB.” We never heard from him again. I’d like to think he won the lottery or went into Witness Protection.

  155. Long-Time AAM Lurker*

    It’s not quite as dramatic as some of the stories in the comments, but nearly a decade ago I quit a job in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week with no notice. Since my first job right out of college it became apparent that while some people can be really good at what they do individually, some people are not meant to be managers. This particular manager had at least 3-4 people in my role quit prior to me being hired (that I know of, at that one company), and shortly after that I realized it was a conflict both in personalities and with their management style and it said a lot that no one would stay long-term. There was also no room for any internal moves, or even much upward growth.

    After a couple of stressful years, I had gotten yet another email expressing disappointment and dissatisfaction with a project I was working on. And for whatever reason, that day I snapped. Everyone else had gone out to lunch, and I loaded up my car with my belongings, blocked all company/coworker phone #s, left my laptop and key fob on my desk, and sent an email notifying HR that I was quitting effective immediately.

    I had no other job lined up, so not my best life choice. I had been put on a PIP that set me up to fail as they were gearing up to fire me, so at the time it felt like a huge F-you to my boss. I did feel guilty about any extra burden it might have put on the rest of the team, but since that incident I have reconnected with some of my former coworkers and there are no hard feelings – actually some laughter and “good for you” because everyone was aware of the various issues with this manager. We’ve revisited that day and the aftermath over drinks since then and a lot of the team members/management involved have moved on to other jobs. The manager has and will remain blocked on all channels and is unable to contact me.

  156. Not on the Marketing Team*

    A coworker who had been around awhile without a promotion realized that she wasn’t going to be given the opportunity to advance so she found a new job elsewhere doing something completely different. She made it clear that it was her chance to spread her wings, and she might hate it, but she had to give herself the opportunity for growth.

    A week before her departure we had a huge public event. Each year for the event we purchase branded shirts and sweatshirts from a small, local vendor for our staff to wear. We love lifting up his work because he is a great guy with a small side-business. This year, our screen-printed logo on the items was slightly off in color—neon green instead of a bright green. To the average eye it looked a bit odd, but not egregious. To our marketing team it was horrendous. They were up in arms and asked the vendor to provide the items at a discounted price. The head of marketing also emailed all staff about the importance of maintaining brand consistency and that no staff could wear the off-branded color items out in public. Several staff members were upset about how the marketing team handled it. It felt like they went too far, especially to have a small, local vendor eat the cost when it was just a minor (to us) color mistake.

    On her final day working here, my coworker came to work wearing the off-brand logo sweatshirt. The marketing team was silently fuming about it but stayed quiet. At first, I thought she just didn’t remember the edict that it couldn’t be worn in public. But right before she walked out for the day, I asked her about it. She gave me a slightly evil laugh and said it was intentional, and she just wanted to piss off the marketing team. I had so much respect for her in that moment.

  157. Prev LW*

    Hi. Years ago, I wrote in with a letter entitled “my employer makes you wait 3 years for a raise and is staffed by lunatics” (Alison’s wording, not mine, lol) describing how my company wouldn’t give me a raise* until I was there for three years (up from the two years when I was hired) and had submitted a packet of information proving that I deserved it.

    Thanks to AAM, I got a new job. Serendipitously, my last day was the week of my three-year anniversary. I had submitted the whole packet and everything to hide that I was job searching, and then didn’t stick around for it to go through. When I told my manager I was leaving, he had the audacity to say “Is there anything we can do to make you stay?” and “Aww, we were just about to get you promoted*!” I just stared back at him with an empty smile. Incidentally, he also tried to convince me that four weeks notice is standard, but thanks to AAM, I knew that wasn’t true, and stuck to two weeks. All in all, it became clear to me that that company was out to pick up recent grads with no work experience, convince them the way they did things was standard for the industry, and lock them in with golden handcuffs.

    The company I moved to hired me in at a higher level, then promoted* me within less than two years. The handcuffs are shinier, too.

    *There was some confusion in the original letter about whether I meant raise vs. promotion vs. COL increase. I work in STEM, where moving up means going from e.g. Junior Analyst I to Junior Analyst II, etc. You do the same work, just at a higher level, so I called it a raise. To me, a promotion meant going into project management or a PhD-level role. But I’ve since learned that this may be a structure unique to tech fields. Regardless, I maintain that an arbitrary three-year requirement for this move is lunacy.

  158. whomp whomp*

    When I left my last job, I was leaving for a lateral position technically within the same large organization, just whole different team and reporting structure. I still got an exit interview… and I squealed like a pig.

    I talked about the fact that my team bullied me to no end for my entire tenure there, and worse than that, the manager I had for most of my time there knew about it and did absolutely nothing. I was constantly criticized and made to feel I wasn’t capable of anything. I reported it several times to several people, and nothing ever happened. I talked about how I was blacklisted from projects, that same manager was very clearly colluding with the team set on keeping me on the outside of everything, and was very clear that I would have stayed if it had not been for that team. The HR(ish?) person doing the exit interview was horrified.

    Months later we had a massive restructure because my old team screwed up very badly and they ended up… on my new team.

    Since the merge they’ve (apparently) continued to tell anyone who will listen how terrible I am at everything I do, but no one listens anymore. In the year I’ve been in this job I’ve accomplished a lot of really awesome things so my work speaks for itself. I’m also a finalist for a national award right now and I bet they’re sooooo pissed. And I kind of love it. :)

  159. Education for all*

    I worked for a small charter school run by a director and his son-in-law, who had no educational experience. It was a pretty toxic work culture- the director liked to stir up drama among staff and students, hide in hallways eavesdropping on private conversations, spent hours every evening sending emails to teachers chastising them for various perceived failings etc. His son in law was not much better, he was the type of manager that would send you a text when you called in sick yelling at you for doing so.
    I haven’t worked at that school for about 4 years, and it didn’t end on a good note. I was looking for jobs and my director got a call from another school looking for a reference (their school policy stated a reference was required from the direct supervisor) and he immediately fired me. Fast forward 4 years later and the son in law sent me a text asking for a google document. I sent him a link to a google document that said “Screw You” in size 96 font. Haven’t heard from him since

    1. Bruce*

      My sister in law taught at a small charter school, it was so bad that one of the parents created a web site to document the horror stories. The director was using the school funds as a personal slush fund, buying expensive cars and funding their lavish wedding reception. On top of that they were abusive to staff, and were so bad to my sister in law that stories about her ended up on this web site… which did not help her job prospects. She left teaching after that experience, and the charter school lost its charter after an investigation of their finances by the district.

    2. Little Bobby Tables*

      Now I’m wondering if the director’s motivation to run a high school was because that’s where he had peaked.

  160. Bird Law*

    I had a boss that cycled through someone (largely minority women) to torture until they left the company. Eventually, she picked me. It was made worse by our open office plan where I was sat right in front of her. She left the company before I did but, when I did leave, my career really shot through the roof.

    I got one prestigious job in our field, excelled there in a visible way, and then I moved and got another prestigious job.

    Although it took a while for me to recover from that workplace and re-center my workplace norms, I very rarely think of her. And I don’t think that’s mutual-she’s been looking at my LinkedIn.

    But now she’s blocked, and she will be blissfully forgotten again. :)

  161. Torange*

    Why is there an apostrophe for ‘you’ but not ‘boss’ or ‘job’ in the post title? That isn’t how pluralizing works. You can’t pick and choose which plurals an apostrophe is applied to.

    1. Peanut Hamper*

      I can answer this. (Recovering English major here.)

      The reason is because both “boss” and “job” have standard plural forms. “You” does not. Thus, the apostrophe to avoid it looking like a misspelling.

      You can’t pick and choose which plurals an apostrophe is applied to.

      Yes, you can. There is no official organization tasked with standardizing English. (And all those folks who complain about people who don’t speak standard English don’t speak standard English themselves.) The key is to be consistent.

      I find no problem with the use of this apostrophe. Pedantry for the sake of pedantry rarely serves a purpose when it comes to languages, especially the English language.

      3. linger*

        And for that reason, you sometimes do see an apostrophe with pluralised abbreviations (it’s not necessary, but it’s not necessarily “wrong”).
        Another way of looking at it is that here the pluralised item is a quoted expression, not a single word. So, in contrast to the plural nouns in the title, there should be some punctuation before the plural -s to mark the fact that it is not part of the quoted expression. Which would logically give “‘F—you’s”. So maybe there’s a single quote mark missing, rather than an added apostrophe.
        (Note, following exactly the same logic, I’ve chosen not to put the final period within the trailing double quote mark. Some American editors differ on this point.)

    3. Scrimp*

      No, the title is grammatically correct. The plural of job is jobs, the plural of boss is bosses.

      There are no possessives in the title.

      The correct plural of F-you is, in this case, F-you’s, because it is talking about multiple instances of F-you, from different people. If it were one person saying F-you to many people all at once, then people you talk about the F-yous.

      Hope that helps!

      1. linger*

        On the face of it, that sounds an entirely reasonable functional distinction to make. However, in standard English, the plural of you is still you, so a single utterance to multiple addressees is still one (well-distributed) “F-you”.
        Mind you, some nonstandard dialects (including mine) allow the distinct plural form youse, hence “F-youse”.

        1. C*

          The plural of which would be (depending on dialect) f “youses”, “yinzes”, or “y’alls”.

  162. Ako*

    I unfortunately wasn’t there to witness this myself, but at the fast food joint I worked at in college one of the high school aged employees leapt out of the drive thru window and shouted “I QUIT” as he ran across the parking lot.

  163. Dr. KMnO4*

    In grad school I had a main advisor, and a secondary pseudo advisor (the two were best friends and the two research groups were treated almost as one group). Both professors were pretty awful people, especially in regards to their treatment of grad students.

    The most egregious incident, and the one that precipitated my later F you ending, came mid-way through my time in grad school. I started having pain early in the Fall semester, and despite multiple trips to the ER and seeing specialists to try to diagnose the issue, no one could figure out what was wrong. For SIX MONTHS I was in pain all day, every day. And not like “minor headache” pain. We’re talking “there is no comfortable position for me to exist in with this stabbing pain in my back”. As grad students, we had no official sick leave, so no matter how I was feeling I went to work, pushing myself to get everything done. I left a week early at the end of the semester (I was lucky that my finals were all on Monday) and went home to see a different doctor, who ordered a test that diagnosed the issue (my gallbladder had stopped working, and the doctor suggested that stress was a contributing factor). I needed surgery to remove my gallbladder, and I ended up having it a few months later.

    I missed THREE DAYS because of my surgery (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday). I was back to work the same week I had an organ removed. My boss made me make up those three days by working on three consecutive Saturdays.

    So here’s my F you moment to my boss: After my successful dissertation defense, the research groups, the professors, my mom, and my friends all gathered for a short celebration. My boss asked me to speak to the current grad students and give them advice. My advice to the other students was, “Grad school can be stressful, and that stress can manifest in a lot of different ways. The most important thing is for you to take care of yourselves – mentally, physically, and emotionally. Your work is important, but you as a person are more important, so don’t burn yourselves out by pushing yourselves too hard.”

    My boss was standing behind me so I couldn’t see her face, but my friend reports that she looked quite upset at my advice.

    1. Bird names*

      Love it, especially with the plausible deniability since in a different context the advice would be completely normal.

  164. TokenJockNerd*

    this one took lots of set up.

    my niche youth sports activity got taken over by an owner who knew no things about the sport or its industrial conventions, and he instituted a “when you leave all your notes, drill, & progressions belong to the company” policy.

    kay.

    I had a whole binder bc lots to keep track of. I am also very good at alphabets and syllabaries, so when I resigned 2 years later and he demanded my binder, it was full of notes transliterated into hiragana.

    (this may also be malicious compliance

    I of course could not transliterate it back for them, I no longer worked for the company, everything was confidential and company property.

    2. allathian*

      Almost as good as the museum person who kept notes in Egyptian hieroglyphs, or was it cuneiform?

    4. linger*

      And this was hard copy only? Ooooh. That is nasty.
      After inputting it as electronic text (ugh), a backwards conversion to romaji is theoretically possible in a reasonable timeframe. (I once had to convert a 6000-name database from katakana to romaji; it took over a hundred ordered character substitutions to handle all the infrequent edge cases.) But then you’re still left with massively underspecified English sound contrasts (e.g. romaji ‘a’ covers all of /a/, /æ/, /3/, /^/), and probably some unresolvable ambiguity as a result.

  165. Holy Carp*

    Back in the olden days before technology, I was working at a place where we ordered new stock by handwriting it on a form that used carbon paper to make a copy. We would snail mail the original and store the copy in a file box.
    It was a hideous place to work for many reasons (mainly my boss’s condescending attitude) and I was looking for a new job. The district boss pulled me to one side a couple days before my long-scheduled vacation to inform me that I was being transferred to another location, effective upon my first day back.
    I went through the orders file and trash-canned about a third of the open order copies before I left. I went on vacation but neglected to call the store later to tell them I was not coming back for them at any location ever. A friendly co-worker later told me the boss continued to be mystified about all the stock that was delivered without an open order in the file.

  166. OrdinaryJoe*

    A co-worker attended an out of town week long work conference – there were about 50 of us who attended for meetings, classes, expo, etc. – and called in sick the entire time. Occasionally this would happen to other staff and so it didn’t initially raise a red flag other then concern that the flu was going around and other staff would get sick. No one saw him for the entire week until the flight home … He gave his notice the following Monday. Turns out he was moving to the town we were just at and that his wife flew in separately the day before. They spent the week house hunting, meeting with his new employer to do HR stuff, and generally planning their move LOL

    1. And thanks for the coffee*

      It has never occurred to me that I could call in sick while away for a conference. I guess I never got sick, but even so. This story is really bonkers.

  167. Quill*

    It was not awesome, but here goes:

    I got fired… uh, encouraged to resign… from a job that had been miserable for the last two years. The final straw for my boss was that I hadn’t picked up the phone immediately on a Saturday to answer his questions. (Readers: I was in a pool!) I was not, and never had been, on call.

    I left notes about all the things only I did, and where things were, because I needed at least a neutral reference, right? I did not trust my boss to not answer “oh yeah, Quill sucks” if someone asked if I’d ever worked there, prompted or no. He gave me like half an hour to do so.

    Two weeks later he called, and because I was already searching for another job, I picked up without checking caller ID.

    “Quill,” he said “Where the hell did you put the temperature logger?”

    “The temperature logger?”

    “Yes, THE TEMPERATURE LOGGER!”

    “You should find everything I was ever responsible for in my wrap up notes” I said, and hung up on him.

    1. Rainy*

      I got a text message from the director six weeks after I left my last job, accusing me of deleting the handover materials I’d left in the shared drive. I’ll admit that they’re fundamentally useless, because I only gave them what they asked for, but they are there unless someone else deleted them.

  168. An Australian in London*

    Not really a F U, but probably angered them far far more than a FU would have.

    Worked at a small firm. They paid salaries by cheques drawn on a bank branch nearby. One day I went to deposit a salary cheque, at that branch (I was a bank customer). The teller wouldn’t accept it because there wasn’t money in the account to cover it. I told the two owners they were paying me cash right then and there, and if they ever missed payroll again I was out.

    Readers, they missed payroll a second time, some months later. They also took the opportunity to gaslight me and tell me it was my fault that they never wanted to hear about an issue I knew would come back to bite them.

    Rather than storming out, I gave them four weeks’ notice, urged them to start hiring my replacement immediately, and that I’d start documenting everything needed for a handover. Three weeks and four days later they hadn’t hired anyone and begged me to stay longer.

    I said sure, I’d stay a second month… if they gave me a 40% raise, and agreed in a written reference and all reference checks that that was my salary when I left. They only had to pay one month of it, so it didn’t cost them much, but I heard teeth grinding when they accepted my proposal.

  169. Tilly*

    In an internal communications role, the main role objective was to develop retention strategies as most of our nurses were quitting within a year. It was a terrible culture from the C-suite down. On my mid-year performance review, I rated myself 50% for that objective and wrote “Could not meet objective as there are too many barriers to overcome. I personally have only made it six months and will be leaving effective xx date.” And that’s how I gave my two weeks.

  170. CzechMate*

    I worked in adult education for a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad school director. Student complaints were common and the school was poorly run, so the school director decided to create a character named “Marianna” to field all student grievances. Her incredibly odd rationale was that if complaints could only sent by email to a person who didn’t exist, then students couldn’t barge into the office and demand to speak to someone. In reality, the Marianna emails were written by whichever member of office staff had time to check them. As a result, Marianna’s tone, message structure, and responses varied wildly, making the students think that their complaints were being taken by someone who was truly unhinged. I always thought it was bizarre and gaslight-y, but it was what the school director wanted, so we had to go along with it.

    A few months after I left, a former student emailed me to say she’d been trying to transfer to a university but had missed an important deadline because of some confusing communications with the school. She forwarded me a string of emails from Marianna as proof (and, yes, they were bizarre, confusing, and unhelpful).

    I sympathized and said that I wished I could help her, but there was unfortunately little I could do as I no longer worked at the school. However, I did suggest that she set up a video call or in-person meeting with both the school director AND Marianna so that the three of them could talk through what happened.

