Last month we talked about enjoyable ways your behavior changed once you decided to leave your job — when you could disconnect and stop caring — and here are 12 of my favorite stories you shared. Read these and be inspired!
1. The puppets
My mom works as an elementary school teacher and is finally retiring this year. Instead of doing some online progress test, she had her kids make puppets and write stories about them (she assured me this was more mentally stimulating for them than the test, and I believe her). Some busybody admin came up to her at lunch and started ranting and asked her why she didn’t do it. My mom just looked up at her and said, deadpan, “I was making puppets.” It’s my new go-to excuse.
2. The enthusiastic agreement
I used to work in risk and compliance where you’re basically the “no” person who everyone hates. Part of my role was to sit in on development meetings about new initiatives/services, and then come at it almost from a devil’s advocate perspective with all the considerations the organization would need to go through before committing one way or the other. My boss was kind of a renegade who saw my role as a necessary evil, where my colleagues just saw it as mostly evil because I was always getting in the way of their cool and whimsical ideas for how the organization could grow. People on all sides were pretty horrible to me, and it was honestly the worst environment I think I’ve ever worked in across a 20+ year career.
I decided to resign a couple of months before actually doing it and checked out mentally immediately. I couldn’t completely turn my back on my professional responsibilities so instead just pushed things out a little, knowing I’d be gone by the time the hard conversations would have to happen about the viability of these whimsical (and often slightly insane) ideas. “Got a new idea for some weird and wonderful harebrained thing? Sounds exciting, tell me about it … let’s put a meeting in the diary for the first week of August to discuss!” — knowing I would be out the door in July. At other meetings, “Do you have any input from your side, MyName?” … “Not right now, all sounds good to me, let’s revisit in September” — knowing I’d be bed rotting and unemployed by then.
The weight that was lifted off my shoulders the moment I checked out mentally was indescribable. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from the years spent in that miserable job but I had a great last month or so.
3. The awful chair
In my last role, I’d love the job and the team until we got a new chair of trustees. We went through four CEOs (interim and substantive) in four years (having had one CEO for the previous decade) because she was so awful, and staff turnover rocketed to 400%.
My role was a very high profile independent contributor, and I often got emails from the chair, always critical. In my last weeks, she repeatedly emailed asking for a “friendly chat” … and I just blanked her. First of all saying I was too busy writing a handover document (I was the longest serving team member, I had a lot of institutional knowledge no one else had) and then … I just didn’t reply and set a rule on my inbox to send her emails to trash.
4. The goal planning
I put in my resignation at the end of Q3 and waited until mid-Q4 to leave (gotta get that Q4 stock vest, baby). My team was doing goal planning for the following year, which was always a fraught multi-step process that involved soliciting goals from the managers on the team, culling them, running them up to leadership, revising, going back to leadership again, etc. etc.
It was a slog every year, but after I resigned I had a blast during annual goal planning. I tuned out of any goal that didn’t interest me and dropped back in to (politely) drop truth bombs on goals I thought were stupid. I maintain that I would have called them out either way (a stupid goal is a stupid goal, and I don’t want to be held to it), but I definitely had fewer reservations about being politically correct, and I was merciless about critiquing the goals being imposed on the team I managed (because there was no longer the concern that people would be like “oh, she’s just being lazy and doesn’t want to do the work”). And I LOVED being able to end every opinion with, “But it’s no skin off my back either way, you guys do whatever you want.”
5. The recurring dream
Not so much the leaving itself, but for months after leaving my previous company, I had dreams of different variations of The Last Day. I guess quitting felt so good, my brain wanted to experience the feeling over and over again.
6. The payment demand
Our private practice clinic merged with a hospital-based system of clinics four years before I retired. I was in my late 60’s, and most of my patients were also older and on Medicare. Medicare pays more for the same visit if the patient has more risk factors. The organization was obsessed with maximizing risk factors, largely by both adding extra diagnoses to the problem list and commenting on them in the chart note. They used software to comb through past records, including outside records.
