give you resignation letter to your employer in one of those greeting card sized envelopes..fun to see the look of excitement on their face before they realize that they are shitty employers

Arriving on time for work, but with luggage and a train ticket, asking for my weekly check to be signed immediately becusue the train was leaving in 2 hours and I didn't want to arrive late at my new job.

just save all your pto's, put in your 2 weeks, and then use your vacation and sick days, come in the last day to pick up your final check. you could also upper-deck the toilet for good measure.
that's all hypothetical, of course. i recently left a job on good terms, but there's nothing more awkward then those two weeks when all the associates sneer at you for leaving to go to a better firm.

Thank you so much. Goodbye.

Worked for two days in an office that had a terrible karma, it was my first job after graduating and was paid well ( I went for the money) I was just sick to my stomach. The boss was a nice guy who I had as a TA and had worked on a competition earlier in the year. He had hired me and was leaving for a holiday and I left the day he went to Hawaii, I just walked in and told the office manager I was leaving and the other staff were just shocked. I didn't even ask for the two days pay I felt terrible and ended up writing a card to explain my actions. It turned out to be a bit of a sweat shop over the years, so Iam glad to have left and also made me a little more suspect of high paid firms and the enjoyment in your work.

1. quit a job and took my two weeks vacation concurrently with my two weeks notice. the last day of work would've been my birthday july 24th

2. was laid off at one job...showed up the next day to clean out my desk and printed all of my email correspondence for the last three years...
approximately 3-400 pages at around 10-12 when there were quite a few people waiting in line. i had already been interviewing...so i had a new job within half an hour of being laid off.

3. a guy came to our office for a day and didn't show up the next.

i know of a woman who notified her employer via a yellow post-it on her monitor; "i quit."

at my mom's job she said the receptionist came in one morning, typed up her resignation letter, printed it out and walked out the door

Hello Sir ,
I've had enough,...
goodbye and all the best to you ! ...


(8th may 2004 , 3:33 pm)







rock on ! ! brothers

and i thought that john waters invented the term "upper-decker".

when i worked in chicago i knew someone who found another job. they called their supervisor and left a voice mail that they quit. they started that job the very next day.

the supervisor was on vacation...came back three weeks later. meanwhile the payroll department had just assumed that the quitter hadn't filled out their timesheet...so they cut a paycheck and did a direct deposit.

which was useful, since the quitter ended up getting laid off a week after being hired.

I tried the passive quitting method once, didn't show up for two days. I came back the third. When asked where I was at, I just shrugged like I had been abducted by a UFO or something and didn't remember. All I got was a concerned look.

Got much better stories about a previous employer and their layoff tactics. They let a guy go while he was on vacation with his kids at DisneyWorld. Comes back to a "were downsizing" message.

Same firm hired a guy. Worked until lunch hour on his first day. He never returned. The principals thought he got into an accident or something. Called his house, left messages, never heard a word from him again. Wonder if they mailed a check for 4 hours work?

Again, same firm, at the summer picnic one guy's eating his burger with the president. Stands up to leave and says, "I quit." Went and cleaned off his desk and left that day.

Silly me for actually writing a letter.

The short-term thinking of many employees always amazes me.

When I quit my last job before starting my own office, I informed my employer of my intentions, worked for another two months to finish the project I was running (and continued to work hard), wrote resignation letters to each of the partners, and then even after I had left months earlier put together the competition binder for the AIA awards for the project I had last ran.

Several years later, I still get a projects that account for a couple of million dollars worth of construction cost per year because of my past employer referrals.

Unfortunately, I didn't know what an "upper-decker" was until later.

i think tyvek's approach is definitely the best, a lot of architectural communities are tightly knit, going out like an asshole could ruin your name in a certain city. i still keep in touch with my old firm, and even get some freelance work if need be, and know i'll always have a reference. as tempting as upper-decking is, i think i'll save it for house parties i get kicked out of.

(and i thought that john waters invented the term "upper-decker".)


Ok, I know who John Waters is, but what does "upper-decker" mean?

Left on I suppose good terms a number of months ago.

1 month ago received and shrugged off a letter from some state agency investigating work practices.

