Got told to go help someone and they got in my face yelling for looking at a piece of equipment they were having problems with. Next day I said I wouldn’t work with them and got told that I can’t pick who I work with. It turns out that you actually can pick who you work with.

I was a line cook for a hilton hotel restaurant. It was easy, and I’d been there for about a year. They had a position open up, night shift supervisor. Basically the same hours I was already working, just have to do a bit of admin on the side. I was the only one working there that had a degree instead of an arrest record, was just looking for a bit of extra money, so I applied thinking I’d be a shoe-in.

Well they wanted the night-shift supervisor to be able to spontaneously feed a hypothetical group bigwigs that would surely show up the second I was left in charge (This is not a nice hotel, btw, we never had big wigs.). So they brought in another candidate, and decided to have us do a cook-off with surprise ingredients. I was like, what? This is ridiculous, they wanted me to invent a new dish that wasn’t on the menu (I made $10/hr). I lost the cooking challenge (I made tuna melts lol), but the guy who won declined the position (real smart of him).

So did they then offer it to the only internal candidate seeking the position? nope! just kept looking for someone else. Came into my next shift, and the waiters came back during a huge rush with like, 5-6 special off-menu orders they wanted me to accommodate (not related to allergies or anything). I got halfway through cooking the first one, and then just… crashed out. Said “nope! fuck this.” clocked out, left.

They called me for the next few days trying to get me back. “But you promised you wouldn’t be upset if we didn’t give you the supervisor position!” yup, I did say that. I changed my mind. Fuck you and that hotel.

Found a better paying job the next week.

I worked for a pretty big university here in the U.S. Not a premier research school, but pretty big nonetheless.

About a week before classes start, I get a call from the department head. They’re cancelling the classes in the specialization I teach due to low enrollment. He’s shuffled my schedule (expected) but one of my classes will be one I’ve never taught before and have absolutely no business teaching.

Now, mind you, this university has been going down hill for a while. Tenure was eliminated in all but name. Funding slashed. Class sizes exploded. Pressure increased to get federal grants to “make up the funding losses” while the school gives you absolutely no support in navigating the federal grant maze. No raises for years, except one small boost to make our salaries match a “sister school” that really wasn’t.

I told my department chair I couldn’t teach a course I knew nothing about. He relented and agreed to shuffle things around some more and put me in an old class I taught years back. I pulled out my old course materials, opened the textbook, started updating my old syllabus, and realized I just didn’t care anymore.

I’d been repeatedly fucked over again and again by these people and I was done. Honestly, I broke down and cried on my spouse’s shoulder for half an hour.

I called back the department chair and told him I quit. He said he didn’t blame me and wished me luck.

The silver lining? I now run my own software business (SaaS), get up around 10 am, add features whenever I feel like it, and draw a modest paycheck. My stress is way, way down and I’m learning to love my boss (me).

I was 10 minutes late one day and the boss started screaming in front of all other workers when I was everyday at work after my time to help the other workers (truck drivers), sometimes an hour.

When all the drivers left I rushed to the office and told him that I was leaving that same moment. “My own father doesn’t scream to me, you are not gonna do it”. And left in August from an ice cream business.

I waited until they left because they didn’t have to pay for what the boss had done.

Rage quitting is overrated. Just do nothing at work. Odds are, no one will notice. And you keep getting paid to do nothing.

At the last hospital I worked at, a nurse was badly injured on the job for something totally out of her control. Probably shouldn’t give more details than that so I don’t dox her or myself.

Instead of giving her worker’s comp and helping her recover, the hospital fired her over some completely unrelated frivolous bullshit (along the lines of "a patient overheard you using profanity while talking to a co-worker). This was also like a couple months away from her becoming vested in their retirement program.

I’m just a tech, but it was abundantly clear that giving my time to that company would be an incredibly risky move - fuuuuck that. I put my notice in the next day.

I hope she sued the absolute fuck out of them.

The last job I quit our manager and his manager both got fired for doing some bullshit so I ended up being the defacto manager of our department handling the minor day to day customer issues while we were basically otherwise unsupervised. After like 4-5 months they transferred another manager to us from a separate location who immediately started gunning for me. He tried writing me up 3 times in a matter of like two weeks over little bullshit things. None of which stuck because it had to go through HR and when I explained my reasoning for doing those things they were like “wtf, no” and dropped it. The weekend after the third one I was talking to one of my brother’s friends who’s dad ran a shop about it and he called his dad and got me hired there the next monday (which was really cool of him because I didn’t think we were that good of friends). Never went back to the other job or even told them I was quitting.

