I’ll go first. I did lots of policy writing, and SOP writing with a medical insurance company. I was often forced to do phone customer service as an “additional duties as needed” work task.
On this particular day, I was doing phone support for medicaid customers, during the covid pandemic. I talked to one gentleman that had an approval to get injections in his joints for pain. (Anti-inflamatory, steroid type injections.) His authorization was approved right when covid started, and all doctor’s offices shut the fuck down for non emergent care. When he was able to reschedule his injections, the authorization had expired. His doctor sent in a new authorization request.
This should have been a cut and dry approval. During the pandemic 50% of the staff was laid off because we were acquired by a larger health insurance conglomerate, and the number of authorization and claim denials soared. I’m 100% convinced that most of those denials were being made because the staff that was there were overburdened to the point of just blanket denying shit to make their KPIs. The denial reason was, “Not medically necessary,” which means, not enough clinical information was provided to prove it was necessary. I saw the original authorization, and the clinical information that went with it, and I saw the new authorization, which had the same charts and history attached.
I spent 4 hours on the phone with this man putting an appeal together. I put together EVERY piece of clinical information from both authorizations, along with EVERY claim we paid related to this particular condition, along with every pharmacy claim we approved for pain medication related to this man’s condition, to demonstrate that there was enough evidence to prove medical necessity.
I gift wrapped this shit for the appeals team to make the review process as easy as possible. They kicked the appeal back to me, denying it after 15 minutes. There is no way it was reviewed in 15 minutes. I printed out the appeal + all the clinical information and mailed it to that customer with my personal contact information. Then I typed up my resignation letter, left my ID badge, and bounced.
24 hours later, I helped that customer submit an appeal to our state agency that does external appeals, along with a complaint to the attorney general. 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.
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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.
Good on you. An actual hero.
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 could not do any kind of customer/office support job because I would’ve just walked away from that person or told them to be an adult.
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 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.
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 answer is “we need data that matches what we want”.
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.
A company that doesn’t listen to its experts shouldn’t be around. It’s part of why they pay you for your skills.
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 blood pressure just kept rising, the further I read…
I’m glad you all walked away; a pissed off client is FAR better than a hospitalized kid on your watch. (though it sounds like the client was understanding anyway)
All it takes is one asshole to ruin a whole production. The funniest bit is that the church could have told him “hey Dave, they’re working hard, and they have a point. Take your kid to the back or something until they’re done”, but couldn’t be bothered. Great story.
That Dave guy shouldn’t have a kid if he doesn’t give a shit if a light falls on them. The “you don’t parent my kid” thing is insane. If someone tells me my kid was in a danger zone, I’m moving my kid.
The church may have had previous problems with the guy bing a negligent ass, and finally told him to fuck off.
I had to quite literally push people aside in a crowd because even tho I was wearing a work shirt they refused to move when I had to get to the stage. That made me mad ass hell, I think I would have exploded if I was in your position. You handled that really well.
Did you have to take down the lights with you? Or were they of the venue?
that’s incredible. thank you for being a genuinely awesome human being who cares enough about your community to do this.
If this had happened a year earlier, before we were sold to a conglomerate, I probably would have just helped this guy with his external state appeal on company time, to be petty about being forced to work the phones at all, and kept working the job. I’ve helped plenty of others do external appeals when I knew the review team was dead wrong.
Helping that last guy after I quit wasn’t about me being nice, or caring about my community. It was about lashing out at a company that treated me as subhuman, and forcing them to follow the fucking law, which cost them money. The fact that someone benefited from my rage after quitting was just the cherry on top.
Now I do benefits for about 1800 state employees, and it warms my heart when I can help one of our employees get shit paid for after it’s been denied. Health insurance companies are the devil incarnate, and I’ve made it my personal mission to make sure they all follow the letter of the law and our written contracts when it comes to the employees in my agency.
hell yeah. thank you for making the world less shitty. :)
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.
Got laid off from my career job in broadcasting and picked up work unloading trucks at Walmart at night. Hated it but needed the money. One night, when I was already at my wit’s end due to being treated like a child as seems to be the company’s SOP, I was unloading a row from the truck and it collapsed on me. Corner of a box hit me just below the eye and cut the skin. So I’m in the employee bathroom with a cold paper towel trying to get it to stop bleeding while cursing to myself. Not yelling but normal speaking volume. I guess it was audible through the door because I step out and a manager is there. The first thing they say isn’t asking if I’m ok, but rather chastising me for cursing telling me to stop. I look at her, say “like fuck I do,” take my name badge off and toss it at her feet and walk out.
Rage quitting is overrated. Just do nothing at work. Odds are, no one will notice. And you keep getting paid to do nothing.
That’s what I’m doing right now! Company hired me for a position I was qualified for, had more than 5 years experience in the field. Got hired during COVID after my business went belly up (due to billionaire named hagan out of virginia breaking contracts and then suing me for the privilege of attempting to do business with their slimy asses), so I was desperate for work. Like, I was going to have to move back in with my parents unless I found a job and these guys offered me a position at literally the last moment, so I took whatever they offered, which was $60k/year.
After working there for a couple years, really giving it my all, they decide to promote one of the manufacturing people into my old position (I’d be mentoring them), and found out that they started him at $65k/ year. He had zero experience in the new field, but was being paid more. I ended up getting my bosses to agree to a raise to just under $70k, but the damage was done. They showed me exactly how much they appreciate all my effort and experience. Since that day I’ve done the absolute bare minimum. I do not give a single shit about the company, it’s goals, it’s production, it’s clients, nothing.
And guess what, I’m still getting good reviews and tiny regular raises, I just focus all my time on other things.
Can confirm. Plus if they fire you, you can try and collect unemployment.
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 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 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.
