Sort of. We’d been asked to stay until the job was done for a release of some crappy internal website that had been redesigned cosmetically and no-one realised that would need a complete rewrite from the ground up in a couple of weeks… this resulted in the whole team working for 33 hours – came in at 8, left at 5 the following day. As I was leaving (for a friend’s nearby house, didn’t trust myself to drive a long way) I said jokingly ‘I might be late tomorrow’ the manager said ‘oh no, we need you in at 8am’.

I was still just inside my 6 months probationary period, and I took delight in reminding the surprised manager that probation works both ways 🙂

Move on but don’t scupper yourself in terms of being able to claim JSA if you need to. I think if you just leave you can’t claim straight away, but they might be able to do something if you have a GP note for stress.

In fact, see your GP ASAP, get signed off and give yourself some time to think

I did this last year.

A combination of a schizophrenic company owner, bullying and bigotry (aimed at me) was enough for me.

I made my decision one weekend and rang them on the Monday morning to say I wouldn’t be back. They even offered me more money to stay.

As a temp job I had to put 1000s of needles onto syringes for a large medical supply company(apparently the machine was out of order). After the 3rd day my wrists were in agony so I asked the floor manager if I could do another job, like moving boxes. Nope, syringes it was for me. I told her I was off and went home.

3years later I visited the same place as part of my course at Uni. The machine was broken and people were assembling syringes by hand.

Last week of my notice now, made sure I’d got another job before moving but I was on the verge of just ditching the job and had even done the maths to see if possible.

Small Telecoms company, passive aggressive and paranoid director, dodgy (barely legal) sales, clients leaving in droves (faster than new ones appearing).

There are a few long term staff who are mostly stupid white trash with leanings towards BNP.

It’s doomed to fail but will probably just phoenix under a slightly different name as happened a few years ago.

To give a flavour, something like 60% of the staff are new to the company this year. The longest serving member; 3years. When recently surveyed 90% of the staff said they would leave immediately if offered a new job, and this is described by one of the directors to me as “needing a steading hand to stop a rocking ship” 😯

Twice

First time was after 3 years working for a recruitment company. It was a horrible horrible company to work for, with an office manager I absolutely loathed. I handed in my notice and took a risk on contracting to get experiance doing something else.

2nd time the company and people were fine, but the job depressed me and I was having a fairly shitty time of things at home. Decided it wasn’t for me and left on good terms with no regrets.

Left a teaching job at a bottom league university two and a half years ago.
Didnt have anything lined up so was potless for a good six months.
Now like many on here contracting instead in a role which is far and away the best Ive ever had.

At least 3 times that I can recall – probably more.

I guess my favourite was starting at 9 on a Monday morning and not returning from lunch, I simply could live with the expectation to rip customers off.

Another one I left because they said they had to cancel all holidays for the next 2 months in order to fill an important order that had fallen behind schedule, I wasn’t prepared to lose my holiday so left.

Yes, left the RAF and was awaiting a start date formy current employment. To tie me over I got a job as a security guard. I managed one night shift!

A few years ago when at college I worked in a local pub, just doing friday/ Saturday nights and Sunday lunch. I arrived one sunday morning to get ready for lunch when I noticed an unusual amount of police at the place. I spoke to a cop stood on thedoor and asked what was going on, he asked who i was etc, he said “we are going to need to speak to you”
“oh, why” was my reply, the cop said “we have arrested the pub landlord and his wife as they were running a brothel upstairs!” so didn’t go back and my dad (who used to drink there) was asked a LOT of questions when my mum found out what had been going on. Funny thing was none of the bar staff knew a thing! (honest) 😀

Yes.

Built my own business over three years with a team of ten. Very profitable, great life financially and a truck load of stress that led to very ill health just as I was expecting my first child.

Made the call to close the business down after a lot of soul searching, and made a significant loss after refunding clients and paying staff out.

One of the biggest decisions (all staff were friends) I’ve ever had to make, and one of the best I ever did make.