  171. Blarg*

    In the summer of 2001, I was working at a restaurant/bar/place with arcade games (yes, that one) while in college. I got off to a rough start with my fellow waitstaff because I had a lot of experience and was good at my job, and got employee of the month … in my first month. This was not appreciated by anyone — including me, cause people got mad. I started having issues with coworkers swiping my drinks or intentionally messing up orders as they came out.

    I asked to be transferred to another department, and they agreed — but then kept delaying when it would take effect. I was getting so anxious going in every day, because these mean girls were messing with me so much. One day I called in for a shift because I was so stressed out . The manager was just such a jerk about it on the phone that I heard myself say, “actually, I’m never coming back.” I immediately felt a flood of relief come over me as he sputtered about my being the best waitress.

    I then had to tell my live-in boyfriend that I’d just unexpectedly quit my job, but fortunately, I easily found another one without toxic bully co-workers.

    1. froodle*

      “The manager was just such a jerk about it on the phone that I heard myself say, “actually, I’m never coming back.” I immediately felt a flood of relief come over me as he sputtered about my being the best waitress.”

      Why, why, why do bosses behave like this? “Ah, my best, most competent and trustworthy employee… better speak to them like something on the bottom of a shoe… hey where is she going?”

      What an idiot. Hope he ended up with exactly the employees he deserved.

  172. Didi*

    I worked with an old guy who was famous for having quit a job in our small industry many years ago by mooning the boss and walking out.

    He was a young hippie at the time. By the time we knew him, he was a grizzled veteran of many many years.

    We always wanted to see the young guy come back for a final hurrah. But he was a lot more (though not totally) profesh in his older age. Boo.

      1. Didi*

        The most egregious one was that he used to ask the other old guy we worked with if he could still “get it up.” To which the other old guy would reply, “bend over and I’ll show you.” These guys were friends (though not that way) and neither of them – nor anyone else – would run to HR or management about anything.

  173. anonymouse*

    the stories of people quitting with no notice reminded me that once I quit a vet tech job with an awful boss after about two weeks *by phone.* didn’t even go in to do it in person and pick up my box of tea bags and mug. And in retrospect I feel like everyone ought to quit a job with no notice once in their life – it really teaches you that you ARE the captain of your fate etc and life will go on if you do this shocking “unprofessional” thing when the company deserves it.

  174. TheActualA*

    This was someone I used to work with, NOT me, who we’ll name Sally. Sally struggled with getting along with most folks in the accounting mostly because she thought she was god’s gift to accounting and would pick arguments and lecture folks on the team. Sally was an accounts payable person who had been hired by Bob when she started. When the company hired our new boss, Mary, Sally had to start reporting to her.

    Sally HATED Mary. Mary set very reasonable expectations for the changes she wanted Sally to make, like keeping her invoices organized and filed instead of in random piles. Sally chafed and argued and Mary was measured, firm, kind, and clear. Mary was doing some coaching with me as she knew she was going to want to promote me to manager at some point and I knew as a result of that that Sally was set to be managed out.

    I was in Mary’s office one day when Sally saaaaailed in and gave three weeks notice. Mary gave the gracious and appropriate responses and it was clear that Sally expected to be asked to stay. She was not. Mary told me that it wasn’t great timing but that she was relieved that it resolved this way.

    Sally worked nearly two weeks more and mostly stopped arguing with folks but there was quite a bit of stomping around and sighs of exasperation from her until a Friday when she came back after lunch and told the receptionist she was looking for Bob. The receptionist informed her that Bob was out golfing with the bankers but Mary was available.

    No. Sally would talk only to Bob. No. It did not matter that we did not know when he was back. She would continue to sit in the front office instead of going to her office. Every half hour or so, the receptionist would come back and tell me and a colleague that Sally was still sitting there in a huff.

    After nearly three hours Bob came back from the golf game and Sally pounced on him and told him that she was not staying out the three weeks and SHE WOULD BE LEAVING NOW. Bob asked why she didn’t talk to Mary about it, Sally said that SHE WOULD NOT. Bob shrugged and said something like, “okay, good luck, we’ll send your final paycheck on Monday.” Sally then stomped/swirled out in a flurry of scarves.

    Mary was the best boss I’ve had my entire working life and the person she brought in to replace Sally was phenomenal. Sally’s replacement spent the next several weeks cleaning up her mistakes then accounts payable went quite smoothly. Every six months or so for the next three years I was there, Mary would receive calls asking to be a reference from companies Sally was apparently interviewing with. Sally had never asked Mary if she was willing to give her a reference. Even if there had not been a company policy against giving references, Mary would not have given her a reference.

    Mary and I are still in touch, I’ll have to ask her if all these years later Sally is still requesting references! I picture her leaving every job this way and wonder if she has story upon story about how her talent is not appreciated anywhere.

  175. Queen of the Introverts*

    This wasn’t on purpose but I had an okay job at a small firm that just wasn’t a good fit. I was going to quit anyway, but there was also the fact that my married boss and the alcoholic creative director weren’t speaking because they’d recently ended an affair. After I told the owner and my boss I was quitting, my boss told me she was putting in her two weeks the next day. As we were having this conversation, the owner was finally firing the creative director. Three people down in one day–a quarter of the entire company.

  176. Stephanie*

    I once told a very shitty boss on my way out, with finger pointing, “YOU ARE NOT A MAN OF INTEGRITY!”.

    I hope every word echoes in his head as he’s trying to sleep at night; a bridge burnt well and proudly.

  177. Anon for this*

    A bunch of us got laid off from a startup in the early 2000s after our VC brought in a bunch of their own dudes to run the place. It was common knowledge that the new CEO, who had brough along his longtime executive assistant, was using the company card to charge afternoon outings to the local Schmarriott for the two of them to engage in extramarital shenanigans… and expensing it to the company.

    The day we got let go, another colleague indicated that they were planning to forward copies of alllllll of the proof to the IRS to report the CEO for failure to report the income (the hotel charges for personal sexytime use that were reimbursed to him out of company coffers).

  178. Occasional Commenter*

    I’m in the UK, and many years ago I worked at a job where the manager turned out to be the absolute worst. I was only there 6 months and spent the entire job stressed out. Pretty sure I came home in tears at least once. Everything came to a head one Friday night and I knew I needed to get out of there, even without another job lined up. As I was still so new I was only required (by company policy) to give a week’s notice. As it happened, I was due to go on holiday the following Wednesday and to be away until the Monday. At the time, there was a law in place (might still be, I don’t know) where if you’d booked and paid for a holiday before starting a new job, that time off was legally protected when you started (I think it was known as pre-arranged leave). I discovered a legal loophole which allowed this pre-arranged leave to be included within a notice period. As the holiday I’d booked was pre-arranged leave, I worked this out in my favour. I decided over the weekend to hand my notice in, handed it in on Monday morning, worked the Monday and Tuesday and then disappeared off on holiday. The last day of my notice period was the last day of my holiday, so I never went back after that. ‘Working’ out the majority of my notice on holiday was the perfect end to one of the worst periods of my professional life so far!

  179. Happy to be gone*

    I emailed askamanager with how horrible my boss was. It got published. I shared it with my colleagues

    1. froodle*

      I once saw a letter on here that I would have sworn was written by a specific coworker. The beahviour described was our dipshit manager down to a T and the letter involved an extremely specific set of circumstances.

      I asked her about it, she said she’d never heard of AAM but asked for the link.

      We shared that letter and the comments with our whole team. Months later, we’d be using screenshots of some of the comments / Alison’s advice as a type of reaction image to the idiocy going on at our (thankfully former) toxic workplace.

  180. workingdayandnight*

    Kinda feels like this question was made for me. First off, I work in a creative field where giant egos collide and A-holes abound. Here are a few: A boss once told me he was moving me to a different department to work for someone I knew was a total A-hole so I went out to lunch that day and never came back. At another job, a completely unqualified and obnoxious woman I didn’t work for (but who decided I did when my boss was out on medical leave) constantly harassed me and I constantly stood up to her to the point where I went to that company’s reunion 10 years after I left and people were introducing themselves to me because I had apparently become a legend there. (It was sad to find out she was still up to her abusive ways and the company was still allowing it). At my favorite company of all, I was at a meeting where the most evil boss ever said if we didn’t end this meeting fast he was going to drop dead of a heart attack and I happened to be sitting next to him and said, ‘well then by all means let’s keep the meeting going.’ This was followed by dead silence as he stood there obviously trying to figure out how to respond and then finally said ‘good one’ and left the room. And that was followed by a lot of pats on the back from my coworkers. So yeah, I was always the FU person many of my coworkers wished they could be. I’m the one who never played the game and therefore never moved up to the highest positions in any company. Thank God for freelance.

  181. CarCarJabar*

    The (many multi-million dollars) grant funding for my position was ending, so I started looking for a new position. It was a long, frustrating search, during which the grand funder decided to give us a one year extension, after previously assuring us there would be no extension. Now, in addition to my job search, I had to write a narrative and budget for the extension year. I had 20+ Principal Investigators who were all clammering for the last little boost to their individual budgets and no one was willing to compromise so that the overall budget could be, ya know, within budget. My boss was unwilling to assist me in finding a solution. So, I gave all the other PIs what they wanted and cut my boss’s salary out of the proposed budget before submitting the application and starting my new job.

  182. Saraquill*

    OldBoss was bad enough that I wrote in to Ask A Manager regarding his behavior. The short of it was, he and his wife reaaaally tried hard to get me to quit, such as bullying me hard enough to make me sick, reducing my hours, and a physical threat.

    My fork you was staying until they laid me off. I did not want to leave without making them pay for my unemployment.

  183. David Levenson*

    My first Summer off from college I took a job at a cabinet manufacturer. My role was to clean excess glue spots with paint thinner. They decided I could operate a forklift to empty garbage. I never operated a forklift, plus it was standard shift which I also had never used. They said I’d figure it out, and to be careful I didn’t tip over. That was it. I wrote, “I quit” on a piece of wood, left it on the seat of the forklift and drove away, never to return.

  184. Violet Sorrengail*

    When I was 16 I worked at a national sandwich chain known for $5, 12 inch long sandwiches. In my 9 months of tenure there, I never missed a shift, I was never late, and I was the longest serving person on the staff once I hit my 8 month mark (yeah, TONS of turnover). One day, I got SUPER SICK. I’m talking fever, coughing, congested, could barely stay awake. I called in sick and they told me to find a replacement, which thankfully I did pretty quickly by texting another girl on staff to take my shift. The next day (day 2) I was still sick with a fever so I called in again. My manager was out so I had to call the big manager, who very rudely told me to find my replacement. I called 7 stores and was unable to find anyone to cover. I called back to let him know and he told me I had to come in anyway. I said there was no way it was safe for me to handle food. So he snapped at me “then I’m going to need a doctors note.” Which, in my state, you cannot legally request until you were out for 3 consecutive days. So on the 3rd day, I dragged my sick little butt into his office, handed him my doctors note, quit on the spot, and walked out. He called me back later to apologize and ask me to come back and I gleefully refused. I haven’t eaten there since.

    1. Bird names*

      The pressure to work while sick is bullshit anyway, but I’ll never understand why bosses in food service are especially bad about it.
      Good for you for standing up for yourself and also protecting customers from getting sick, too.

  185. Anonny Miss*

    At my last toxic job, I worked with one other colleague on a big annual weekend event. The first year, the event technically went fine, but my colleague treated me horribly. Despite me working hard and staying positive, she rolled her eyes at me each time she saw me, never said anything positive to me or about me, and snapped orders at me even when I was already doing what she was yelling at me to do. So much yelling and disrespect. I bit my tongue in order to get through. Afterward, she spent an hour or so angrily complaining to another colleague when I was within earshot, saying I was solely to blame for any problem that occurred, including a vendor’s mistake and the minor mistakes she made (like a typo she made on something she’d refused to let me or anyone else proofread). It was all lies. When our manager asked me how the event went, I kept my answer basic and said that the only problem was that it was difficult to get along with the colleague and I hoped it’d be better next time. That was all I said. In response, the manager called a meeting with me to dicuss how I am the problem and how I need to learn how to accept “lip” from people and not complain. She yelled at me about this for an hour and 15 minutes while I sat there silently and accepted her “lip.” (This was typical behavior for her. Lots of yelling at everyone.) I still remember staring at her while she yelled, biting my tongue so hard it bled, thinking “guess I’ll cancel my evening plans so I can update my resume!”

    Job searching took longer than expected, and during this time, the dysfunction and yelling increased. I was still blamed for things I wasn’t involved in (lots of us were), moral on the team was terrible, and speaking up no matter how tactfully either meant I was just ignored or actively punished like before. At one point the Yelling Manager wanted me fired, but another manager defended me so I got a neutral/negative performance review instead. When I finally got a new job, my last day was two weeks before the next iteration of the annual event – the busiest time of the year for me. The timing wasn’t intentional at all. I had started the job search right after the last event, and it didn’t help that my new company had a hiring freeze during the interview process which had dragged it out. It was just how the cookie crumbled. Much of the remaining prep work for the event was waiting on other things so I wasn’t able to get ahead before my last day, and they had to scramble to hire a temp worker to replace me. My other manager said he found it all quite satisfying, calling my timing the “biggest possible middle finger” to our toxic colleagues. The kicker was that on my last day, Yelling Manager begged me (half-seriously I think) to stay on because she said she had no idea how to use the copier without me.

  186. Loose Socks*

    I work as the head of HR for my department, but I report to a regional HR department and ultimately have very little power at my local branch. This is important context for why the following happened and why I love that it did (even though it ultimately highlighted a massive HR failing).

    We have a problem employee. I won’t go into specifics because the issues are numerous and complex, but a quick rundown is that this employee, we’ll call her Jane, fixates and bullies. Badly. She had her only employee taken out from under her supervision because of how badly she bullied him, to the point she put the branch at a very clear legal liability. And yet, I am still not able to fire her.

    Well, Jane used to bully Sarah (also fake name). Sarah is at a lower level than Jane, but because of the weird nature of our facility and the fact that it is much smaller than other similar facilities, Jane is the backup for a lot of Sarah’s tasks, and Jane HATES it. Jane launched a targeted campaign against Sarah, where she monitored her relentlessly, tattled on her, and purposely set things up to fail for Sarah. Trust me when I say I documented it thoroughly, and pushed through for the highest level of disciplinary actions as I could, but then Jane would turn around and tell “her side” of the story to MY boss, the regional director, who always ended up backing up Jane because Jane also had a lawyer on speed dial.

    Well, Sarah quit. She did everything properly, and on her last day set her email to auto send an email to Jane, cc’ing Jane’s boss, the director, myself, and the regional HR director. The email was GLORIOUS and laid out exactly how horrible Jane had been in excruciating detail. The last paragraph included the phrases “You have a miserable soul”, “You are insecure because you are terrible at your job, you know it, and you know James (employee that reported to Jane) is better at your job in every way”, and my favorite “I know you hear and read what you want to hear and read, so let me be crystal clear so you don’t misunderstand what I am telling you; you are a bitch. You are miserable, sad, and no one cares about you enough to notice when you are gone, except to say how nice it is without you breathing down our necks.”

    Jane is the head of IT at our facility, but lacks the access to pull back the emails. So everyone read it. I immediately went to the director’s office, where Sarah’s boss already was, and told them there’s nothing I can do, she’s not an employee anymore. Then the Regional HR Director called and asked what that was about, and I told her that it was essentially the culmination of what she allowed to happen by blocking every move I made to prevent this.

    Jane still works here, unfortunately. But that email effectively put a leash on her. I think Sarah put everything in that email that none of us could explicitly say due to professionalism, even though I had said all of it to her multiple times (and documented it) in more professional ways. But this was sufficiently embarrassing to make her rethink things.

    2. Goldenrod*

      “I know you hear and read what you want to hear and read, so let me be crystal clear so you don’t misunderstand what I am telling you; you are a bitch. You are miserable, sad, and no one cares about you enough to notice when you are gone.”

      WOW. Impressed!

  187. linda kaserman*

    I worked in an office environment as a manager. The directors i reported to were the type of women in business (80’s) who went by the book, with no deviation. They didn’t like flex time, considered making employees take an entire day if they wanted a couple hours for a dr appt, etc. One of their other managers – a woman i worked with was pregnant with eclampsia and wouldn’t go home the day the doctors had diagnosed her. She wanted to finish up her work and she came in the next day. Did she not realize she could put her and her child at risk? They loved her. lol.
    Directors – would not give me the personnell i needed to complete a project on time and without errors. I asked her for support, mentioned that my whole team was putting in a minimum of 2-3 hours overtime, i was putting in 10-15 hour days 7 days a week. We were associated with another deptartment and would have been easy to let me have one of her employees for a week or so. She denied all requests and told me to get it done.
    i even went to the Department Head the project was for and told him it would be crap and why. He appealed for me but was denied also.
    During this period, i would just go about my day, do my job, encourage my employees, sodas, ice cream treats etc. and work work work. I lived with my parents at the time and i’d go home, maybe eat and go to bed.
    She once told me i didn’t look ‘worried’ enough about completing the project. WTH?
    I asked her if she’d rather not groom myself, wash my hair, wear make up what would make me look to her approval?
    So, data in was crap. Publication was crap. She had the nerve to write me up and say i failed at my job.
    signed it under ‘duress’.
    Decided right then and there to quit.
    Mulled it over a few days, talked to my parents and my mentors still at the company, and i put in my resignation. She asked what i was going to do, did i have plans. I told her i had plans to never work 15 hour days ever again, i was going to get rid of the daily headaches i had, stop buying tylenol from costco and that i had no clue what i was going to do. Gave it to her the day before she left for a 3 week work trip. My last day was a day or two after she returned.
    Later I found out from one of my former employees –
    My employees – who i had worked with for a long time, wanted to toss me a party of course. And they also wanted to get me a gift. She denied both.
    They did a pot luck – out of their own pockets and bought me the most beautiful watch – Fossil. I still love that watch and it means so much to me.
    Also, i later found out because she ran the department so badly, people quit left and right.

