What's the most creative way you've left a job?

george
1

My last day with my current employer is 3/9. I’m moving on to work for a vendor of ours who provides desktop support and a lot of other infrastructure type functions – mainly because my company is going out of business in a few years.

I gave about 8 weeks notice because currently I’m the only one doing the day-to-day Security operations for the entire company. In those 8 weeks, there has been no knowledge transfer, nobody new has been hired, and there was a considerable amount of back-and-forth between my old job and my new one about spinning me back to continue working where I’m at, just as a vendor.

Friday, I learned that my old employer will not put out the extra money to keep me around - even for a few more months to help onboard someone.

My boss and I get on very well and speak very candidly about a great many topics and there’s a lot of disappointment from both sides regarding this decision, but this has kind of come from ‘On High’.

So, I was asked to submit a resignation letter stating when my last day would be. Here is the first Draft that I sent in (which everyone laughed at and there is a more formal one that I followed up with) -

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I’m following that up with this: So long and thanks for all the fish!

On to bigger and better things!

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2

Leaving my most recent previous job.

Thursday (late March), in my annual review:
Boss: I want to get you positioned to take over as our primary DBA by the end of the year.

Monday
Me: Here’s my 2 weeks’ notice. I’m going to be a DBA at this other place across town.

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3

I did a resignation letter once, and the college professor who was not my official manager but my de facto day-to-day boss edited it for grammar and content. Also, lesson learned: Do not hand in resignation letter in April 1st.

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4

Every person I worked for answered “I thought that might happen” when I turned in my notice. But then asked me to change my mind, while also telling me nothing would change.

5

I probably would’ve stayed where I’m at until the end, but there were too many times when they just didn’t come through.

I asked for a raise and had data points with all the successful projects I’d accomplished along with a litany of other things and it turned into three months of, “We’re seeing what we can do…”

Hopefully you’re in a better place, now!

6

Heh, I’m a stay at home dad. I’m working on getting some woodworking projects monetized but it just made more sense to have me stay home and support my wife from here. I’m thinking if I can pull in a couple hundred a month in cash we’ll be doing really well.

I had asked for a raise, but mentioned that staying at home really helped deal with the lack of money. I got a really good review, and then it was followed up with counseling on a brand new metric and pulling me back into the office; all in the same phone call. My wife and I did the math and my pay wasn’t netting us as much as we thought it was. And really if we hadn’t just bought a new camper and truck we’d be doing incredibly well.

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7

I’ve never heard that :frowning:

8

I’m like, if you thought that might happen and you don’t want me to leave then why did you do it? But then I realized my boss had someone else’s hand up her ass.

9

I don’t have a creative story to post, but I do have a stupid story to post. Fortunately, not about me, though I watched the drama unfold. Copying and pasting from a post I made back in 2009 about something that happened at Boeing:

One of the guys in the core sysadmin group left recently for greener pastures, and his replacement arrived for work on Monday. Most of the team is made up of contractors from $GIGANTIC_IT_CONTRACTING_AGENCY, so rather than having to go through the hiring process, the core server team manager put in a requisition for another contractor with the correct skillset—in this particular case, we needed a level 20 HP-UX wizard. Said wizard was delivered on Monday.

I arrived like normal on Monday morning and saw that the new guy had arrived and was settling into the appropriate cube. His fellow contractors were clustered in with him, doing the standard Monday morning pre-work bullshitting and helping him settle in. I amble over and shake hands.

The guy’s hand is wet. Clammy, slightly cold, and damp. He’s smiling, and appears fine, but wet hands. I get introduced (“This is Lee, the storage guy…”) along with the inevitable pr0n joke (“…so if you need some disk space to hide your porn, he’s the guy to ask! H4W H4W!”), everybody laughs, I tell the guy we’re happy to have him and that we have plenty of work for him, and I head to my office.

Two hours later, I emerge from my first round of meetings and realize I can’t remember the new guy’s name. I’m starting to feel bad about it, because I’m going to be dealing with him later that day, as we’ve got a Superdome that needs configuring and I have to show one of my minions how to do SAN allocation with volume set addressing, because HP-UX rides the short bus to the data center. I get up and head out to see the guy again, frantically trying to remember his name, and decide I need help. My office is the last one in the row, so I stick my head into my neighbor’s office.

“Dude, what the hell is the FNG’s name? I can’t fucking remember.”

Coworker looks up at me, his brows drawn down in puzzlement. “Why?”

“Because…I was going to see…if…he…why are you looking at me like that?” As I’m talking, coworker’s expression changes to bemusement. He looks as if someone is standing behind me with a Nerf Cannon, but I can see my reflection in the window and no one’s behind me. Coworker shakes his head.

