So, I got to thinking: In 24 years of working, I have had 19 jobs. I was fired once, but I quit all the others. (Admittedly, I did quit once just before being fired.) Only twice did I quit jobs with another job immediately lined up.

This seems rather... tumultuous to me, and I was wondering what other babblers' job stats looked like.

Great lines delivered while quitting are also appreciated.

[ 10 September 2005: Message edited by: Tape_342 ]

I quit three jobs, one because I had a better job lined up, one because no matter how much I crapped on the boss he wouldn't fire me, and one recently teaching guitar lessons part time because I was going out of town to work for my full time job and wouldn't be able to be there for months.

I was fired from a large meatpacking plant after a failed Union organizing drive. That place is now Union, and is about to go on strike for a first contract. I worked long and hard on the organizing drive that brought the Union in after I was terminated.

I have never been fired from a Unionized workplace, maybe because the treatment was better and I have not felt the need to take my frustrations out on my employer.

Some events surrounding being fired, at tapes request.

1. During a busy lunch rush, while being fired in a fit of rage by my employer, I took all the lunch order papers and threw them on the broiler, then laughed as they went up in flames. I then split my last check (about $100) up among the five waitresses as compensation for lost tips.

2. One boss yelled at me, 'You don't tell me what to do, I tell you what to do. I don't work for you, you work for me'. I said that he was half right, as usual.

3. Shouted loudly from the kitchen, 'I don't care if you want me to put that on a plate, it's got green shit growing all over it!'

4. While being fired by a boss whose wife was having a series of well know affairs with younger men, I told him 'You can fire me from my job, but you can't fire me from your wife.'

5. A boss approached me with a grim look on his face, and I knew that he was going to fire me. He started by saying that 'this isn't easy for me', and I said 'well then don't do it'. It took him about 20 minutes to fire me, because each time he started to talk to me, I kept telling him that if it was that hard to do, then get me to do it, because I always do all the stuff that he couldn't do.

6. A restaurant that I had worked at for about 8 months was sold, and the new owner quickly drove most of the staff away. I was promoted to kitchen manager, and was give a 10 cent an hour raise. I told him that I wouldn't do it for that kind of money, and after we argued for a while I was fired because I wasn't a team player. I told him that I was a team player, and I would prove it to him. I went out and talked to the rest of the staff, and 10 out of the 12 that were left there quit. All of them told him that they were quitting because they were team players, just not on his team. We then went over to a new restaurant that was opening up in town and applied as a group, playing on our experience working together. We were all hired in one capacity or another, and nobody took a pay cut, but some got a raise out of the deal.

[ 10 September 2005: Message edited by: slimpikins ]

I've never been fired, but I quit two jobs knowing that the boom would be lowered as soon as I became openly confrontational. My first job is the only one I ever quit knowing that I had another lined up.

In my last official job, it had slowly become clear over a year or so preceding that the company managers wanted to take our once-powerful department apart. One or two people left for personal reasons and weren't replaced; I don't think our managers were smart enough to grasp at first how total the destruction they could wreak would be, but you could see them catching on finally, and they were so obviously delighted!

So they started pressuring each of us as individuals, in sometimes sickening ways. This was happening in 1987-88, before any of us had words like "downsizing" and "outsourcing" to hang on to, to clarify in our minds the larger process that was underway -- but no question, that is what was happening.

In practice, people were being picked off one at a time, personal reasons being given each time -- it was really quite ugly, I thought. So I did a pre-emptive resignation -- I can still see the sneer on one manager's face when we met in a stairwell the day after I handed in my letter of resignation, and he said, dripping insincerity: "I don't suppose there's any way we could change your mind." It wasn't a question. The lily-livered bastard.

Reading the one-sentence letter, he yelled, "What is this shit? You're under contract. You can't quit. Now get the fuck back to work."

My reply was, "It was my understanding that Mr. Lincoln freed the slaves. You can shove my contract up your pale, fat ass."

I've never been fired, but I did quit one job (that I desperately needed) because the place was just too miserable to work at. Best decision of my life, because I pretty soon found a job that ended up with my developping an actual career (such as it is/was).

A nanny gig the summer after grade 9 that only lasted about a month - I was getting paid $98 per week for full days with two children, and the mother expected me to cook their meals, take them to the park, and do their laundry. Oh, and the kids were spoiled brats and the mother was a bitch. I quit that one, happily. And I think the mother was happy too, because she just couldn't figure out why a 14 year-old couldn't be a perfect homemaker and give her two children educational experiences while cleaning the house and doing the laundry during the day.