Yesterday received notice to pick up a check at my old office that makes up the difference between the straitght time overtime I was paid and time and a half overtime I was suppposed to get.

i was let go two weeks after my honeymoon. i asked why they waited and not before i got married - when i could have actually sent out resumes - they shrugged their shoulders and said they didn't want to ruin my wedding. i got nice sheet set from the office though.

oh and here's how i did the last place i technically worked at -

http://www.archinect.com/forum/threads.php?id=25465_0_42_0_C

When I was in high school, my friend and I were working at a local pizza place. I quit on one particularly busy Friday evening. The owners were out and they left the guy who made the pizzas in charge, and he took it upon himself to be the the most anal prick he could be. After a while, I couldn't take his shit anymore, so I just left the counter, yelled at him with the place full of customers, demanded to be paid (we were paid in cash every Friday), and left. As I was getting in my car and leaving, my friend came running outside saying, "I quit, too!" It felt so satisfying.

thanks for a good dose of reason tyvek.

I've tried to quit most architecture firms with a certain degree of professionalism (with varying degrees of success), but it was a different story when I was working retail.

Back in a former life, I worked at a Circuit City store in the suburbs, and our new store manager had a practice of locking the employees inside the store at night until all the cash registers had been counted down and balanced, regardless of whether that employee was on the clock or not. (The process of counting the drawers and running the numbers usually took at least an hour or two after closing)... Combined with the fact that he was always pressuring us to bait-and-switch customers and yelling at us if we failed to sell a customer the item with the highest profit margin, I finally lost my temper one night after being locked in the store for over an hour (off the clock) with my mom waiting in the car for me outside, I invited the store manager to suck a fart out of my ass, and promptly let myself out via one of the fire exits.

By the grace of God, that was my last retail job.

I gave a three day notice on a wednesday, while the boss was leaving for vacation.

This was bizarre...I handed my boss my letter, he asked whether it was what he thought it was, and then he started crying!

aww..tadpole. thats kind of sad.

Waited tables for a crappy restaurant as an undergrad. To make a long story short, I had been lied to and manipulated for quite some time by the manager. finally after the last straw i signed up to work every night for the next 3-weeks (as much as I could.) The night of my first shift I showed up with my uniforms in hand and dropped them on the floor of his 'office'(closet.) I had been thinking of a bunch of clever speeches or insults I could throw at him (all of which ended with me calling him bitch, of course) but in the end I chickened out and said simply "I quit." The best part is that i found out later I was the third server that day to quit.

Now if i had known about upper-decking at that time....

I was a bartender for a while, and when a job for a firm came up, I put in my two weeks. My last official day there was Friday, but I was on call that Saturday. Being perpetually broke, I had really wanted to work. When no one called me in, I called one of my co-workers and talked him into letting me have his shift. When I got to work, the manager asked what I was doing there, having not called me in. I told him the situation and he said it wasn't do-able, because the switch hadn't been approved by a manager. I said okay, and I clocked out and left. As soon as I walked out the front door, the same manager called me and said I was on call and I had to come in. I told him it was already 10, and being that I was on call at 9, there was no possible way I could make it into work that night (altough I was standing right outside the door). Anyway, the other guy was already too in the bag to work, so we both got fired. It was my last day and he put his notice in a week before. It turns out they ended up being very short staffed and the owners were more than a little upset with the managers actions. Thas's what you get for being an ass! Chickenfucker!

Worked at one office with about four staff, it had been a particularly difficult period bad projects poor management, all of us in the office were getting kind of pissed, we had all been cut back to about 60 % work week for a couple weeks( instead ) of firing staff. I had been there the longest and had the same treatment as a new employee so I wasn't particularly happy. I wrote a letter to the boss that we all signed and before I had a final read of it the last guy to sign it just gave to our boss. Man was he pissed. The one guy got into a yelling match and quit while the rest of us just walked out for a day. A few days later we walked back in and each had our jobs after individual interviews with the boss. It was an ugly couple weeks but vowed to not work for anybody ever again after that.

I was a security guard for the parking lot at Graffiti Showcase in Pittsburgh. On the slower days I would sit in a chair and watch the lot. The bos would climb on the roof and look down to check on me. He didn't like me sitting in a chair. Instead of confronting me, he took the chair away - the very chair he provided for us (the cook was a part time guard on the busy days).