I was a freelancer for about a decade, and only ever walked off of one job site. It was because of safety concerns and one asshole. I was a stagehand, setting up lighting, decking, and audio gear for a musical in a local megachurch. I was in charge of a crew for this job, through a local labor company; Church hired the company to provide labor, who hired me as a subcontractor to make sure things went well, track workers’ time, etc… The load in was set to last three days, with them rehearsing in the evenings. Then they’d open that weekend.

I ended up attaching myself to the lighting crew for the first day, because decking and audio crews already had people who knew what they were doing. Plus if I’m in the catwalk, I can usually keep a pretty good eye on what is going on around the room. Some catwalks are easy to get to. They’re designed thoughtfully, with the expectation that crews will need to access them regularly. Other catwalks are… Not so easy. Maybe it was designed to be easy at one point, but then engineers added more structural beams, HVAC installers added air ducts, electricians added panels and conduit across doorways and walkways, architectural lighting got added in walkways, etc… Basically, the construction was a bunch of different crews, and none of them talked to each other to keep the catwalks accessible.

This church’s catwalk was unfortunately in the latter group. Getting to it involved a combination of a six-story-tall spiral staircase, army-crawling under an air duct, climbing over some electrical conduit, and squat-walking on a steel mesh grid to avoid some overhead beams. Needless to say, we made the trek up there once, and immediately decided that we weren’t going to be carrying our lights the same way we got up. Hell, lots of our lights wouldn’t even fit the same way we came up, due to the army-crawling section.

So we throw a rope down from the catwalk. Our lights are heavy, and it’s about a 7-story-tall lift to get from the audience to the catwalk. But many hands makes for light work, right? I ask who knows their knots, because we need someone on the ground to tie the lights onto the rope. One of the newbies (who I had never worked with before) raises his hand, so I send him down to act as ground support. His job is simple. We send the rope down from the catwalk, he ties the light to it, and then we haul the light up while he watches from the ground, making sure we don’t knock into anything or scratch the ceiling of the theater. Lather, rinse, repeat. This dude has the easiest job in the entire goddamned building, because all he has to do is tie a knot every few minutes, then watch the rest of us work.

So we send the rope down. A minute or so later, he calls back up that we’re good to lift. So we haul this light up. It’s heavy. It sucks. Many hands makes for light work, but we can only get a few hands on the rope due to the way we’re positioned in the catwalk. But we muscle this light up. One down, only 90 more to go.

But then as we set the light down on the catwalk, we realize that the “knot” we had lifted it with was basically just a bunch of loops with the tail pulled through. It fell apart as soon as the tension on the rope was released. Apparently our knot-tying ground support lied about being able to tie knots, and just went with the “if you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot” method. Except his “tie a lot” part wasn’t even safe, because he ended up just making a tension knot that completely fell apart as soon as the tension was gone. So I send someone else (who I have worked with before, and actually trust) down to the ground, and they send him back up.

All of this was simply to say that we were already a little bit on edge regarding this lighting install, because if that “knot” had come undone midway through our lift, we would have dropped a thousand dollar ~120lb light onto the audience seats, from about 90 feet in the air. So I want you to keep that part in mind when I bring up this next part…

After we get thirty or forty lights lifted, we’re feeling the strain. These lights are heavy, and my guys are smoked. The catwalk is hot (because hot air rises, this is in Texas in the summertime on a sunny day, and we’re basically pressed against the roof,) and we’ve all soaked through our shirts with sweat. For every light, once we get to the edge of the catwalk, we basically have to manhandle it up and over the railing to avoid scratching the decorative ceiling panels that are below us.

In the meantime, the church’s audio guy has shown up. He is sitting in the audience, chatting with another church employee. He apparently brought his son to work today. His son was like 5 or 6, and was suddenly running around in the audience, directly underneath us as we’re lifting these damned lights. Again, we’re already worried about dropping one of these lights. Even if we have the best knots in the world, accidents happen. I have seen clamps, handles, and hard points break off of lights before. I have seen ropes break. I have seen steel cables break. So there’s always some measure of “this could all go wrong and there’s nothing we can do but watch it fall” in the back of your mind with every single hoist. We already watched a knot fall apart that morning. And now there’s a fucking child playing underneath us.