I walked out of a job about 6 years ago, joined a small start up as their Head of Engineering when the company was supposed to get a massive cash injection. That didn’t materialise and after 6 months of flying around Europe doing investor presentations to VC funds whilst uncovering just how far behind schedule / how hopeless their development team were / how crap the company was, I got very ill. Started not sleeping and having panic attacks all the time, eventually I realised that either I quit or the job would probably kill me, so I just walked out one day after a Board meeting telling the CEO I wouldn’t be back. Took several years and a lifetime on SSRIs to recover from that experience…..

Yes when I had no family I was “ordered” to do something I didn’t want to, told the manager to stick his orders up his arse, sideways.

Walked again a few years back after the company bought in a new director who regarded the place as his personal punching bag, stress was sky high, nobody knew who’d be bawled out next so I went home and didn’t go back.

Walked out after not being paid promptly.
They asked me back after two weeks.

A friend of mine who was a senior designer for a medical company walked when without any prior issues she was summoned to a meeting and handed a final written warning for “unhelpful facial expressions”.

She won the tribunal. The MD was a total nutter.

Yep. Best thing I ever did..

The MD was a total nutter.

We had a CEO who fired people if he was in a bad mood (which was often). We kept the local solicitors very busy with compromise agreements. Eventually he was fired (well actually paid off very generously).

Was an insane period.

Yes – best thing I’ve done – was being put under undue amounts of stress, got signed off with stress then got dismissed on my return.

Spent a couple weeks general labouring & then got offered another job for a competitor. The new company is about 100000000000000 times better to work for!

Yup, three times at least. Worked out for the best each time.

But as the current (American) boss says: “life is like a sh1t sandwich. The more bread you have, the less sh1t you have to eat”.

Not quite enough bread to pull that stunt off again, in my case

Walked out of plenty of jobs , which is probably why I’ve never achieved what I think I could have . Spent most of my working life as a chef and there has usually been high demand for decent chefs so it’s never been a really scary thing to do . I have always had the decency to tell people that I was leaving , I think to go home and just not come back without telling anybody is a pretty low trick . Saying that I have never been in a job that I have really hated and quite enjoy the cut and thrust of people trying to shit on me while I tried to make sure that they didn’t . Also spent plenty of years doing relief work , where the nature of the job puts you in a pretty powerful position .

So, just so I got this straight, we have Chef Ramsey on the forum?

🙂

I’ve engineered leave a couple of companies, no point leaving with out safety ‘net’ 🙂

And most recently I didn’t even attempt to get my contract extended, at the NHS – even though I’d nothing to go to. I thought I could make a difference and improve things, how naïve.

Worked ok, started a new contract two days after it’d finished.

Yep, I walked out one day after being dicked about once too often by my manager. Wrote a letter of resignation, walked back in to hand it to his boss, spent half an hour explaining why it was all a crock of shit and persuaded them that it needed to change.

Which it did, so I stayed.

Even though I never followed it through, that moment of realising that I didn’t have to put up with that rubbish and that it would be possible for me to walk out and carry on with my life has always been a very empowering and positive memory for me.

Twice. Once from a bar job when I was at uni, but that’s not a very interesting story.

The second time was another university job, at a Budgens supermarket. During the course of an evening shift (4pm-10pm) I became incredibly ill – I was shivering, sweating, delirious, the works. I was working on the tills near a drafty door, and I got so cold I asked the manager permission to wear a hat (I was so out of it it didn’t even occur to me to ask to go home early). She refused, and made me stay there until the end of my shift.

The next morning I was rushed to hospital in an ambulance and spent the next four days in an infectious diseases unit with suspected meningitis.

Needless to say I didn’t go back. About a month later I got a letter saying if I didn’t return my uniform I would be billed £200.

I’ve done it a couple of times, though a fair few years back. Thing is though, I’m in hospitality and bloody good at what I do so know I’ll always be able to walk straight into another job.

As long as you have something to fall back on, do what makes you happy

A few times, working for an agency, got sent to site in wales, mid november, thick snow,freezing cold, to manufacture shuttering for some factory, arrived, signed in looked around and walked out and home.

Few hours later had this crazed teenage woman screamiong at me i had let the company down, obviously she had watched to many of The Apprentice and thought she was a contestant.

She then told me i was fired.

The MD was a total nutter.