I asked him to return the chair. He said he wanted me to stand the whole time. I said I would be glad to when the situation demanded it. I also told him to return my chair or I would quit that day - I was willing to negotiate. Chair on slow days (some times no cars at all). Constant perambulation on the busy days. He didn't sense that I wanted to negotiate. Rather he told me to work that night (standing) and take time to think about how I needed my job. That was the kicker. I demanded my final check and left.

i was pm'ng at an installation design firm. a new cad drafter hiree comes in - fruity looking, somewhat sensitive, 6' tall. nice kid.

so we're working our tails off - its a busy place, high levels of tension, stress, and b.s. going around - most people could handle it. at lunchtime, our supervisor comes in stomping - hands in the air "I cant FU@#ING believe it!".

"what happened", we ask - bewildered to high heavens.

supervisor says, "well i call [new guy] because, well - its 2:00, and he hasnt come back from lunch yet" he says. "i go '[new guy], are you ok??' he says 'yeahh....youre probably wondering why i havent come back from lunch yet right?' 'yeah- well being that you work here- kinda, yeah' 'well', new guy says 'i kinda had a panic attack and...well, i'm kinda not coming back....so i guess i quit' and hung up the phone"

we had a riot. too too funny...

In college I had a roommate who had gone to lunch one day from her job at a card shop and decided she just didn't feel like going back, ever. But then she realized she hadn't been paid yet for the previous 2 weeks and really needed the money. But she didn't have the guts to face her boss or even talk to her on the phone. So she asked me to call and pose as her "Uncle Bob" and tell her boss how when she went to lunch that day she had suddenly suffered a severe nervous breakdown and was now recuperating at my estate in the country. I called and told this story and I could here her boss gritting her teeth to contain her hostility - and she told me that she had just seen my roommate walking down the street in front of the store that same morning, and that I should tell her that the only way she was getting her check was if she came in herself to get it and that if she did come in she should expect to encounter "a very good reason to have a real nervous breakdown."
So I told conveyed this to my roommate and she never went back for the check.

I quit almost every day between 6 and 11pm. I keep coming back every morning though, generally in a hungover state from the celebration associated with quiting.

I understand quitting dramatically from retail and waiter jobs in one's youth. Maybe also if you've only been working somewhere for a few days or weeks you can get away with these things - especially if you're not planning to stay in that region afterward and you don't do anything too outrageous or disgusting. But otherwise you should probably at least consider the possibility that the consequences can follow you around.
Our firm got a state government renovation project for a site that's considered high-security. We had to submit a lot of detailed paperwork with the work and life histories of anyone on our project team. Somebody at some level did some checking up on all of us, and one person on our team got flagged as a concern. This person seems to think that an old employer badmouthed him to the investigator because of something he did as an intern. But whatever the reason, we can't use him on that project.
Even if you never get background checked, past stunts do tend to make it into the architecture grapevine and follow you around, especially if you stay in the same city for awhile.
Also if you're not through all the licensing stuff yet remember that you need at least some licensed person at each firm to still like or respect you well enough to be cooperative, because you have to verify employment twice - once for IDP and once for NCARB certification after your licensed (and sometimes again later for some states' reciprocity applications.) Even if your old employer doesn't really want to go to the hassle of marking you "unsatisfactory" on the stupid IDP forms and submitting an explanation of why, he can just "lose" your paperwork for awhile and create a holdup of months or more in your progress.
Also sometimes the much-later consequences have nothing to do with architecture. One of my old college classmates adopted a baby and had to have a social worker talk to everyone he and his wife ever knew. He too had one of these workplace stunts in his past that came to light - because in that case he'd actually been charged with a misdemeanor for what he did. He had to write an explanation for the file - he spun it as a regrettable incident that he was old enough and wise enough to be ashamed of. Everything turned out ok.

good point Aluminate. something i always try to remind myself as well is think about who you flip the bird to when that a-hole forgets to signal a lane change, they could be your next client....i am a bit of an angry driver so it's tough...

Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better

yeah, but those don't make for good stories. My best/worst one was just that I got hired somewhere in the middle of a school year. They stole me away from another firm that I hadn't been at long, and I specifically asked "If I come to work for you, will it be full time in the summer?" because I didn't want to job-hop toooo much, and they said, "Yes, of course." Fastforward to summer.... I'd been there full time a few days, and one of the principals asks to take me out for coffee. I don't drink coffee. He knows this. So we go over to starbucks and have a nice little talk about how he's not sure they have enough work for me to be full-time and why didn't we talk about this sooner (because I thought it was settled from the beginning!), and if they did have the work, they didn't have the budget, so I'd have to take a pay cut, and could I handle that? So I told him I'd think about it, and the second he stepped out of the office, I got on a phone to my previous employer and lined up two weeks of temp work. When he got back I just said, "How about we fix my last day at Thursday?" That was pretty gratifying to see the suprise on his face, without being career-damaging.

every job i've ever quit, i've always given a nice dose of honesty at the exit interview. i usually let them know the one thing that they could change to make their office a better place — valuing their employees more, less overtime/better scheduling, reining in a nasty co-worker, etc. they usually cringe when i say it, but in the long run, they always appreciate it.

I worked parttime at a firm during grad school that I was really interested in. I knew that I wasn't working enough hours to do much architectural stuff, but I thought that it would be a good way to learn about the office.
As it turns out it was a nightmare of a position and I politely told them I didn't have time to work in the spring semester.
In May was suprised to recieve a letter inquiring if I would be interested in becoming a full time employee. By that time I had already decided that I would be moving out of state and I sent them a letter thanking them for the offer but stating that I would not be staying in the area.
I thought all was well into a friend of mine ran in the principal at a career fair and he bitterly talked about how I 'blew them off'. Yikes...I didn't even do anything. I guess you never know how people will take things...

One morning we came in to find that our student intern had come in very early that morning, so she wouldn't have to run into any of us, and left her keys and some books she'd borrowed on the conference table with an index card propped in front of them on which she'd written "The semester got too busy. I won't be in this afternoon and I can't work here anymore." Never heard from her again.
Usually we bet that students hired in August will disappear around Thanksgiving, when things get tough academically. But they usually reappear in January, and they also usually give a little more notice.

Fast forward a couple years, and we get a call that this intern has applied for a job with a big firm and can we comment on her "work habits and personality"? But we didn't tell them about the index card resignation or anything. We figured she probably might be more accountable about a "real job" than a part-time student internship. One would hope, anyway.

e.... what's and exit interview???? The last guy that I let go or quit was held on the front porch with a box of his personal items. in today's business environment When people leave, they leave right then, turn off their computer and shut them out of the office. It sounds nasty but for protection of the office files and other staff we make them leave right then ( chances are that if they have thought about leaving for sometime they stolen what they want already) If we ask them to leave then we can control what is released to them.

I've always had an exit interivew. Basically a 5 minute meeting with a principal/partner asking "why are you leaving?" You tell them some BS because you want to stay good in the arch community. Meanwhile leaving your old co-workers behind and not helping their situation one bit. Like when I said money wasn't why I'm leaving, when the new job gave me a 40% bump. Ha ha ha!

Whistler: so are you saying you instantly lock people out even if they give the proper two weeks' (or more) notice?!

at my old firm you would be called to meet with a certain principal (the same guy who hired you) and while he was passing you the pink slip IT would be locking down your computer and taking you off the network.
I heard stories that during the recession people would go to lunch to comeback and discover that they had been locked out. They would have to sit around and wait for the call of death from the principal.

whistler, an exit interview usually happens in larger places to try to understand to give employees a chance to express their thoughts on the experience of working in the office. i've seen it happen in smaller offices too, but it is not as formal. A's point about not helping your old co-workers out is exactly one of the reason's why i speak honestly. they've usually heard it from me previously, but i stress it again on leaving.

bryan, yes. many offices will ask you to leave immediately. they do not want to risk a disgruntled employee deleting or damaging anything.

While I can see the reasons for asking someone to leave immediately if they are fired or laid off, I question the ethics of doing so for someone leaving of his or her own accord. Giving notice is a courtesy given to the employer in return for which the employee generally expects to continue in his or her position with full salary and benefits during the notice period. Being shown the door immediately upon giving notice would be a bitter slap in the face to most people, especially if pay and benefits were terminated immediately as well. I also think it could have legal ramifications as you would essentially be turning that employee's quitting into a firing.

bryan, in my experience, if an employee was shown the door immediately, they are paid for two weeks, but i do not know if an employer must do this.

