I was made redundant
...so off-topic somewhat, but anyway...

My ex-employers were kind/stupid enough to allow us all -- the entire staff of a magazine that had been sold off to a competitor -- to use our old office as a base for jobhunting (so we could use the fax, 'phones, photocopier etc). This left us free to strip our various PCs down to their cases, raid the software cupboard (it was a computer review magazine) and carry off any review kit that hadn't yet been returned.

However I think my crowning achievement was managing -- through sneaky use of the building's fire escape and rear exit -- to make off with the office laser printer. The thing weighed a bloody ton and I had to walk half a mile with it to catch the bus home.

Yes, I am a shameless, thieving gypsy bastard.
( reallywittyname veraciously conspues lexiphanicism on, Thu 22 May 2008, 15:04, 3 replies)

large Tesco like store
Not Tesco but a similar store in Ireland think guns but with a D and some extra letters. So this needs few lines of a back story but you can skip ahead if you want.

Still reading? Ok as a smaller danniemcq I tore my abdominal muscles sneezing (really bad hay fever) and as a hyper/stupid teenager it never really healed right and has torn again since a few times. One of them times involves this story.

Ok think that’s all the back-story required so working in said store on the Pasta aisle for few weeks and everything was grand. Slightly above min wage (€7.50ish an hour) 30 hours a week, working with some sound heads, sleep breaks on the toilet rolls in the store room, free food etc. the usual ya know.

So fateful day in question half the staff are off due to some bug going round, cramps, getting sick, sore head the whole 9 yards. I'm working away like a trooper till near lunch when I go to the store to get a box of pasta. Reaching up I get a sharp pain in my side that feels like I’ve been stabbed (not that I’ve ever been stabbed but I can imagine!) roll around on ground for while before getting sick EVERYWHERE and finally get to the toilet where I stay for a while. Eventually stagger out met my boss and he looks at me and does the usual what’s wrong. I tell him what I think but of course he knows different tells me to take an early lunch and come back in a while and I’ve just got that bug. The bastard actually had me believe I was just sick at the end of it.

So anyway I head home and come back an hour later. 2 mins of stacking a shelf and run/hop/stagger to the loo and there goes my dinner from 8 or 9 years back. I walk out of the toilet again and meet my Supervisor and general store manager, the floor supervisor makes some quip about me having the bug too. CUNT. I see red turn on my heel look straight at them and tell them/scream "it's not a fucking bug, I've torn my abdominal muscle again thanks you cunts. Take your job and shove it up your arse"

I walked out there and then got a taxi home and lay in bed for three days. Never went back except on beer or pizza runs and still have a locker key and I think my jeans are still there. meh

Sorry for length... or am I?
(Samantha Bricks Better half done a poo on, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:56, Reply)

No stylish ones yet
Since January of this year, I have been killing time between PhD and the real world (a job in the US which I start in 7 weeks!) by working a number of mindless drudgery-type jobs. These have included:
Tutoring inept students so that they don't fail immediately.
Invigilating exams for said students.
Updating a course for overseas students.
Running my college bar.
Catering at graduation events.
Data entry for the NHS
Receptionist for the NHS
PA to a PA to the head of some spiffy advertising company in central London.

Of these, I haven't actually quit many in any kind of style, as I knew they were temporary. However, I did cock up on 3 of them to such an extent that I will NEVER be welcomed back.

Invigilating exams - I fell asleep and fell off my chair at the back of the room. I'm not allowed to invigilate any more.

PA job - I paid in £6000 of cheques into the wrong bank (was meant to be HSBC, I went to Nationwide by mistake). This was after I had spent the morning cutting crusts off sandwiches for bigwig execs, so I wasn't too fussed. They were, so I am not welcome in the company again.

But best of all was working for the NHS. I had to enter details of people into their database, which was ok the first 10 times, but after 300 forms, I was losing the will to live. Especially once I was told that I had to ask permission of my fat lazy boss if i wanted to use the toilet. And the internet was banned, b3ta was blocked on the 2 occasions i managed to log in, and i wasn't allowed to listen to my walkman whilst i worked. So I started making slight changes to the database. It was only personal details, so a few people became transgender, a bloke called Mohammed* became Jewish, an elderly blind woman became an astronaut, and my personal favourite was entering 'lunatic' into the job field when one bloke had said that his next of kin was his sister and his wife - who happened to be the same woman... And on my last day, i edited the same person's details for the whole day, smeared Vaseline over the keyboard, and left. That showed 'em.

I'm looking forward to quitting the bar job soon, so i'll be reading these pages very thoroughly over the next week!


Apologies for length, but it's been 6 months...

*name changed to protect the innocent
( ascorbate, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:53, 5 replies)

In a jam
Many years ago, when I about 14, I went with some mates to do a summer job picking fruit (this is not a euphemism, so don’t start). It was a glorious hot summer, and every morning, Monday to Friday, we’d be picked up by bus at 8 o’clock and driven to the fruit farm. All we had to do was work our way along rows of fruit, picking gooseberries, raspberries and strawberries. None of which I liked, and so I could fill my bucket twice as fast as anyone else, who adopted the ‘one for the bucket, one for me’ approach.

Our wage was the princely sum of £2.50 per bucket. Marvellous. “Doesn’t matter if the berries are all squishy, lads,” the farmer told us, “they’re all going to be made into jam anyway”.

I don’t like jam either, by the way.

However, by about day three, and concerned as to how much he was paying out, the farmer decided to drop the value of each bucket by 50p. The tight-fisted, in-bred little shit. But, we carried on picking our assorted berries, and £2 per bucket still wasn’t bad in the grand scheme of things. It wasn’t as if we had bills to pay or anything. And happily, the sun shone on, and we had a grand time.

