Have you ever had a boss/higher up flip out on you when you quit?

She demanded an explination and then proceded to say, “So you’re leaving because you will get better training, more support and get more leads?” (I was a Realtor at the time.) She was really snippy at me and furious. I really didn’t get it because that is one buisness where you don’t really want to burn bridges. She went out of business and never even made it to enjoy the recent real estate boom before the burst.

I had a boss who was clearly bothered by my departure, because I was honest about my reasons for leaving: I was given contradictory priorities that meant that no matter what I did, I would fail miserably at one of them; I was expected to support things I had no training in or experience in (and, most importantly, though I didn’t tell him this directly, no interest in); I was tired of make-work to support policies that were never enforced anyway; and the HR department was dicking around with compensations and bonuses in a way that I thought was sneaky and underhanded (and I had said as much, more than once).

He tried to talk me out of leaving. He offered raises, different priorities, and the like, and I declined.

They went through six people in my position in the next year. They all quit.

Yes this happened to me when I did volunteer work. I signed up for a year and when my commitment was over the head of the organization had a hard time letting me go. He even tried to give me an unsatisfactory reference to my next assignment. When I talked to him a few years later he admitted that he was upset because he wanted me to reenlist for another year.

In my past life as a pastry chef, I worked for about 10 years in a very high-pressure kitchen. The head chef, a Frenchman, was furious at anybody who quit, no matter the reason. I got to know him quite well, and came to see why he reacted this way.

He was a fiercely loyal person himself. In all those years, he never actually fired anybody, even during slump periods when there were more cooks in the kitchen than clients in the dining room. On several occasions, he bailed out cooks from jail. To the dismay of the rest of the staff, he kept complete incompetents on the payroll, slowly training them over months and years to do just a couple of things passably well. In other words, once you were hired, he would never, ever abandon you.

These guys worked 80+ hour weeks under extreme conditions, and so a quasi-military spirit of camaraderie developed among them. Nobody felt this bond more intensely than the chef. When someone announced that he was quiting, the chef saw this as a betrayal both of his own loyalty and of this brotherhood.

The reaction varied. Often the betrayer would be immediately sent packing, his two-week notice notwithstanding. If allowed to stay through the notice period , the chef would never address a word to him; he might as well be a ghost. The kitchen fairly crackled with the chef’s barely contained fury.

I’m happy to report that though I witnessed this drama many times, I was never the object of it. I stayed until the chef himself was forced out, unable to renew his lease on the building. We’re still friends. I think he feels a measure of guilt, like he let down those of us who were with him to the end.

They told me I was making a mistake and they were giving me a huge opportunity I wasn’t seeing clearly; it was a mistake to leave and I lost out, bigtime. Arrogance kills.

Once when I was a teenager, I worked as a lifeguard and decided to go see what it was like to work at a local water park rather than the typical neighborhood pools. After two weeks of training and two weeks of rotating shifts at the park, I still hadn’t been told my wage. When I got my check I finally found out I was making LESS than minimum wage (like everyone else there). They can get away with this because it is a seasonal job, so they claimed. The next day I handed my resignation to the Supervisor and he went BALLISTIC, screaming and tearing the paper, telling me I wasn’t living in the real world and all sorts of craziness. He ended the day by literally kneeling down and begging me to stay because he was “Losing all his best guards”. No surprise there.