‘What was the moment that made you realise you absolutely had to leave a job?’ – 19 people who just couldn’t take it anymore

Being dissatisfied with your job, or even downright hating it, isn’t unusual, but most of us manage to grin and bear it. However, sometimes something that happens that finally breaks the camel’s back and the towel is well and truly thrown in.

They’ve been discussing righteous quitting on the AskUK subreddit after GoldenGolgis posted their own experience…

‘I’ve worked for over 30 years in public health and charity work, great jobs between 5 and 10 years each, but when I’ve chosen to move on from a place (rather than seek a promotion or a sideways step), it’s funny how something that seems relatively small is actually the final straw, and you realise you’ve been kidding yourself for too long that things are okay.

‘It happened again today for the first time in some years… after a long period of being a rockstar in my service, I was unexpectedly hauled over the coals in front of senior management by someone who wanted to make themselves feel better and me feel put in my place. Afterwards I sat at my desk and just felt it settle on me like a thick snow… oh, I’m done. Not angry, not upset, just very calmly done.

‘What have other people’s final straws been?;

Fair play for not wanting to put up with that, and lots of other people had similar experiences, like these…

1.

‘Boss tearing the entire team a new one, two days after I put crying kids into a car to go on holiday without me because I needed to work.

Yeah mate, it’s you, not me. I quit.’
–ClimbsNFlysThings

2.

‘When a more senior person said ‘Anybody could do your job’. I let them find out they couldn’t by resigning the following morning and taking unused annual leave which more than covered my notice period. Handed my laptop and security pass over to my boss with the resignation and walked out. A competitor hired me six weeks later.’
–DogDrools

3.

‘I was told there was no money in the budget for a raise. The very same month we were told the company made record profits.’
–No_transistory

4.

‘After a year of him shouting at me for everything and belittling everything I did, didn’t give me a day off after four weeks and got angry when I had a hospital appointment,

‘Last straw he got the order wrong but shouted at me in front of everyone. So I decided I’m not gonna be this man’s punching bag. Told him to fuck his job and walked out during lunch hour. I felt so free (I was only 22).’
–Pale_Slide_3463

5.

‘Being told we have a mandatory trip to a Glasgow suburb, where we’ll be staying in one of those god awful corporate hotels….and… we’ll be SHARING rooms, with a colleague.

‘That set a date firmly in mind for when I had to be gone by.’
–Poo_Poo_La_Foo

6.

‘When I got beat up by shoplifters on Boxing Day. The area manager was on holiday, so I phoned store manager who was filling in and he gave me permission to close. I was sitting there missing two teeth and a broken nose. While paramedics did there best to patch me up. The area manager phoned me up to have a go at me for shutting the store and demanded I reopen.

‘That was it after that, took the first opportunity to leave.’
–Blackmore_Vale

7.

‘I won’t tolerate people I work with raising their voice at me as if it’s going to make any difference to what I’m being told for no reason other than trying to intimidate. My line of work is not life and death. There is never any excuse for not treating people in an amicable way.

‘I’m not a child. I’ve resigned from two jobs on the spot because of senior management thinking they can treat people like dirt. I’d rather take a job in a local shop for a couple of months to make ends meet than put up with that nonsense.’
–Sadastic

8.

‘I was denied time off to visit my dying mother in the hospital. To clarify I asked for the Friday off she died on the Saturday.’
–Fast-Drummer5757

9.

‘The year they paid us 6x less bonus (£50) on a year they tripled their turnover (£1m+). The same night they gave it to us (Xmas party) they didn’t stop talking about how good a year it was financially and how good the future looks for all four of us that they hired…’
–Pitiful_Shoulder9730

10.

‘After doing 30 hours a week overtime unpaid I had a review where I was told I wasn’t working hard enough.’
–Justboy__