A couple of days into week two, and farmer tight-arse informs us that the price is going down again, to £1.75. Now, I wasn’t well versed in the art of employment practice, but surely, the longer you’ve been doing a job, the more your pay goes up? Doesn’t it? Apparently not, in this case.

Slightly peeved by this, our work rate and productivity went down a bit, understandably, but the sun still shone and it wasn’t a bad setting in which to be pissing around with your mates. However, on turning up the next morning, we were informed yet again that the price per bucket had gone down again, this time to £1.40.

This was the final straw – farmer tight-arse was really taking the proverbial now. “I’m sick of this – I’m not coming back tomorrow”, I said. My mates all agreed. But, since we were stuck there all day, we thought we might as well earn some more cash, and have a little fun into the bargain. And so it passed that, each time anybody needed a piss, we would do so in the buckets we were filling, and grin inanely as we handed each bucket back. Then we left, never to return again.

So if anyone out there was around in 1985, and thought that their Robertson’s fruit jams tasted slightly funny, I’m afraid that you have probably unwittingly consumed some of my very own piss (and that of my friends as well). I’m very sorry for that, but it’s proof that if you’re in business, you should never piss off your workers. Because they’ll just find a way to piss all over your business…
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Thu 22 May 2008, 14:48, 6 replies)

Once upon a time, in a far, faraway galaxy...
...some yellow writing about some kind of story glided through space at slow space, followed by a movie.

Anyway, 'bout a year and a half ago, I used to work for a large international BlueChip IT company, based in Peterlee (and other places around the country). I was working on an account for a large government department that used to be ran by David Blunkett. Anywho, the team I was on was a new project team, experimenting with doing first-time fixes, and trying to resolve issues before technical leads were consulted.

While working on this team, it was safe to say that most of the issue we received were very simple fixes that would take a matter of minutes to apply, and needless to say, became very monotonous very quickly.

After a few weeks of constantly doing the same fixes time and time again, I decided there must be an easier way to get these fixes done... maybes with a simple button press rather than say delving into someones Windows registry, or making amendments to their Active Directory profile, etc. I set about writing a small tool in Visual Basic that would take a computer name or user id, and make the propriate changes within a couple of seconds. After a couple of days work, and a few guinea pig sites, I decided I would share the tool with the rest of the team, and our team leader. Everyone was delighted with the toolkit that saved loads of time, and work, and it allowed us to focus on much harder work with the extra time we had.

After a couple of weeks of use, I was approached by one of the Operations Managers for said account, and my work had been brought to his attention by my team leader. They were very excited, and wanted me to write a similar, simpler toolkit for the Service Desk to use so all the first line agents could do the same fixes while on the phone to members of the government account. With the promise of a good bonus and recognition for my work, I eagerly started working on said tool.

Within a couple of weeks, I had the perfect tool for the Service Desk, with simplicity enough for anyone to use. Brilliant! ...yes, you would think that. But, that's when I realised just how much the management in that company were a bunch of cock-suckers!

A couple of months passed, and the tool worked great! First-time fix rates dramatically improved, customer satisfaction was high, problems were getting solved, all honky-dory! Then it suddenly dawned on me... all this was happening because of this little tool I had produced. Then I realised I hadn't had so much as a "Thanks", nevermind a good bonus I had been promised months before.

Over the space of a couple of months, things changed! Rapidly, and not necessarily for the good. The company had changes to be made... one of which was to move the account to SilverLink in Newcastle. I volunteered to be one of the first to move as I was starting to feel settled with the pressure the company was putting on me with them giving nothing back. The move was a complete failure. Two days in to the move, the government told us we couldn't use the computers anymore for security reasons. After 5 weeks without any access to the network, the company decided to ship us back to Peterlee. After 2 months of doing nothing, we were pushed from pillar to post with more and more jobs being pushed upon us.

After a brief holiday, I came to work to find nothing had changed and things were getting worse. From that point, I kept getting dragged in the office by both Operations Managers for bollickings over things I hadn't done. They basically bullied me. They tried bollicking me for being unhappy with the company. They bollicked me for doing my job correctly. They even bollicked me for helping them out with making that tool.

Enough was enough, I had to get out. I applied for numerous jobs... some many, I lost count. But, within a week, I had an interview with my current employers, and the following day, I was offered the job. I accepted with gusto (and I love this job too :-D).

At the point, I had so much pleasure handing in my resignation that I couldn't help but laugh out loud as I placed on the desk of the Operations Managers desk.

But, it didn't end there. I'm sure they just wanted to kick me in the ribs as much as possible before I left. Two weeks before leaving, they dragged me in the office, and told me that they'd take legal action on me if I tried to take my code for the toolkit (which I had no intent of doing). They also told me they'd take legal action if I tried to sabotage it (again, I had no intent). I basically laughed it off, and left on my last day without much problems.

I the decemeber of that year, I met up with a couple of old colleagues. They told me that the company had made some changes to the network one night a few days after I left, and caused chaos with the system, also making the lose the functionality of the toolkit I created. Not only that, the Operations Managers also tried to get people to give them my phone number... to which everyone told them to fuck off.

And that... really did show them!


Length? 'bout 720x420 pixels.
(ShaunyBoi has been surviving fires since, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:47, Reply)

Wish You Were Here?
Just remembered about a bloke from my last place of work. He took 3 weeks off for a brief jaunt around Europe with his wife, all this was done legally and it was part of his holiday entitlement, but the fact it was for 3 weeks in a row pissed off some of the managment at the office (Another reason behind this was that the tekky guy in question was one of the more qualified tekkys and some clueless sales bod had agreed to start a new system install for a pretty large client during the time tekky guy was away). The managment tried everything they could to cancel this blokes time off or at least limit it to 2 weeks and pissed him off no end with their pettyness (is pettyness a real word?).

