Good on you. An actual hero.

I used to have a job in IT, building PCs. It sounds fun, but building computers all day gets old fast. After about a year of working there I decided i’d like to try working in a different department, so I asked my boss about being moved. He told me that the specific department I had requested didn’t need any help and the department I was currently in was his priority. That seemed fair.

A few months later, somebody in that department left for another job, so I saw an opportunity and I swooped in. I told my boss that if he was looking for someone to replace the guy who left, i’d really appreciate it if he kept me in mind. My boss told me that he appreciated and acknowledged that I had been working there for a long time and he would keep me in mind. About a week later he calls me into his office and tells me he’s going to move me to the department I had requested.

9 months go by and I haven’t heard another word about being moved. 9 whole months.

At this point I was already thinking about quitting. Then I had a performance review which I was told would be one-to-one. But it wasn’t. My boss and two of my department supervisors were there. My boss brings up an issue of which I was at fault, and shows me a spread sheet as evidence. I checked the date on the spreadsheet and it was from 3 months prior. If it was that much of an issue, why did he wait 3 months to tell me? Why not bring it up at the time? That’s not helping anybody.

That was the final straw. I started looking for jobs when I got home that day. I got one and gave my boss 2 weeks notice.

I worked at a company that helped people find the best loans for their situation.

Basically a price comparison site. No sponsored content or anything.

One day I was asked about setting up a payday loans option for the site and just said no.

I’d listened to some podcast about just how predatory the industry was, and even though our national regulations meant it couldn’t get as bad as some places, it was still unacceptably predatory.

I showed the manager stats for repayment, interest and average income of a customer and said if he went forward with this I would not be participating.

And if he was going to ask me to participate regardless, I would hand him my notice on the spot.

They never did anything with payday loans after that. I think most people were pretty happy about it.

This was years ago, I was working a supervisor position at a certain green mythical sea lady themed coffee chain. I was sitting in the parking lot before my shift enjoying a shitty chili dog from sonic way more than I should have been. Previously that day, I’d recieved a text from my manager asking me to go in early, I elected to ignore it, I’m off the clock I have no obligation to text back or even acknowledge the message. Back to the chili dog. So, I’m scrolling through my phone and I see a message in the group chat for my store where someone asked some kind of question, probably something was broken idk. I replied with an answer and immediately had a text from my manager that said something along the lines of “how you gon reply to that after ignoring me all day?”

I walked in and gave him a shaky nervous lecture (I have really bad anxiety and hate confrontation) about how he doesn’t own me or my time when I’m off the clock, he has no authority over me when I’m off the clock, and it’s bullshit that he’d be whining in my inbox about petty stuff like that when he could’ve talked to me in person about it five minutes later when my shift was scheduled to start. I ripped the key off my chain and threw it at the ground in front of him and said to “work the shift your fucking self”.

Yeah, I was immature. There were a million better ways to handle it, but he happened to catch me in a critical time between being radicalized and learning emotional intelligence. Sorry dude, you got all my corporate rage in one go.

Whatever, left the worst job I ever got koolaided into enjoying that day.

I worked for a company who always positioned themselves as way more important than they were and were hellbent on micromanaging everyone. It was all about image and corporate culture. I can play that game fairly well, but I wanted to minimize my time dealing with it. I was part of a small group of 3-5 subject matter experts who rank similarly to management, but didn’t have to manage anyone. This tended to isolate us from the McJob environment as we worked things out between ourselves and all the bottom tier managers were nice to us because they wanted us to help their employees. We were salaried and unlike most jobs which use salary to make you work more hours, here salary meant I could bend my hours more than most employees and do 4x10hrs or 4x9+4hrs and leave early every Friday. Sometimes my boss would tell us to leave early for the day or take us to lunch. Sometimes we’d go out to lunch when our counterparts from a client company were around. It was an okay gig and my direct managers were okay. Covid happened and upper management could barely stand the idea of anyone working somewhere other than their watchful eye so they try to drag us SMEs back into an mostly empty office calling us “essential workers” despite us being 100% able to do our jobs from home and fully nonessential in every meaningful way. I needed the job, so I went. Around that time we got a new manager who was supposed to straighten the place out (instead doubling down on every reason the place was shit). When I arrived at our mostly empty office I let myself into the IT closet and grabbed 4-5 monitors to build myself a monitor wall. I showed up in sweatpants. I took frequent breaks. I played Tux Kart on my phone. I played songs like “take this job and shove it” over my PC speakers while I was working. We put on techno music and remixed snippets of angry customer calls to it. (QA was vibing to the tune of our rebellion!) I raced my rolling chair up and down the isles and generally acted a fool, but not enough to get fired. Our small group of SMEs was tight knit and after a few days of acting our wage, one lady quit because she had kids and there wasn’t any childcare available yet because of Covid. Our manager basically forced her into it because he would not compromise. The governor was still telling everyone to stay home. This woman straight up rage quit telling our boss exactly where he could shove it and all of us were VERY clear with our boss that he would lose the rest of us if he didn’t shape up. Of course he knew best. The bossman was a fucking self-important narcissist and tried to call our bluff only to find himself with 0 SMEs a week or two later. I went home that night and found a new job with a friend. To top it off, I was in the process of switching roles at the first company, so when I left, I imagine they felt an extra sting of having to restart that search. Their mission was “asses in seats” and they would hire anyone to meet headcount on their contracts, so whoever replaced us may not even have known how to properly turn on a computer much less fix one. One fellow SME followed a former colleague of ours who got him plugged in elsewhere. All of us found new jobs in record time. They had been driving us too hard to really document much, so when we left I assume everything collapsed back to the level of 0-experience newbies with no guidance or product knowledge at all. The company must have burned enough people because they moved most of their activity to a new city and some of it offshore where they continue their bullshit to this day. That’s what you get when you piss off nearly every qualified individual in a market! My small team of SMEs was awesome and I would absolutely work with any of them again. The comradery was top notch.

