the wet carpet, the pickle jars, and other stories of final F-you’s to jobs you hated

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

Last week we discussed final F-you’s to jobs or bosses you hated, and here are 18 of the best stories you shared. (Caveat: appearing on this list is not an endorsement of said behavior in every case! Stories are shared primarily for entertainment value.)

1. The revenge

A legal secretary at the Big Law firm I worked at knew she was going to be fired, so the day before she went into a bunch of partners emails and sent their wives evidence of infidelity, printed out confidential employee evaluations/communications about bonuses/pay and left them in everyone’s desk, and then cleaned out the swag closet (company-branded shirts/hats/bags etc) and dropped several thousands worth of merch with Law Firm’s name and logo off at a homeless encampment.

2. The egg salad

I (queer F) quit a job where the manager (M) kept making subtle religious misogynistic remarks. A meeting, I quietly picked up my things, went downstairs, dropped my equipment at HR and left.

I had been home for two hours before I realized I’d left my lunch in my desk. Egg salad.

I probably could have messaged someone on the team, but hey, no one had the courage to stand up for me so … yeah. I heard through the grapevine they found it two days later.

3. The stand

In a former job, I was working for a contractor to the U.S. government and was a very high-performing technical engineer in a niche field. There was another guy I worked with (I’ll call him Jake) who was also good but was very quiet, shy, and afraid of conflict. At some point, our old manager left and we got in a new manager (Tarzan), who I would describe as very macho-assertive. This new manager liked to bark orders and be short with people. This didn’t bother me because I knew I was indispensable, but it did bother Jake and he tried to avoid Tarzan as much as possible.

After a few months, I was lucky enough to score a conversion to civil servant and become a government employee directly, working in a different branch of the same agency. I had planned to notify Tarzan and his manager separately by email, but fate intervened. At our next weekly team stand-up, Tarzan was in a terrible mood and chose to leap on a small and inconsequential mistake Jake had made and gave Jake an over-the-top dressing down in front of us all, including, “This is F–king unacceptable on my team.” In the awkward silence that followed, I simply said, “I can’t work on this kind of team. I quit effective next Monday” and left the office.

I filled in Tarzan’s manager more fully about the situation and he understood and congratulated me on the move, but I heard from others who remained in the team meeting that Tarzan was truly shocked, and his apology to me later in the hallway made it clear that he spent a day or two wondering whether he was going to face repercussions for “driving me away.” Hopefully he reconsidered his approach in a more lasting way after that!

4. The wedding

This is very petty, but I can be petty if pushed.

I had a boss who always had to have someone to target. The person was always a woman. For two years, it was me. I couldn’t do anything right. If I said one thing, she said the opposite. She once blamed me for the weather. If I needed her to do something, I always advised her to do the opposite.

This same boss always prided herself on being close and in touch with her employees’ personal lives.

So when I got engaged, I told everyone but her. I invited everyone but her. (It was an office of 15 people.) I kept the whole thing secret, and everyone else was scared to tell her. My wedding occurred when she was on vacation. Everyone also knew I was moving to be with my husband after I got a job where he was. For at least three months, everyone knew all of this information except her.

When she got back from vacation, I put in exactly two weeks. I told her I’d gotten married. The look of shock on her face was all the revenge I needed. Then, at the going-away party I told her I didn’t want, I gave the staff a professionally framed picture of all of us at my wedding right in front of her.

On my last day, my boss was out. She tried to call me, but I let it go to voicemail. She told everyone else, “I will never get over this. I can’t believe she did this.”

I’m sure she did though. In the future, don’t ever tell me what you pride yourself on.

5. The grant application

The (many multi-million dollars) grant funding for my position was ending, so I started looking for a new position. It was a long, frustrating search, during which the grand funder decided to give us a one-year extension, after previously assuring us there would be no extension. Now, in addition to my job search, I had to write a narrative and budget for the extension year. I had 20+ principal investigators who were all clammoring for the last little boost to their individual budgets and no one was willing to compromise so that the overall budget could be, ya know, within budget. My boss was unwilling to assist me in finding a solution. So, I gave all the other PIs what they wanted and cut my boss’s salary out of the proposed budget before submitting the application and starting my new job.

6. The 2FA app

I left my job a few years ago. The new big boss was a jerk, told me my position was useless and unneeded.

I was their entire IT support, by the way.

I knew he was going to fire me or push me out, so I found a new job and peaced out. I wanted to be nice about it, and I offered to show him some basic IT things he’d need to know since he said he wasn’t replacing me because he could do everything I could (reader, he could not).

One of the things I tried to insist on was a 2FA that was for a major software admin account, that was tied to my phone (we had to use an app, no choice). I explained that someone else needed to download the app and set it up before I left since the day I did, I was deleting my account/app. He declined (seriously, was like, “No, it’s fine”) and, wouldn’t you know, two days later he tried to get into something and was declined because I wasn’t there with my phone. He texted and called me about it, and I just sent him a single email saying I was no longer an employee and had no access. Then I blocked his number and ingored all other attemps at communication. He didn’t need me after all, he could handle anything!

