Quitting quietly... or otherwise

HALLIE EPHRON: First we were reading about The Great Resignation. People quitting their jobs during the darkest days of Covid. Now it’s morphed into a buzz around “Quiet quitting.” In other words, mailing it in – doing the least possible to stay on the payroll.

I’ve quit several times, but I’ve never been a quiet quitter. I volunteered to get laid off from my job as an educational consultant after eight years working at Digital but they wouldn’t put me on the list. My performance ratings were too high. So I had to quit (no bonus for me) to take a job at a small training company, a job I hated so much (SO dysfunctional, they specialized in MISmanagement and burning out their young hard working employees) that I quit after 6 weeks.

Yes, I admit I had another contract job (flexible hours) already lined up, and it was the step I needed to take to make space in my life to write fiction… in the hopes that it would one day pay off with a book contract.

Have you yet uttered the words, “I quit.” And how did it pan out for you?

RHYS BOWEN: Since I’ve had very few “proper jobs” in my life I haven’t had much chance to exclaim “I quit” and march out with dramatic flair.

The only one I remember quitting after one week was between college and starting at the BBC when I was employed as a tea lady at IBM. There were supposed to be two of us. We had to make huge urns of tea and coffee then wheel the trolleys around the building. The trolleys were so temperamental and heavy that I couldn’t control mine, flying down hallways and crashing through doors willy-nily. The other girl quit after one day. I was also expected wait tables in the executive lunch room.

It was all too much for one person so I quit. The only time in my life.

Otherwise I never actually left the BBC. I took a leave of absence to go and work for ABC in Australia. I left Australian Broadcasting to get married. I left doing PR for the California Nurses Association to have a baby (couldn’t wait! Lots of old cows there). Since then I’ve been a writer. My own boss and very happy.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Hmm. That is a great question. I tried to leave my TV job a while ago but they wouldn't let me, so now I work at the station free-lance, which is absolutely great.

I did quit my summer job at the Dairy Queen a million years ago--circa 1967–because my family was all going to Europe. I do remember that they were really, really angry about it. Summer jobs were hard to get, and they thought I was leaving them in the lurch. They were right, of course, and I still, all these years later, feel bad about it.

Oh–and I once quit a job before I started. I was hired away from Channel 7 in maybe 1984 by a local TV station in Washington DC. I agreed to the offer,...and went into the big boss’s office to resign. And he was so upset, and kind of got…threatening? About it. He said–you’ve worked here for less than a year, and you’ll get a reputation as a quitter, and no one will ever hire you again. I was so intimidated that I un-did the whole deal.

I’m glad I stayed. Completely.

JENN McKINLAY: I’m not a quiet quitter, although I did ghost a few lame retail jobs back in college. Sorry not sorry. Treat employees right and they won’t leave you in the lurch.

Other than that, I’ve only had one full-time job which lasted three years and that was it for me. After that, I did a variety of part-time library gigs until I went full-time with the writing eight years ago. Writing is, of course, full time but if you love what you do…well, you know.

LUCY BURDETTE: I was desperate for cash in college so took a job taking care of axelotls in the biology department. These are prehistoric-looking amphibians and there were walls of them, each in its own plastic box of water.

I can't recall what experiments were being conducted, but I do know that some of them were albino and some were grafted together, stomach to stomach. Since these creatures won't eat anything unless it's moving, I had to take chunks of frozen liver in tweezers and wave this in each axelotl's cage--then they would snap at the liver and gulp it down. They needed four or five bites apiece. APIECE.



And then to make things worse, the boxes needed cleaning twice a week. Dump the creatures into the sink, scrub out the slimy boxes, return axelotls to their containers. But I kept at that until I scored a job that had something to do with filing in the library’s card catalog.Phew!

One more: I was home from a semester abroad and missed the opportunity to apply for a lot of summer jobs. I saw something in the paper about sewing in a handbag factory. I could sew so I applied and got the job.

Sewing leather on an industrial machine is nothing like sewing aprons on your Singer at home. It was so hard! And the foreman hated having a college girl on his team. Plus the other workers were largely Hispanic, some spoke no English, and none of them had the option of quitting a difficult job.

I couldn’t take it and I’m still embarrassed that I quit after 3 days and begged my mother to go down and pick up my check.

HALLIE EPHRON: I had a job briefly going door to door selling encyclopedias. Also calling people and offering magazine subscriptions. Lasted one day in each.

I was highly unsupervised as an adolescent.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I just have to speak up for the “quiet quitters” of the workplace - if you read the news stories in business sections (which tend to slant heavily toward the bosses…hmmm) you’ll find they often define “quiet quitting” as such reprehensible practices as 1) only working 40 hours a week, 2) not being available via email after work or on the weekends, and 3) not volunteering for unpaid work “for the good of the team.” I highly recommend Ed Zitron’s Quiet Quitting and the Death of Office Culture to anyone who’d like to learn more.

That being said! I’ve had a lot of jobs that were, by definition, ending: summer jobs, temp jobs, a contract legal documents review job. As my recent Social Security reminded me, I have a spotty history when it comes to working for other people - I was in school most of my 20s, a stay-at-home mother for most of my 30s, and have been self employed since I hit 40.

I had a lovely first career job as the Development Officer at the DC Historical Society, and I was sad to quit, but they actually threw me a party because I was leaving to marry Ross and start law school!

I did get fired once, though. Like, back to your desk, clear it out, security walks you to the door fired. It was the law firm I worked for around the time Youngest was born, after I’d entered my first book in the Malice Domestic contest. As you all know, it was published, and about a year later, the HR lady called me in to her office and gave me the chop.

They said I was spending too much time on the job working on my career as an author - and she did have a point, I was emailing and doing publicity stuff from my desk. Although in my defense, I was still carrying NINETY TWO CASES on my docket.

Because I got fired, I got unemployment, which the firm challenged because - all authors will shriek at this - I had a book out and must have been making too much money to qualify. Needless to say, one visit with the State Unemployment agent cleared that up. All I had to do was show him my advance and explain I wasn’t seeing anymore $$ until up to a year later. :-)

HALLIE: So what about you? Have you ever quit a job? stomped out in a huff? Quit quietly? Hung around and mailed it in? And lived to tell about it??