“Guy split. Left like an hour ago.”

“What, like…to go downstairs?” I am slow on the uptake this morning.

“No, like, he quit.”

“But he’d only been here a half-hour!”

Coworker nodded. Apparently, upon arrival new guy had made a bunch of jokes to his fellow contractors about how working at a big company was going to be easy street, and that most of the stuff on his resume was fake and that he’d cruised through the interview to land this job so he could “just relax and get paid that government money”. His fellow contractors had violently disabused him of the notion that the job was a blow-off by laying out his starting project list, and then inviting him to the morning’s non-optional project planning meeting to talk about him jumping into the backlog of HP-UX admin work that’s been piling up.

At some point, the new guy excused himself as if he were going to the bathroom, left the secure area, and…vanished. The core server team manager got a call shortly after that from the contract company account manager, consisting of the account manager blubbering saying that the new guy had just called him up and quit over the phone. Account manager then made repeated apologies and promised to produce another, more better HP-UX admin at some point in the immediate future.

I’ve never had this happen before and am still kind of blown away by it. I suppose he thought he was walking into some kind of Dilbertesque fantasy land, where we all sit around and browse the web and maybe occasionally staple a document. Admittedly, working aerospace and DoD contracts, that’s sometimes true, and we have our share of Dilbert moments. But I can’t imagine what kind of idiot would actually try to pull that for real. Or, rather, I guess I CAN imagine it, since I’ve met him.

TL;DR – Guy lies on his resume, lands a contract job at a giant company, assumes it’ll be a BS Dilbert-style blowoff, then freaks out and blows when he finds out he’s expected to work.

And $GIGANTIC_IT_CONTRACTING_AGENCY? It was, of course, CSC—a company name I’ve taken in vain more than any other name on Earth.

4 Likes
10

I laughed out loud at the ‘takes the short bus to the data center’ line.

I can empathize. I hired in a new System Administrator early last year (after a year of the spot being vacant). Guy made it through the three phone interviews, if a little green; no big deal, newbies can be taught.

Dude gets in the chair and literally has no idea what he’s doing. Zero. He comes to my office at the end of his first week and says, “I keep hearing this term used over and over again, but in the context of the conversation, it doesn’t make sense.”

Okay, we use a fair amount of strange acronyms around my current workplace and because it’s healthcare, sometimes it gets confusing.

DS: "Yeah man, no worries. I’m glad to help. What’s got you confused?"
FNG: “VM. What’s a VM?”

The expression on my face must’ve been cue enough because he laughed a little uncomfortably. But all I can remember thinking was, “Are you fucking shitting me?” I must’ve personified that look.

DS: "Well… what do you think it means?"
FNG: "I dunno."
DS: "Have you consulted the vast font of knowledge that is Google?"
FNG: "Well, no…I’m not good at research."
DS: "…"
FNG: "heh heh…"
DS: "It’s Virtual Machine. We deal with three flavors. VirtualBox, Hyper-V, and ESXi."
FNG: “Oh…”

I can see the mouse on its running wheel trying to process what I’ve just told him. From a life prior to working with computers, I can tell he has no idea what I’m talking about. I e-mail him the SharePoint articles that I wrote on all three technologies, which also take from various sources around the webz.

He replies to my e-mail and the grammar and spelling are atrocious. This is a pet peeve of mine because at the time, the Infrastructure team interfaced a lot with Directors and C-level personnel. This guy was writing like he was my 15 year old nephew texting.

I sat in my office reading it and letting my irritation subside. I figure I’ll think it through and tackle this next week as well as begin to introduce him to some application administration I want him to take over.

Get into the office on Monday and he’s 2 hour late. No call. No e-mail to either myself or our Manager. He rolls in around 9:30am and I’m in my office doing my thing. He comes in and flops down into a chair and proceeds (unsolicited) to tell me about his girlfriend’s kids and how they’re a problem. I’ve known this guy all of 5 days, but I take it with a grain of salt and let the guy vent.

The ranting reaches a lull and I interject that we need to discuss some things. I bring up the e-mail and my concern that he didn’t know what a VM was. He tells me that this is just the way he types and he’s not going to change. He says he’s sorry about not knowing what a VM was. I make note of this, but tell him that I have some tasks for him to take care of. The tasks were, all in all, pretty simple. I needed for him to spin up a local VM using VirtualBox, download Visual Studio, install it, and follow the SharePoint instructions for setting up some password decryption tools we use. I let him know that each of these components is important for some of the applications I’m going to have him administer. He tells me he understands and will get it taken care of.