  188. Tiny Clay Insects*

    I was 18, working in a photo developing shop (yes, it was the 90s, when there were still lots of these). My boss was not good [for example, I’d have to develop photos from porn shoots he was doing on the side, he threatened to fire me when I got my eyebrow pierced even though there was no policy against it… he was generally inconsistent and unprofessional].

    December was the busiest season, because people would get lots of Christmas cards printed. One day in December, I got sick, and had to call in. When I called my boss to let him know, I was apologetic, but told him I was just too sick to be there that day. He yelled “f**k, f**k, f***k!” and hung up on me. I immediately called back and said “I quit” and hung up, and never went back.

  189. AC NYC*

    I was the COO of a dysfunctional nonprofit.

    At 5pm on a payday, I left my laptop, ID badge, and credit cards on my desk.

    At 5:01pm, I emailed my resignation, effective immediately to the CEO. In my letter, I cited every safety violation from the past year, included the Department of Building violations, the d asbestos my CEO refused to have abated. Then I walked out and got the best night’s sleep of my life.

    At 8am the next morning , I filed for unemployment, citing ‘safety issues’ as my reason for resignation. My CEO certainly did not want anyone from the Department of Labor seeing my letter of resignation, so he didn’t contest it.

    Oh– and did I mention that I CC’d the entire board on my resignation? Because I totally did. One member resigned from the board and was a reference for my next, much better, job.

  190. Sheila A*

    I’ve told the story here before but, in high school, I quit my job at a hilariously poorly-run Round Table Pizza location by having a pizza from Cybelle’s (Round Table’s biggest competitor in that city at that time) delivered to me right before my lunch break.

    When I called in my order to the competitor, I had to convince them I was for real, and I promised a huge tip for the delivery person if they entered our restaurant from the door that was farthest from the counter and, while weaving their way through the tables filled with customers, called out, “Pizza delivery for Sheila! Cybelle’s pizza delivery for Sheila!”

    And when he did, I leaned over the counter and said, loudly, “Over here! I’m Sheila!”

    The owner of the Round Table told me to get my things out of my locker and never darken his door again. I ate the Cybelle’s pizza on the bus ride home. Best-tasting pizza of my life. :-)

    1. Bird names*

      Difficult to say which part I like more, the resignation by pizza delivery or getting to eat a pizza right after leaving a bad place of work. Well done all around. :)

  191. Carys, Lady of Weeds*

    This is going to be buried, but this past summer was the only time I’ve quit with no notice. I accepted what I thought was going to be a higher-level job, similar to the one I’d been laid off from in January 2024. It was a fantastic step forward in my career, expanding my knowledge and – oh wait, nope, it was a phone-heavy customer service position while still including that high level work but with extreme SLAs – like, *24-48 hours*! Think, hmm, tracking down and asking previous llama owners for paperwork saying they no longer have any claim to the llamas or the llama pastures currently owned by our clients. There’s no way to control someone else’s timeline, sometimes previous llama owners are dead/unreachable, and requests like this normally have SLAs in weeks, let alone days. So along with taking multiple calls every hour, I had to call other people constantly. Additionally, this company was doing some realllllllly shady stuff with AI.

    Two and a half months into the job, they were a week away from rolling out an extensive brand new, government-affiliated program to help people buy llamas. I’d been job searching like crazy and found a new job that – while it paid less – was less stressful, actually used my experience, wasn’t remote (I was sick of my tiny apartment) and had zero customer service aspects. I sat through a team meeting that Thursday, where my condescending, married-to-the-job manager once again did his whole “We need to do better, I understand, I don’t ask for anyone to praise me when I defend this [heavily understaffed and overworked] team to management, but we need to do better, here are the new guidelines with *tighter* SLAs, you can do it and also please use overtime, I worked until 11 PM last night and I believe in this company!” spiel, and then, as soon as I was off camera, emailed in my immediate notice. So. Satisfying.

  192. And Keep 'Em Crossed*

    I am desperately hoping to get to pull one of these off shortly.

    I have worked at Original Org for well over a decade; for about half of that, they’ve continuously dangled a promotion over my head. They keep telling me I’m working at Grade +1, but somehow the money nor the permanent role have ever been found… Long story short, I got sick of this game, used some connections, and found myself a temporary promotion at a sibling organisation. That temporary role is coming to an end, so either I get it made permanent (with a significant raise on top of what I get now), or I have to go back to Original Org. OO, because they are contractually committed to giving me my original job back, are scrambling to sort everything out in time for me to return.

    I’ve been applying like a mofo and have an interview for my permanent promotion tomorrow.

    Original Org treated me like crap for over 10 years and were even worse when I originally found my temporary job and left; I didn’t even get a card, much less a leaving do, when others got huge presents and parties when taking similar opportunities. I haven’t told them I’m interviewing and would love to just drop it on them (and then the mic).

    Please all cross your fingers that I get this job and can drop the rope to stay with my lovely new org and delightful colleagues…

  193. It_guy*

    Not me, but an old boss.
    She was a director at company that was well known nationally for being a toxic fuster cluck. One of the owners emails was so awful that it ended up in a text book as an example of what not to do.

    Anyway…… She took time off for maternity leave, and when she got back, she resigned immediately after she managed to get everyone of her direct reports a new job at a different company.

  194. TakeTheSadnessOutofSaturdayNight*

    I was fired from my last job via an HR Ambush. It was a shock to me and to a lot of the people I worked with who were upset. Anyway, they replaced me with someone right out of school. I had heard from my former co-worker they were not doing well in the job. (Almost like someone fresh out of school didn’t perform as well a someone with 10 years experience). A few months later, we were introduced at a networking conference and she told me she was looking at leaving. I said I understand since the Director was notoriously difficult to work with.

    The next month, I was told she came in one day with a cake – a half sheet from a grocery store. In the frosting she wrote “I quit” with her name. She left it out in the room before the start of a meeting with a bunch of high up directors and clients.

    I was sent a picture of it – with a slice already missing – because the crew had started to eat it. The Director who had fired me for no legit reason ended up being fired himself last fall.

  195. Petty is as Petty does*

    We hired a new senior manager at my old job- let’s call them Miranda. Miranda was unprofessional and deeply insecure and showed this by gossiping and targeting everyone on our close knit team. 5 people left within 6 months.

    When my turn came to be targeted, I gave exactly 2 weeks notice. I was asked to provide overviews of my projects which morphed into daily meetings where I was berated and ordered to provide “more detail”. I was asked to save all emails and filed them by project. Because many of my projects went back 20 years, I had LOTS of email, and I knew Miranda just wanted to see what I might have said about them to HR, so I made a special folder called “Very Important” and filled it with company picnic invites from 2003, office supply orders from 2012, junk emails from our company, and a couple that actually had some HR info as red herrings.

    On my last day I sent Miranda the link to my email archive, blocked their number, and left knowing that they would see that folder, decide that’s where I hid my notes about them, and spend countless hours going through 20 years of random crap.

  196. H48*

    I wasn’t kept on at the end of a probation period by a boss who’d a) left everyone else to give me glowing feedback and never stated any concerns b) cited reasons that ranged from petty to gaslighting, when the few with any truth to them would have been addressed with breathtaking ease had he expressed concerns and c) been rather sly in priming me a few days prior with a “only stupid people kick up a fuss about getting fired” themed anecdote as if I wouldn’t connect those dots. All unnecessary and pointless manipulation, because there was nothing wrong with the actual truth – I wasn’t a personality fit.

    He compounded this by calling the recruitment agent who’d placed me and giving her a screed about what I should be doing that directly contradicted everything I had ever told him about what I wanted out of my career. She was silly enough to give this credence and to call me far too early the next morning full of what *he* thought about *my* future and what she was thinking we could do to action that. Which again contradicted everything I’d ever told her. She did not stop to ask me my opinion of any of it.

    My revenge, which was not intentional but in hindsight was pretty on the nose, was to fob her off and go get an interview to join sales for a rival recruitment company in the same building. She was not impressed when she called again and I told her… (I didn’t get that job). Longer term, it’s simply been living well – landing myself a lucrative career he never envisioned and she’d never have put me up for!

  197. Provolone Piranha*

    I once went through an acquisition that placed me in the management of a horrible boss (let’s call him Draco). He made homophobic comments (I’m a queer woman) and was generally a jerk. The company was an unorganized mess.

    They hired someone new, Harry, who started a few weeks after I did. He had more experience than I did, but we had the exact same job. I totally would have understood if Harry was making $5k, $10k, even $15k more than I was, but I could not believe it when I learned he was making FORTY THOUSAND DOLLARS more than me for the SAME. JOB.

    Draco shrugged his shoulders when I presented him with this information (Alison’s scripts were very helpful in those conversations). HR shrugged their shoulders. So I entered what I called “hair on fire job hunt mode” and landed a new role within a couple months. That role came with a $30k raise.

    When I gave my notice to Draco, he asked me how much the new job would pay me. His face was priceless when I revealed the number. In my exit interview with HR (a different rep than I’d spoken to previously), I also detailed his homophobic comments. Her jaw dropped. I also left a scathing Glassdoor review.

    I’m still in touch with Harry, who was a really wonderful coworker despite all the surrounding drama. 6 months after I left, he let me know that Draco had been fired.

  198. Nilsson Schmilsson*

    Years ago, I was president for a small, family-owned company (not my family). About 40 employees, absentee owner, 7MM in sales. They decided to sell and the new owner was such a dick. Sat me down one day and, literally, screamed at me for 10 minutes about how I wasn’t worth my pay (prob $100k), I should be making $45K, I had to make up the one hour I missed for a dental appointment, I was to work 4th of July because I had used my vacation, and he wanted to make me hourly. We weren’t even open on 4th of July, but he wanted me to come in and sit in my office (which he had also taken away). Did I tell you he lived in a different state? I waited until the following Sunday, while he was at a family function, came in and cleaned out my desk, dropped my keys and sent an “I quit” e-mail, to which he never responded. But the absentee owner’s punk kid, who was a “vice president”, emailed dozens of times, to which he got not response. The next day several employees called me to tell me that new owner was so angry, he had to leave his family function and deal with “this mess” and told them “I knew she wasn’t a team player.”

    At that very moment, I wasn’t. And I didn’t care. And I still don’t.

  199. Argus*

    At my very large company, a disgruntled employee on their way out the door decided to stick it to the head of the organization, who was known by all as simply “Wakeen.” Right before walking out, he sent a blast out to all clients that said simply WAKEEN IS A WANKER.

    Now, if you leave, you are escorted out by security.

  200. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

    I worked in newspapers for many years, and while my own departures have usually been orderly, there are some legendary stories in the field.

    Such as the guy who was fired, but had to work out his last shift on the copy desk. Bad idea. Apparently he inserted the words “This paper is edited by rats” into a long front-page story and it went to print.

    Another guy working at a paper in a seacoast city was toiling away at his desk when he noticed the painters had left a ladder propped up against the building on that side. He climbed down, walked down to the harbor, got a job on a tramp steamer, came back more than a year later and sat down at his old desk as if nothing had happened.

  201. kt*

    After a lot of escalating tensions on the team (including one of my colleagues rage-quitting on the spot two days before), my boss said something along the lines of “If you don’t agree with this, why are you still here?” I got to respond, “Actually, I was planning to give notice tomorrow, but since you asked… ” It felt great.

  202. Goldenrod*

    I love this topic!

    I’ve already mentioned this in the comments on this site, but this was my favorite way I’ve left a job….It was a job in HR and it was a NEST OF VIPERS. There were, to be fair, some individuals who were great, and I still miss those particular people…but overall, it was super toxic and dysfunctional. I was the executive assistant to the President of HR for a large university.

    On my last day, I left my hardcover copy of “The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt” buried in the bottom of my desk drawer.

    I loved the fact that – once it was discovered – no one could plausibly get mad about it without self-identifying as an asshole! It still warms my heart, thinking about it.

  203. K8M*

    I made a powerpoint of all the ways he could go F himself. I never sent it to him, but it made me feel better!

  204. FeathersM*

    I have always been considered extremely professional in the workplace. I had one job working for a non-profit with a boss who was a “white hat” in public but notoriously awful to employees and came from generational wealth. We did pro-bono work for low income folks, and at the time I was working crazy hours (with no overtime pay) AND finishing my last semester of an MA that required me to leave a half hour before closing, but I was coming in early so still getting my work done. He decided that he didn’t like the arrangement anymore and instead of talking to me, he cut my pay in half with zero notice. I was making very little money at the time. His office manager came to me quietly and warned me that my next paycheck would be half of what it had been. I have never been so angry in a work situation. I immediately packed a box and left that day. His partner called and begged me to come back but I refused. I had a new job the next day. I still think about that incident sometimes but it made me proud of myself to know early in my career what my limits would be.

  205. PomPom*

    I had a job I really enjoyed, where I got to use my skills and create great relationships. The only downside was my boss, who was a toxic micromanager. She made me cry on an almost daily basis (in all of my career, that was the only job where I’ve cried at my desk), by gaslighting me, asking for the impossible, and changing her mind constantly. So when someone who knew me by reputation reached out with a potential job, I jumped on it, making sure that my new boss wouldn’t be a monster. I kept it under wraps, and when it was time for my two weeks’ notice, I told my boss I was quitting, and she was the reason (and I very happily repeated that to her C-suite boss when asked why I was leaving). She asked if I had another job offer, and I just reiterated that I was quitting because of her horrible managerial style. Now, I’m not the greatest thing in the world, but I do have a very specific set of skills that is hard to come by, and she knew exactly what she would be losing. Over the next two weeks, like an emotionally abusive spouse, she promised me the world. She said she would change. She bought me gifts. She promised a promotion. And every time, I delighted in telling her no.
    On a side note, over half of the senior execs stopped by my office at some point in my last week, closed the door, and whispered “Are you leaving because of [boss]?” Yeah, everyone knew she was a problem. She was gone from that place a few months after I left.

  206. Khai of the Fortress of the Winds*

    I worked as a manager of a college bookstore. The bookstore was owned by a large corporation, not the college. One day my regional manager called me (at 4:45 on a Friday) to tell me that they were firing all of my staff, I was not allowed to tell any of my staff, I would have to undergo training on how to fire all of my staff, and I would have the privilege of doing all of my staff’s jobs myself. I could, of course, hire as many part time employees as I wanted. I calmly told my regional manager that if they fired my entire staff, they should consider this phone call my two week notice.
    Monday morning they fired my entire staff over the telephone and I notified my campus contact that I would be leaving. Because I was leaving voluntarily, I had not had to sign a nondisclosure, so I told the college exactly why I was leaving. Less than twenty minutes later I got a phone call from my regional manager to tell me that they had just gotten a very hostile call from my campus contact. No kidding! What my company hadn’t realized was that I had a long, very extensive family history with the college. The college president actually cut a trip short to come in and talk to me about the situation. I recommended to the college that the company hire my recently fired assistant manager. The college pressured the company into hiring him, I left, went my merry way, and opened my own bookstore and lived happily ever after.

    2. Jenny with the Axe*

      Love the ending, and especially love your username! I have read every single one of Carey’s books, and “Starless” is the one I reread the most frequently.

  207. creightonward*

    In my first job, my company hired a COO after I’d been there a year. We all knew him as someone we’d worked with a lot as one of our company’s contacts previous to his hiring. He was rude and fussy every single time we spoke to him, and our CEO knew this but didn’t care. But he put a lot of value on us respecting him and trying to seem like the good guy. I quit after he tried to make us come in on a public holiday with four days’ notice, and questioned me about why I refused to work the holiday in front of everyone else in the company. He also called me confrontational and inappropriate for trying to solve one of our customers’ problems with our product. In my last team meeting, everyone said goodbye, I said thanks, and then once it went quiet he wished me good luck. So I stared dead into the camera and said nothing until the awkward silence got too much and they had to move on.
    The best thing is that it’s been just over 18 months in my new job, I got a promotion after six, and my pay is 60% higher than it was at that first job – for fewer hours and more holiday.

  208. Dandelion*

    My old job was very toxic, with a very bad management. I left during COVID so I spent my last day alone in the workspace. Because I was angry at the company, I change my office computer’s background by a photo of me giving a finger. I learn later by an coworker that the people who discover that was the top management, aka exactly the people I wanted to

  209. Freud Who Dat?*

    Not quite quitting, because family reasons made that impossible—but I had several glass pickle ornaments hanging on the cubicle wall right where my extremely abusive male boss used to stand when he was setting off my PTSD (which he knew about) by deliberately sneaking up on me from behind (I was not permitted to have a mirror or turn my desk around). After one really bad incident I hung up a pair of scissors next to the pickles.