Anywhoo tekky bloke goes on holiday and after his first week we recieve a postcard from him in Germany saying something along the lines of:

Having a great time drinking too much (as usual), please accept this as my two week notification of resignation.

Regards


Tekkybloke

A photocopy of this postcard was stuck to the noticeboard in the staff room even after I left the company.

Apologies for crap retelling of a decent story
(mon bison powered by magnets, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:46, 3 replies)

dont know about you
but i had quite a nice end to a redundancy...

i worked for a call centre which was due to be moved to bangalore. upon hearing this my team went crazy (as people tend to do in these situations) I, however, kept my head down, and continued to work. I had a family to keep, and couldnt afford being sacked before my redundancy.

a week passed, with people calling in sick, and a general dip in office performance.

I was then secretly offered £250 bonus if i stayed for 1 month, £500 if i stayed for additonal month, and an additonal £750 if i stayed until the full transition (3 months = £1500) This was seperate to the offered redundancy money.

I was then invited to Stornoway (where some of the operations ended up) to transist office operations. I was flown first class there and back Monday til Friday for 4 weeks all on expenses, I returned in my final wek to the original office to be then offered another new job within a different wing to the company.

I have never looked back.
(Dan dan dan They tik urh jerbs!!!, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:43, 3 replies)

Before I left school
I changed jobs more often than a chav changes his white sports socks.

They were all part time or weekend jobs, but I had as much sticking power as Rod Hull on a roof.

A few examples:

Sunday morning paper round - 3 weeks (kept sleeping in)
Charity "magazine" distribution - 2 weeks, didn't do the third week (it was raining)
Stable hand - four weeks (only paid half of what they promised)

Then, when I passed the magic 16th birthday, I could get a "proper" job at last. The small local supermarket had a permanent notice in the window "Weekend Staff wanted". I applied and was given a job on the spot. £2 per hour, 6 hours each Saturday and Sunday. £24 quid a week - yeehah, I thought I'd hit the big time.

No. I. Hadn't.

I'd just landed a job working for the dirtiest of all the dirty old men. The manager asked me, after supplying my uniform of a horrible nylon waistcoat to be worn over my own clothes, to check the sell by dates on the frozen food. Which meant leaning way over, into the freezer.

Yes, dear reader, he'd positioned me perfectly for a damn good grope at my bum. Which he proceeded to help himself to.

Now even at 16 I wasn't exactly a shrinking violet (no, really) and I sure as hell wasn't putting up with that. I straightened up, turned around, and looked him in the eye. Called him a "dirty old bastard" and went into the back shop. I took off the waistcoat, dropped it on the floor, put on my coat and went home.

Time spent in shop? About 20 minutes, total.

When I told Mum and Dad what had happened, the debate on what to do raged for a good while. Mum wanted to call the police, Dad wanted to go down and beat seven shades of shit out of him, then burn the shop, then call the police.

In the end, my brother suggested calling the supermarket's Head Office and threatening to call the police. Dad pounced on that idea, phoned them threatening a sexual assault charge, and got a full month's pay out of them for me (not bad for 20 minutes). He also made damn sure they were going to sack the manager, and sure enough he disappeared shortly after. They could have just moved him to another branch, I suppose, but at least the teenage girls round our way were safe.

I never applied for another job there, preferring to continue my varied, if short lived, employment elsewhere.

Actually not quite on topic as I never uttered the words "I quit" and I didn't flounce out - I stormed out in a rage. Close enough, though.
(TheWeeWitch hasn't been here much recently .., Thu 22 May 2008, 14:40, 5 replies)

not on topic in the slightest
but a bomb has recently gone off in Exeter city centre and apparently there are a few more dotted around.

a couple of restaurants and WHSmiths....

Might lead a few to quit perhaps...
( Vipros. clever got me this far, then tricky got me in, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:37, 6 replies)

I quit
I used to work in a wel known electronic store. my boss was a complete twat.. so on my last day he gave me the shittiest job, of putting components into bags and putting them onto the hooks in the store. i made a point about putting all of the components into the wrong bag, with the wrong price on the wrong hook. he must of figured something was up as i wasnt rally known for putting effort into mundane jobs. but then he was a twat so he might not have noticed for polishing his own ego
( Kingtoke was shit at life on, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:35, 1 reply)

Many moons ago...
...during A Level time, I had a psychotic old hag of a psychology teacher (oh the irony- mentalist she was). Her idea of teaching was to bark random questions at you and then berate you if you didn't know the answer immediately. No explanations, no helpful hints, nothing.

Anyhoo, I spent the majority of my formative school years stoned out of my mind and would happily smoke bongs before going to school and waterfalls at lunch time. Prior to that I'd always been a bit of a geek and my grades never suffered as a result. However, not surprisingly, I sometimes found it a struggle to make it into classes, particularly ones taken by said evil harpy. One day she took me into her little office at the side of her classroom and demanded to know why I was missing so many classes. I just said I'd been a bit ill, blah blah, outright lies which she should really have been expecting.
So what does she do? Threaten to put me on report? Or tell my folks? Speak to the head of year? No,no, she tells me that I must immediately make an appointment with the doctor and then come back and tell her in great detail exactly what the diagnosis is! Even though I was lying, the fact that she had the audacity to demand such a ridiculous thing - has she never heard of privacy, or tact - really riled me, particularly as I hated the stupid cow anyway.
So we got into a huge row about it and I stormed out of her office and back into the class where everyone was waiting. She followed me and said the fateful words; 'Are you finished?'. Ah, ha, no i'm bloody not, thinks I and proceeded to tell her just what a poor teacher she was - not just a vitriolic attack but a frank, honest and constructive criticism of all the reasons she was so bad at her job. And then I flounced out.