If a person quits of their own accord, and offers two weeks notice, but the employer decides to show them the door immediately, then they're not considered to have quit - they're legally considered to have been terminated. So in that situation, the reason that employers offer 2 weeks severance is because this way their unemployment insurance does not get activated (because the employee is being paid for the time right up until his own chosen "last day".)

But if the employee has not quit of his own will, but has been fired or laid off, then there's no reason that the employer "must" provide any severance pay. It is at their discretion, and certainly more common in the case of layoffs than in the case of an employee who is terminated for cause.

It is the practice of many firms to "lock out" employees who have been let go, in the manner described in some above posts. This is recommended by insurance companies and human resources consultants, to prevent retaliatory acts (of the sort described in some posts above!) or the taking of unauthorized company property and files. Even the person above who talks about coming back the next day to print 400 pages of emails is a good example of what employers are trying to prevent when they ask for the keys immediately.

Particularly in the case of employees terminated for cause, I've seen some firms behave pretty ruthlessly in that situation - for example having staff pack up the employee's belongings while he is in an office being fired, and having a security guard escort him to the sidewalk as soon as he exits the boss' office.

But to do this to someone who has quit of their own accord is pretty unusual. I guess there's no rule against it - and if there's some reason to suspect that the person has some grudge that they might act out in their last days, then I guess it could be wise - and there's no law against it.

Usually when I've seen people give 2 weeks notice and then be asked to leave immediately (with 2 weeks pay) it's been because they've been very recent hires (they've been there just a few days or weeks) and the employer has felt that there was no reason to continue to waste time and resources on someone who is still in the stage of being trained. But in that case they were still allowed time to pack their things and transition whatever they were working on to somebody else and say their goodbyes.

Even if they quit we do the two paid thing as noted and it might not happen a lot in the Architecture world but just about anywhere else its the appropriate protocol. If you do think about it wwhat motivation does one have for that last two weeks anyway, it just becomes a drag for the other office staff. I 've only had to do it twice but I wouldn't do it any other way. I was told by someone once that best way to handle it is to meet them at the front door first thing in the morning and make sure you have a hot cup of coffee in your hand, just in case ( like if they lunge at your throat after you fired them you can toss some hot coffee on them, seriously).

Good to know.

It's been my experience that firms want to keep around quitting employees for at least the two weeks' notice, if not more. Most where I worked for have requested 3 or 4 weeks' notice from more senior staff (anyone responsible for managing/coordinating projects and anyone who is the contact person for all or part of a project.) It can take awhile to smoothly finish up or transfer projects. Kicking out the door the main contact on a project seems like it is a bigger risk (to the flow of the project and to the relationship with the client) than incurring the slight risk that the quitting person might slack off or do something in "revenge" in his last weeks.
I had a former career in journalism and people in my company were also expected to stick around and meet deadlines for anything they'd started. In my earlier "careers" in retail and the service industries it was a lot more common for quitting employees to be shown the door right away. It seems to make more sense there since employees are more interchangeable and don't usually have ongoing projects.
The only place I worked where it was ALWAYS the policy to boot people immediately was at a bank. This probably does make more sense in a financial institution.
My employee handbook from the college where I work now says that we must let resigning employees work out their two weeks' notice unless "because of the highly confidential nature of the material handled in some areas" there is a security concern, in which case the department head must get clearance in writing from Human Resources before the person can be shooed out the door, and two weeks severance will be provided.


My only interesting quitting story: I was an intern in a "starchitect" firm, and I was unhappy especially with certain "CAD technician" coworkers who were micro-managing me. I gave notice, worked my last few weeks, and on my last day the principal sat down at my station and asked if I would like to do some little projects for them as a freelancer - and I wouldn't have to come into the office except for a meeting once in awhile. I started to ask some details, when one of the eavesdropping CAD guys jumps in saying "you can't do that. If you let people work from home we can't enforce CAD standards...." and the principal says "you the CAD tech are telling me the firm owner that I can't do that?" I only did one freelance project for them before I moved out of state.