  210. Definitely not Amber*

    Right out of college, I worked for a business organization (similar to a Chamber of Commerce) that was absolutely awful. During my interview, I had to take an IQ test—a red flag in itself. The director and assistant director spent their afternoons drinking and smoking cigars in the office, all while carrying on a not-so-secret affair. The workplace was chaotic, and the director had a terrible temper. He would often stand in the middle of the office and loudly berate whoever happened to be in his line of sight. In short, it was a nightmare.

    On December 19, I was suddenly informed that one of my responsibilities was to invite all 350+ members to the annual Christmas party—scheduled for December 20. Up until that moment, I hadn’t even known there was a Christmas party. This was before email, so sending out last-minute invitations was impossible. When I told the director that what he was asking for simply couldn’t be done, he completely lost it. His face turned bright red as he screamed, “You scored off the charts on your IQ test! How can you be so f**ing stupid? You shouldn’t even work here!”*
    At that moment, my anger boiled over. I looked him in the eye and said, “Well, I don’t anymore.” Then, I grabbed my purse and walked out.
    To top it off, they tried to withhold my last paycheck, claiming I hadn’t given notice. So, I brought my dad with me, sat in the office, and refused to leave until they finally cut me a check

  211. Is it Friday yet?*

    I took a promotion to a senior role at state agency where it turned out the newish head was a terrible manager. Important people at the parent and grandparent agency also thought so, but speculation was the head of the parent agency didn’t want to admit a hiring mistake. (This person was even removed during a 4-month investigation, and returned to his job over the strong suggestions of many, including the independent people who wrote the report and said he was a terrible manager, although I suspect they may not have found much evidence of the actual issue for which he was initially investigated. There were a few much more minor investigations by the grandparent agency that went nowhere, despite finding various issues.) I tried to ameliorate his effects, but ultimately felt I had to leave instead and I found a new job outside the state. During my notice period, the state investigatory agency ended up writing a scathing letter about his management skills that they publicized, and the head of the parent agency was finally forced to fire him by the new governor the day before my final day. While it wasn’t *my* grand farewell gesture, it was a delightful parting gift from a job that gave me PTSD for a good while afterwards!

  212. Bruce*

    Not so much an F-you but a stand up move: Back in 1984 I came to work on a Monday to find there were big layoffs happening. My boss and I worked as a team for a Sr. manager, he was told that he had to cancel the start of a new employee who had shown up for his very first day of work. Sr. manager resigned himself, then spent the next week to find that guy a replacement job. It is likely that by resigning he saved at least one of our jobs, my boss and I were reassigned but stayed employed.

  213. Theon, Theon, it rhymes with neon*

    In grad school, I took a class in another department with a professor who bullied his students (e.g., mimed throwing chalk at one while saying “I should throw this at you for asking such a stupid question” (not actually a stupid question)), and simultaneously was so incompetent that he hadn’t mastered the language he was supposed to be teaching. The things he was “teaching” us were so wrong that even I, in my first semester of this language, could tell they were wrong. Actually, factually, unambiguously wrong, not like “How people actually talk vs. what the grammar books say.”

    One day, he was making mistake after mistake, while verbally harassing my fellow students (including a very nice, soft-spoken guy, who always kept his head down and was very deferential to authority), and it finally got to the point where I realized he wasn’t just making sloppy mistakes–he didn’t know the language. I started raising my hand on every mistake he made and asking for clarification. He got increasingly worked up, but he kept trying to answer the questions. So he kept digging himself deeper and deeper as I pointed to this or that page number in the textbook and read aloud the passages that contradicted him. At one point, he admitted that he hadn’t taught this language in 10 years and had prepped for it in one weekend right before the semester started.

    Finally, near the end of the class period, I raised my hand yet again when he was talking, and he visibly *flinched*. Then he reluctantly called on me. We had a bit of a debate, I told him, “That’s not what the textbook says,” gave him a page number, and he sat down and flipped through his copy, muttering angrily to himself and turning red. Of course I was right. His way of getting the final word was, “That’s not what’s going to be on the test on Tuesday.” Me: “All right. Then I won’t put that answer on the test.” I knew full well I wouldn’t still be in the class on Tuesday.

    I kept a straight face all period, as did the soft-spoken guy (whom I vaguely knew, because he was the only other student from my graduate department in this class). After class, I rushed throwing all my materials into my bag, because I wanted to get out the door at the same time as that student so we could talk. Fortunately, he waited for me, and the moment we were in the hall and the door was closed behind us, we started talking at the same time:

    Me: “I cannot BELIEVE I have to teach this class!”
    Him: “You were greeeat, Theon! You were amazing!”

    He was doubled over laughing–and this was very out of character for him! Even though I barely knew him, I felt a bit protective, because I knew he had done *nothing* to provoke the bullying he was getting from the professor, and that he never fought back.

    I spoke to the head of my department, and we agreed I should drop the class and study the language independently, but since she needed our department to stay on good terms with his department, she said I needed to do it politely.

    So I sent the most insincere email of my life, telling the professor I was very sorry but I had too heavy a workload and would have to drop his class. He sent me what must have been among the most insincere emails of his life, wishing me luck in my studies. My private reading of those emails was always, “F you, I’m dropping your class, you incompetent bully,” and “Good riddance, you smart-a**.”

    I spent the rest of my time in grad school warning other students in my department away from his class.

    Not the “F you” I wanted to give him, but the one my department head authorized. And I still remember with pleasure the professor flinching, and my fellow grad student doubled over in uncontrollable laughter.

  214. Sparrow*

    One of my first professional jobs was working as an admin assistant at a large insurance broker. There were a lot of weird things about the culture there, including: I wasn’t allowed to clock in until my shift formally started at 8am, but there was a mandatory team meeting at 7:45am every day and I’d be written up for tardiness if I was late for it; jokes about drug abuse and suicidal ideation were frequent from all levels; and my manager once pulled me into her office to chastise me for taking one (1) sick day the day before, a conversation that included her telling me all about the time she’d been in the ER with a medical emergency until 7am and still made it to work on time to lead the 7:45 meeting. Did I mention I was being paid minimum wage?

    I quit after about half a year because I truly could just not take it anymore. On my last day, right before clocking out for the last time, I took my big honking purse into the supply closet and just shoved all the office supplies I could in there. Sticky note pads, paper clips, and—most important of all—at least a dozen Paper Mate Flair pens in various colors. They were (and still are!) my favorite pens.

  215. Jennifer in FL*

    I had been teaching at a private preschool for seven years as the lead Pre-K teacher. After another year with no raise, an increased classroom size (23 four year-olds by the end!), and a lack of respect and professionalism in general, I told my director that I wouldn’t be returning the following year. For the last month of school I slowly emptied my classroom of my personal belongings and supplies that teachers acquire over the year, including the master copies of the curriculum and lesson plans I had designed and implemented in my classroom. Many of the other teachers had freely borrowed all of these supplies and files (including the curriculum) over the years, and I had been happy to share.

    When school resumed in August, I began getting frantic emails from the director and some of the teachers. Where were the copies of my lesson plans? Where was the list of the monthly curriculum theme? Why weren’t my stamps/puzzles/etc in my classroom cabinet? I responded that after seven years I assumed everyone had their own master copies of the lesson plans/curriculum by then, and I had taken my personal items home. One teacher had the audacity to ask if I could bring it all back so they could continue using it. After I stopped laughing I politely sent a message saying, no, that wouldn’t be possible. I then blocked the school number and email address. The school closed a few years later after reduced enrollment and the lack of staff willing to work for barely over minimum wage.

  216. golf carts are versatile*

    Two stories that connect to one another, at a management company where clients give us money and we take care of their facilities so they don’t have to do the work themselves.

    Story 1: I was an onsite admin at a client’s facility. Our client decided they could do what we do themselves and broke our contract. They fought us on the fee we imposed for breaking the contract early. My boss discovered that the fee was the same amount as the golf cart the client bought for us to use at the facility we managed. And so, on the last day, my boss loaded the golf cart with the contents of his desk and drove it back to our office.

    Story 2: I was promoted to office manager at our local office and my colleague was head of maintenance. Corporate did some restructuring, which was their attempt at staving off being fined out the wazoo by the state for all their compliance failures and lo and behold! Somehow they suddenly couldn’t afford to keep paying us. We had already been treated poorly for months as our paychecks mysteriously kept disappearing in the mail and our health insurance suddenly wouldn’t work at a doctor’s visit. Suddenly, the entirety of maintenance was fired, including my colleague. He was Not Happy when I left that evening.

    I got to work the next morning to find that the aforementioned golf cart was missing. A coworker told me I needed to go up to the third floor atrium immediately. When I got there, I discovered that burned into the perfectly manicured lawn was “F*** [Company]!” When I checked the security tapes, I saw the former head of maintenance driving the golf cart as two former members of maintenance sat on the back, one with the giant weed torch and the other a fire extinguisher, dispensing their feelings about the situation onto the poor lawn.

    Unfortunately, all the security tapes somehow went missing and the company never found out who did it.

    2. Jam on Toast*

      Gosh, security technology is just so…buggy…sometimes. You just can’t predict when it’ll let you down :P

  217. Tired today*

    This will probably date me age wise, as it comes from a time when they were actually telephones on airplanes.

    I worked in a hospital many years ago with psychiatric aides, nurses, Medical residence and other medical professionals and paraprofessionals. It was a very stressful environment, but people worked together really well and genuinely liked each other.

    I was on shift on Saturday when the phone rang and one of the technicians answered it. Her responses were odd – – “oh my God, oh no, seriously” but laughing the whole time. We all stopped what we were doing and circled around the phone. She said “good luck!” And hung up the phone.

    It turned out one of the nurses had Going to Vegas and won upwards of $$50,000, maybe from slot machines I don’t know what. She called to say she was on the plane to Hawaii and was not coming back to work.

  218. Nat20*

    This may not count but when I worked at a hotel, the housekeeping manager was a woman I’ll call Cheryl. I was at front desk so I didn’t report to her, but I was friendly with several housekeepers. Cheryl kept a tight ship and the hotel was always in great shape, but behind closed doors she was a tyrant. I had no idea for a very long time because she was all smiles to me, the other front desk folks, and especially to management; ultra friendly, flexible, hardworking, and always happy to help. Behind the scenes she was literally screaming at housekeepers (including over the phone on their days off, or on HER days off), denying time off for no reason, demanding people work when sick or during family emergencies, assigning some people unnecessarily huge workloads (i.e. way too many rooms to clean for one person to clean in a day) while sending others home early, giving the best shifts to her 2 friends and cutting hours for others as punishment (also leading to uneven workloads but also uneven pay), and still micromanaged the people who were rushing to clean too many rooms. It was a mess. But she also made threats of retaliation if anyone complained to management. She was so good at hiding it from everyone else, it took me a long time (and some housekeepers getting fed up) to slowly piece together the whole truth, which happened to be around when I was about to start a new job.

    So as I clocked out on my last day after serving my notice, I pulled aside the general manager and told her everything, including that Cheryl had threatened people into silence so I would not tell her who I had talked to, only that it was not just one person. The only snitch was me, and I was literally on my way out the door. (I don’t know what came of it, but I knew the GM to be proactive and awesome and I could tell she took it very seriously.) So less of a personal F-you, more of a solidarity-with-coworkers F-you.

    Moral of the story: always tip the housekeepers at a hotel. Always. In cash. They put up with so much.

    1. WFH4VR*

      I leave a minimum of $15 a day these days, now that most hotels are screwing their housekeeping staff by only cleaning every third day. If you can afford to stay in a hotel, you can afford to tip the housekeeper.

  219. bripops*

    My grand-boss at my last job, “Jan” was a nightmare whose behavior ranged from petty to outright illegal to actively placing me in danger–the kind of stuff that could fuel AAM for a month. After the stress ruined my mental and physical health to a point that I no longer recognized myself, I found a new (way better) job and spent my notice period crafting a 7,000 word dossier that I sent to her boss, her boss’ boss, and the VP of HR at 5:02 on my last day. It documented everything, with dates, screenshots of where she’d done a lot of this IN WRITING, and proof that my supervisor and I had spent almost a year trying unsuccessfully to address the problems through the process outlined in the employee handbook. There was a table of contents and something like 12 attachments. 20 minutes after I hit send I had a missed call from a number with the area code of the company’s corporate headquarters (I didn’t answer) and a few days later the VP of HR sent an apology to my personal email address apologizing and assuring me that she’d started an investigation. I don’t know what the immediate outcome was, but a year later a client who Jan refused to cut ties with after he violently threatened me ended up physically assaulting my replacement, and I’d already built enough of a case that Jan was demoted (which also reduced her bonus potential) and no longer manages my former supervisor, who’d gotten even worse treatment because of how often she went to the mat to protect me.

    Even better: my new job is looking for the kind of services my old job provided, and I was able to steer them towards the competition. Jan’s not the only one who can be petty.

  220. Not DEI*

    Without advertising the position, our owner hired a non-qualified white dude to fill the GM role when our old GM left. I’m was a qualified white woman and quit over it to start my own competing business. The owner told me to call him if it didn’t work out for me, and I replied, “And I will say the same to you. Because I don’t think this is going to turn out the way you think it will.” The owner called and begged me back just shy of six months later. I’m now the GM making four times what I did before. Unqualified white guy has had a string of sales jobs since.

  221. Figgie*

    My spouse and I had rented an apartment in Mexico (prior to everything shutting down in the USA) and had signed a lease starting in July 2020 during Covid. He was willing to finish up one big IT project before he retired, but he wasn’t willing to live in the frozen north for yet another winter.

    So, in September (we already had plane tickets to head to Mexico in October), he called his boss and told him “either I retire in two weeks, or if I can work remotely from Mexico, I will stick around for another 15 months and finish up this big project.” We had run the numbers and were fine with him retiring in just two weeks, but he felt like he needed to offer to finish up the project.

    It took them less than 15 minutes to call him back and tell him that working from Mexico was just fine with them and thank you for being willing to stay to finish the project.

    Which is how we ended up in Mexico 7 months of the year since October 2020. He did the project and retired in January, 2022. We are still in the same apartment in a Mexican neighborhood and it was the best decision we could have made. :-)

  222. LeighTX*

    I was hired for what I thought was my dream job, that within six months had turned into a nightmare. I spent the next six months crying in the bathroom at least once a day, until finally, on the 10th of March, I got an offer elsewhere. I immediately asked to meet with the owner and told him I was leaving to take another job. Before I could even finish my sentence he said, “Talk to David (our CFO)” and walked out of my office.

    I went to David and told him I’d be happy to give two weeks notice but I really only needed until the end of that week to wrap up. We agreed that Friday the 14th would be my last day, he was lovely, and I left at 5 pm as usual. The owner called me later that evening and said, “You didn’t say goodbye! If you will work until the end of this week, I will pay you through through the end of this month!” I replied, “Well… I guess that would be okay.”

    And that’s the story of how I was the first (and possibly only) person to ever leave that place without being fired AND the first to get severance pay.

  223. Wendy Darling*

    I didn’t do this one and I was NOT AMUSED when it happened but now with some distance I kind of respect it:

    I was helping set up a team in a new office, so we’d hired a halfdozen people all at once, and the manager of the project and I, a subject matter expert, were both on-site to onboard and train the new team.

    One of the team members was VERY uncomfortable with the NDA we asked all the employees to sign. Everyone at this company had signed the same NDA. It was a very standard tech company NDA. In the intervening decade I’ve become a bit radicalized and think he’s got a point that the NDAs are creepy and also kinda BS, but they’re still industry standard so I suck it up.

    This guy did not suck it up and, when it became clear he could not do the job unless he signed the NDA, he walked. He didn’t even make it past lunch on day 1.

    However, after he quit he mass emailed all the other new hires (and me???) and told them he was quitting because the NDA was immoral and denied his humanity, and that they should all quit also and join him at the anti-capitalist revolutionary news organization he was starting, where he would tell the world about our company’s unethical practices.

    No one else quit over it and I don’t know what happened to that guy after that, but I wish him the best even if I still think he was a bit dramatic about the entire thing.

  224. NYWeasel*

    I was working for the stereotypical abuser. Would blow up at you for something minor, then try to make up for it by buying flowers or some other over the top gesture. And yes, this was a BOSS, not a romantic partner.

    I’d seen a lot of people scream at him and walk out, only to come back a few days later when cooler heads prevailed all around. I vowed that if he pushed my buttons that far, I would never return.

    After a couple of years staying mostly under the radar, he blew up at me (for refusing to do something illegal) and I knew I’d hit the breaking point. I went to my desk, gathered my things and walked up to him with a deadly calm demeanor, saying “I appreciate the opportunities you’ve given me and all that I’ve learned here but now my time here is done. Goodbye.” I then turned and walked out before he could even process what I’d said.

    That night they tried to reach out to me to talk me into coming back, but as luck would have it, I’d already found temp work, and didn’t need to go back. This was pre-email and cell phones, so I never got the full story on how it all shook out but from what I know, my resolve in leaving bc of him losing his temper only improved his perception of me.

