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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I also worked for an health insurance company, tho my experience was less extreme than yours it still sucked ass.
I worked the phones, and was hired together with a couple of other students through a student-oriented job agency. They lured us in with talks about how you can “really help people”, and that pretty much every income call was “always positive”, and naive young me believed it. I found out real quick that, surprise surprise, people don’t call their insurance to tell them how happy they are with another out of pocket expense. And the helping people part was bullshit too. I couldn’t waive fees, or approve insurance payouts, and when people wanted a payment plan I just filled in the form on the companies website for them. Wanted a payment plan that was different from the options on the site? Tough shit, either accept it or be prepared to be on hold for an hour while I transfer you to the department that might do it for you after grilling you for making, in their eyes, the bad financial decision of being alive.
I was lucky enough to never have been threatened on the phone, altho I couldn’t say the same for my fellow student colleagues. When that was brought up with management they acted like it was the first time ever in the companies history, which I saw through immediately.
Since we were technically making financial decision for other people, we had to get certified. The process costed around 400 euro, but was refunded by the company on the condition that you worked there for at least a year. If you quit after 9 months you’d get 75% back, 6 months 50%.
I quit the day after being employed for 6 months, and have skipped past every call center job I have come across since.
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.
Then to top it off, at least once a month, there’d be a mandatory 6 a.m. store-wide prep rally.
That’s some purgatory type shit. Those hours better be paid. Also, sad to hear about the unicorn
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.
A gas station chain as a client and the type of work that came with it. I was working as a help desk tech subcontractor and already had about 20 different clients. I’ve been doing this for a decade but because the new ones always messed up their work, we had tons of reminders and automated tasks in Teams. So I was already on edge because of the constant Teams notifications and all the triple checks.
Then they introduced this new client, a gas station chain, with hundreds of locations. I already worked in gas stations when I was a teenager and hated it. I hated the constant beeping for pumps to be unlocked when someone wants to buy gas. And I certainly didn’t want to have stressed teenagers on the phone telling me it’s super important that all their pumps are working on a Sunday afternoon while my instructions were to simply convince them to wait until the next business day if all we tried didn’t work. Fuck cars. Fuck oil companies. I can usually tolerate working with Microsoft even if I hate it, but Microsoft + oil companies. Fuck no.
I still haven’t found the will to get a new job, but my bank account is now starting to push me with insistance.
they had mandatory overtime from october to december, with some mandatory sundays too, so working 7 days a week without a choice. so i left asap and never showed up for overtime. found another job in the same field within a week
Reminds me of when I worked in an Amazon warehouse, ecpectation was 4 10 hour days, peak season it became 5 12 hour days, often with them letting us know on our last day right at midnight we’d have to come in for another shift the next day.
And then it continued for like 4 months until I got fed up.
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”.
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.
Also, just adding this here, but if you work in a team and have the means you should always keep records of your own productivity and quality.
YES. I’m piggy backing on your post to drive home why you keep your receipts.
I was fired for performance issues after a little over a year of employment. They claimed I was working at a level lower than an entry level new hire. This was a big surprise to me as my most recent review was glowing, my expertise was carrying the department, and no one ever mentioned any concerns. The company was having issues, though, and I was the highest paid person in my department.
Unbeknownst to them, I keep a work journal. I spend five minutes at the beginning of each day reviewing what I did the day prior and what needs to be done that day, then recording it all in a little notebook made exactly for the purpose (I can link anyone if they’re interested). So I spent about 20-25 hours over my time there doing this and had meticulous records of the entire time.
What’s fun about my termination is I was out for 2 months recovering for surgery from a work injury. They fired me the day I returned for unsubstantiated performance issues that I can refute by the day.
Guess who is getting a $150k settlement.
That little notebook, on top of keeping me on track and making work easier, earned me about $6000/hour.
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.