I got another job soon after as a chambermaid that lasted exactly one day at a small motel about a 5 minute drive from my home soon after the babysitting gig was over. Another girl my age was there - she had been hired the day before. The motel owner was this wizened, nasty lady who was a Registered Nurse - "not an RNA. You know what RNA stands for? Registered Nursing Asshole." She didn't want us to talk to each other while working together fixing up rooms. We got to know each other a little bit after Registered Noose left us to do up the rest of the rooms. I think it was a 6 day per week, 4 or 5 hour per day job. Both of us had extracurricular stuff we were doing. So we went to her at the end of the day and told her our schedules, and said that we were available for the whole summer, but I think I had one Saturday that I needed off and the other girl needed one weekend for a family trip. The woman fired us on the spot and told us that she's not interested in lazy girls who aren't interested in working. Yeah, that's why you hire 14 year-olds and pay them $4.50 an hour. We left, very happy to be gone, and the girl and I were friends for years afterwards, for the rest of high school and beyond, although we've lost touch now.

I had a summer job at a drug store the next summer after grade 10 when I was 15, which I liked. I quit when I went back to school and got involved in too many extracurriculars in the evenings to be able to handle a part-time job on top of it.

At the end of grade 11, I got a job at an A&W that I thought would last into the summer. The manager was horrid. The job sucked so badly. The uniform was a horror. I quit after three or four weeks - I just didn't need it badly enough to stay. I didn't get another job that summer - I went to summer school for a month to take a grade 13 English course with some friends, and goofed off for the rest of the summer.

The summer after grade 12, I worked at a Loeb grocery store. That wasn't too bad, as minimum wageslave jobs go. I quit when grade 13 started.

Then I dropped out of high school on my 18th birthday, which was in November of grade 13. I got a job one week later, which was to last about 4 years, at a bakery. The first two years were full time. Then I went back to high school for a semester to get my diploma while working part-time at the bakery. Then I worked for another year and a half or so, full time. I quit on good terms, to go to college.

I took Early Childhood Education for a year, and liked it, got straight A's. The summer after my first year in ECE, I babysat a friend's little boy for a while. Then an admin assistant job came up at my church, which paid about as much as day care worker jobs would pay, and I applied and got it. I meant to continue ECE by correspondence, but soon didn't bother as I found my work at the church quite meaningful and consuming.

I left the church job when I got married and moved to Toronto, so that ended well. In Toronto I got a job as an admin assistant at a wheelchair company owned by a guy who gave me the creeps and wanted me to scam EI so I quit after two weeks.

Got a job as a Customer Service Representative at a calling card company. Got the job through a friend who was sleeping with the boss and tended to get all her friends jobs. I did a good job there and was soon given more responsibilities, but the pay didn't come with it, and the job was extremely stressful since it was a call centre (incoming, thank god), so I quit and signed on with a temp agency, which was scary since we needed the money - but I just couldn't take the office politics and the horrid job any longer. I was pregnant at the time.

I got a bunch of admin temp assignments that paid much better than I was making at the calling card company.

Went on maternity leave, then found a contract position as an admin assistant with an agency that runs EI programs on contract. I really liked that job. But then I eventually quit that one to go back to university.

After university, moved to Toronto, worked for a temp agency for a while as an admin assistant.

Then got the job I have now - admin assistant as well.

[ 11 September 2005: Message edited by: housemouse ]

On the first day of on-the job training, the woman who tried to train me (she was mean, and wouldn't have been able to train a dog to sit) explained to me that the cheap rates advertised on the hotel sign were for rooms they weren't going to rent because the hotel was not very booked. So she'd tell potential customers that the rooms were "booked" (ie, she lied).

The cash register was right out of the forties (seriously, it was one of those manual ones, where the 'no sale' thing pops up in a little window), you had to check credit cards against a manual list of hundreds of invalid cards (sorted by credit card number) because they were too cheap to use an electronic verification service. After about the third customer who she lied to about the cheap rates got angry, I decided I did not want to be in that place one more minute. I told her, calmly, that I would be leaving and not completing my shift. After she tried to explain to me that I couldn't leave (?) she then said I had been in charge of the cash and told me I had to cash out (she hadn't even explained to me how to do it). Then she cashed it out, found a 20.00 underage, and explained that I would have to sign for it (I had probably handled one cash transaction that day; I'd worked in retail before and I never had an underage or overage of more than a couple of cents). I told her I wasn't signing anything, and left. No job like that was worth 4.50 an hour (minimum wage at that time), where they didn't even pay OHIP premiums for the permanent staff.

