Now that I’ve settled in at a new company, I feel like this is a great time to tell you all about the hell that was my old job and my extremely cathartic rage quit.
(These are all fake names obviously)
When I started at QRS Construction we were 2 months into the pandemic and it was the first job I could get after finding myself on the receiving end of the slew of layoffs from my old-old company (but that’s a different story) and I loved it. It was a small construction company that was focussed on scalability and had a steady stream of ongoing projects for the local school district and contracts with surrounding cities; it was pretty much perfect in my book, exactly the kind of company I saw myself growing in. Looking back there were so many red-flags that I was just too optimistic to see.
The first 8-9 months were great and despite commuting 3 hours each day (1.5 hrs one-way), I genuinely enjoyed going into work; I liked the projects I was working on, the people, the clients, it felt like a family. And just like a family, the boss, Ethan, (owner of the company) would just not shut up about politics.
In those 9 months I was given the responsibility of cleaning up the carnage left behind from a project manager who was truly horrible (now that’s another post entirely)..along with my newfound responsibility came a $1/hr raise and a job title change. The change in job title only happened because clients felt better having a “project engineer” running their jobs instead of a “construction administrator”.
After that I became the go-to for cleaning up and managing the worst projects. At one point I was managing 16 projects as well as acting performing all of the various project roles associated with them (Project Manager, Project Engineer, Superintendent, and even onsite labor on occasion). I was 12-14 hour days on the regular, skipping lunch, and was still constantly behind. The only time I got paid overtime was the Saturday that I had to physically go to a jobsite at 7 am (which I found out about at 7pm the night before); I did get a small “bonus” added to one of my checks that was worth about 5% of what the overtime pay would have been…super generous right?
Amazingly, that summer from hell was not the driving force behind my leaving. At that point I still loved my job, I was getting burnt out sure, but obviously the boss had to be seeing all the great work I was doing and how capable I was. And surely with my education and previous experience it was only a matter of time before I was promoted again, right? It’s easier to hire a new PE than it is to find a capable PM, RIGHT?
The next time a new project manager was hired I justified it in my mind, she didn’t last long (but damn her personal life kept us entertained). Once she was let go I was once again tasked with cleaning up the mess. It was at this point that I realized that I would only ever be seen as the DTP (designated terd polisher – a term coined by my coworker/friend, Samantha) and started casually applying for jobs.
As time went on, it became very clear that there were two classes of employees at QRS, the people who mattered (generally terrible people, tbh) and the people who didn’t.
All the while I was also dealing with Ethan’s political “jokes” and opinions. I chose not to engage, it was a lot of “mmhmm”s while silently begging him to shut up so I could get back to work, I had tried to explain that I don’t like discussing politics and would appreciate it if we could keep conversation away from it. I only snapped back at his comments 3 times: the first was to call out his hypocrisy, the second was letting him know that his “joke” was not actually funny and actually pretty offensive, but the third time was the worst. The third time he made offensive comments about trans people which resulted in me informing him that one of my parents is trans and that his commentary was completely inappropriate. That was the first time I filed a report with HR.
I am so lucky that the HR “department” at that company is exactly what HR is supposed to be, an advocate for the worker. Samantha (the same friend who coined the term DTP) was/is HR and she is an absolute angel who does not take any shit. Samantha was the only reason I had the courage to submit an HR complaint against my boss, the owner of the company. To his credit, Ethan gave what felt like a heartfelt apology and (supposedly) enrolled in a sensitivity/diversity training course. I say supposedly because he was also supposed to set up these same trainings for the rest of the company but they never happened in the 4 months I lasted after that and I highly doubt they’ve happened since I left.
After that incident is when I started applying for jobs with gusto, which is also when I learned that my pay range was in the bottom 10% (taking into account education and experience) in my area, it was insulting. But not as insulting as finding out that the new PM Ethan hired was 5 months out of college with a grand total of 2 years of experience working as an intern.
To be clear, instead of promoting one of the 2 project engineers (myself and Alan) who each have 8+ years of experience and had been busting our asses for months, he hires a kid (Cody, aka fuck face, aka FF) fresh out of college to manage them. To give you an idea of what FF was like…our first conversation was him offering to make sure that I got “boots on the ground experience to help me move up in the company”. FF never said anything that wasn’t dripping with condescension, at least not to the people he deemed lesser than him; it wasn’t long before I started printing up 90% of our email correspondence as a cya measure. His emails were condescending, ethical nightmares, and full of terrible direction that he wouldn’t accept anyone's opinion on.
