Fired for thinking about quitting?
Not really petty revenge for me, but very petty for her.
So I’ve been working at this convenience store for almost two years. Technically, my title is “part-time manager,” but honestly I’ve felt more like a puppet manager. The job had its good moments, but it also came with rude customers, stressed owners, lazy employees, and really inconsistent management. One minute the husband would tell me not to say anything to employees, and the next the wife would tell me I should. So I just tried my best to handle everything.
The owners would vent to me constantly about employees calling out, showing up two hours late, and other problems. They aren’t terrible people. In fact, they even spent around $160 on a food safety manager certification for me about a month ago. I think they opened a second store before the first one was fully stable, and the stress shows.
About a week ago, I clocked out and left the store, accidentally forgetting to return a borrowed name tag. A couple minutes later, I came back to return it. While I was there, the phone rang, another employee handed it to me, and it was my boss. She asked me to print “the tags,” and I responded, “The whole store? I already clocked out.” Then the call dropped.
A few seconds later I realized she meant the food labels, which only take a minute or two, not the price tags for the whole store, which can take over twenty minutes. So I texted them and let them know I did it.
The next day she came in upset and said she didn’t like the comment I made about “the whole store.” Then she called me an idiot and said she would never ask me to work off the clock. But honestly, there were multiple times where I would already be clocked out and then get asked to do something before leaving. Usually it only took a couple minutes, so I did it anyway.
That was the second time she spoke to me in a degrading way. The first time was when I left a note saying I didn’t want to become a full-time manager and would rather go back to being a part-time associate. I left a note because I had always been told that was the proper way to communicate schedule or position changes. Her response was to call me a baby for leaving a note.
After the second incident, I started seriously thinking about quitting. I talked to a few coworkers who had been there longer than me because I felt like giving them a heads up was the respectful thing to do. If I left, things would obviously become even more stressful there.
I had already made plans to turn in my two weeks on June 9th. I was even planning to help train my replacement and repay the cost of the food safety certification because despite everything, I still felt they were mostly decent bosses aside from the name-calling when stressed.
Then someone told my boss I was considering quitting. About fifteen minutes before my shift ended, she told me, “This is your last week.” At first I honestly didn’t understand what she meant because I was working an unusual schedule that week, and English isn’t her first language, so I thought she meant the schedule itself was ending. I asked if she wanted me to finish my shift or leave immediately, and she told me I could finish it.
At the end of the shift, she finally explained that someone had told her I was planning to quit and said I should have told them “months ago.” Which felt ironic considering she had literally called me a name the week before.
Now whenever I run into regular customers in my neighborhood, they ask why they won’t see me at the store anymore, and I tell them honestly what happened. The funny part is the owners always said the store was “like a family,” but they never once asked me why I wanted to leave in the first place.