Grabbed a worker by the lapels and threatened him (before I was there) claimed later that he was stressed as suffering from terminal cancer, (he isn’t )

mental

Twice. Once supply teaching and the other was Planet X (left after 7 days).
I don’t mind hard work, but trying to do 3 people’s jobs with no training takes this piss somewhat.

Twice on the trot (years ago). Been a contractor ever since so it’s different now.

First time was when I had a totally inflexible and ignorant manager (corporate travel company near Aldershot – in a dreadful town beginning with ‘F’) and second was a so called development company in London Road in Southampton who were happy for me to sort out the mess which was the web site I was working on but would only let me do so on my own time.

Me ‘This (.Net) application doesn’t even build. How do you debug it?’

Them ‘We just use Response.Write to see what’s wrong’.

Me ‘But surely your applications must build? That’s the way everyone in the industry does it…’

Them ‘Other people might do it that way but we don’t’

I’m going to make it build…

Ok, but we’re not paying you for it.

Bye…

I didn’t walk out because I wanted paying but I lasted 2 days in a foam moulding factory before deciding I didn’t want to waste my summer holidays doing braindead work with chavs for 10hrs a day. Told the boss at lunch time on the 2nd day, he said fair enough and gave me cash in hand for the 2 days work. Then I got a summer job at Tesco which wasn’t quite as bad 😆

I’ve never walked but usually engineered my way out.

The best on was when the company I worked for wouldn’t pay me my bonus of £6k on GM and TO I did. They actually admitted that they weren’t paying me because they didn’t set any money aside as they thought the targets they set weren’t achievable!

Anyway, another job lined up nicely, told them I’d leave unless they stumped up the cash. They agreed to pay but to get it I had to stay…

Well there was no way I was staying so I waited until the FC was at his busiest and asked him for a letter stating they’d agreed to pay me my bonus. He did exactly as I expected and wrote just that, no mention about me staying to get it.

Next day, handed in my notice and waved the letter under the MD’s nose about me getting the bonus when he mentioned I’d not get it if I left.

He the took a very different tone, relaxed almost, and congratulated me saying nobody had ever had him over like that before and well done.

I replied, in the most insincere way possible that I didn’t know what he was talking about with a big grin on my face too.

Well, Mr.Ray Howard, I did you up like a kipper.

I got paid a month later and the company went under three months after that.

Well running a company in a “no notice state” (Michigan) anyone of my staff can come in and resign there and then. Plus we can fire anyone with no comeback. It’s nuts and does my head in for lots of reasons.

As a young (23) bar manager I left. If I’d been older, I’d have had a constructive dismissal case (I suspect) against the area manager. The AM was a bully, made no secret of his personal dislike of me, passed the buck for his failings and took credit for my achievements.

As it was, I knew I was leaving and going back to Uni. I’d saved well whilst working so could afford a couple of months off over the summer.

One particularly busy night (about 1am on a bank holiday Saturday, just received my annual bonus) he was in the venue, making my life difficult.

When he told me he was off on two weeks holiday 6 hours later. I wrote my resignation ‘letter’ on a post-it, passed it to him, called him a **** (rhymes with cassive munt) got into a taxi and disappeared.

He called the following morning with apologies, explanations for his tw**ishness etc. It gave me enormous pleasure to see him working for the next few weeks.

Would I now with mortgages, school fees, children etc? No chance. I’d need a plan B, C and D before I considered it and even then, would suck it up and not burn bridges.

When I was about 14 I got a holiday job in a local frozen food manufacturing factory. I spent a morning on a production line: one pleb puts foil trays into holes on a conveyor, three rows wide. It slides along under a row of nozzles which squeezed out ‘meat’ of unspecified origin, some sort of gloopy mince. My job was to use the back of a spoon to spread the brown blob around the bottom of the foil tray, then it moved on. You got about a second per tray, it was moving pretty quickly. Then it went under another set of nozzles which put white paste (allegedly mashed potato) on, and another spotty yoof ran a fork over the top to make it look home-made (apparently).

I managed until lunchtime then just went home, I decided I’d rather have no money than do that all holiday.