  225. OverIt*

    I used to work in retail – didn’t like the job, but my boss was incredible. Then she went on mat leave and her temporary replacement was the exact opposite – rude, insensitive and treated us horribly. Everyone quickly started quitting, but I stayed on because I was going back to school in the fall and would only be working part-time (hours my boss on mat leave had agreed to and put in writing).

    The week before school was starting, I got my schedule and it’s all times that conflict with my classes. I went to talk to the new manager and she basically told me she didn’t care about my availability and would schedule me whenever she liked. I worked the rest of the day, packed up all my things and left a note on her desk that I quit. Never stepped foot in there again.

  226. Nancy*

    I knew I was going to quit a job, but still had a solid month before I was handing in my notice. (My husband got transferred to another state.) I was with a workplace I had been with for almost a decade and had been promoted to a manager three years previous when my boss was promoted to director. (I replaced her.) I had worked with her the entire decade and had exceptional reviews straight through. One of our sister companies had a position open in my boss’s position doing almost her exact job. My skill set was perfect for it and it would be a job I would have jumped on if I wasn’t already leaving.

    My direct report is also amazing. What we do is pretty niche and there is a ton of hands on training that is required. We both had a lot of institutional knowledge that is hard to replace. Even my boss would have a hard time piecing it together. I had naturally assumed she would have a great chance to take over my job when I left. She was a natural fit.

    My boss suggested to my direct report that she go for the director position at our sister company instead of pushing me forward as a candidate. My boss admitted to another employee, who later confided to me, that she didn’t want to lose me as a manager and was hoping I wouldn’t apply at all if my direct report applied. Before the rumor mill reached me, I was definitely hurt and offended knowing after a decade of working under her, she would give her reference to someone else even if I had no intention of applying.

    She was likely smug thinking her plan had worked when I didn’t apply. But instead, my boss lost me and the person who would’ve likely taken my job all in the same week and all of our knowledge with it. I was so happy for my direct report. But my boss got what she deserved. And I got to sit and watch her unknowingly blow up her own department over something so petty.

  227. froodle*

    I used to work in a call centre for one of the UKs Big 6 energy companies.

    I was part of a small team chosen to trial a new role they’d created, basically a combined trainer / SME / call escalation role between call centre agents and their team supervisors.

    Because it was a newly created role, we were defining it, creating our procedures and processes, and putting together our support documents on the fly.

    The manager who was originally in charge of us was tapped to move to another role, and the person who took over was a thoroughly unpleasent wretch of a human being who, her first week in, berated us in an all-team email, in all caps, for something she mistakenly thought we’d failed to do because… idk she was a massive idiot who couldn’t read? Just an ugly admixture of malice and incompetence all around.

    Anyways, one of the other people on the team – let’s call him Sean, because his name was Sean – had been busy codifying our various how-to guides, support documentation, training needs lists etc into a kind of in-house Wiki.

    Sean is smart, capable, likable and a good communicator. He has a good rep amoung the other people on this pilot, amongst the team of call centre agents he supports, and among the supervisors of those agents that he works under.

    Ugly Admixture, of course, hates him, as that particular type of person is wont to hate any kind of high performer. She nitpicks and belittles Sean, cutting him down and speaking over him whenever she gets the chance.

    Sean remains professional and polite… and one day he doesn’t show up to work. And then the wiki vanishes.

    He texts a few of us to let us know he’s quit. And then he texts us again laughing about his phone blowing up with calls and texts from Ugly Admixture about the missing wiki.

    I laughed reading it. I’m laughing now.

    (I also quit that job with no notice, but mine was more on the lines of “left one day at the end of my shift, never went back, refused to sign for the registered letter they sent me and changed my phone number”. Not as funny, but abosolutely zero regrets)

  228. Raktajino*

    I worked for a company that ran after school programs in local schools. My regional supervisor was great, and the support we got from the main office tended to be decent. Except when the CEO looked your way. She not only micromanaged, interfering with that routine support, but she’d do it poorly. Supervisors and the program-level staff would have to spend time fixing errors or fielding complaints from parents after the CEO had come through “helping.” Oh, and unsurprisingly, the family members she hired were similarly awful. At least the CEO didn’t have direct, regular contact with kids.

    My supervisor eventually found another job and poached me, so on my last day I went ham on the annual school year feedback survey. I used both sides of the paper to enumerate how difficult the CEO and her family members made the programs and parent-program relationships. I got petty, I got long-winded, and I didn’t sign my name or tell a soul. The next fall, I learned from another poached employee that the CEO had spent all summer on a witch hunt trying to find the author of this letter. (She never thought to match handwriting, apparently, or my K-5 teacher handwriting homogeneity served me well.)

    From glassdoor reviews, I suspect nothing substantial has changed.

  229. Boringly Anonymous*

    This is less revenge and more karma just kind of doing its thing, but I had a boss who was a micromanager and a bully. For example, they called a team member with a PhD (no, he didn’t mention it a lot) “Mr. Last name” whenever they were mad at him (it was a first name only culture, so it was obvious what they were doing), and if they were annoyed with you,they would give shoutouts to other people for your work, evening if they played no part in it.

    We had a culture of the leadership team sharing out work their team had did but giving credit to whoever did the work, but this boss would present it like it was their own, if they were upset with you, or they would credit someone else. And, of course, they were not mad at you for reasonable reasons, not that this would make the behavior okay. They also did not understand big pieces of the technology that we used and no matter how often you explained this to them, they acted like YOU were clearly the problem and several people got wrote up for things that were so far out of their control. They regularly over promised what the technology they didn’t understand could do, and thus we would be on the hook for solving problems that we could not solve with the tools we had, which we could not get them to grasp.

    I was laid off probably in retaliation for something the details of which would reveal my identity, but I can’t prove it and the statute of limitations has likely passed. What they did not account for was that literally the next week there was a report that was very high stakes, that no one else knew how to do because they kept us all too busy to cross train. The specific constraints of when data came in for the report meant that none of it had been done, and so they had to scramble to get it together in a short turnaround. I, on the other hand, woke up relieved that it was no longer my problem, which was probably a sign I should have left a long time ago.

    This was in a department where the average tenure was fairly long, with people not leaving very often. Within months of losing my job, two other team members, both with relatively short tenures (one with less than a year, which was unheard of for this department) left and specifically called out all of the boss’s problems in the exit interview. I don’t know where they are or what happened, because I made a serious career pivot to another type of role in another industry (much happier now), but I know that at least one of the people that left did not get an approved backfill and with both of those people leaving, it made the average tenure on their team something like 4 years shorter than the other teams in the department, which really stands out. I hope wherever they are, they remain far away from me.

  230. The Other Evil HR Lady*

    My dad had a great one! He was a service manager for a company that services and repairs generators in Florida. Obviously, generators are VERY important to have during a hurricane, particularly if you’re a certain type of customer, say a hospital or hotel. Anyway, he was on the phone with a customer that was not as important, say the owner of a yacht, and the customer was yelling and screaming profanities on the phone. My dad – being the seasoned manager that he was – calmly told the customer that if he didn’t lower his voice and stopped cursing, he would hang up. The next word out of the customer’s mouth was a curse. My dad hung up – duh! A little while later, my dad’s manager had a talk with him and was very upset that my dad had hung up on a customer. Mind you, this was in Florida, and my dad had been a service manager in and around New York’s 5 boroughs. He’d hung up on customers before that had continued to yell profanities after a calm reminder, and his managers never saw a problem and always backed him up. Anywho, the manager said my dad couldn’t do that. My dad said okay, bye, and walked the hell out – no notice. He was 56 years old and officially retired a year later.

  231. Employee of the Bearimy*

    I was on the other side of a final f-you that I couldn’t help but admire a bit. We had an employee who was terrible at her job more or less from the start and it became clear very quickly that it would be best for everyone to part ways before her probationary period was up. She had a side hustle as a home baker, and would often bring in new “test” recipes for the office, which were always very good. The day we let her go she had brought in a big traybake which was about half gone when we took her aside to let her go and ask her to clean out her desk. She went straight to the kitchen and dumped the remainder of her offering in the garbage, serving tray and utensils included. Then she went to pack up her things and leave. In her position I would probably have done something similar, so I appreciated the minor pettiness.

  232. Rita*

    I had one that was kind of the reverse situation! I had been laid off from Industry A and took a job in different but connected Industry B. By the second day, I knew the move had been a colossal mistake, and within a month, the Sunday scaries were keeping me up all night and I daily wished I could switch jobs with the baristas where I got coffee on my way to work.
    .
    I managed to get a new job in Industry A about 10 weeks in, but because one of my Industry B bosses was someone I’d had a lengthy professional relationship with and who’d taken a chance on me, I gave a month’s long notice. I was thrilled an end was in sight, but those four weeks stretched in front of me like eternity.
    .
    The boss I respected was traveling for work for the next several weeks. My other boss was blowhardy and incompetent; he wouldn’t tell people I’d resigned and kept trying to convince me that I was making a huge mistake by leaving. After a week of this, I (professionally) lost it and said he needed to respect my decision to leave and that he would not change my mind. I could tell I’d made him mad. He called an immediate all-staff meeting, said I’d accepted another job and would be leaving as of that day.
    .
    I know he thought he was screwing me over, but it was all I could do not to jump up and down and start cheering right there. I’m fairly certain I had a big fat grin on my face. This was more than 20 years ago, and I still remember like it was yesterday how it felt to wake up the next morning and know I never had to go back to that office again.

  233. Safely Retired*

    I learned that a person in a different part of the department who I depended on to get some critical tasks done correctly was being dismissed. Her manager hated her, and the director swallowed the manager’s version of things. I heard about it from one of her friends when they asked me to write her a letter of recommendation. I was happy to do so, making it clear that I had counted on her for demanding and complex work that absolutely could not be allowed to be done wrong. This was before word processors, or email, so I had it typed up by the secretaries who sat outside the office of the director. I don’t know for a fact that they shared my letter with the director, but I did hear that he told someone that firing her was his biggest mistake.

  234. Rebecca*

    After my long time VO retired and was replaced by a foolish child who tried to explain to me why my work wasn’t up to his expectations -USING SOMEONE ELSES WORK as examples – I took a week long vacation. Came back and quit. Stating my values no longer align with those of this institution or the leadership of this department.
    He was fired less than a year later.

    1. bryeny*

      What’s a VO? nothing google’s come up with (voice over, very old, variation order, value object) seems relevant. For what it’s worth, it helps to spell out acronyms and abbreviations here — a surprising number of readers will scratch their heads over many of them.

        1. bryeny*

          Oh, that’s a good guess. and it really shouldn’t be necessary to spell out VP. whine withdrawn.

  235. Captain Clegg*

    At my previous job, our supervisor (we’ll call him Richard) refused to do anything at all; when a customer would approach his desk, he would outright ignore them, and just sit there scrolling on Facebook or talking endlessly to my coworker (we’ll call her Georgina) and I about how important he was while leaning back in his giant chair. On the rare occasions that he did interact with customers, he would act so condescending towards them that they would actually complain to Georgina about how rude he was. He loved to talk about teamwork, when in reality it was either Georgina or I doing all of the work. When I transferred to a different location, I wrote some documentation and gave it to both Georgina and Richard. Of course, Georgina ended up taking on everything that I had been doing, because Richard wouldn’t do it. Georgina eventually got a new job, and put in her two weeks notice. Richard wanted her to train my replacement. By that point, Georgina was so fed up with having to do Richard’s job for him that at the end of her last day, she dumped all the documentation that I’d written on his desk so he would have to train the new person himself. Then a few weeks later, the new person quit, leaving Richard alone in the department. For the first few months at my new location, I would occasionally get panicky calls or emails from other departments at the old location because Richard didn’t have the password for an account or something. I told them that Richard should have all of the information, because everything was in the packet Georgina and I gave to him when we left. It was fun seeing him have to do things himself for once, even if it was only for that short time when he had no one else to give his work to.

  236. Witchsmeller Pursuivant*

    I worked for a major tech company in a creative role. New VP got promoted from an unrelated department into a leadership product role and wanted to leave her mark. She got rid of my very awesome manager but left our creative department with no director and no guidance or check-ins or feedback. We were excellent at self managing, so the work got done. Shortly thereafter a contractor from a temp agency was brought in to, I don’t know, give us a hand?

    If you’ve worked with creatives in high pressure environments, we tend to be a pretty sassy, salty bunch. Cussing is common. One day VP calls me into a room with said contractor who pulled out a notebook and proceeded to rattle off every time I said “fuck” in a day. My friends, the list was long and my mouth was agape. Not because I cuss like a sailor, but to have asked a temp employee to spy on anyone was next level b.s. Honestly, if I’d been asked to document someone else, as a contractor, I’d be running to my placement agency and ask them to tell the client to knock that off.

    It took every shred of fortitude to not flip the bird and a table and walk out then and there. I actually went home and talked to my partner before I made any rash decisions. They told me to do what was right for me.

    The next day I walked into HR and requested that they prepare my exit package.

    “Are you tuning in your 2 weeks notice?”

    “Nope, this is my 1 hour notice and I’ll just sit here in your office while you cut me my last paycheck. Thank you very much.” It was a very uncomfortable hour for them while I sat and stared at them in silence.

  237. Lily*

    Not quite a spectacular F you but a sneaky celebration…the last thing I did before I quit my role at an NGO with terrible management was submit a large grant application, which they won. But because I had quit they didn’t have anyone with the skills and experience to deliver the project. And so the project was sub-contracted to my new business, giving us a nice income boost through the difficult start up phase.

  238. The pen is mightier…*

    When I was a grad student, I had a job that involving scheduling meetings for professors and other bigwigs. Some of those meetings involved food. The process for ordering the food was arcane (because: academia), sometimes I had to pay out of pocket and get reimbursed (whyyyy) and a few times my reimbursement requests were rejected for asinine bureaucratic reasons. Mind you, I was earning minimum wage in one of the most expensive cities in the world. We also had to do things like requisition individual pens. It was bananapants. When I left that job, I stole a whole carton of pens from the supply closet. While that might seem like nothing to you, that moment will live rent-free in my mind ‘til the end of my days. (PS I’m now a professor myself, and I treat my students to food – on MY dime – on the regular.)

  239. Raida*

    Many years ago at the end of year everyone at the workshop got their bonus – and of course don’t tell anyone else what you got. They all immediately compare, of course.

    Dad got $400 – others were getting $2k+.
    So, he packed up his tools, had lunch, and when lunch was over just stayed sitting on the toolbox in the yard with his coffee and cigarette.
    Boss came around to tell him he’s supposed to be working and he said “No I don’t work here anymore, I quit.”
    So his f-u was… didn’t tell the company he quit, just stopped working and waited for someone to ask – and he had jobs booked in to do that afternoon and across the next month.
    There might have also been some literal “go f*ck yourself” from him, I’d lay money on that.

    Is he a grumpy bastard? Yeah. But he’s a grumpy bastard that does very good quality work and was fully qualified with both trades the shop used – the boss made a mistake thinking that *not liking* him was a good reason to cut the bonus.

    Many years later… my brother was given a $200 end of year bonus. (like 25 years later, and $400 was an insult to Dad, so do the maths on just how low this is). And it was ‘performance based’. And he quit. And he was really worried what Dad would think – voluntarily **unemployed** was unthinkable! Dad was SUPER SUPPORTIVE that brother realised he was being insulted and was worth more.
    Now that boss had thought he was smart, insulting the dual-trade guy, because there was a 4th year apprentice who he could get to do the work for less money.
    But my brother is who trained that apprentice.
    So brother quits, works his few weeks of notice out.
    And on his last day… the apprentice quit.
    Because FCK YOU KNIGHTY.

  240. Disappointed with the Staff*

    Just before the summer break in one job my team leader sat me down and explained that I wouldn’t be getting a pay rise, the transfer to the more interesting work wouldn’t be happening, and I should expect to do the part I hated more since I was so good at it. Then he went on holiday for several weeks.

    I managed to get a job offer with an “as soon as possible” start date. So I found my contract and was somewhat surprised that I only had to give two weeks notice (salaried role, normally four weeks or one month notice). I emailed my team leader my two weeks notice, CC’ing the HR person.

    Sadly my team leader was able to cut his holiday short but not short enough to get back before my last day. So I never saw him again, and my “handover” was to someone in another team who didn’t really care. I noticed their ad for “my” job was still up six months later :)

  241. Julie*

    A salesperson at a newspaper set up some way up play “Take This Job and Shove It” on repeat using a device in a drawer, put their phone handset in the same drawer, dialed up the number for the whole-office loudspeaker system, turn walked out.
    “Take This Job and Shove It” played on every speaker in every room and the customer-filled lobby for a good 45 minutes while management scrambled to figure out where it was coming from. Eventually, someone spotted the phone without a docked handset and shut the song off midchorus.
    This was 1999, so the salesperson probably had to sacrifice some pricey audio equipment to get this done, but teenage me thought it was great, even as I tried to answer phones over the din.

  242. Former Grocery Store Cashier*

    I finally have a good story to tell. When I worked at a grocery store in high school, a coworker submitted his letter of resignation with F*ck You written down the side of the letter. He burned so many bridges that day.