Turns out she went home that day crying and the head of humanities, my fantastic history teacher, had to cover for her all day. He thanked me the next day in his lesson for telling her exactly what everyone was thinking, and even said he was surprised I hadn't given her a good slap!
I didn't go back to the lessons for a further week; she was demanding an apology before she would allow me back. I discussed this with my head of year and at the end of the week went to her and said that although I was sorry for the way that I spoke to her and the fact that it happened in front of a full classroom, I wasn't sorry for the things I said as I meant every word.
In my end of year report I was praised for my mature handling of the situation. In hindsight it was pretty mean but I honestly think it improved her behaviour towards pupils somewhat and helped her become a better teacher. It certainly made her think twice before picking on me again which was a blessing. It also gave a couple of the other teachers an opportunity to talk to her about some of her behaviour which until that point they had been reluctant to do. All in all a pretty good result.

Sorry that was a bit of an essay - the memory of her still winds me up 10 years later!
(Moniker1, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:32, 1 reply)

While at Uni
I had to take a part-time job as a stockroom worker for Currys, not great but my needs for funding were such that I could overlook the mind-numbing work.

The work was shite, made me come in and cover shifts for fucking silly reasons, had me helping customers take fridges that weighed twice me halfway across the car park (it was a big commercial park) and generally making me do really shitty tasks. Fuckers even made me work Christmas time and New Year - for no extra money.

I lasted about a year of this, not one to be defeated so easily, but Christmas was fast approaching again and I was not going to be doing that again (I enjoy visiting family in the holiday periods, despite the fact that they are as dysfunctional as a box of mad frogs on LSD).

I gave my notice and set about levelling the field of injustices (I'm incredibly petty about these things).

Final day, Saturday, working from opening to closing (12h shift, not uncommon) set about doing the usual routine at start up, but instead of arming all the security systems - I yanked them out, being the only one in for the first hour had it's advantages (and being that me and the security guard were as thick as thieves helped immensely s he helped me dispose of the cabling I had removed when he arrived 10 minutes before opening).

Next stop was the central dvd machine - for those who know, this is the bad boy that is connected to all the display tellies out on the floor that show the usual crap advertising that all Currys seem hell bent on pumping out on their shop floors. One hardcore porno and a bottle of super glue later time for my last stop.

Managers office, specifically managers computer which had all the video tape recordings on it; and I had the password (silly bint gave it to me when I asked for access to customer records to sort a delivery out - wtf?).

Logged in, still had 15 minutes before any of the staff showed up, had a good ol' browse - deleting any evidence of my tampering, and downloading a folder called 'Evidence'. Turns out that she had been taking recordings of some of the sale staff doing *cough* favours for each other (top people for sale scum). Delete.

Waited for everyone to show up, a smile and a wink for some of the staff in the vids (well I had to watch, it would have been insulting not too......what?!?), manager shows up, 15 minutes of spouted crap and buzzwords, then break to start the day.

And out I walked, never to come back again.

At my leavings drink that night, the sales staff came in to find me propping up the bar already (having been there since I walked out of work) and cheering me for my 'interesting' sabotage. Spent the rest of the evening having trays of shots that tasted like gummi bears bought for me.

Turns out no-one was tech savvy enough (or willing as it may have turned out) to unplug the dvd player, or change the channel on the display TV's, so instead they were all turned off. Made for interesting sales pitches when customers wanted to see one working, or when the little bastard kid kept coming in and turning them on at random (incidentally, the porno I chose may have involved a woman being pleasured quite vocally by a horse, you can buy anything on the internet these days).

Length? A horse's wang on a 52" plasma is very sizeable I'm told.......what?!?

After note - This place was horrible to work at, truly awful and only the fact that it was paying for my beers to bleach my mind of the experience kept me there. I went on to do some minor IT support for a school later on which was much better, not to mention more money, and access to 6th form Girls who wanted to know all about what uni was really like.... ;)
(UncleChuckles "Cthulhu fhtagn", Thu 22 May 2008, 14:27, 1 reply)

Of jobs and quitting....
I once found myself stuck in the mother of all shitty helpdesk jobs.

A very small firm, no regulation of software releases - dealing with the retail industry, and forcing it's staff to work 14 hours (7am to 9pm) on a Saturday, one weekend in 3. The developers had a fantastic habit of releasing untested software updates to the various retail chains that used the companies hardware / software, and the support (me and 2 others) had to try and pick up the pieces the next day when 400 + stores would call up, telling us to sort it or else.

The managers ground down your soul until you were convinced that this was it, you couldn't do any better and you were going to spend all eternity there, at their whim.

Life was shit.

One Friday, after a particularly crappy incident, when displaying proof of others ineptitude to the managers, I was told to "Sit the fuck down and be grateful that you've still got a job." I wrote my notice by hand, there and then, and handed it to my boss.

I didn't have a job to go to. But fuck it, the dole was better than working in that shit hole. I had never before considered being on benefits, but even the vast quantity of marijuana that I was partaking in at the time wasn't enough to block the pain that place brought upon me.

So, the days moved forwards towards my impending departure. It dawned upon me that I had been slowly destroyed as a human being over 18 months, and my blood began to boil.

As it turned out, I had managed to get my last day as a Saturday, and would leave the place at 9pm on that day.

