Sean Lovelace—
Tell me the last time you quit a job. That’s a tough thing. You have to look at yourself and suck up and do it. Paint it for me. Then you must look at “that person” when you quit. Tell me how/why. I bet there are “hell yes I quit” and “why did I quit?” and the other thing, the space between the two.
Tell me how you felt. I mean this could be good. I’d like to hear your stories. I will NOT rip them off for my fiction, until I DO.
BONUS: Ever been fired? I was fired twice. Both lovely stories.
Only time I quit was pretty boring. Got a new job offer, old job didn’t give references, so I just left the same day I got the offer, left a bunch of books I had read at my desk instead of working out for coworkers to grab for free.
Got fired once while working at a convenience store in college after selling an underaged kid cigarettes and stealing a sandwich, probably also because I showed up to work late like every day.
I think if I ever have a kid I’m gonna force him/her to quit a job when he/she’s young, just to give him/her some spine, teach him/her not to take shit from an asshole boss.
Quit as a carpenter/upholstery assistant (when I was 15) by lying and saying that my uncle offered me a job at his store. My boss was this Portuguese guy who was super super right wing and made me listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio all day while I took nails out of couches. He would ask me about political things and I told him I didn’t know because I was 15, and he would complain about “schools today.” Once he asked me, in the middle of the day and unprompted, if I knew how to fold an American flag properly; I didn’t and then he asked me what I even went to school for. When I quit I told him I couldn’t give him a two week notice because my uncle wanted me to start right away and he angrily wrote my check and told me he didn’t like my “mafia dealings.” I still don’t know how to fold an American flag and I saw him once, like six year later when I was getting my hair cut, though I don’t think he recognized me anymore.
I have been fired and I have quit. All in the past two years.
I was fired from my job at a corrupt pharmaceutical company. I had been there for three years and the reason for my termination was: I had left five minutes too early before my shift was out. Most people would receive a write-up. Not me though. Out the fucking door.
My last job was driving me to the edge of insanity. I had requested to be move to another department — then I asked again five months later. All I got was a laugh to my face from my manager and these exact words: “Your perception is skewed. You’re just like everyone else that asks me to be moved. Two to three months later, you’ll just complain and ask to be moved again.” I walked out of his office, took a few steps and thought, “Fuck this.” Then I turned around and said I quit.
These events actually inspired me to write my newest piece. I’m glad it happened.
I quit my last job, which was also my first job since graduating from the MFA (which I did right after college). I felt miserable about it. The people there were fine, though they made me uncomfortable with myself sometimes, but a lot of things make me uncomfortable with myself. Mainly certain things about the way we did our work made the job hellishly stressful for me when for most people there it was I think kind of relaxing or zen, and I couldn’t handle the stress, and I made stupid mistakes as a result, which stressed me out a lot more, and finally I decided I couldn’t do it, so I talked with my supervisor and we agreed I should leave. It was all very reasonable. I cried a little anyway. One of my problems in life is no one knows how to react to a grown man crying in public. I didn’t know how not to cry. I had thought it would be a good job for me, I felt like a failure, it was the first time I was ever bad at something I actually wanted to do. Now I have to remind myself every day that it was the right decision because I haven’t found a new job yet and I’ve always worked, since I legally could at 14.
If you can make a paper football (triangle), you can correctly fold a flag in reverence.
-Past Boy Scout.
Man, I was hoping for more reaction from this. Jobs are tough, tough to find, tough to succeed at, and sometimes tough to leave. We wrap so much of our identity into our jobs that it often times seems unhealthy.
I quit a job running a chicken place because I thought I was about to be fired. As time has passed I’m fairly certain that the owner wasn’t about to fire me but he did a damn fine job of making me think he was. But I was completely fried on the place anyway. I had lost hair and gained waistline inches. It was strange to leave a place where 20+ looked up to me and/or counted on me to provide stability in a stressful environment. One of my assistant managers suggested that I should call a staff meeting to let them all know I was leaving. I told her that wasn’t the way these kinds of things worked. She was thinking like a college student and the president of an organization leaving. Word trickled around the staff, some of them felt like I had let them down some where pissed at me. I told them I understood. I’m way more used to being the worker than being the boss.
