Well I've left a couple of jobs because there was some awful stuff going on, but I had no kind of FU money when I did it (I kind of did the second time but it's complicated), so I don't have a story of my own.
But when I was still working at Wal-Mart, I was witness to the Legend of Frank.
Frank was an older, white haired gentleman who was already a hero, he'd had a long military career and the truth is, he was one of the best employees the store had. But he had his terms. He had the only job at Wal-Mart he cared to have, and he worked the only shift he cared to work.
But he'd done so well for so long, no one had a problem with this. Thing is Frank did not need the money, at all. He had a military pension, his house was paid for, and he was actually delaying Social Security for a bigger payment because he didn't need it. He worked for reasons that aren't fathomable to me. He used the money he made to buy fishing lures and gave a chunk of it away to the Children's Miracle Network and stuff like that.
Now I have good and bad things to say about Wal-Mart. Right now I'm going to say one of the bad things.
I don't know if this is by some evil design (I doubt it, never ascribe to malignancy that which can be explained by incompetence) or what, but it seems every once in a while some goober in Arkansas, for the hell of it, decides to change the way employees are scheduled or what jobs exist and what they do, and the usual effect of this is it tends to make older, more highly paid workers quit or find themselves in situations where they have to resign because they have a personal situation where they can't start working nights instead of mornings or something like that.
As a graduate of business school myself, I call that MBA thinking, and I say that pejoratively. Actions like this are necessary sometimes but what I saw was something that some overpaid executive cooked up on a spreadsheet to make it look like he/she found a way to save money when in fact he/she was only shuffling people around and causing operational risks. If (s)he'd paid attention in business school he'd realize what he/she was doing was in fact pointless.
This is what happens when people under intense pressure to justify their huge six or even seven figure salaries who have never worked in a Wal-Mart store, who think of the company not as people and stores and trucks and groceries and merchandise but rather as abstract numbers, make decisions about the jobs of people they will never meet. I'm sure these corporate people are perfectly nice people, but I doubt very much that the $11 an hour workers whose fates they manipulate are more than an idea or a piece of the data to them. Dunbar's number. Wal-Mart has 2 million employees. You do the math.
Well anyway, someone decided that Frank's job was too cushy and he needed a new schedule. They basically took his job and another job, cut half the responsibilities and work from each, and switched them so you wound up with this weird situation where the new job had some of both of the old jobs. And while it wasn't a completely illogical way to do things, it didn't make sense to the people who actually did this work. This was a "I'm a smart corporate executive and you are a lowly peon, do what I say" initiative.
When this happens, they usually call you in to an office to tell you it's happened right before the schedules showing the changes come out. That way they can say they gave you advance notice without really giving you any ability to deal with it. It's a shitty thing they do because they know so many of their good employees won't quit because Wal-Mart is all they have.
But it didn't pan out for them this time.
Frank looked across at the overnight manager and said no, I won't do it.
The manager, who was a real douchebag, said yes you will and you'll like it (witness as unreliable but I can definitely imagine this guy saying that).
Frank looked at him and unclipped something from his belt and something from his shirt pocket. He then opened his wallet and removed something.
"Here's my box cutter. Here's my discount card. And here's my badge. That's everything I have of yours. I'm going home."
Three hours into his shift, Frank turned around and walked out the front door of Wal-Mart and into a legend, vanishing in the darkness of the parking lot. It threw the rest of us into chaos because we had to pick up the slack, but none of us complained, for he was our hero. Because at some point, every single one of us had wanted to do that.
Last I heard of Frank, he's doing a lot more fishing nowadays.