I don’t feel bad one bit.

7. The refused non-compete

Years ago my office hired one of our interns to join us full-time. He was a great guy and we were all looking forward to having him on board in part because we were significantly understaffed. He took one look at the contract and said, “Not signing anything with a non-compete.” We knew he had other offers and admin actually listened to us and took the non-compete out of his contract. Which meant they had to take it out of ours as well, but that’s not the point of the story.

My boss was a rigid, bigoted jerk. He was also my grandboss’s favorite so we never even tried to get any traction. New hire had two little kids and a wife with a completely inflexible job, so when the kids got sick, he stayed home. We had plenty of sick time but Boss thought this was inappropriate because 1) mothers should stay home with sick kids, not fathers and 2) it showed a lack of dedication to the job. Finally he called new hire into a meeting and told him he should hire a nanny.

New hire gave notice the next day and opened his own office across the hall because he had no non-compete.

8. The inventory

My boss had it in for me after HR revealed EVERYTHING I told them in an investigation into him. I was a retail manager and we were preparing for the annual store inventory, which was to start when we closed at 6 pm on a Sunday and generally took about six hours. I was in charge of preparing for it. I had detailed notes, a store map marked with what had been prepped and the schedule to finish it. One of the things HR was investigating were complaints that my boss didn’t do anything all day, and preparing for inventory was included. He took no interest in anything I was doing and I managed the process myself.

One of the cashiers had left a roll of quarters out at the end of the night on my closing shift. My boss took that opportunity to immediately fire me for “unsecured funds” the next day. I left in tears. This was technically policy, but for $10, unlikely to be enforced unless someone had a grudge.

One of my employees called me on my way home, as she noted I didn’t go in back to collect my things. In addition to the energy drink and my lunch in the fridge, I asked her to grab the inventory map and my notebook and erase a to do list on the whiteboard, which she happily did. There was no other record of what had been done and what needed to be done for the inventory, and since he had not participated in the prep work at all, my boss had NO IDEA what to do.

The inventory went horribly. What normally took six hours took 11! I felt bad for the hourly employees who were there that long, but at least they got a nice paycheck and none were scheduled to open the next day. My boss was salary. He not only had to stay there for free until 5 am, he had to open the store at 7 am. Since they were short-handed due to losing me, he had to work his full 10-hour shift.

9. The tirade

I’ve told this one here before, but it’s so good. It happened like 15 years ago and I still think about it regularly.

The best rage quit I ever witnessed: we had a weekly all-hands staff meeting with mandatory attendance. If you were on the road you were required to dial in. ‘Mike’ called in, and when it was his turn to speak he delivered a scathing tirade that was the stuff of quitting fantasies — absolutely A+ stuff. The big boss was so stunned he couldn’t respond at first… but then he pulled it together and hung up on Mike. But Mike was a step ahead — he’d dialed in on TWO lines, so he was STILL on the call, and got another couple of killer lines in before he got disconnected for good! Mike was a company hero for months after that.

10. The wet carpet

My then-boyfriend, future-husband and I worked together at a TGIFriday’s-style restaurant in the late 1990s. We were both scheduled on a Sunday morning, and with the plan to drive to work together, I’d spent the night at his place (an apartment in his parents’ basement) on Saturday night.

Around 8 am on Sunday, I stepped out of bed to start getting ready and, as I stepped down, my foot touched something wet. Something wet enough to soak my sock in about two seconds. Turns out the basement was flooded — and flooded BADLY. He called in to help with clean-up, and the manager was really crappy to him, definitely assumed he was calling off due to being hungover, wanting the day off. etc. Now, my future-husband wasn’t a manger per se, but he was a keyholding floor supervisor (basically a fill-in if a manager wasn’t available to work), a trainer, and sometimes a fill-in book keeper for the restaurant — so not someone who casually calls off work.

He pulled up a four-foot piece of dripping wet carpet, stuck it in a trash bag, and sent me to work with it. What followed became so iconic that when my cousin started working at the same restaurant more than three years later, it was still a story being told to new people. Luckily (for me, not them), the manager who was crappy on the phone was standing at the host stand as I walked in the front door. I dropped the huge, lawn-sized trash bag at their feet and said, “Mike thought you didn’t believe him when he called earlier. He wanted me to bring you this proof and to tell you he quits,” then walked away to clock in.

Calls were made to Mike, and the resignation stuck. When the manager asked me to clean up the trash bag, I refused saying it was a gift for him, not me. Still not sure how I didn’t get fired for that.

11. The hotel rooms

Back in the early 2000s, I worked at a hotel. Our hotel was negatively affected by 9-11 because of the decrease in travel. We were eventually foreclosed on by the bank and were owned and operated by the bank for three years until it was sold. The people that bought the hotel came in and let almost everybody go and staffed it with their family. They didn’t lay off the front desk manager yet because she had information they needed.