I drag the guy around to various meetings so that he can get acclimated. A week goes by and I ask how the VM is coming along and he tells me he hasn’t done it yet. I’m mystified and just ask why and he tells me that he didn’t really think it was important because he was studying what a VM was through Microsoft videos on YouTube.

I pull him into my office and try to keep the incredulity out of my voice and tell him that this is totally unacceptable. I tell him that my expectation is that this work gets done by mid-week so that I can keep training him.

Mid-week comes and it’s still not done. I go to my boss and I keep her in the loop about this and am told that I should be more flexible. So, I pull FNG into a small conference room and spend 4 hours of my day hand-holding with him to get all this work done.

2 more months of this shit go by with him being wholly inept before I finally insist that his probationary period be cut short.

Dude looked great on paper and interviewed really well, but he got in the chair and just refused to do anything without inordinately huge amounts of help. shake fist

11

Oh God.

“Get out.”

5 Likes
12

I stuck with a job way too long, and paid for it. I feel like I’m digging myself out of a hole I got myself into, and it’s not easy.

Basically, stayed at a job years more than I should have. kept supporting a PBX I really didn’t want to, had no access to newer tech, and no mobility. It was comfortable (I.E. easy most of the time) and paid reasonably well. Plus tons of vacation.

I left after being laid off/moved to another company that took over the IT contract for the place. Got a 90 day contract, then a couple of extensions. Working for the same asshole boss. The final straw came when I took the last extension with the provision that I got the scheduled time-off for my wedding and Asshole Boss made me hunt for someone to ‘swap on call’ with when I only had a couple weeks after said wedding to work. Thankfully one of the remaining good coworkers covered it.

I had an offer to go ‘full time’ but don’t regret not taking it. From what I understand, had I taken the full-time:

  • No promise of severance once I converted.
  • Would have had to drive to an office nearly an hour away twice a week for no known reason.
  • Still working for Asshole.
  • Still no mobility.

So I left:

  • Impressive severance, which I’ve mostly sat on.
  • Out of work.

I was unemployed for two weeks. Less than expected, even: I was just getting into “unemployment mode” when I got hired. It was a year contract gig, but I’ve been at that place for well over 2 years and they’re making progress on making me full time, have hit me with a raise, and generally appreciate me:

  • Bosses have actually said nice things about me.
  • Other “Big Cheeses” have said nice things about my performance.
  • Actually got a “hope you’re feeling better” when sick recently.

I’ve realized I have some definite PTSD I’m dealing with over old job. I’m really so unused to getting more than abuse and impossible projects from management and it’s an adjustment.

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13

I’ve been out of IT for about 18 years give or take, I can’t remember how long it’s been and that disturbs me, but you’ve given me the names of the software you want to use, and referenced a set of instructions. I think I could get it done in a couple days at worst.

And that’s not including sending up the batsignal here.

14

Right? It’s not rocket science - especially when I’ve provided documentation (with pictures, even) on how to do all these things.

That FNG is gone, thankfully. He’s gone off to some other place and is very likely skating by.

I’ve managed/led people, of a sort, in a previous life. I tried being hands-on. I tried being hands-off. I tried showing him on my own machine how to do things. I tried to sit in a room for (get this) 6 hours while he did this work and answer questions, but nothing was really working. All in all, just a really horrible fit.

I think in his new job he basically just manages creating users in Office 365 and configuring e-mail on iPads.

15

We had an employee walk out after 45 minutes on her first shift as a kennel worker. Because she didn’t know she was going to have to walk the dogs and handle poop and urine. You know, the ONLY TWO TASKS of a kennel worker.

And yes, that was part of the posted job description and interview. Either she thought we were joking or she paid no attention… :roll_eyes:

16

Rocket surgery is not in her future.

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17

But Alexis, didn’t you know she’s special and should not have to do those things? :slight_smile:

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18

She just wants the cute kittens and puppies!

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19

That’s what @Wife deals with at the clinic she works at. And I dealt with the same thing when I was a teenager and worked at a pet store years ago.

Working a vet clinic or pet store can be great for an animal lover, but you also see the ugly bits, a lot. The staff (in my experience) can make some really morbid jokes as a coping mechanism.

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20

Especially when you work with as many rescues as we do. The worst of the worst come through… Dogs that are aggressive. Sickly. Dying. All of the above. Broken puppies. Having to decide to we repair a leg or amputate it (I usually vote for amputate - fixes the problem everytime, is the least expensive, and has the fewest post-surgical complications. I am usually outvoted. And then thousands of dollars later they amputate. But I distress.). Trying to save things that really shouldn’t be saved. Watching them come in knowing many won’t make it out. Heartbreaking.

And I wouldn’t trade it for the world. :heart_eyes:

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