Every day I would get an email with a long list of possible diagnoses. If the patient did not have them, Medicare would still pay a one-time payment if the diagnosis was mentioned and an explanation of why they didn’t have it. This added many hours to my workload, and they refused to share any of the extra money they were getting from Medicare. We’d get a pep talk regularly emphasizing how important this work was. One of the pep talkers let slip that the organization was paid an extra $1.5 million the previous year.
When I decided to retire in a year, I quit doing this unpaid work for that final year. It greatly improved my quality of life, and I had more time to spend talking to my patients rather than typing. Any time I got negative feedback for not doing risk-factor adjustment, I just would say, “Pay me my share of the money it brings in” and they left me alone.
7. The teaching demand
When I decided to leave teaching and had another (non-teaching) job lined up for the end of the school year, I suddenly had a great time teaching.
The district had previously funded a reading program my students had done in their earlier school years. They cut the funding but (no surprise), expected the program to keep running based on teachers taking it on for free. I just … didn’t. I left the not-filled-in forms on my desk with a Post-It on the top of the stack saying FUNDING CUT.
8. The on-time arrival
At one job, I found it easier to actually show up on time (not a coverage-based job, my 10-minute tardiness didn’t impact anyone but myself) once I knew I was leaving, because I didn’t have the urge to run away screaming every time I approached the building.
9. The departure
I had finally resigned from a job that had an assistant manager that hated me so intently and nonsensically I developed shingles. On my third to last day, she again did something so outrageous that instead of just swallowing it I went directly to my manager and told her I wasn’t going to be treated like that and it didn’t make sense for me to finish out my notice period. I hugged my coworkers, clocked out, and just left.
10. The town halls
I retired a year and a half ago. For the final about seven or eight months before my last day, I skipped every single mandatory town hall meeting my employer held. I hate-hate-HATE the self-impressed bloviation that floods from the mouths of the so-called “senior leadership” cadre during those things, and I simply decided to retire from that aspect of the job a little ahead of when I retired from the rest of it.
I also stopped refraining from rolling my eyes when people said or did stupid things during the meetings I did attend. The only time I ever got called out on that was when the meeting was one of the interviews for my replacement (I was on the interview panel). The candidate was woefully unqualified and I have no idea how he ever got moved forward to an interview, but by golly he got there, and he WOULD NOT SHUT UP. It was 30 minutes of non-stop word salad, and when he started up on yet another blast of meaningless words, I rolled my eyes so hard I nearly sprained my eyelids. My supervisor gently chided me after the interview, but I frankly didn’t care at that point.
11. The cough
My last day at a job I hate is tomorrow. I had been having health problems all winter and spring, including a cough that had lasted approximately six months and had pretty much everyone I knew begging me to go to the doctor (which I did do, of course). I knew the health problems were at least partially stress-related. I did NOT expect that the very day I put in my notice, the cough would suddenly disappear. I have now had almost two weeks with no coughing, after coughing almost every day since Thanksgiving.
Bye, current job. It was not nice to know you.
12. The realization
I didn’t have to resign for it to happen. People were dropping balls on projects and I was so stressed out because the work we were delivering was not good and I knew we were going to lose clients. I raised the issues with my manager. I escalated it when I felt like he wasn’t intervening enough. Then, when I expressed that the stress was impacting my health, the person in leadership flat-out told me, “Stop caring so much. There’s a point at which your commitment to doing good work hurts you because you can’t do all the jobs.” I talked to my therapist and she agreed — if my manager and leadership weren’t getting more involved, it meant I needed to also not be so invested.
Since then, I have worked really hard to just do my part, flag what I can to my manager when it’s appropriate, and then let it go. It’s been such a gift to myself to have a healthier relationship to my work and not be so emotionally invested in it. It’s just work and I’m not curing cancer or doing anything that serious.