  243. Kathy Keyes*

    In my early twenties, I moved across the country to a rural part of New England to be with a (now ex-) boyfriend who was going to grad school. Interesting jobs for early career professionals were hard to come by because of the remote location, so I felt grateful when I was hired as an entry level fundraiser at a local nonprofit. It wasn’t my first nonprofit job, but it was certainly the most dysfunctional to that point.

    The org was a small group that helped local, low income families buy cars, in a region where public transportation was limited and having a car was necessary for everything. On paper? Great mission. In practice? Holy side show, Batman. The org had two “co” directors – in practice these were just two equally dysfunctional, power hungry maniacs who had no business running anything. “Sadie,” director #1, was a former car saleswoman who I later found out was also a former felon who had spent time in prison for fraud. “Jeff”, director #2, was a guy in his 60s who had once been a big shot business and political guy in town who had a mid life career shift into nonprofit work brcause according to him, he “wanted a change.” Turns out what he really wanted was a place to go to drink his schnapps-laced coffee all day while making “deals,” something it seems his former work scene couldn’t make work for him anymore. Sadie and Jeff haaaaaaated each other and fought all the time. Screaming arguments. Passive and aggressive comments daily. Playing staff members against each other. It was like working in an abusive family – Sadie frequently took it out on all of us too. Yelling rants about how incompetent we all were, how she was keeping the ‘whole thing afloat’. Jeff wasn’t any better. About 6 months after I was hired, I found graphic letters saved on the office server that Jeff – a 62 year old married man – had written to a 25 year old woman who had quit right before I started. (And yes, she quit because of him). I took those letters to the Board president and told him straight up that several of us young women did not feel safe with Jeff OR Sadie in the office and his response was, “Jeff says he’s going to stop drinking and get help. He’s figuring it out.”

    This place was THE WORST but I had rent to pay and my boyfriend was in school and I didn’t have many other options – we had 3 months left on our lease before graduation and i convinced myself I could just grit through it. The final straw came the morning I walked in and was immediately accosted by Sadie, who physically grabbed my arm and pulled me into the back room, and then dramatically PUSHED ALL THE PAPERS OFF THE BACK TABLE while screaming, “are you an IDIOT?! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!?” – for something I hadn’t actually done wrong, and can’t even at this point remember. It was my breaking point. I said nothing, turned around and walked back to my office, where I proceeded to IM my boyfriend to let him what I was about to do. I got a “do it” message back from him and we were off. I dumped all of my computer files in the server’s trash folder, then copied some of my writing work onto a thumb drive, typed up my resignation letter, and then sent a text to our receptionist, Tina, that just said: “Stop what you’re doing and don’t leave for your break yet.” Then I walked into Sadie’s office, threw my folded up letter in front of her on her desk, and said, “I might be an idiot, but now I’m an idiot who never ever has to work with you again. I quit.” I walked out of the office and never looked back. Tina bought me a drink later that night and through tears of laughter tried to describe the look on Sadie’s face as I walked out the door – ahhh I can just envision it. Unsurprisingly, the nonprofit folded a few years later because of poor management. To this day, still one of my greatest moments.

  244. Teacher Problems*

    When I was a college student, I landed a job as a staff writer for an online magazine. As an English major and aspiring author, I was thrilled. At first, the articles I got were fun (if a little unserious), but soon it became clear that my editor expected one clickbait article and one ad-disguised-as-an-article per week. I persevered, because hey, who was I to throw away a *real* writing job?

    The final straw came when my editor told me to plagiarize because proper attribution would “throw off the whole aesthetic.” I handed in my notice, but not before publishing a lengthy article about the ins and outs of midwestern passive aggression. My Floridian editor, bless her heart, did not see the passive aggression.

  245. StarTrek Nutcase*

    I worked for residential state facility that was home to 400 disabled adults. I was solely responsible for accounts receivable including monthly Medicaid billing ($4M/month) and Social.Sec., VA, Railroad, and Civil Svc. benefits ($1.5M/month). There was a steep learning curve and significant penalties for errors. After 8 yrs, I had it down to a science (I’m a self identifying anal organizer) and had significant time for other duties prior employees had never done.

    Anyway, Thursday at 4:58 p my supervisor, M, asked to speak with me. The Dept. Director, S, wanted her to “reprimand” me for an email string I’d started with HR (“B”) again requesting B fix an error to do with a resident. I insisted M pull up my original, compare it to B’s response, and pointed out where B had altered my email that was attached to B’s response. I was furious that S had just assumed I was the offender and not B (a known problem employee). So I told M I quit effective immediately (now 5:14). At that moment, S called M to see if I had been reprimanded and M said there was proof it wasn’t me but B, and I had quit. I walked out, went to my office and packed up, loaded my car. Oh, and I destroyed all my hard-copy notes, hints & shortcuts, removed all bulletin board notes (mostly vital contact info for various government agencies), as well as removed all formulas from the Excel spreadsheets I’d created to simplify billing and reports.

    To be clear, residents wouldn’t be impacted at all (reasons) but it would cause a huge headache for staff. Agency HQ would question S about the delay receiving millions in revenue, but I knew she’d lie regardless. I felt some regret for M as she would be greatly impacted, but then she also didn’t stand up for me or even take a minute to check the emails herself. As for my replacement, ultimately, the basic info was available online in various official publications, but our facility was unique and exceptions obscure so there would be a steep learning curve – but I’d survived so could someone else.

    Ironically, I had to return a week later to sign some paperwork at HR. And surprise! B was who had to handle me. After giving me copies of the completed. paperwork, she asked why I’d quit without notice (no one had gossiped). I told her it was because of her alteration of my email and S’s stupidity thinking it was me, an excellent worker, and not B, a crappy one. B was shocked speechless. I finished by saying if there were problems with today’s paperwork, I’d hold her responsible. I walked out and never looked back. I loved the job’s complexity & value to the residents, but I quit the boss not the job. And taking retirement a year early didn’t impact my finances.

  246. Librarian*

    So, if we are allowed to talk about the biggest that has happened to us?
    I’m a local government director, huge rights to employees, and I routinely tell people if they ask how to resign “you can put I quit on a post it and put it in my box on your way out the door, please just date the post it and turn in your key”
    We’re not legally allowed to be most of the bosses I read about on here, and all my staff has always been unionized, and has a HR department.
    I inherited a unique situation. Rachel had a job with us, went on a special assignment for an extended time (years). I needed the work done, but Rachel was entitled to her job back any any time (her particular assignment), so we hire Monica for the job, with clarity in writing that if Rachel comes back, we find an alternate assignment for Monica. Nobody changes rank, pay, benefits, seniority, hours or working location. Just assignments.
    Rachel announces with functionally 4 days notice she wants her job back. Monica is pissed. I find assignment for Monica, a desk 15 feet away. Rachel comes back having not done the job for about 5 years, starts ducking out of training and meetings with plenty of excuses. Monica locks all the filing cabinets and says she can’t find the key. I have to order Rachel to come to training to re-learn how to do the job she is entitled to, and go with her, to get her to train. I have facilities standing in front of the filing cabinets (a wall of them) ready to break the locks and telling us we may need to replace all the filing cabinets before Monica thinks of one more place she might have a key and ta-dah we have a key (we still get charged for the work from facilities). Rachel starts using a lot of leave. Monica refuses to do the work she knows how to do (which is one position work and really needs to be done) because it isn’t her job. Rachel goes home early when I set up meetings to talk about catching up.
    We then get notification that Rachel has retired, an email to the organization sent Friday at 5:01 pm. Notification was put into the retirement 3 months prior. That was the biggest FU done to me, and I still don’t know what I did to Rachel. Monica never spoke to me again. Silver lining, I went through the work unit, organized everything differently, required cross training, made duplicate keys to everything, so that could never happen again.

  247. Jackie*

    I graduated from a 4 year nursing school in 1984 with a BSN–which was a relatively new thing because the nursing profession was mostly graduates from 2 year programs that were not formally college degrees. I had interviewed at the city hospital where I had done 2 six week internships, but there was a hiring freeze going on at the time. I accepted a nurse position at the local hospital in my college town–which turned me from former student to “townie” overnight.

    I was there for less than 8 weeks total. A brand new, green as shit 22 year old nurse who hadn’t even taken my boards yet–a sorority girl who had 3 weeks earlier been partying at the frat houses!—barely any orientation, and because I had a “Bachelor Degree” somehow that automatically made me smarter than the LPN nurses with decades of experience. Which they put me in charge of after a couple weeks, because the goal was to eventually transition them out to become an all RN with BSN hospital. I represented the threat to their job security. I had such panic anxiety issues because I knew I didn’t know what I was doing. Then the patient load decreased, so they temporarily closed down my med-surg floor. I found out from another nurse that I was on their schedule for the next month–the heart monitoring floor!! No notice from my supervisor. And I was assigned the dreaded 3-11pm schedule where staffing was bare bones. I felt that I was in the wrong career, that I was not cut out to handle this responsibility of taking care of patients.

    Shortly after this, one morning around 11 am I was in my “still college” apartment, freshly showered, and dreading that I had to report to work at 2:30 pm. I got a phone call from the city hospital telling me they had an opening for an RN, and would I like the position? More money, better benefits, time during work to study for boards, plus 6 weeks of one-on-one orientation with a mentor assigned to me. I immediately accepted, thrilled that my dream had come true!

    With that in mind, I knew I could not physically go to work that afternoon. I was terrified of harming a patient with my gross inexperience. I had to quit RIGHT NOW. I drove to the hospital with soaking wet hair, jean shorts (maybe a close replicate of Daisy Dukes – hey I was 22!) I got to the parking lot, hand wrote in pencil on a piece of paper on my steering wheel “I quit” and signed my name (to make it official of course), and entered the hospital to go to my head nurse’s office–which happened to be located at the end of the hallway of the unit I was assigned. So my co-workers saw me in street clothes a few hours before I was to report for duty in my white uniform complete with cap. Told my supervisor I was done, effective immediately, and that I was not coming back later that day to do my shift, and that if I had to meet with HR it had to be while I was there because I was never coming back to that hospital. I told her all the issues I had with the place/management (once again I was 22 at the time!). I met with the HR rep, who said “I assume you have another job lined up” and I said “Of course I do, do I look like I’m crazy!?” ( well, in retrospect I probably did look a little crazy with my long Cher wet hair, T-shirt, and cut off shorts lol)

    At the time it didn’t occur to me that I had torpedoed my health insurance, etc. With all the confidence of a 20 something – year -old I signed over my lease that was due to end anyway for incoming students for September, drove to Pittsburgh, stayed with a friend, and got an apartment the next day. Moved in a week later, started my new job and never looked back, and never put this HELL time on my resume.

    Med-surg floor until 1987, then Trauma ICU for 2 years, then nurse anes. school for 2 years while working in the ICU on my school breaks, then CRNA with MSN since 1991- working at the same hospital while moonlighting at several other places throughout my career. A majority of my current colleagues have been my students in the OR at some point in their education.

    Going to be 64 this summer, still working 2 days/week, and never in my wildest imagination did I ever dream that I could go from being absolutely terrified of taking care of patients, to taking charge of the wildest patient scenarios in the operating room for the past 3.5 decades. It’s still unbelievable to me.

    1. Catherine*

      Oh my gosh, as a nurse I feel the terror in my bones in this story! Straight to managing the cardiac ward 3 weeks in?! Yeah nope

  248. Allright, before the flying monkeys attack*

    Well… in IT there are quite a few ’urban legends’ of people either decimating everything (hence the ’walk-out policy’) or leaving a ”killswitch” or having a ”dead man handle” proc running (if Cat doesn’t log in for 3 weeks… ’ all your base are belong to us’)… but one of the ”urban legends” has probably been done multiple times.

    As I witnessed this as a nOOb… one of the mainframe guys had been ’pushed’ into retirement (government-union-job so very much done by the book). Goes 3 or 6 months, and a password expires on a (government = mega-oops) server. To reset the password you need the old password… so they call the ’retiree’ and it got about 5 people to call him that someone actually typed in something along the lines ’gof*yourselves’ as it actually was the password he’d changed it into before he left.

    So yeah, I think I’ve used that same a few times. Kind of cathartic… ”You know the password for the server?”
    -G******

  249. So long, Farewell*

    Back in the last century, I worked for a small company with two office locations that worked very independently from each other. Due to a lot of misery and leadership shenanigans, more than half of the staff in my office quit with no notice on the same day. (I stayed because I couldn’t afford to be unemployed at the time.) Though this had been planned in advance, no one knew that about one-third of the other office gave notice the same day. I’m glad I stayed just to see that chaos.

  250. askalice*

    I used to work in hospitality, an industry notorious for mistreatment of staff. I was a crack waitress, could handle lots of pressure, keep my tables turning over, good tips, the works. I got poached by a different restaurant who seemed really keen for me to work there, but once I got there, I found myself under a micro manager who continued to reduce scope of work she wanted me to do, off some sections on the floor, off the floor entirely, into the bar, just the coffee station. It got so that one day I had a customer yell at me cause they were one metre away from me but I wasn’t ‘allowed’ to serve them and they were rightfully irate (still shouldn’t have been such asshats though). I was so pissed off at bouncing between irate customers and an awful petty manager, that I just said f this and just… walked out the front door mid-shift, to various yells behind me. Didn’t even go into the back room to get my bag.

    The next day I returned to get my handbag and said I’d like to give two days notice, yesterday and today.

    The final kicker? Me and hell-manager shared the same first name! She did a lot of damage to our brand reputation.

  251. KJ*

    I may have commented this one before, but I was at a job where my boss was horrific – telling me I had to wear make up, stockings and heels (I did none of that), making me give her run downs on presentations when I was standing in a bottle shop at 7:30pm on my way home (I ended up with a slight drinking problem from this place) because she hadn’t been involved in the presentation in any way, and couldn’t talk to the figures, turning up at 10 and leaving at 2:30 whilst screaming at me to be in at 8 and leave at 5, allowing other staff to bully me, etc.

    I quit (quite politely) and they advertised my job – where I’d been told I couldn’t get a raise – for $15k more than I was getting paid. When they asked me to train my replacement after my two weeks were up. I charged them my “consultant” rate, which was double my hourly salary, and then spent the two days I was doing it to tell the new person to run as far away as she could and all the horrible things I’d endured.

    New girl never started the role, and old boss never reached out to ask me to train anyone else. :)

  252. Pumpkin cat*

    This is pretty small, but I enjoyed it. I had this pompous man who was my boss who loved to tell me about the fancy college he went to in a second world country that I had never heard of. I graduated from an Ivy League so ok, whatever. Perhaps due to his cultural background, he was really big into “putting me into my place” and establishing some sort of weird caste hierarchy (very oddly, in our department most of the employees except for me had also immigrated from the same second world country). He actually told me that I shouldn’t talk at meetings – this was wildly inappropriate of him to say, everyone else at my level participated in meetings (though they were men who looked like him). He liked to talk about his stay at home wife a lot (I am a woman) while heavily implying this is best for women. Considering I was working for an American Fortune 500 company in Virginia, this weird interlude into a foreign country’s neuroses and sexism was not for me, so I began making plans to leave. After I had accepted my new job, I had a fun night out and decided to sleep in. Was about half an hour later than my usual start time. Pompous boss jumped on me and sat me down to talk about my lateness. I interrupted him, took control of the conversation like I had been itching to do for six months, said my lateness doesn’t matter, and he was so floored, he couldn’t speak. An American woman, my subordinate, correcting me???? Taking over the conversation? I then gave my notice and it was so satisfying to watch him realize I had the upper hand. Blech, that dude.

    Unfortunately, my next boss was ten times worse, a total bully nightmare. What is up with these control hungry men who can’t get their brains around independent women in the workforce?

    1. Pumpkin cat*

      Got my terminology wrong – the country is considered a “developing economy” – second world countries were old soviet block ones.

  253. catbookmom@gmail.com*

    This was back in the 1980s, but… I had been working for a small CPA partnership for 3+ years. The Senior partner was nasty in many ways, though he was a BFD in the profession in the state/city. Lots of reasons to leave. So one morning I asked for both partners to meet with me, and told them I was leaving in 2wks, AND that I was staying in the CPA field. The senior partner made some remark about how I’d have to give them more time to adjust, and I replied “You’ve had a LOT of people leave; maybe not so many of us have stayed in CPA jobs. So you should be able to cope.”
    I had to fight them for my little bit of profit-sharing money, and they sent a letter to all of my clients about how inadequate single-person offices were. As it happened, my ex-spouse was on the state Board of Accountancy, and they at least ‘talked’ to senior partner.

  254. starkradio*

    I had worked my butt off to create the role I was working, a support position for my technical director. He got fired, then I watched three TD’s come and go above me. The 4th came in and was wildly incompetent, but was very good at sucking up to the big bosses and so he became my boss. I was the only woman working in the (union) technical department. My previous bosses and I had an arrangement where, in my contract, by mutual agreement, OT would be banked and PTO would accrue. He was careful to not work me more than 10-12 hrs a day, and if the shift was a crazy 16 hr one, he would do the first 4 hrs, then I would take over.

