I
f you're like most people, you treat quitting with the false solemnity of a funeral for an annoying family pet. You stifle any PEACE BEYOOOOTCHs that have been building up inside you for years, act a little sad and maybe say a few thoughtful parting words.
Other folks just can't resist expressing exactly how they feel with an ass-loaded roman candle. These people approach quitting a job like performance art, living the I'll show them dreams of frustrated employees everywhere, and occasionally showing us just how badly those dreams sometimes turn out ...
If we knew how to program video games, we would totally quit every job this way. We're talking an interactive resignation letter where you have to shove various office supplies into your boss's ass to escape a cubicle dungeon full of cankle-shoed fat women and terrifyingly greasy IT guys. We almost want to learn how to program, get a job doing it and then quit that job, just so we can resign this way.
"And in the second level, I beat you both to death with the Pepsi machine."
A designer working at 2K Games said goodbye with a custom Mario game that you can actually play here, complete with the star power song and "I QUIT!" dancing on the screen whenever you grab a mushroom. Its quasi-respectful tone and brain-punching awesomeness aside, we can't help but suggest that he leave it off the next portfolio he turns in to a game developer, unless he's looking to capture the record for world's fastest job interview.
"Well, I can see from your portfolio that you're a bombastic asshole. Get the fuck out of my office."
A more low-key and slightly poignant example was created by an Ubisoft programmer, depicting the company in a film noir adventure setting, except instead of guns and gin joints it's full of a bunch of rail-thin geeks who can't decide what they want to do with their lives. Emo noir, we suppose.
But nothing quite tops the unnamed techie who decided to leave behind a Mac alert explaining just how he felt about his temporary employers:
The "I've Moved Back Into My Mom's House" button is noticeably missing.
What baffles us about this is how he seems to be trying to set an ultimatum for his employers to treat him better. He says himself that neither the company nor rest of the staff will be affected by his quitting, so his work couldn't have been that great to begin with. Then he accuses his boss of being a screw up, but takes the time to leave a little box in case they want to hire him back. No boss ever in the history of anything would consider clicking on that damn thing. Mainly because you'd have to assume all three buttons lead to old man porn.
Sometimes the best way to say "I'm leaving" is by waving around a naked penis. Or by filming a video using the Star Wars crawl to describe how you would have sex with everyone in the office, and then waving around your naked penis obscured by a clown face. OK, that's never the best way to say anything, but don't tell that to this guy:
Our big question is, why bother covering up? He's gone this far to insult everyone, and yet chooses to censor his wang (in the creepiest way possible, we might add). Any of his intended targets still watching the video when Mr. Chuckles shows up had it coming--he flat-out announces he's going to be naked about a minute and a half beforehand.
Kevin Nalty, who used to be the consumer product director for Propecia at Merck Pharmaceuticals, used American Idol and his bare chest to leave his job in order to pursue an online video career. While Big Pharmaceutical to YouTube might sound like the worst career move ever, after viewing his resignation video, we have to think the US Health care system got the best of that transaction:
Well-liked members of the workforce tend to get a nice cake when they leave a job. Or, if you're like W. Neil Barrett, you bring in your own cake with a letter of resignation written across the frosting.
He's smiling because he's poking his dick through the bottom of the box.
Admittedly this is pretty clever, we're more on board with this cake, which sends a clear impossible to miss message:
Under no circumstances should you ever eat a cake that looks like this.
Well, not impossible to miss. Evidently, a guy known only as Patrick walked into a job he hated, dropped this bomb on his boss's desk, then took his paycheck and walked out. What's worse, his boss didn't understand what had happened, and had to have the whole exchange explained to him later by his remaining staff.
"I thought the cake was quitting!"
However, we feel that if you're going to quit your job, you might as well do it shitfaced with a bottle of Cheez Whiz, which is exactly what this guy thought. He showed up to work at a grocery store lit to the gills at 5AM, which many of you may recognize as being way before most people are even awake. After fighting with his coworkers and shouting some slurred expletives, he grabbed a bottle of the condiment and wrote "I Quit" on the storefront window, vanishing into the city like a drunken cheese-wielding Batman before the cops could show up and arrest him.
We can only imagine the awkward looks exchanged when he realized he still had to come back and pick up his last paycheck.
Singing a toe-tapping resignation to your boss like Jonathon Schaech in That Thing You Do is the perfect mix of douche and awesome, sort of like Sean Connery slapping you in the face with his dong.
While singing.