The night we all got let go, I went over to the front desk manager’s house and she proceeded to log onto all of the hotel booking sites we sold rooms through — hotels.com, Expedia, Priceline, etc., and changed the rates to $1 per night and then called all of her friends and told them to book a room. The new owners got in the office the next morning and saw all the confirmations for the $1 rooms (the hotel had 400 rooms so probably 100+ were booked this way) and freaked out and started calling her, begging for the login information so they could get in and stop the bleeding. She didn’t answer the phone.

12. The parking access

A few jobs ago, I worked with a team that provided onsite parking for corporate employees of a major online retailer with significant physical presence in my nearby metropolitan area. We were all laid off kind of abruptly, because Retailer decided they wanted to switch to a cheaper parking lottery system.

Background: the system we used to assign parking worked on sometimes months- or years-long wait lists to get parking in an employee’s chosen buildings, with less secure “temporary” spaces also available at less optimal garages. Parkers were supposed to reach out to us with issues they encountered with their access fobs. One of the people using a temp garage, “Percy,” wrote us silly poems about his access woes whenever he had to reach out, and quickly endeared himself to the entire team that way. He happened to be on a wait list for a building that was notoriously slow-moving and difficult to get parking access in, but he was always upbeat and kind in his emails, which was a nice break from the usual for us. He became legendary in our office even though we were only there about a year and a half.

On our last day, a couple coworkers and I realized that because all our emails/inboxes were getting deleted, nobody would get in trouble if we just … gave Percy parking access to his preferred garage. So together the three of us penned a little thank you note to him for always brightening our days and got his new access fob sent out before we left. I hope if he’s still there, he’s loving his parking access.

13. The pickles

When I worked at a grocery store we had a worker who was still in high school get fired for missing too many shifts. He seemed to take it well, but when he went to turn in his uniform, he passed through the condiment aisle and took every third jar of pickles and smashed them on the ground. That aisle smelled like pickles for at least a month afterwards.

14. The debrief

Mine was a more belated F-you. You know the saying, revenge is a dish best served cold. I used to work for a tiny consulting firm, and they thought they were The Shit. I had worked there for a long time, and I finally screwed up the courage to leave after years of being treated poorly.

I got a job at a huge company that was a big client of tiny firm. The CEO of Tiny Firm was buds with a VP of Big Client, so I can only assume management of Tiny Firm thought that they had things locked in for continued business at Big Client. The thing is, that VP has no actual authority over the subsidiary and department I work for, and it’s actually me and people at my level who often make decisions on which consulting firms to bring on for jobs. So when a job came up for bid, my old tiny firm submitted a proposal, along with several others. I reviewed all the bids, and theirs was by far the highest and, quite frankly, missed the mark. I sent them an email letting them know that their bid was not successful and they asked for a debrief. So I responded with a high-level list of their deficiencies. The most satisfying deficiency I got to point out was in a discipline that I am a widely-known expert in (in my industry). They were just flat-out wrong about a regulatory change I was heavily involved in. Best part was that the person who asked for the debrief is the same person who when I resigned said that they weren’t worried about my many years of industry knowledge leaving with me. I guess they needed my industry knowledge after all.

15. The thermostat

My mom worked in an office that had grown very toxic —and she was the only person who knew how to adjust the thermostat (don’t ask!). Literally on the way out the door on the day she quit, she jacked it up all the way to 90.

16. The copier

I work for a company that services copiers. The way our service contracts are structured, clients are billed based on the number of pages they print. So the more things they print/copy, the more they pay each month. We had one client call in years ago stating that their bill had to be wrong because they never make anywhere near as many pages as they were billed for. They called back a few days later and let us know that they had figured out what had happened. An angry employee who was leaving the company came into the office the day before she was quitting, after everyone else had left, and just printed off hundreds of pages just to run their bill up.

17. “I understand, I just don’t care”

I quit my last job with no notice. The PTO policies were draconian, an on-paper 10-hour shift would routinely stretch to 14 hours, and in the throes of Covid staff had to eat their lunches out in their cars – in January, in the northeast. I secured a comfortable new job on a Thursday and told the new place I could start Monday. I’d been there 2 months and wasn’t going to stay a day more.

At the end of my shift, I told the managers not to expect me on Monday. They asked me why I was doing this to them; I calmly replied, “Because I don’t like working here.” When admonished that I didn’t understand the staffing bind this put them in, I said, “No, I do, I just don’t care.” Unsure of what to say to this, they looked at me with their mouths open until I decided this wrapped things up and said “Well, enjoy your weekend!” and walked out. As I headed out, one of the friendlier staff, unaware of what just happened, called out, “See you on Monday!” to which I called back, “I wouldn’t count on that!”

18. The escape

I unfortunately wasn’t there to witness this myself, but at the fast food joint I worked at in college one of the high school aged employees leapt out of the drive thru window and shouted, “I QUIT” as he ran across the parking lot.