Things with FF came to a head one day when he sent an email to a new superintendent and myself laying out his “expectations” of us. I forwarded the email to Ethan and Sara and told them in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t going to put up with his attitude and directed them to a folder on my desk (I was working from home while recovering from COVID) that had the printed up problematic emails, including detailed notes. When I got back in the office we had a meeting about the issue that was FF; well, I thought it was an issue, Sara thought it was an issue, but not Ethan. According to Ethan, the condescending emails were just “communication differences” and FF is “young and ambitious” and “has a fire about him”….and because he didn’t want to address this with FF directly, instead he scheduled an all (office) staff meeting to talk about respect.
It occurred to me during this non-solution “solution” that FF was firmly in the “people who matter” court; he was the golden boy who could do no wrong and got all the perks, despite pissing off coworkers, clients, vendors…no one liked him, except the boss.
At this point I was job hunting with a fury and was in the late stages of interviewing for a position that seemed too good to be true. I was offered the job in the middle of a project meeting with FF (good lord, that meeting was something) and excused myself to take the call, waited a day to get the offer letter and immediately emailed my resignation to Samantha and Ethan. Ethan was on vacation and checking emails periodically..I decided that emailing him on vacation was better than only giving him a week’s notice. The next thing I know I’m getting a call from FF, nice as can be, letting me know that he’s really enjoyed working with me and all the normal platitudes you give your colleagues when they leave the company.
After the world’s most awkward phone call, where FF spent a solid 5 minutes fishing for an “it was nice working with you too”, I checked my emails, figuring that the boss had emailed me some sort of response…nothing, not even an acknowledgement. But then I got a phone call, it was Ethan!…who was trying to call someone else and dialed me by mistake… I figured “no big deal, he doesn’t want to deal with that on his vacation”, in that time I had half the company reach out to me wishing me the best and wanting details… so when the day Ethan was returning rolled around I was a ball of anxiety wondering what he was going to say, if he was going to counter offer, etc.
When he did finally return, he said nothing to me; it went on like this for 3 days, the few words we did exchange were about his vacation. But don’t worry, he had plenty of time to talk about it with everyone else.
It was after a long lunch with my two good friends/coworkers Samantha and Opal that I got the courage to confront Ethan about everything; I packed up my desk, cleared out my devices and waited for him to be free…
I walked into his office with my pile of tech, put it on his desk, and told him I was done, effective immediately.
He looked…shocked and asked “what brought this on?”
So I explained that “it’s become blatantly obvious that the opinions and experience of one group of people count for nothing while the opinions and experiences of the other group count for everything” and that “I want to make it perfectly clear that I am not quitting because of FF, he’s the symptom of a larger problem and I’m done putting up with it.
He then asked me to close the door and told me he didn’t understand, so I reiterated. Then he wanted to know what triggered my quitting right now instead of waiting.
I told him that it’s probably because we just had an entire meeting on “respect” and I didn’t feel very “respected” that he couldn’t even pay me the “respect” of acknowledging my resignation:
“Didn’t Samantha reach out to you?”
“Of course she did, but YOU didn’t. YOU’re my boss and you didn’t have anything to say to me.”
There was a non-apology apology of course.. “I’m sorry you feel that way”
After that it kind of fizzled out with me saying something like “I wish you all the luck in the world, see you around” and then leaving.
It was loud..the few people who were in the office heard everything, even with the door closed and I have zero regrets.
According to my Opal, bossman took about an hour to emerge, looking like a kicked dog, and said he felt really bad…and then she laid into him for all the crap he put me through (this story barely scratches the surface) and made it perfectly clear that this was his fault entirely and that he feels bad because he should feel bad. Not sure how I got so lucky to have a friend like her, but she’s a keeper.
The news/story of my departure spread and over the next few days and I had calls and texts from half of the company…people wanting more details, people apologizing that I had to deal with that, people telling me that they’re proud of me…the outpouring of support was astonishing. I honestly expected for people to be upset with me, but the opposite happened.
I enjoyed my time off before starting my new position and still keep in touch with a few good friends from QRS, let’s just say that the updates have been…interesting.
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I know that my rage quit might not sound very ragey, but I’m a “don’t make waves” type of person, so for me it was a big deal.
Also, if this sounds like an overreaction to everything please understand that there was so much more going on at that job that I didn’t include and that I had reached the point of being so stressed out that I was getting physically ill on a near daily basis.