The Company Let Contractors Go With No Warning, So Another Contractor Quit With No Warning Either
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The saying goes, what goes around comes around, and that’s exactly what happens in this story.
A bunch of contractors are working for the same company, but the company decides to let a bunch of them go without any notice.
When the remaining contractors ask why their former coworkers weren’t given notice, they’re pretty upset at the answer.
That’s when one contractor comes up with a plan for revenge. Keep reading for all the details.
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.
This would not be a fun job.
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 4pm.
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!”
It was a pretty unsettling thing to hear.
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 decided to give the company a taste of their own medicine.
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.
At 5pm 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!”
Talk about an unexpected exit!
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.
I love how OP’s coworker got revenge on the company by walking off the job without any warning. Well played!
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
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This is a good point.
Here’s another good point.
Exactly!
This person thinks he handled it well.
That really was a perfect way to quit after seeing how his coworkers were fired. He handled the situation very, very well.
Hopefully, the company learned something from this experience, but I doubt that they did.
If only his former coworkers knew about his revenge!
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