So I call down, something along the lines of “Hey, can someone get that kid out of the way? We’re working up here!”

The sound guy almost immediately shouts back “how about you parent your kids, and let me parent mine!”

Like I said, my guys were already needing a break. We had already told ourselves that we were going to take a water break soon. As soon as that dude’s response had stopped reverberating around the (now dead silent) auditorium, I called out “Okay {company name}! Make it safe, then tools down! Take 20, then meet me on the dock!” Simultaneously, all ~40 crew members got the exact same glint in their eyes as they realized what was going on, finished whatever they were doing, then walked away for a smoke break.

In that 20 minutes, I called the company owner (who I play board games with nearly every week), and let him know what was going on. This was ~90 minutes into an 8 hour day. But notably, the crew had a 5 hour minimum. Meaning they’d get paid for at least 5 hours regardless of how long they worked. The intent is to ensure every job is worth the drive; without a minimum, nobody would take a 30 minute job if they had to drive 45 minutes to get there. And he said I could give the crew a choice. They can stay for the full 8 hours, or they can take the minimum and walk away right now. Next, I talked to the church’s main point of contact, to let them know what had happened, and what I was about to tell the crew. And when my crew came back after their break, I gave them all that choice. Every single person on the ~40 man crew took the minimum and walked away for the day.

The show’s load in was delayed by a day, and the church’s sound guy wasn’t present for the rest of the week’s load in and setup.

My boss had Narcissistic Personality Disorder, complete with face-melting off-the-record disapproval of my behavior, followed by “love-bombs” affirming my positive contribution to the workplace, mere days after. This resulted in not so much a rage-quit as taking my first opportunity to exit as fast as possible. And the cherry on top? An open invitation to come back mere weeks afterwards. The pattern was so textbook, that all I had to do was look up NPD romantic advice and search+replace “partner” for “boss” in most cases.

That said, I was pretty mad about how a great opportunity was ruined like this, let alone not as advertised. We’ve all heard “this meeting could have been an email”, well there’s also “this tirade could have been a counseling session.”

I was told that I gave one of our young engineers a “crisis of conscience” for telling him about how a product we were developing needed some more work and testing because we didn’t have enough data on it to release it for use.

Somehow management decided that I was poisoning the company and was toxic for not releasing a partially tested product that could either get people sick or set things on fire and then get people sick.

I was told to get on board and apologize to the young engineer for being a bad example or leave. I started polishing my resume, then turned in my resignation.

I spoke to the young engineer in a friendly and non-acusatory manner and he denied staying any of that to management, he claimed he understood what I was telling him and he agreed with my statements. We still keep in touch.

I walked out on my last couple of jobs before I started working for myself.

At one, I had a coworker who was hyper competitive. She had two friends there who hated me even though we’d barely interacted. It got to the point where they started talking about beating and shooting me. The manager ignored it because he didn’t like me for religious reasons. (He was a conservative Catholic who repeatedly accused me of sexual misconduct because I spoke to male coworkers “too often”. He insisted that men and women speaking to each other unnecessarily is basically the same as sex.) I left and reported it to Security. There was a 3 month long investigation, run by the “Employee Satisfaction Dept.”, which turned up no evidence, so I was told I had to report back to work. I did not. A month after I quit, the ringleader, who had been aggressively competing with me for years, quit also.

The job after that was less dramatic, but was frustrating. I spent 6 months trying to get the CEO and coworkers signed up for a business conference. I needed the CEO to decide who was going to which seminars, since she was paying. I emailed her the relevant info, and emailed it to her husband, and printed it out and gave it to her, all repeatedly, because she kept losing it. I also repeatedly texted her about it. The day after the deadline to sign up, she started to review the info. When a coworker pointed out that we’d missed the deadline, she accused me of misinforming her about when it was. The piece of paper she held up to show me the correct deadline was the original document I’d given her 6 months ago, and the deadline was written in my handwriting. She told me that since it was my screw up, I was going to call the people running the seminar and make them waive the late fee. While I was waiting to hear if the VP of that company would approve the waiver, she kept screaming down the hallway at me every few minutes to ask if it was done yet. I started thinking, you know, I could just get up and walk out of here… So I did. I left the keys on the desk and went to the park to watch some ducks.

The next day, I started working for myself, and that went great until I retired.