The boss pushed me too far one day in the middle of a stressful period of a refit of a retail outlet (won’t say which one as it’s family-run and the owner’s on here!), told the boss he had 30 seconds to apologise. He didn’t so I grabbed my stuff and calmly walked out to the car. Just as I was about to open the car door, the point of no return, the owner appeared running down the in-ramp begging me to come back for a chat. Went into a nearby cafe for a bit and walked back in with a pay rise, two day’s paid leave the next week and the boss got a serious dressing down!
It wasn’t my main job so no worries about bills etc, just an extra so I could go on holiday that year but was still a bit scary walking out!!

The greatest thing I’ve learned since being made redundant 3 years ago is how important it is to move if you don’t like something. Never be that person who says “I hate it here. I’m leaving” every day for a year.

I’ve had 6 jobs in 3 years after 6 years in 1 job and it’s been enlightening, challenging and rewarding. I’d love a “job for life” but they don’t exist anymore and I think a lot of people are kidding themselves thinking they deserve to be in one place and enjoy it for 10/15/20+ years.

Always worked notice.

Be happy.

Oh, and WillH, what prestigious occupation are you subscribed to? Is it less plebby than food production? Where do you think your Meal Deal comes from? Meh.

Loads. Well over a dozen. When you’re an unskilled 20 something working in catering it’s almost a part of the job requirements. You suck up shit until you’re full, then walk, preferably on a busy Friday night.

Looking back now from the sage old age of 41, I honestly don’t regret a single moment of any of my many awful jobs though… Learnt something from someone at some point at each one. Self employed and uber-skilled these days 🙂

After many incidences of not being paid my final wage, despite working the correct notice period (and working bloody hard too) I finally put some of this learning into practice as a 26 year old student in Edinburgh. I was working at The Bailey in Stockbridge under a tyrannical monster of a manageress.

At the interview, I explained that I had a holiday booked, gave her the dates and she wrote them in “The Big Book of Holidays”. A week before I was due to go cycling round Cornwall (three months later), I looked at the rota and saw I was on shift throughout my hols. I took it up with her, she feigned ignorance, got the book out and showed me the Tippexed over page. Then guilt-tripped me into almost believing I wasn’t being loyal to the pub.

Went back the next night when the very soft-touch manageress was on duty and told her that madbitchmanageress had authorised a pay advance for my holidays. Took away two month’s wages and had a fantastic cycling tour with my GF 🙂

I’m still barred from the pub which is a shame ‘cos it’s a nice pub.

Freedom is everything – if you’ve set up your life to where you can’t walk out of a job your living beyond your means – I live way more frugal than what many would consider acceptable – the flipside is I am debt free and I have my mortgage paid – my house is small and my bike isn’t the best – friends often say – ‘if I were you I’d move up the ladder’ Or maybe I should get of rid of my old car but I like my car because it’s mine not the banks and when I do replace it I’ll be paying cash that I saved … I guess my point is that modern consumerism too often makes us vulnerable due to our outgoings – Thats when we put up with unhappy work environments … Was trying to give said advice to a mate who’s just spent £10.000 on bikes this year bit lives in his girlfriend’s house and has no savings or back up plan – can you really enjoy your toys at the expense of freedom? The only job I’ve walked from was when I had savings to fall back on – we all need to realise that it’s not disposable income – rainy days are going to come ..

That’s not freedom, that’s a grim prison of your own making. Live a little (that said, I broadly agree with your sentiments – just remember, you can’t take it with you and memories will be all you have one day).

Only once, it was from a job in a water bottling plant where I was the person who put handles on 5 litre bottles like this:

Doing this involved slamming the handle down onto the top of neck of the bottles as they came past on a conveyor belt. They came past at 40-60 per minute depending on how many people were manning the line and if you missed more than a certain number a minute an alarm went off and the whole line shut down. By about half an hour in your hands were covered in little cuts from sharp plastic on the rings, after an hour your palm was bruised in a perfect circle where it hit the lip of the bottle, after 6 hours your hands wouldn’t open properly and after 13 hours with a half hour break your entire upper body screamed at you.

I managed three 13 hour night shifts and then walked out an hour early and told them to stick it. I was somewhat undermined in my flounce by the fact that I was 16 and had to wait an hour for my dad to come and pick me up.

It took weeks for my hands to work properly again.