Preparations were made.

I stopped going to the toilet on Wednesday. I managed to avoid crimping a length off for 3 days, and I increased my food intake until I was barely able to walk, such was the strain placed upon my balloon knot.

Arriving at the office on Saturday, walking like John Wayne, and with a thin sheen of sweat on my forehead, I calmly took my appointed place at my desk and worked. 13.5 hours later, it was time.

They only had 2 single toilets in the building, each one a self contained cubicle with bog and sink. The ground floor was my first target.

As I sat on the throne and gritted my teeth, I wondered if I had made a mistake. My vision went slightly blurry as I strained to unleash the beast within. Thankfully, I was the only person in the building, so no one else could hear my howling as I began giving birth to a U-blocker of epic proportions.

I started to wonder if I was going to need to call the hospital after I was done on that toilet, but, slowly, the pain passed, and I found myself in a position to crimp off a log early, splitting the winnings if you will, and tactically move up to the second toilet located on the first floor.

Thankfully, the second pan-cracker passed more peacefully than his brother, although it too had the desired effect. Soon, both chod bins were loaded with what could only be described as a scale model of the andes mountain range.

I walked slowly back downstairs and finished the last part of my shift. I had shed about 40% of my mass in those 2 toilets, and when the end of the day came, I left, without flushing, and leaving the doors wide open, never to return to that hell hole.

I heard that when the staff for the next shift turned up, not only did the entire building smell like Satan's ringpiece, but the attempt to flush was met with complete failure of the 80's plumbing.

Apologies for length, but it was a 3 day accumulation....
(Ryushin, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:22, 3 replies)

true
Some might remember that I worked very briefly as a rep. This is obviously the worst concivable job for someone like me, who has no social skills and who hates everyone. I lasted about six weeks until my boss came to observe one of my 'welcome meetings'.

The purpose of this was to grab tourists straight off the plane and sell them excursions in a jaunty voice, pointing out all the attractions of the island. We had scripts, but on this occasion I went slightly off script:

Hi - welcome to the beautiful isand of Cephallonia [pause for ironic expression]. There are loads of facilities in this small village - two bars, a restaurant and a hairdressers. There's no car hire, no post office, no bank and no supermarket [pause for jaunty wink]. There is a bus, but it goes before six in the morning so you'd be better off on one of our excursions, a snip at 100 times the cost [jauntiness at maximum effect].
If you need to ask me any questions, I'll be outside your hotels in the early hours of the morning and when you're on the beach. Don't come to me when you're sunburned or injured because you got too drunk - that's your own problem [laugh jauntily]. Any questions? No? Right, I'm off for a free meal at the taverna.

Within hours, my company car had been taken away and I was on the ferry off the island.
(frankspencer, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:17, 4 replies)

On my last day of office job;
I stapled a sausage to one of my colleagues doors.

Was then hauled in to see the MD and sacked for a 'racial attack' as my colleague was called Ian Krauss.



*may not be completely true*
(gin'll fix it, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:04, 3 replies)

I used to work for a food factory
(Slightly off topic)

Between Uni and REAL work, I got a temp job working in the same factory as my dad did. My dad was a technician and i was employed as a packer.

We used to make all sorts, donuts, jelly, fudge, and marshmallow. Basically we made confectionery goods.

It got shit when the orders started to dry up and so did the work, so we used to take boxes of food home.

That part of the story isn’t really funny, the part that is - is how I can recall in front of shocked friends in the pub how I used to Pack Fudge with my dad... yes - I was a fudge packer... he made it I packed it. It was messy, but it paid for my weekend’s beer.
(Dan dan dan They tik urh jerbs!!!, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:02, 1 reply)

I used to work...
in a pub 'at the side of the woods', if you live in Manchester you might know it, and after being interviewed I was really excited about the perks of the job;

-free meal on shift
-free drink after shift
-free taxi home
-pay rise after initial 3 months
-time and a half on sundays & after 12 o'clock

After a week of working there, I realised that all of the above were untrue and my boss was an absolute psychopath of a woman. It was as if she had a split personality disorder, her mood/attitude towards her staff could swing from one end of the scale to the other within an hour or so...

Putting up with her shit for nearly two years, it was approaching Christmas and New Year; the busiest time of year for the pub. Especially Christmas day, £50 a head booked months in advance, massive amount of preparation and effort went into planning a smooth event.

On Christmas eve, I was in the pub having a few drinks and some food with four of five of my closest friends when boss-witch approaches our table and asks us to hurry up and finish so she can give our table to customers waiting who would spend more money than us. Astounded, I waited till she had left our table and took her aside and explained that we'd be staying all night and putting a considerable amount (at full price) behind her bar.

She. Flipped.

Screamed at me in front of all the customers and regulars about my lack of respect, attitude to work and loyalty to her. Told me after the week was out I wouldn't be required (after xmas & ny obviously)

Not rising to it, my friends and I left without causing any trouble and moved on to plot my departure.

I was due in work at 10 a.m. the next day to begin the set up for Christmas day. However I turned up a little earlier than expected with a large padlock that conveniently fitted through the hole that locked the barrier across the car park entrance.

Ever tried to call out a locksmith on Christmas day?

I heard shortly after that she couldn't get the lock off until 4 p.m. and the pub took less than 15% of it's expected earnings.

Feel a little bad about it now as I might've ruined a few peoples Christmas days but there was plenty of other better pub/restaurants locally that didn't require ridiculous charges and advance bookings.
(gin'll fix it, Thu 22 May 2008, 14:00, Reply)

I worked as a Kitchen Porter while doing my GCSEs.
They promised me "you'll be out before 10.30 every night, so don't worry. Work hard and you'll be fine."