Got pulled off all of my R&D projects and told by the CEO in a meeting with all of the team leaders (who enthusiastically agreed) to focus entirely on this one project as it was critically important and mandatory whether we liked it or not before we could go to market with our product. Said OK, got it ready in record time, none of the managers wanted to approve testing. Got told a generic “We need more info.”

Fleshed out everything I could. Did all sorts of bench top testing with full reports, did thorough budget analysis for the entire thing, a complete gantt chart with every contingency accounted for.

Two years later I’m in the latest of god only knows how many approval meetings with management. I’ve dialed back how much I expect out of them and I’m just trying to get an official project initiation form signed so at least I have a record of them acknowledging the project’s existence. One of them asks, for the nth time, “Why do we need to do this again?”

Boss looks at me expectantly, like “Yes, why do we need to do this?” as if I was the one who put myself on the project. I said “I can forward you the email where you told me to drop everything and work on it. If you changed your mind I’m more than OK to drop it and work on something else, but I refuse to hold even one more meeting to get agreement that I should even be working on this.”

He says “I think we just need more information.” I ask “Such as?” knowing full well there wasn’t a single more thing I could add. “We just need more information.” All of the team leaders just stared at me. So I quit on the spot and walked out.

Talked to a friend who still worked there and they still haven’t moved forward with that project years later, and the governing body still refuses to allow sale of the product until they do. It’s a 2 year timeline for testing so I have no idea what they are thinking. It’s only $100,000 too, they paid me more to try and get approval for two years than it would have cost to do it in the first place.

The state ended up overturning the denial, and the insurance company was forced to pay for his pain treatments. It took me 9 months to find another 9-5 job, but it was worth it.

There are certainly heroes and champions among the common folk. You are one.

Less of a rage-quit and more of a rage-promotion. (it’ll make sense, just keep reading.)

I am someone who keeps track of what I do, my productivity, and how much output I’m generating in my work. A company I used to work for decided they wanted to do back-door layoffs by handing out phony write-ups and putting people on performance improvement plans, and they targeted me.

Essentially, I went into a meeting with my boss thinking I was going to get promoted or at least an attaboy, because I knew I was the highest performer on the team.

Nope. It was a writeup. I told them straight up that I was doing more work than anyone on the team, I could prove it, and I wasn’t signing. I fought the PIP with HR too, and the delicious thing was my bosses knew they fucked up, because I breezed right through it.

Ended up interviewing for an internal req that put me in a senior position on another team, and what galled me the most was the insistence of my boss on a going-away lunch, and I hated every second of it. I was gracious on my way out because I didn’t want to burn bridges, but I honestly hope that person is rotting in Hell now, and am very pleased that that company got bought out and sold for parts, so hopefully they all got fired too.

I have rage quit two jobs.

A long time ago I worked in a supermarket as a personal shopper. It was a pretty decent job, early start (4am) but an early finish, so it felt that I had the whole day to do whatever I wanted, though I was tired.

Skip ahead to Christmas eve, where everybody apparently has left their huge shops until the very last minute. Not only through our online service, but also in person.

Imagine this: You are being pushed to complete orders as quickly as possible and being called out for being slow, not only that, but every aisle is so full of people that you literally cannot push your trolley through them. I literally couldn’t move or do my job. I’m fairly embarrassed to say that I walked out, didn’t even tell anybody, and to my surprise I never got called out for it (I think it was too busy to notice) and the way the system worked, one of my colleagues would have just got the order and completed it without me.

The first job I ever quit, I must have been 16 years old. I was working as a promoter for a bar in a small town, essentially walking around with a sign, hanging out flyers, etc. ironic that a 16 year old is advertising a place they wouldn’t otherwise be allowed into, but it was cash in hand and pretty dodgy.

On my first night I was promised $50 for my work, but ended up being given $25 because they said it was a trial night. Suddenly my nightly salary is $25 and as a 16 year old, I’m a bit too scared of this dodgy guy in his car that was paying me to ask for the full amount.

Skip ahead a couple of weeks (I work maybe 3-4 nights a week, hours are like 10pm-5am) and tonight, it is pouring down with rain, I’m freezing cold, my uniform involves a t-shirt, and it is genuinely just a horrible experience.

I go to my boss, and tell him that I’m gonna go put my coat on and he says that’s not part of my uniform. I get a bit ballsy and tell him I want the extra $25 for the night before, and he said he never promised me anymore money than $25. So I walk home, in the rain, feeling hard done by but also like I learnt a valuable lesson. I never worked for less than I was worth after that.