I once got fired from a call center job for calling a customer a fucker. Turns out they don’t like that.
I lost my scholarship after my first three semesters in college and moved back in with my parents and started working at Coldstone Creamery. I hated working there. Never take a food service job where you have to sing. Every time someone asked me to go get something from the refrigerator I’d steal sodas and snickers and eat them back in there and hide them behind boxes to finish later. I was kind of a mess and could never keep my work schedule straight. One night I was hanging out with my friend when I got a call from my manager saying I needed to be in that night, that I was on the schedule. I said I wasn’t coming in and the manager said okay. The owner called me back and said I should go in. I said “if it comes down to either coming in tonight or losing this job, I don’t really need the job that badly.”
I’ve gotten fired twice, both had to do with missing too many employee meetings. And with generally not being able to manage any sort of schedule. It’s a recurring theme in my life.
Sean:
I have been fired numerous times. Can’t say I ever quit a job.
My best getting fired story was as a janitor at a hotel. They fired me in this indoor garden room for having stolen a cherry danish.
I got up, threw papers in the manager’s faces, told them to go fuck themselves…then I took the Walkie-talkies we used there and threw it into a glass door.
I went to the lobby and Geraldo Rivera was there checking into the hotel. He happened to be there covering some pizza bombing thing that happened in my town.
I then called him by the wrong name and told him not to stay at the hotel because it was a shithole.
He smiled politely and looked somewhat off-put as I walked past him.
After that, I got a job at a car wash.
I quit the library because my position was going to be reviewed by the board after my insubordinate confrontation with a superior. Political motivation involved. No regrets on the quitting, regrets on the insubordination. The HR person stuffed my belongings into my arms and marched melodramatically inches behind me in a shuffling manner until I was out of the door, which was slammed behind me. I had much worse jobs for 3 years. Things are better now.
male public criers unite
Sean tell us your getting fired stories!
this all makes me want to beat you up
how odd
I just quit my job two weeks ago. Yesterday was my last day. I worked at a bakery where I was at first harassed by another employee (he called me my coworker’s “girl” as in, “Where’s your girl?”, forced me to eat a croissant covered in hot jam as a lesson about making good baked goods (“What are you tasting? How does it make you feel?”–I wish I could accurately convey how humiliating and condescending this was.), and then said one day when a black kid got beat up by the cops in our city, “good” and proceeded to go on a hideous racist rant. Once he also asked me why my face “looked like that.” He got better, but the job didn’t. I worked ten and eleven hour days for 9 dollars an hour. Some of the work was great, but the managing of the place made it so terrible, and I spent a lot of time in a 20 below freezer. I felt suicidal. Two weeks ago, my boss forced me to eat rotten coffee cake, insisting that I had made it incorrectly, when it was just old and rotten. A few days later, I quit. I’m over educated (have my MFA) and signed up with a temp agency, but despite months of interviews and applications, I have no other employment on the horizon. But it was either me or that job, and jobs where you make shit money and do shit work are a dime a dozen. I guess I’m going to try Panera next if I can’t find anything else.
I was in my first semester of an MFA program the second time I quit a job. I had to call people during an election year to see if they were planning to vote for Pataki or Giuliani, that sort of thing. My dear old friend John came to town; I was not given any of my requested time off. We walked in together at the start of my shift, guitar in hand, and broke out in song: “Take this job & shove it, I ain’t workn’ here no more…” Prior to that, I worked retail in a store that hired a new manager after seven years. Ya might say our personalities clashed one last time & that was it: the strength of my rage overturned a rounder full of winter coats so the heft of my wrath tumbled his direction as I walked out for (my own & everyone else’s) good.