    New boss didn’t like that and insisted I work the full shift. You want me to work 16hr days 6 days a week, 48 weeks of the year? I’ll burn out in the first 4 weeks. I hereby, I stated, withdraw my half of this mutual agreement – you want me to work insane hours, you can pay me for it.

    This ended up with a grievance hearing. I walked into that hearing with the entire board of directors and this boss, AND the union rep, sitting on one side of the table, and me on the other.

    Boss had kept a dossier on me for the last 6 months. Surprise! So had I! Document everything, was how I was taught.

    It was not a good meeting. 12 against 1! No representation for me, I was scapegoated big time, the union could care less. I had enough, stood up, and left, and went straight to my doctor’s office, sat down, burst into tears, and he promptly wrote up a medically required leave, and the next day I walked in, handed that letter to that stupid boss, gathered my stuff, and walked out. He was speechless.

    Took two people to do that job after I left. Then he left the biz, never to return. I’m doing just fine, thanks.

    Good revenge is a life well lived.

  255. PandaPia*

    At the job I had since high school I met with upper management and asked for all the supervisors to get a raise to $15(the local city had just started paying that and similar companies paid that). I had just completed college the month before. At the end of the meeting the director said to me “If you think you can get a job that pays $15 then why don’t you” and I said ” okay I will” and walked out. This was right before an event and left them short handed. I felt bad for my coworkers who had to work with this director for the day because now they needed her. She didn’t really know what she was doing and needed her hand held the whole time.

  256. Anonymous Blue Jay*

    I got fired from my federal job a couple weeks ago, and although I liked the job and my coworkers, I definitely wanted to vent my frustrations with the administration. The first was actually before I knew I was going to be fired; it was the first day that they were demanding those stupid bullet points, and when I sent it, I removed the word “Sincerely” from my email signature. The pettiest of petties, I know. The second was after I got the email firing me. I saved the document where I wrote up my bullet points in OneDrive and added at the bottom, “This week, I also discovered that this country is sliding into the fascism. Do not obey in advance.” Finally, I had a whiteboard in my cube, and right before I left, I wrote “FIRED” in big red letters, and above that, “Wish I could have stayed longer (heart)”. Hope that one got people talking!

  257. A Jane*

    This is the opposite of what was asked for, but is funny so I wanted to share…

    Many years ago an old boss of mine had to fire a lady who wasn’t working out after many discussions with her about what she needed to do to improve. He’d been more than fair with her because he was a really nice guy… too nice. He finally had the big conversation with her one Friday privately in an office and told her she was fired.

    On Monday the lady turned up for work again because he’d obviously been far too nice and too vague while talking to her on the Friday and she hadn’t realised she’d been fired! So he had to have another much more awkward conversation with her, which she left straight after!

  258. TheNatFantastic*

    In my mid 20s, I had worked for a company for long enough to be one of the longest-serving and highest performing members of staff. Several promotion opportunities came up within the company and I applied for one of them. Interviews were done with our new HR person, Kate, and part of the interview process was a personality test.

    When the announcements were made, it came out (because she was proud of it) that Kate had made all the hiring decisions based on the results of the personality tests and how she interpreted them, not on the interviews or history of success within the company (one person was told by her that the personality test showed that they were ‘too compliant’ for the role. Of Compliance Officer). So I got another job and left the company.

    Whenever anyone left, it was standard to send a company-wide email (around 100 people) saying goodbye and inviting people for leaving drinks, so I did. I just so happened to make the first letter of every sentence spell ‘UP YOURS KATE’.

    I was worried I’d been too subtle, so I ‘accidentally confessed’ to a couple of the biggest gossips at my leaving drinks.

    I ran into the CEO a few weeks later after EVERYONE in the company now knew about it – he found it absolutely hilarious

  259. ElleK*

    I was already about ready to move on from a small company that was dysfunctional in myriad ways when the founder-MD retroactively changed my employment contract from giving two months notice either side to giving one week. (For context, the original two-month notice period is not legally required where I live but is commonplace in full-time employment; the one-week notice was not legal under local employment law; and the retroactive change was egregious).

    I signed the contract without complaint; and a few weeks later I went on a previously-booked holiday, left a a letter on the MD’s desk giving my one week’s notice as required, and never went back.

  260. Cat Rolls*

    I quit my last job with no notice. The PTO policies were draconian, an on-paper 10-hour shift would routinely stretch to 14 hours, and in the throes of Covid staff had to eat their lunches out in their cars – in January, in the Northeast. I secured a comfortable new job on a Thursday and told the new place I could start Monday. I’d been there 2 months and wasn’t going to stay a day more.

    At the end of my shift I told the managers not to expect me on Monday. They asked me why I was doing this to them; I calmly replied “Because I don’t like working here.” When admonished that I didn’t understand the staffing bind this put them in, I said “No, I do, I just don’t care.” Unsure of what to say to this, they looked at me with their mouths open until I decided this wrapped things up and said “Well, enjoy your weekend!” and walked out.

    As I headed out, one of the friendlier staff, unaware of what just happened, called out “See you on Monday!” to which I called back “I wouldn’t count on that!”

  261. LordBute*

    I know I’m late but I have to tell this story. I was working as a groom at a showjumping stable in England. Early 90s so no cellphones. The boss liked to shout at people and he expected you to read his mind at what to do. I was holding 3 horses waiting for orders who was next when the boss started shouting at me because the horse that was next was not ready.

    I shouted back and told him that he could do it himself as I was quitting and going home to Sweden. When I got to the carpark, I realize that I don’t have any transport. This is at an equestrian centre in the middle of nowhere…
    I manage to get a ride with a friend but her horses were competing in the same classes as my boss. So, I sit in her horsebox waiting for her to finish so I can go home and pack. My boss tries to find me and when he does, he bribes me with a bacon sandwich to come back and work for him again. He didn’t say he was sorry but I got a raise and he never shouted at me again. I stayed in that job for another 2 years.

  262. Jazzedpink*

    My very niche but high visibility position was initially located at HQ along with all of the other similar type of positions. My job, in a nutshell was to validate and advocate for resources in a specific area for midterm planning. We’re talking billions of dollars. For some reason it was decided that it would be a good idea to move my position under the control of the subsidiary who consumed most of the resources for which I was responsible. Which, of course, was a huge conflict of interest because they tried to put pressure on me to validate their requirements while refusing to substantiate what they were asking for. Meanwhile all other subsidiaries were angry because they felt they were being ignored and I was giving preferential treatment to my subsidiary. My own supervisor didn’t understand what my job was, no matter how much I explained it to her, my team was understaffed, I had two instead of five people working for me and I was working ungodly hours. My health started to tank and I finally decided to call it quits. And as a thank you for the lack of support, I advocated for moving my position back to HQ, every time I met with members of the C-suite. My best going away present was welcoming my successor who, surprise, surprise, no longer worked for the subsidiary but once again for HQ directly.

    1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      Wait, you made the place better with your final acts?
      I’m glad they listened to you, but they still suck.

  263. Purely Allegorical*

    I had been working for a few years for a company – things started out well but went slowly downhill as the leadership of my unit imploded. There were a lot of toxic issues at that place, people with genuine, unrestrained personality disorders, exploitation of junior staff, unethical business practices, etc. On or around my last day, I wrote an absolute flaming, lengthy review on Glassdoor. Apparently it was so ‘bad’ that HR had an emergency meeting about it to discuss impact on staff and figure out who might have written it (I had lots of friends still at the company who told me about this later). After I posted it, one of my friends immediately texted and knew it was me because “you have a very distinctive writing style”.

  264. Just plane crazy*

    Last job had some ridiculous dress code wars going on a few months before I left, and because I wore dresses daily, I assumed I’d be safe. But I was not, and my power-mad manager had me read aloud the entire code to her, twice. So I knew perfectly well what was in it, but also what wasn’t. Nothing about KISS makeup, costumes, evening gowns, tiaras. Needless to say, I was a very gleeful boundary-tester during my notice period and kept the tiara and ball gown for future fun. But I love to think off all the things that are now included in the dress code at my former employer!

  265. Madame Desmortes*

    After four years of fighting with my horrible ex-workplace to be able to do my job, I sidestepped into a different kind of position in a different area of the same university. (This was nearly fifteen years ago. I’m doing very well where I am!)

    A few years after my departure, the Big Boss who had been a big part of making my worklife a misery invited a Super Big Name in my field to come do a public talk. Lots of publicity, beautiful (and expensive) place on campus chosen for the talk, former-workplace really went all out. I went to the talk, of course — I still had interest in the field! — sitting quietly in the middle of the room (banquet-table setup, not lecture hall) with a couple of colleagues. Former Big Boss was a couple of tables over; he could see me and I could see him.

    In the schmooze time before the talk started, Big Name caught sight of me, smiled a smile that could power a small city, and made a beeline to my table — bypassing Former Big Boss — to say hi to me and affably shoot the breeze. I was the only person in the room Big Name was that happy to see.

    Former Big Boss looked like he was sucking an Ever Given’s worth of lemons.

  266. Anonymouse*

    It’s not super dramatic, but…I once temped in a TRULY toxic office full of lawyers. It was supposed to be temp-to-perm, but there were so many red flags on day one that I called my agency on my lunch break and politely told them I’d be happy to stay until they found someone else, but to please let them know I was not interested in going perm.

    I was there for about four months, and every single day, I saw some kind of awful, entitled behavior that renewed my commitment to not sticking around (the hours were also terrible, ten mandatory hours of overtime a week…which they did pay, so the money was good! But my mental health was not, and only knowing it was all temporary kept me going). During this time, the office was interviewing candidates to replace me, which I was aware of and didn’t mind, except that they pretended that they weren’t – they’d have me set up a conference room for an interview and then sort of go “tee-hee, can’t tell you what it’s for” about it.

    The kicker was when one day, my agency called me and said in a slightly stunned tone of voice, “Um, I guess today is your last day; they just let us know they found a replacement.” But of course no one in the office I was actually working in ever said anything to *me*. At 5:45pm, fifteen minutes before I was due to leave, on my last day there, when none of them had acknowledged this fact, or said, “Hey, thanks for helping us out, good working with you” or any of the normal things you say when someone you’ve worked with for four months is leaving, one of the lawyers emailed me asking me to put together a travel itinerary for him for a trip the day after the next. This was something I could have easily managed in the time I had left, but would have been difficult for my replacement on her very first day, while she was onboarding, so if I didn’t do it, in all likelihood, it wasn’t going to get done.

    Somehow in the last fifteen minutes of my employment in that office, I went blind, and forgot how to read.

    1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      I’m so glad to hear about your speedy recovery. The body is a truly amazing machine!

  267. MarleyBarley*

    I worked at a department store for about 3 years while I was getting my BA and finally had to quit due to lack of respect from management. I was not getting scheduled breaks, never received raises despite several great reviews, hours were added to my schedule last minute, etc. My last day was supposed to be Black Friday but I just stayed home. I never no-called no-showed in my life. I’m never late. No one from management called me, no one followed up to ask if I was going to be late, nothing. Months later, I had to call their office administrator to get my W2 for tax season and I was greeted with, “Yeah, what do you want?” Truly unbelievable.

  268. Philomena Grosbeak*

    I was doing the work of two people at a company that refused to promote me or give me more than a COL raise. I went looking and found a better job, closer to home.

    When I went in to give my 2 weeks notice, my manager said, “Philomena, tell me it’s not just about the money.” I agreed with him and mentioned several hot industry trends that New Job had as part of my responsibilities, that Old Job had refused to take on.

    Then he said, “So, where are you going to work?”

    I replied with, “National Money Regulatory Agency!”*

    His jaw dropped. Yep, IT WAS ABOUT THE MONEY.

    *Not its real name.

  269. RaginMiner*

    I had a beautifully honest exit interview with his boss and HR. This guy had called me the wrong name, screamed at me, and a litany of other disrespect. He was almost fired, forced to move to another area of the company, and has WAY more scrutiny on his behavior. I feel that I defeated a “well that’s just the way he is!” cycle of behavior.

  270. Ghost Acct*

    This isn’t mine, but was told to me about another department-
    The previous manager was an awful person all around but especially to work for. While this guy was on vacation, one of his employees won the lottery, came into work the next day, did payroll for the employees in that department, and then walked out.

    Reportedly, when informed about the employee quitting the awful manager was like “What? I didn’t authorize that!” to which people were like… Yeah dude that’s not how that works?

    (I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn this but that manager didn’t last much longer and his exit was much less voluntary lol)

  271. Mike*

    I was a waiter at my university’s faculty club for a while in college. One of the student shift managers was quite immature and was egged on all the time by an equally immature coworker. One day we were understaffed after lunch and working hard to get the tables bussed and reset. Our manager was even more unbearable than usual, and finally he and his buddy just started insulting me in fake friendly fashion for something I don’t even remember, though it was unfair. I glared at them for a second, then gave each of them a middle-finger salute, said, “To hell with the pair of you–I quit,” and walked right out of the dining hall and out the door. I heard later the guy got a serious bit of disciplining for driving off one of their better employees.

  272. Deborah*

    They closed the Labor and Delivery unit where I worked, with not much notice, and while they tried to find all the staff positions at sister hospitals, it was a huge disruption. On the very last day, the nurses hid HUNDREDS of little plastic babies all over the unit. This seemed like a fairly benign revenge until a few months later when they told us they would be converting the space into a behavioral health unit. I hope they do a THOROUGH renovation on that space!!!

  273. Keyboard Jockey*

    Many years ago, I left a job that had grown toxic by way of a new boss with an email that ended “God bless.” That text linked to a GIF of a young kid sledding down a hill, with the caption, “LATER SHITLORDS.”

    My coworkers found it hilarious. I did not hear a peep from my boss.

  274. Infamous Portrait*

    Hi I’m the OP who posted about that infamous portrait. I did a few things when I knew for sure I didn’t want to work there anymore. Remember how I said The Portrait was right in view of our sexual abuse awareness display? Well what
    I didn’t mention was that the display included pamphlets, and I was so mad about it that for a few days that week every time I left the office I would take one of the pamphlets and tape it over the portraits face. They were always removed the next day, and they could’ve checked who was doing it since there was a camera right in front of it, but no one ever said anything to me lol. I also gave it the finger during my 4 week notice every time I passed it. So there’s definitely security footage somewhere of me flipping the bird to this portrait for 4 weeks straight.

    The second thing I did was on my last day. I knew there were pamphlets in the lobby and break-room/kitchen advertising various crisis pregnancy centers. On my last day I gathered all the ones I could find, shoved them in my work bag, and threw them in the garbage as soon as I got home. Typing this all out also reminded me that I once tore down an anti-abortion poster in the break room and ripped it up before throwing it away.

    Being incredibly annoying to your crappy employer can be very cathartic. I know I could’ve gotten in trouble for all of those things, but I just didn’t care. I would always pause right before I did any of these things, and I would think to myself “would future me be mad or embarrassed that I did this?” and I would come to the same conclusion, NOPE!

  275. StellaDoodle*

    I was working a mat leave for a company (I was a marketing freelancer). The whole experience was an example of dysfunction and toxicity in the department. The person I was covering for did not leave me access to her files (I only had paper files, which had almost nothing); she moved nothing on or in her desk when she left; she was texting our shared boss every day asking what I was doing and what was happening; when I first gave some positive feedback to an employee, she shockingly told me she’d “never been told anything positive before”. And that’s just the person I was replacing (temporarily!!!). My boss was the worst boss I’d ever had – he gave me zero direction on anything, if I asked a question he would brush it off and tell me to “figure it out”, he was never in the office (it was an in-person place), he wouldn’t push to get me access to actual files so I could read up on past projects and get informed. He was the WORST. He eventually fired me, which allowed me to have the summer off, which was great! I vented for a few days, and then counted my blessings. I then contacted his boss (who had hired me in the first place), and very objectively and with no emotion told her EVERYTHING he was doing – not giving direction, that I didn’t have access to files, that he was never in the office, etc etc. I found out a few weeks later that he’d been fired. I may have laughed a LOT :)

  276. And thanks for the coffee*

    I just can’t wait to start reading these. These commenter posts are some of my favorites: Stories from the Field.

  277. Bookworm*

    Was fired from a job a few years ago and got tired of waiting around to hand something over to management. There was literally nothing else for me to do (as I said, fired) so once it was a few minutes after 5 PM (and we were all in the same time zone) I went ahead and cancelled the item and told them the laptop would be returned the following day.

    I know there’s the argument for being professional and leaving on good terms, but this was a case where it really didn’t matter because they made it clear I was in their doghouse. Some of it was definitely my fault, but they were also genuinely awful people who did nothing to make me felt I like actually belonged there (professionally or personally) and I don’t regret how I handled it.

    1. Bookworm*

      Forgot to add, I also made sure to write about my general experience (not including this specific action) on Glassdoor. :D It will identify me to those who recognize some of the other things I wrote about but I really feel like my experience was genuinely that terrible and this is the only accountability available to me.

  278. In the Zen Garden*

    Roughly three months after he started, and just as I started a master’s degree necessary to advance in my field, new Grandboss let me know he would never hire me for another position in his department. He also inferred he would block moving to another location as well. From then on, he only hired externally for advanced positions and thus lost multiple long-term lower level employees after they attained their advanced degrees. When I left a few years later, I shared what he told me in my exit interview. I don’t know what was said to him about it, but something must have been because he brought it up later.

