As the saying goes…

If you play stupid games, you’re gonna win stupid prizes!

And that leads us to today’s story…

Check out what happened in this story from Reddit’s “Petty Revenge” page.

Start now!

My contractor coworker quit with 10 seconds notice after what our manager said about contractors.

“I worked an engineering contract for a while. They were pretty open ended, like a lot were, with a vague (but not binding) length specified.

Kind of like: “This contract is expected to be for 12 months, but it is at will of the employer, and could end earlier or be extended further.”

But for those that do that kind of work, usually they stick to the vague timelines, and a lot of well performing contractors get extended.

Anyway… one day our team of 10 (all contractors, managed by one full time employee) let 3 of the contractors go. (And they had ME do it!

Technically I was running that team, but… I was a contractor too, and not in charge of any firing like that.) So they were told “this is your last day” at 4 pm.

They had a question about this.

Me and another contractor asked our sponsor “hey – how come we didn’t give those guys any notice?”

He said brightly “that’s why we hire contractors! So we can cut them loose at a moments notice whenever we want to!”

We didn’t love that answer. Also – it was a weird thing to say to two other contractors… He basically told us we’d get no notice and be let go instantly someday.

Anyway, long story short, that other contractor was a VERY sharp guy. He started interviewing, and got another job. He told me about it (and I didn’t tell anyone else).

It started in a few weeks. He just kept right on working the contract job, and was right in the middle of a bunch of work that only he understood.

This was gonna be good.

At 5 pm on his last day he just stood up, grabbed his laptop/mouse/docking-station, walked to our sponsors desk and set them down. He just said brightly “hey, thanks for everything, this is my last day!”

The guy said “wait, you’re leaving?” and he just said “yes, thanks!” and walked out. That was it.

(He did also hit ‘send’ on a more official ‘last day’ email at the same time too.)

It was really funny, his work was half done, he didn’t answer any calls or questions about it, and it took us like a month to figure it all out and get that project back on track.

If the sponsor hadn’t been SO delighted about being able to fire contractors at any second, that guy would definitely have given a nice two week notice and worked to have a smooth handoff of his work.”

Reddit users spoke up.

This person had a lot to say.

Another Reddit user shared their thoughts.

This individual weighed in.

Another person spoke up.

And this reader has some thoughts about this…

This manager definitely didn’t deserve to get a heads-up about this worker leaving.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.