The earliest I ever left was 12.45, the chef was a total cunt who would take trays out of the oven and actually throw them at/to me. Hilarious when he's got the only pair of oven gloves on. He used to throw sharp knives into a sunk full of washing-up water while my hands were in there and shout "look out" afterwards.

I quit after two weeks by going up to the hotel manager's office and saying "I'm packing it in, I'm sorry."
she asked why, and I said
"I need more time to do my school work and I'm just here too late each night. And incidentally your chef is a total fucking cunt."
her reply?
"Yes, he is, but his brother owns the place, so we can't fire him." And she gave me a beer and a taxi home, which at 16 was just about the best present ever.
( Mockingbird Practitioner of SCIENCE, Thu 22 May 2008, 13:56, Reply)

Drunk MD, threatened with a rock, called a liar, racism, sexism, questionable accounts
all sound like the perfect ingredients for a recruitment office but no. I had the pleasure of working for a small IT recruitment company in the SouthWest. Actually I imagine some of you know who they are, i wont say the name but its similar a popular car insurer,oh yes!, just change a letter and the order of the words. Anyway I digress, The MD would go off everyday about 11 and if he came back about 5ish he would be drunk. Phrases like "off the boat" were banded around about foreign candidates and even racist songs where sung. People would take 2,3 hr lunch breaks because they could and it wasn’t uncommon to come back into the office and find people watching porn on the pc’s or playing games. As fun as it sounds it was fucking shite. People were angry with the MD for the situation of the office the accounts team were so useless they couldn’t pay anyone, well actually that was down to the MD too but I cant say much more about that but im sure you can figure it out. Oh and I got offered out of the office by my team leader and he had a rock in his hand. Strangely he is a great guy now. The place changes people. Anyway I digress that builds a picture of why it was shit but that’s not why I quit. I quit because after 18 months of working my arse off and trying to make a go of it the MD comes in one day and takes me downstairs,

MD - Bobby why have you only made 3 permanent placements in the past 9 months?
BP - I have made a lot more than that where are you getting your figures?
MD - XXXXXXXXXX told me! He said you only made 3 placements im going to have to discipline you
BP – do you not want to ask me about it or see my figures?
MD – I trust xxxxxxxxxxxx completely he is my eyes and ears when im not here.
BP – oh so you must have seen a lot of porn and heard some lovely adapted nursery rhymes then?

That didn’t go down to well and then he opened his mouth and said

MD – how dare you, how dare you, don’t talk to me like that and the rant went on for a good two minutes while I sat there looking at his red stained teeth and the sweat on his balding head. I had enough and quit. Got two months pay out of it. Which was handy as I took 6 weeks off and played golf everyday, with my ipod on and a few doobies (still a cool word) in my bag.

Due to the accounts the company was bought out by the MD’s old boss and was soon found to be in a dire financial situation indeed. Rather than pump money in which was the plan, he fired everyone else and the new boss took all the contractors. I believe they are still trading with a staff of 3, old md, his wife, and some poor kid who isn’t being paid.

Apologies for length, I spent 18 months there, it made me a bit mad.
( SteveFrench Cardio is for homo's. do you even lift bro?, Thu 22 May 2008, 13:55, Reply)

And the other time I worked for Zee Germanss...
I've told stories in the past about them, but I suppose it bears repeating myself a little here...

When I graduated from Engineering school I had been working for several months in a German-owned semiconductor plant as a Process Sustainer. What does that mean? Simply put, if one of the machines stopped in mid-process I had to recover the wafers (carefully), measure the film thickness on them, then calculate a new polishing time for them to salvage them. Also, when we ran the qualification tests on the machines to ensure that they were running properly, if they failed the test I was the one who made adjustments to them to get them to run again. This meant that I had to work on shift, specifically the night shift. It meant working from 7:00 pm to 7:00 am on a two-days-on two-days-off rotation, which meant that in order to see my girlfriend or my kids I had to shift my sleep cycle on my days off. And that translates to a permanent case of jet-lag.

So the plan was for me to graduate, work as a sustainer for a year and then move into an engineering position. I graduated (and immediately got a serious pay raise, as I was now a degreed engineer) and continued working as a sustainer... for the next three years.

See, that plant has a high turnover rate among people in supervisory capacities, mainly because they ask the supervisors to accomplish things and then set roadblocks in their way. I went through three supervisors in my time there, and the last one didn't like me much because the Maintenance guys resented having an engineer working on shift with them and took to badmouthing me and sabotaging me at every opportunity. I tried pleading my case, to no avail. I was stuck in that department with no hope of getting off shift and being an engineer.

Meanwhile they expanded the plant, which meant that the sustainers were spread thinner. They hired a few more and promoted a few people into that position, some of whom I trained. The only thing was that everyone wanted to work the new equipment, which meant that no one wanted to come over to the older section where I was to relieve me for lunch or breaks, and the woman who was supposed to be working with me insisted that they were far too busy to spare her to cover for me. As a result I was pulling pretty much an entire twelve hours on the floor and even when I went down for food I was called on the radio and often had to go back up to take care of something that the Maintenance clowns had done to make a machine stop processing, which meant that I came back an hour later to cold food.

The last straw was my annual evaluation. I was given poor marks and was going to be subjected to disciplinary action because of two errors I had made in the past six months.

That. Was. IT.

I called for a meeting with HR and outlined all of the above. The disciplinary action was dropped and I was told I would be getting my raise, but I was still to be a sustainer for the foreseeable future because they couldn't get anyone else. I replied simply that this was not acceptable, and I was resigning as of that moment.