  279. cathy*

    This is not one for the record books, but I used to work at a place with bad management, and they treated one co-worker particularly badly (he had an easy-going attitude and I think they thought he didn’t work hard or something, but that was not true- he was great.)
    He left with no notice, saying that he got a great offer out of the blue and had to move fast to make it happen. This was pure BS- he actually had been looking for a while, had plenty of notice and took a vacation between jobs.
    We (co-workers) were all very happy for him.

  280. Lou's Girl*

    I worked as a teller at a bank branch while in college. Another teller at a different branch apparently got fed up and left. Walked out for lunch and never returned. Typically, not a huge deal, except, she had a key to the vault, opened it before lunch, helped herself to a couple packs of hundreds and left without a word.
    No one noticed she was missing for a couple hours, then it was too late. Now, normally in banking there are a series of checks and balances and usually it takes 2 people to open the front doors for business, close at night, and open the vault. For some reason, she had been trusted with a lone key to the vault to ‘save time’ according to the manager (so, you know, she wouldn’t have to bother the customer relations team on the floor and make them leave their customers I guess?). I don’t believe they prosecuted her as it would have cost more than what she took, but the manager was written up and demoted.

  281. PurlsOfWisdom*

    Many years ago I managed a small local food establishment that was very popular in our area. When we opened our second location I put in SO MUCH WORK hiring, training, setting up, generally doing everything to get stuff running.

    The day we opened, I was there at 3am and worked for 9 straight hours getting us through the craziness of our much anticipated opening and providing support to our new employees. Everything was great, if incredibly hectic. When the owner came in around 11am I went home for a few hours to sleep (like we had agreed upon ahead of time). When I woke up from my nap to get ready to head back in and support for the late shift and closing for another 6-7 hours I opened my phone to a FLOOD of texts, calls, and voicemails from the owner screaming at me about not being able to find procedure documentation for basic things. He apparently found it after a certain point, right where it was supposed to be in the same spot as in our other location but that didn’t stop the angry messages. I immediately sat down with my laptop and emailed in my 2 week notice and returned to complete that day’s shift. I worked my last 2 weeks doing the absolute bare minimum and refused to entertain any attempt at apology to rescind my notice.

    It was, apparently, an absolute shit show for a while after I left as the owner had no clue how to do half the shit I did and now had to do it for both locations.

    I have zero regrets and I have never looked back.

  282. Red Caboose*

    I used to work in public education. I worked at a Title I school for over 30 years. The last two years were hell because of a terrible, no good, very bad principal. Completely immature, ran the school like her sorority house, and was just a general miserable human.

    I decided to retire rather than deal with her another year.

    When I left, I took 30 years of building and industrial knowledge with me. I did leave a binder with important information on my principal’s desk before I left on my final day. This was a request from her – to leave critical information after my “long and distinguished career.”

    Anyway, the binder? She threw it away. Her assistant saw her do it and texted me if it was anything important. I said “Probably.”

    Cue the panicked phone calls – How do you reprogram the security gate? What vendor did we order X from? Who do we call when an animal dies at the Ag Barn?

    My answer to everything has been “I honestly don’t remember. That’s why I put it in the binder I gave Immature Idiot Principal.”

    Immature Idiot Principal called me after realizing that NO ONE had the master code to the security gates. I repeated again, “That was in the binder I left on your desk on X date.”

    She started ranting that I should never “just leave something on her desk.”

    I hung up on her ass and it felt soooo good. Oh, and they still haven’t figured out how to reprogram that gate. I mean, I could help them, but why?

  283. dreamofwinter*

    I’m soooo late to this thread. But I love to tell this story!
    In the late 90s I had been temping a ton and was thrilled to get an interview for a permanent position as Sales Support at a major payroll provider. Unbeknownst to me, the person who interviewed and hired me had full authority to do so, but did so while her boss was out for the week, and when he returned he was pretty un-subtle about his feeling that I wasn’t attractive enough for the job.
    They stuck me in the back corner of the office and gave me almost nothing to do. Two weeks in, he called me into his office and told me that I needed to go shopping and get some better clothes. I was fully compliant with the dress code – at least with the letter of it, e.g. wearing dresses, nylons, heels – but in my own gothy/flower-child style and on my own not-thin body with my own mousy face.
    Needless to say I left feeling pretty personally insulted. I woke up the next morning and realized I could easily find something better, so I composed a resignation letter on my computer, used my fax program to fax it in, and went back to sleep.

    As a previous poster said – je ne regrette rien!

  284. alas rainy again*

    I was a salaried consultant working assignments at a big teapot factory. In that line of work, the only opportunity for salary increase was by changing jobs, as I unfortunately learned. My manager was stingy enough to make us pay from our pocket the unpaid lunchtime “monthly” meetings that he kept canceling anyway. An awesome opportunity fell in my lap for a very coveted assignment at the same client, but for a competitor consulting company. I had been blown off by my manager for months so I showed up at our main quarters, found him presenting a meeting, got waved away, and gave my notice to HR.
    When HR asked me why I was leaving, and why I was coming to them and not to my manager, I quietly listed my unfructuous attempts as my motive for quitting. It was both embarrassing and very satisfying to see HR pulling my manager out of the meeting and dressing him down.
    (A few months later, my ex-manager had started his own unrelated business. Retrospectively, I am quite sure that he had already been working on that project for quite a long time)

  285. The Bureaucrat*

    My husband used to have a very abusive boss. She hired him as a manager but later brought in a friend whom she wanted to have that role. She gradually demoted him by reducing his responsibilities until he went from being a manager to her administrative assistant. Although she did not reduce his pay, it was still humiliating. She even took away his desk, leaving him with no set place to work.

    He was able to find a much better job and negotiated to start the following Monday. That Friday, while she and the company president were at an offsite meeting, he processed the payroll and paid out his vacation balance. Then he emailed them both with his resignation, effective immediately. He printed out the email, taped it to her office door, and left. I gather the shit hit the fan within a few minutes, and it was reported to him that his former boss and the company president raced back to the office to look for him.

    I was then, and still am, very proud of him for pulling that off so effectively.

    1. The Bureaucrat*

      You may not like this as much, but I gave him a suggestion for messing with her head before he left. One of his responsibilities in his demoted role was to buy cake for office parties. At the party just before he left, he waited until he saw her take a bite of cake, and then he loudly exclaimed, “I’m so happy to see you eating a piece of cake. You’ve been a much healthier weight lately.” Her face fell, she set down the cake, mumbled, “Thank you,” and walked off.

  286. TRC*

    My biggest F*** You was going back to work and being scrupulously professional for a week to wrap up loose ends after I was “fired” from a remote project.

    When they said I was off the project, I was shocked and asked “when?”, thinking it was a two week notice thing. They were so clueless that they asked “what would happen if me just didn’t go back?” When I said “payroll wouldn’t go out” and that through a wrench in their gears.

    I was offered a demoted position back in the main office or I could leave the company. I took the demotion

    Only senior staff would know why I really left and for everyone else, the story was once I’d gotten that office up and running. They wanted me on some other projects at the main office.

    I just really like the phrase, “scrupulously professional” so again I will say that is how I performed all week. Jobsite senior project managers avoided me like the plague and probably never ment my eyes all week. But they were going to get a nasty gram from HR if I reported someone else was circulating any other reason I was leaving. That was fun to watch a few people hauled in by there ears.

    This may not sound like an F*** You, but it was basically me wandering the hallways flipping everyone the bird every minute I was there.

    And that step back to do some actual projects that were real issues were the start of my 20+ year and counting career.

  287. WoodswomanWrites*

    I once did a temp clerical gig for a few months and became friendly with two of the women on the team. Separately, each confided that they were anxious about a senior vice president who was sexually harassing them. This was many years ago when sexual harassment was largely ignored.

    The VP promoted one of them and then offered her an opportunity to go to a prestigious conference. He told her he would arrange for their hotel rooms to be adjacent. She was worried about losing her promotion. The other had been a temp and was promoted to a full-time role. He would lean over her desk and touch her. She told me how vulnerable she felt as a single mom who desperately needed the benefits that came with joining the company.

    On my last day, I wrote the VP an anonymous letter, easy to do in a company with multiple floors and many printers. I said I knew he was sexually harassing women in the company, referenced that it was illegal, and told him he better cut it out because I was watching him. Pretty much in those words. Then I stuck it in his mailbox on my way out of the building.

  288. The Not-An-Underpants Gnome*

    Not mine, but my mother’s.

    Mom worked as a court reporter at the county courthouse for years, left to take a better job, and then was hired back again in 2005 when my dad started getting sick with what turned out to be the lung cancer that eventually took him out in 2006 (thank you Agent Orange -_-).

    During her first run, there was a fellow reporter who we’ll call Karen, because that’s her name and I don’t give a rat’s ass because she lived up to the insult, who just DID NOT LIKE my mother and treated her like absolute garbage. Mom always kept out of office politics, so to this day, we cannot figure out why Karen hated her so much (our guess is for jealousy reasons related to Karen’s personal life that I will not go into; I do have SOME class).

    Flash forward to 2019; the old head reporter (who was somewhat nicer since she’d had to deal with Karen solo for years) has retired and Karen is in charge, due to having seniority over Mom since Mom had left and come back. A new reporter, who we’ll call Minion, has joined, and she immediately becomes Karen’s little favorite.

    Mom, by this point, was considering retiring at the end of 2020, when she turned 65, but between the blatant racism from Karen during the hiring process that produced Minion and the fact that Mom was having to clean up Minion’s messes, she’d had enough.

    She was already working with HR at the courthouse on something else, so it wasn’t a surprise when she got called into a meeting. She was present, HR was present, and so was Karen. The only person surprised was Karen, who according to Mom looked like a deer caught in about 50 different headlights when my mother announced that she was retiring effective January 2020 instead of December 2020, and that she would NOT be available to freelance after retirement.

    Thanks to the multiple people Mom WAS friendly with at the courthouse, I can confirm that 5 years later, Mom’s position hasn’t been filled because word of Karen’s racism got around and nobody wants to work for her, they’ve started using a tape recorder for proceedings to make up for the lack of a 3rd reporter, and their reputation for quality transcript work has TANKED.

    Suck it, Karen. *evil cackle*

  289. EllenD*

    In the 1990s, while in UK civil service, my Department had a horrid manager who had such a bad reputation that no-one within the Department would take a job working for her. She did good work and fully complied with the lick up/p*** down approach to things. Her staff had the highest sick record of any team in Dept and the most complaints about her management. Anyway, she decided to take voluntary redundancy. About a month before leaving her pregnant deputy, rung HR and said that she was taking sick leave until horrid manager had left and HR did this (I later confirmed gist of story with deputy’s husband). On the day horrid manager left, there were three leaving parties – her own – one held by HR to mark the end of dealing with her and the filing cabinet of complaints about her – and the third by her team and former colleagues to mark Caroline of Brunswick (she wasn’t called Caroline) day. Caroline of Brunswick was the wife of George IV, who described her as ‘short, ugly and smelly’.

    1. ChiliDog*

      I once used PTO to attend the retirement party of someone who was so horrid everyone was celebrating the first day after they’d left. I had since moved to a different department at a different location. Totally worth it.

  290. Odd Squad*

    A former employee who wasn’t great at their job but was protected by being friends with the CEO and a generally personable colleague basically refused to retire even when their health prevented them from doing whatever had been done. With a change in CEO, they finally retired. Before leaving, they were supposed to submit a major governmental filing but said they had. Submitting it is a huge pain, so it’s not something you’d forget if you had done it.

    Fast forward a few years to when the next report was due and it turns out nothing had been filed and fines were imposed. Millions in fines. The company hadn’t received notice from regulators because the report is only necessary if you’ve done certain transactions. We’re pretty sure this was on purpose.

  291. CaliforniaRoller*

    A mid-level manager at one of our clients couldn’t stand the new ownership so he made a copy of the company phone book, quit, and started making calls.

    He let various customers know that they should be double-checking parts because the new QA manager was a nepotism hire and a drunk.

    He let several companies know the new owner stopped buying new licenses and had pirated their software instead.

    He called us to let us in on the fact the new owners had moved the equipment we leased them to another state, made modifications to it, and subleased it to someone else.

    He also called the Department of Labor and let them in on how management was shaving hours from employees.

    They didn’t quite go under, but the new owners sold for a lot less than they’d spent buying the place.

  292. Accidental, I swear!!*

    Back when PCs where a new thing, I got a lab job but my boss was an engineer who knew nothing about labs. Thus he was useless when problems cropped up, and I was on my own. I grew to HATE that job, it was so stressful! I quit with tons of notice, but on my last day, I had big problems with the lab software. Knowing Boss was not going to help, I tried to go into the code to fix it myself. Well, somehow I accidentally deleted a line or two. Totally destroyed the software functionality. Not on purpose, but I’ve thought all these decades that they believed I did it on purpose as revenge.

  293. Nerdboss*

    I worked for the city government in one of the largest cities in the US for several years. Towards the end I was burnt out by the ever increasing workload and disillusioned by the red tape that slowed everything to a glacial crawl. Towards the end of my tenure, I sent an email directly to the city manager proposing an Employee Resource Group (ERG) for LGBTQ+ employees citing the benefits and potential positive impact. I cc’d my manager, their manager, the assistant director of my department, and the department director. It was very frowned upon to make that kind of skip-level communication and I was warned not to do it again but the ERG had its first gathering not a month later, after I had quit. A very mild f-you but a rewarding one all the same

  294. Bubbles*

    Three months after I quit I was invited to the company’s Christmas party. My manager objected because it would be too awkward, so the grandboss told him to stay home. I had venison and it was really good.

  295. AKA Little Miss Sunshine*

    Not a deliberate FU, but an unintentional one…

    I worked for a kiss-up, punch-down, spite-filled nightmare of a manager who had a pathological hatred of another member of my team. Think ‘cancelling a well-earned service bonus after the associated award had been publicly announced’ levels of hatred, using (if I recall correctly) upcoming/previous (spurious) PIPs they’d put my teammate on as the reason… Teammate wasn’t the only target, but they certainly bore the brunt.

    The manager’s foul personality was recognised company-wide, and at some point, someone in another team referenced ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ in a throwaway remark, and it stuck. And spread. And became ‘LMS’ for speed of typing in internal messaging.

    The messages I saw weren’t focused on LMS, to be clear – it was just a random acronym that occasionally appeared in chats discussing some task or other or talking about lunch.

    Eventually, I quit, unaware that a manager could request a copy of all comms from an exiting team member if they could make a case for doing so (not that I would have cared, to be honest, but it sets the scene). So. I worked my notice, never looked back, and only ever thought of Little Miss Sunshine when I caught a whiff of sulphur.

    Years later, I bumped into a former colleague, who told me that Little Miss Sunshine had indeed asked for a copy of all my comms (no idea what case they made), had trawled through everything I’d ever written, and then spent weeks (months?) asking everyone in every team if they knew what ‘LMS’ was short for and what it referred to (we didn’t work with Learning Management Systems).

    No one ever told them.

    1. bryeny*

      This was baffling. Little Miss Sunshine is you, OP — it’s right there at the top of your post. But you seem to be using it to refer to someone else. The nightmare manager, I guess?

  296. Oniya*

    So, a friend of mine (Hawk) used to work at an international airport. He started out as a chef when they actually had a restaurant there. By the time that they shifted over to fast food/convenience, he’d been there long enough that his severance would have been more than they wanted to pay – and he did a damn good job, so they couldn’t fire him or justify a cut in pay. Instead, they reassigned him, and he ended up being the highest paid stock-person in the company’s history.

    He *earned* that wage. Knew that airport’s heartbeat like his own. New restaurant managers would come in and find that Hawk had a better sense of what their stock needs would be than they did. He’d make sure that every kiosk had what they needed for the weekend on Friday. They were supposed to have multiple people doing his job (and covering those weekends), but every time they tried to train a new person – the new hire took one look at what Hawk did in a day and noped out. So, he plodded on.

    I don’t recall exactly what made him decide to move on – probably a cumulative thing, as airport management continued to have more things for him to do, but no help in doing it – but eventually Hawk had enough.

    People knew he’d had enough, too. Word got out through the grapevine, and on his last day, he was approached by a very distraught member of management. ‘Hawk, don’t tell me your *quitting*!?’

    Hawk shook his head. ‘I’m not quitting.’

    ‘Oh, thank God!’

    ‘After 25 years at this place, I’m *retiring.*’

  297. Plants*

    In one of my first uni jobs I had a very misogynistic and generally obnoxious boss who used a manual tax chart to refer to when paying us (in cash) at the end of each week. He would generally round up to the dollar (eg. $432.68 would be $433 or $435) so he could pay in notes. Leading up to when I quit, I learned the chart was years out of date so I was likely being underpaid the whole time. When I left I made him back pay me the full amount owed (despite his protests he’d actually been generous by rounding up). Good riddance.

    1. Plants*

      Meant to say he was using an out of date minimum wage amount as well, so it was a few dollars per hour, over a year period, he’d owed. Definitely more than his ‘generous’ (aka lazy) rounding up.

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