I web searched our former boss and found him on a few job sites for “high earning professionals”. He got fired a bit after we all left and I’d like to think he’s working as a grease trap cleaner now. Then again, in America we fail up.

It took a bit but the impetus was when the stalker they leaked my home address to drugged and attacked me.

I’ve never rage-quit, but I put it out there a few times.

I had a district manager in a burger flipper hell decide to go through all the employees one by one and yell at them about their ‘faults’ in a successul clean restaurant with decent sales/waste.

When he got to me and raised his voice, I handed him the spatula, said if you’re going to stand here and berate me now, you’ll need this because i’m walking the fuck away. I’m open to criticism, but you’re not going to treat me the way you treated all these other people. He frowned, told me I didn’t use grill salt enough and moved on to the next person.

20 Years later, I was working in IT at a healthcare company. I had just finished an exchange migration from a desktop computer to a bona fide bare metal cluster. We got the license for webmail, but never ordered the licensing for ISA, which was specially designed to secure their OWA. My boss said, “Just hook it up, we’ll order it later. The ‘big boss’ is here and I want to hand it off to him”. Me: I am NOT putting that thing on the public internet without a proper firewall, we are constantly in a stream of attacks. Boss: Just do it, nothing will happen, I’ll take the heat. Me: I’m our HIPAA contact, no fucking way. Boss: I’m ordering you to do it. Me: You want my job, decide right now, You can hook it up, go show it off, i’ll find somewhere else. He grumbled and walked away. I had more system failures on that job from him pushing me to do shit wrong, fast and cheap. That place, of anywhere I’ve ever worked, had way more danger to the public of things going down and information being lost.

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.

I did the tax return for the great grand [3rd step niece] of [rich famous international celebrity] who {did that thing you hate] and [if you ask me who it is i will say yes]. child was [ridiculous number] years old and [funny position] of [international charity board] and from said charity [board position] they were going to earn that year [more money than i was going to earn ever]. and they had [twelveteen] of these [funny position] on [international charity boards].

that child has more money than god and it causes me to lose my mind when i think about it.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

My retail job at a Home Depot is the closest I’ve come to a rage quit. Since I’ve already read a dozen not actual rage quit stories, figured I’d share my own not actual rage quit story.

The management at the store I joined treated everyone below them like trash. Very unprofessional, very demotivating. At the time the pay was just barely above minimum wage, nothing to write home about. And, I didn’t have a car at the time, neither did most of my friends, so it meant I had to walk to work and back each shift, the walk itself being about 45+ minutes.

Management knew all this, but would schedule me to close one day, open the next. When you close, you have to stick around an extra 1 - 2 hours after your scheduled shift to help get the store ready for open in the morning. Then to top it off, at least once a month, there’d be a mandatory 6 a.m. store-wide prep rally.

The final weekend I worked there, I closed Saturday night, had that 6 a.m. meeting Sunday morning, then had to stick around until 11 a.m. (or something like that) for the start of my actual work shift. I didn’t get home until midnight, then woke up at 5 a.m. on Sunday and went to the prep rally where they basically convinced us that we were all shitty workers doing a shitty job, and then expected us to sing and dance in solidarity. I finally started working after all that, and my supervisor/manager was jumping on everyone of us that day. I looked at my coworker that sometimes gave me a ride, muttered an impotent “sorry but fuck this”, walked home, and never returned.

And then everybody clapped and the president of Home Depot called me up and personally apologized to me, told me they fired the whole store, and offered to give me a unicorn, which I had to turn down because my dorm had a strict no pets policy. The end.