I saw panic flare in the eyes of all of them as they realized the impact of this. They told me to take the weekend off with pay and think about it and get back together with them on Monday morning, which I agreed to do. But when Monday rolled around and I asked them once again if they would transfer me to another department as an engineer they still refused, so I flatly told them I was done. Half an hour later I was outside with a box full of my stuff from my desk.

Fast forward a year and a half. I was back there again as a contractor, working in the Facilities group, pulling 8-5 and getting paid a lot more. My job took me back up onto the floor sometimes, and I stopped by to see my old co-workers.

Apparently after I left they forced the woman who refused to work the older machines to do exactly that. On top of that, no one would come over to relieve her for any breaks, so she was permanently pissed off, and was in fact now going through a divorce as well. My old supervisors were found to be incompetent and had been either demoted or forced to find another position elsewhere in the company, where they could do less harm. The Maintenance clowns who had made my life hell had been put into supervisory capacities and were now understanding why I had protested when they refused to replace parts as I had asked, and now had to deal with snippy Maintenance techs themselves- and their attitude toward me was vastly changed, to say the least.

It's not often that you quit and then get to see the effects of your absence on a company, but I got to. Apparently I set an avalanche in motion in that department.

Have fun, you miserable twats.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 22 May 2008, 13:54, Reply)

Quitting
.
Not me, but my boss on one of my contracting jobs. He knew exactly how much I was getting paid and it was about three times what he earned. It was really getting on his tits.

Now this was a proper boss. A techie. He was as least as good as I was, if not better - and he knew it. So why was he settling for a third of what I was getting paid? Job security and paid holidays. But he weighed up the pros and cons, talked to me endlessly about the life of a contractor and finally bit the bullet. He quit.

My slave-traders (agency) fixed him up with a long term rolling contract (as rare as hens teeth) with one of the most famous banks in the world. He was on 55 quid an hour. After his first month he rang me up and we went on one of the most decadent piss-ups ever. He spunked about £500 on just the two of us that night. Good times.


Then the next Monday morning arrived and he turned up for work to find the bank locked and was told to go home by a harassed HR droid.

Poor Shaun. His first contract was with Barings Bank at the exact time that Nick Leesons naughties hit the front page....

He got his old job back.

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Thu 22 May 2008, 13:53, Reply)

Can somebody tell me what is going on? Please?
Hmm. This may not be completely on topic, but it does concern my current job. I would quit, but the cost would be far too great.

First, some background. I’ve worked in the public sector since 1991. I’ve worked across several departments, moving between them either due to promotions or just fancying a change. But my service transfers over, and I don’t have any break in service. I’ve been in my current job about 19 months now, and can honestly say that I mostly enjoy it. However, these last few weeks have become increasingly tiresome, not because of the work (at least, not wholly), but because of the management wranglings going on at a higher level than us mere mortals get paid to understand.

Namely, as the current board sig will testify, the blight that is restructuring. Because of the changes that are happening in local government up here, our board of directors has decided that we need to restructure the organisation in order to be ‘fit for purpose’. Fit for purpose. Hmm. Isn’t that what we should be anyway, or have I missed something in translation?

This restructuring has been going for a year now, and many people have either been moved around internally, doing either the same job, or something slightly different, or have been made to disappear. My team (I do rural stuff) was finally subject to a matching exercise on Monday, which involved our head of team meeting with ‘Human’ Resources and looking at people’s job descriptions in comparison with what jobs are available, according to the new job descriptions that have been drawn up. It’s now Thursday, and no one from ‘Human’ Resources has been in touch with anyone in the team to discuss the matter of whether we still have a job or not, or if we are surplus to requirements.

In the meantime I’m trying to get some work completed on a particular aspect of the funding programme I’m working on signed off, but am being stalled by arguments raging at a national level regarding what we can and can’t do. I’m not convinced that the people doing the arguing actually fully understand the concept of the programme they are arguing about, as they seem to want definitive outcomes and indicators laid out. Which, by the very nature of the initiative, is difficult to quantify as it’s an overarching programme that will generate individual projects as it develops. So I’m in a bit of a stalemate situation. Meanwhile, we have groups that will be delivering this overarching programme chomping at the bit to get started and wanting to know when the money will be coming their way. And we can’t tell them, because we honestly don’t know.

On a personal level, if I still have a job, great. I’m 99% convinced that I will; what I’m not so sure about is where I’ll be. If I find myself walking out the door, I’ll pick up a nice little redundancy package for my troubles, based on my years of service and current salary, which is the highest I’ve ever earned. So I’m not really too concerned either way. Plus it would be a massive kick up the arse for me to go and try something different. I’d be reasonably confident of finding another job quite quickly, but if I didn’t, theoretically my pay off would see me through for a couple of years minimum. However, some of my colleagues will not be so lucky if they are made redundant, because they don’t have the same level of service, and any redundancy payments received wouldn’t be that significant. Some of them are already looking elsewhere, but quitting isn’t an option for anyone as we’d all forfeit our pay-offs.

So, four days on, and with the outcome of the matching exercise complete, why has nobody from ‘Human’ resources been in touch to discuss the results yet? Is it too much to ask to get a date in our diaries for these discussions?

Bunch of arsewits, the lot of them.
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Thu 22 May 2008, 13:52, 7 replies)

I used to work for the co-op
and had an utter cunt of a manager, who was hated by 90% of the staff*, the remaining 10% being a bunch of harpies who wanted to fuck him for a raise.
Anyway, he had an annoying habit of changing my hours without telling me (usually from starting at 9 to starting at 6:30), thus me getting a call at 6:35am, shouting at me as to why I wasn't there.