Unsurprisingly, we tend to see this happening most often with musicians, who by trade have been known to sing on certain occasions. Take The Cure, who won a contest to have their music published by a German label called Hansa Records. Confronted with a bunch of dark, complex songs that would later be beloved by generations of social misfits, Hansa went into full-on marketing panic and made the logical decision to try and turn them into a boy band.
Clearly, they are nothing of the sort.
That didn't quite work out, and after recording a bunch of tracks that Hansa refuses to release to this day, The Cure decided that they actually had a sense of humor buried beneath their tear-streaked mascara and recorded "Do The Hansa," an upbeat pop song loaded with ridiculous German gibberish, on their way out the door to embrace worldwide fame.
That's fairly gentle compared to the send-off Queen gave their former manager, Norman Sheffield. In the wake of Queen's unquestionable talent and immense mainstream appeal, Sheffield decided that he was responsible for all the success and was therefore entitled to all the money they made.
Fed up with his antics, Queen decided to quit the shit out of him and wrote a little ditty called "Death on Two Legs," in which they compare Sheffield to a leech, gloat about how successful they are and invite Sheffield to kill himself for being so terrible, an offer which he sadly didn't take them up on. The song sounds kind of like a gangsta rap beef, only nobody got shot.
Gangsta.
If you're going to quit, you might as well do it in front of a bunch of people so somebody can describe you in detail to the police. The below Moe's manager decided to dance to "Ice Ice Baby," a song that somehow expressed his desire to pursue better employment with lyrics like, "the girls were hot wearing less than bikinis," and "wax a chump like a candle."
It actually seems to be sort of entertaining until he rips open his shirt, at which point everyone in the dining room gets a little uncomfortable.
But the best part is, he doesn't clock out until afterward, which means he actually got paid for three minutes of poorly lip-syncing along with a bad song.
Then we have Inetta "The Mood Setta" Hinton, a DJ for an R&B and hip-hop station in Louisiana, who had an on-air meltdown, letting everyone know how much she hated her job. Probably because 16-year olds that sweep up popcorn and used condoms at the movie theater get paid more than she did. So she made a special announcement shitting on all her coworkers before literally declaring "I quit this bitch" and leaving the station, presumably to pursue the exciting career opportunities that await people unable to handle the demands of radio DJ-ing.
Twitter is great for getting your ass fired, but it's also an effective method of offering up a resignation letter in 140 characters or less. Just ask Paula Abdul, who bailed on American Idol, the first televised plague in human history, via a post on her Twitter account, which in keeping with both Paula and American Idol is the most professional thing to do, ever.
Even MC Skat Kat would've at least called.
But hands down the best Twitter quitter is probably Heidi Lunde, who was working for a Norwegian news site where she was told that she'd be responsible for all the user-generated content coming to the site, pretty much meaning she'd have to sort her way through a huge pile of bullshit every single day to find something worth publishing.
So Heidi tweeted she'd just cleaned out her desk and was ready for new challenges, which sounds pretty vague but in actuality she just meant she had moved all her things upstairs to start her new position. That's when her boss called and asked why she resigned over Twitter without telling him first.
A formal meeting was set up to discuss the incident, but her boss promptly blew it off and told Heidi that she needed to submit a formal resignation. Realizing that her job sucked and her boss was about as intelligent as a moldy pancake, she quit for real.
If you have access to a publisher, and the attention span to write a Fuck You that's a few million characters longer than the 140 characters allowed by Twitter. Writers have been insulting people for as long as anyone has been able to read, but some are especially adept at uppercutting their resignations into the taints of their former employers. Take Ernest Hemingway. He was trapped in a contract with a man named Horace Liverwright and wanted out of it for serious artistic reasons, namely because another publisher was offering him a shitload more money and he resented being trapped by anything less than a fire-breathing dinosaur.
"I said 'shitload,' Shitload! Didn't you hear me?!"
So Hemingway wrote his first novel The Torrents of Spring, clocking in at under 100 pages and featuring two protagonists, one that bones a young Native American woman and runs off with her into the wilderness and another that takes mescaline and hallucinates that he's the President of Mexico. In other words, he wrote a book that was completely unpublishable by the standards of the time. But he did it on purpose.
"Let's see him sell this piece of shit."
Horace promptly released Hemingway from the contract, freeing him to pursue the more favorable publishing deal and go on to write several classics of American literature, buy a house in Key West and have sex with countless women. This he also did on purpose.