Never heard from them again.

Hey, I forgot another part-time job I had for a little while. I thought I'd try to get a job on the side while working at the church as an admin assistant since that was a part-time job. So I got a job at one of those cigar, cigarette and lottery stores in the mall. I lasted about a week and a half. The owner was a "hoverer" and made me really nervous. Also, he was a corrupt asshole, too. He had a regular customer who was totally addicted to those Nevada pull tickets, where you pay 50 cents a ticket and pull the four or five tabs away to see if you have the matching slot machine symbols on them. They're held in a big glass drum, and each batch of tickets has a certain number of winners.

Well, he would slip her tickets from the new batch under the counter instead of the batch currently in the drum. Stupid me, I didn't catch on at first, and I wasn't surreptitious enough about it, and another customer noticed and asked for tickets from the same batch. It was because I didn't know I was doing something that we weren't supposed to because he didn't explain it to me. He got mad at me about that and said, "Next time, you do EXACTLY as I tell you, exactly WHEN I tell you."

I quit and, as per a completely illegal contract I signed, I didn't get paid for the week and a half I worked there since the first week or two was considered "unpaid training" if I decided to leave, but would be paid if I stayed. I was just so glad to get away from the asshole that I didn't even bother trying to get my $70 by making a complaint to the labour board. I should have reported him to whatever agency regulates lotteries though.

Also, I forgot about my Christmas break seasonal gigs with The Body Shop that I did for two Christmases in university. Those went well, and I left when the season ended since I was only hired as seasonal help. So that's actually 14 jobs in 18 years.

[ 11 September 2005: Message edited by: Michelle ]

Except for one, all of my post-school jobs came open because someone else was being fired, or squeezed out of the company -- and I was never warned of that by the hiring managers, only slowly came to realize it after being on the job for a few days.

The truth broke through, of course, when I ran into the (to me) curious resentment of my predecessors, who I had assumed would be training me before they left, and sometimes the hostility of co-workers who felt that the predecessor had been unfairly dealt with.

Whenever that happened, it was a foretaste to me of problems I was going to have with management myself. It never ceased to shock me that some dork of a manager would expect just to be able to throw together a predecessor who was hurting and me, who needed training, and walk away from that situation, leaving us to sort it out for ourselves.

Within a month though, I came to realise just how difficult the place was. I was grateful that my direct managers were pleased with me and were always helpful, but this place was so poorly organised that anyone having problems with another department seemed to just be able to confront whoever they wanted to directly in that department, without being all too courteous about it. In the first week, I had someone in the shipping department tell me, in response to what I was a bit confused with that "I don't know what people in your department are doing if they're hiring people who don't know what the fuck you're doing." It never got much better than that. I'd see the office manager chain-smoking and pulling her hair out all the time, and my direct manager I hardly ever saw. I think it lasted about 5 weeks.

About a year after I quit, I bumped into my manager (we had parted on friendly terms) and he told me that they had reviewed and revised the whole hiring process/training programme for the position I had quit because of its chronic turn-over. Oh, now you tell me.

[ 11 September 2005: Message edited by: Hinterland ]

quote:

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That happened to me so many times that I came to think of it as normal, of managerial stupidity as normal. And I came to think of myself as doomed in any "real" job, doomed always to mistrust managers, which is pretty much how my working life has played out.

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I know what you mean. I've had so many experiences dealing with poor managers and hearing other people talk about poor managers, I don't undertand how so many managers don't realise how important they are to all the workers they manage (except of course, that it's explained a lot by the Peter Principle).

quote:

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Originally posted by skdadl:

Except for one, all of my post-school jobs came open because someone else was being fired, or squeezed out of the company

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This reminded me of my first real 'career-track' job. I had been working part-time, while going to university part-time. Screwing around, really. The head of the department normally paid zero attention to me, but one day he saw me carrying an Ancient Greek textbook. Aha, I didn't know, but he'd come down from Oxford in Classics, doncha know, and all of a sudden, I went from part-time typist, to a full human with a brain and everything.

A woman was slated to go on maternity leave and since I was a near-genius for studying Ancient Greek and could therefore do anything, he asked me if I'd fill in for her for the six months. I said sure and thus began my career. (Don't tell anyone, but I never did get that university degree.)