Anyway, having only been there for 3 weeks, I decided to implement the instant get out clause I was entitled to. One night, at about 9pm, I went in, told the night manager what I was doing, who instantly congratulated me (he hated the day manager too), and wished me well. I head up to the bosses office, stack my uniform on his desk in a neat pile, with a handwritten note on top, simply stating 'I Quit'.

not overly exciting, but apparently this fucked him up for the following 2 weeks, as there was no-one else capable of doing my work, which meant that *GASP* the manager had to do it

*no more so than by jane, (a lovely woman), who had a birthday party, and invited him out of courtesy, not expecting him to attend. But he did, he also got pissed, and told her that "if i was 10 years older, and you were 10 years younger, I still wouldn't fuck you".
this went done rather well with her 2, very large, armed forces sons, who proceeded to kick approximately 13 metric fucktons of shit out of him, along with 4 teeth, and cracking his jaw, so "he couldn't talk like a cunt to anyone else". The manager decided against pressing charges, as he worked out what might happen to him next if he did
( lo, the Greebo Warrior - Est. 2002, Thu 22 May 2008, 13:49, 1 reply)

My last job.
I quit because I got robbed with a fucking big knife.

That showed them.
(geordiedave is reliving the time Southgate missed that penalty, Thu 22 May 2008, 13:46, Reply)

Not so much an "I quit!" but a "You can't sack me!"
and this is why:

Because Bad Things Happen When I Leave Every Other Job. Fact.

The last day I worked at my first job, working for a prestigious university in Scotland, the department next door to ours burnt down.

The next job that I left, nothing happened apart from I got a bit drunk at my leaving do.

Then the next job I had, I worked in an art gallery, which was burgled the night before my last day, which meant that my last day was No Fun At All.

The next job I left, nothing happened, apart from I got a bit drunk at my leaving do.

Watch out, theatre!
(happylittletulip helpless and delicious, Thu 22 May 2008, 13:40, 3 replies)

i've worked for myself the past 2 years, so i can't quit (or be fired)
but i do have to work for clients doing computer graphical stuff. the closest i came to being fired was for an arsehole who expected a whole days work done in 2 hours without a proper brief ("make it better")

When i tried to work to this pace he kept moving the goal posts ("i want it clubby! you've given me poppy! even though you've done what i told you!)

also, under these conditions there was no chance of doing any error checking as i went a long, so there was always a high possibility of fuck ups. so when it did go wrong i got the blame and the snivelling little shit wrote a nasty email to my agent complaining about me. it arrived just after my email stating i never wished to work with that company ever again for the reasons above.
( monstrinho do biscoito teeeshurts = www.nogunarmy.com, Thu 22 May 2008, 13:30, Reply)

iQuit
/Steve Jobs resignation letter
( The Great Architect is still waiting for his account to be deleted on, Thu 22 May 2008, 13:30, Reply)

Death of a salesman
It must have been the summer I was 17 - or 19 - I really forget which. It wasn't the summer I was 18, that summer I spent working in a chocolate powder factory just outside of Cologne. Just because the word "chocolate" is in the description of where I was working - don't be fooled. That was Satan's old job, but as I didn't quit under interesting circumstances, it's not going into this QoTW.

Right then, I was 17 - or 19. It doesn't really matter which one I was, I was still a spotty herbert who looked far too young to be knocking on doors except during Scouting week.

But my mad friend was spending the summer holidays working as a carpet cleaning salesman. He was vague about the financial details, but I was young enough not to find this lack of hard information alarming. But commission was payable - once you had closed a sale. He suggested I joined him - I agreed, having nothing better to do.

And so it came to pass that a bunch of teenagers were dropped off somewhere in South London, armed only with leaflets and clipboards, all cheap suits and nervous smiles.

The script was simple "Hello I'm from xyz and we're in *your* area next week cleaning carpets and can offer you a..." and generally, that was as far as you got.

It's fairly terrifying knocking on stranger's doors. Even worse when your mission is to actually enter their house and close that door behind you.

Not that that happened more that once. The first time I started my sales spiel, I was distracted from the script by the fact that the door had been opened by someone who, solely in the act of opening a door and asking me what I wanted, revealed themselves to be camper than a row of tents. I stammered, stuttered, started the script and then found that I had spoonerised the company name, mentioned in the first sentence of the script. The company was called, no word of a lie, Courtney Hunt.

I realised what I had had said a second or two after saying it; I didn't think it was possible to blush any more than I was before coming out with a word which - although it described something my would-be customer might not have experienced, I'm sure he knew the meaning thereof.

I didn't get the sale.

Or the next one, or two, or seventy. My friend and I began to suspect that as the new boys, we had been given the crap leads - this was "Glen Garry Glen Ross" on the wrong side of Surbiton.

Finally, I got into someone's house - as the child on the door said "come in and talk to Mummy about it" - which I did, and then Mummy went mad at me for entering her house, and she and their dog escorted me before I could so much as measure up the hall carpet.

Giving up, I went into a pub. And did a sale to the landlord - who warned me not to phone him during working hours when confirming the quote.

My friend and I knocked off. 16 hours work between the two of us, one sale.

Went back to the office. Handed over the sale sheet. Was told "phone the customer back to confirm". Mentioned the bit about it being a pub, and better not to disturb him. Over-ruled by the "boss" whose commission was riding on the sale.

Rang up pub, got told to fuck off by the landlord.

My sales career ended that day.

Apologies for length, but as we're in the area we'll clean that for half the going rate.
( I_Was_Mordred, Thu 22 May 2008, 13:22, 1 reply)