This being said, I have never seen a story about using that FU money. Please, share your stories!!
I guess this is my story, but it could not have been as satisfactory without my former supervisor. To set the stage, what turned out to be my final job was publishing, and all of the books required a CD and a website. This extra, non-paper stuff was the responsibility of the technology managers. We all worked for one woman, and we were arranged by discipline: psychology, statistics, Spanish, sociology, advanced math, English, etc. I was kind of a mule - when anyone quit or took maternity leave or there was an organizational change, I got that discipline until it was straightened out, so there was not a time during the last 3 years when I wasn't doing 3 jobs, and sometimes up to 5. Like all the others, I really liked working for her. She was clear with us, was technically sharp, instituted smart reporting techniques, respected us, backed us. A manager. On the other hand, I was a sort of Ur-mustachian, and had built up more than just FU money by then, though I had never thought about it in that way. One saved. One invested. It was a thing which was done. Thank you Jim Collins and James Clavell, for the concept.
It came to pass that some of the editresses decided to get her moved out, and pulled it off just before one of our weekly conference calls. Not good. She told us about her job shift (basically, into the rubber room), and began to sob. All of us who reported to her were stunned. What would happen without her? It had occurred, I think, because the VP was one of those men - we are legion - who are afraid of women. The editresses mobbed him, forcing her out. One of them because our new manager.
The new supervisor shamed me publicly and I called my old supervisor to ask if the new one was hunting my head. She said, "Yes. At least to the extent that she announced she was after you at a staff meeting." So I asked her to take a message up, and she agreed.
"I'm going to quit. Not negotiable. Negotiable: they can have a good transition, or a bad one."
"Good transition?"
"I train my successors in each discipline. I keep all the projects for my disciplines going - attend the kick-off meetings, start the projects for the newest books, keep the others up to their milestones, come in on time with the ones due to publish, stay around as long as they want and do as much as they want, until they are ready to replace me. And they pay me severance."
"Right. Severance. Now. Bad transition?"
"I take the three weeks of vacation I'm owed, and when I come back, they get a CD-ROM of work records."
"I'll see the VP and get back to you."
He took the good transition. And she also told me, "If you need any testimony, let me know." I didn't know what she meant until I looked into unemployment and found there is a category called "unreasonable supervision." If the company contests paying it you can present evidence that unreasonable supervision was used to force you out, which is a form of involuntary termination and therefore covered by unemployment. (They didn't contest it.)
I had a meeting with K, the only really smart HR person I ever worked with. I liked her, but it was one of those elective disaffinities Emerson didn't write about: I never sensed she could stand me. At the meeting she was pissy. Finally I said, "K, you're pissy. Want to tell me what's wrong here?"
"Well, you quit. You quit! And we're paying you severance. We never do that. I've never heard of that."
I told her, "As I see it, there are two ways of looking at this. The first is that the company and I both saw this situation as adults committed to getting the work done as smoothly as possible, without stoppages or getting books bumped out of the print queue, while getting new people on line. Ordinary flow of business. I was going to go, and we are making my going as smooth as we can."
"And the other way of looking at it?"
"It was a cheap act of corporate extortion and I pulled it off."