#1
#2
Big box retail electronics store. All hands meeting, so probably 60ish employees.
Management fired a guy right before the meeting (seems like a dumb decision), and before he walked out, he stood up in front of the crowd and said "Well I'm going to miss you all. These idiots fired me because they think I've been stealing stuff, and well I haven't!"
Right then an iPod touch came tumbling out of his hoodie's pocket and hit the floor. Sealed in a box with the company's inventory and antitheft stickers still on it.
#3
The boss goes into the office of one of my dad's co-workers to discuss some kind of technical issue. They disagree about the proper corrective measure, it escalates into a screaming match, and the boss fires the co-worker on the spot. Tells him to take his stuff and get out.
The co-worker comes back the next morning, just like nothing happened. Nobody's really sure what's going on, and since the boss had to go out of town for a meeting, they can't get ahold of him to ask. He doesn't seem to be causing any problems, though, so they just kind of do their thing and leave him alone. The co-worker keeps coming in and doing work, and a couple of days later, the boss walks past his door and does a double-take.
"Co-worker, didn't I fire you?"
Without looking up from his desk, the co-worker replies, "You can't fire me - I have too much work to do."
The boss thinks about that for a minute, shrugs, and walks off. Dude kept working there for another couple of years after that.
Companies across tech, healthcare, finance, and manufacturing are cutting jobs at a massive scale right now. The main drivers? Artificial Intelligence (AI), tight budgets, and major company shake-ups.
According to a report by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, US companies announced over 97,000 job cuts in May 2026 — the highest total for that month since the peak of the 2020 pandemic.
Employers said AI was the primary reason for almost 40% of May’s announced job cuts.
#4
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#6
But pink slips only tell half the story… employees are also walking away on their own terms, both quietly and loudly.
Quiet quitters are the workers who stay on the payroll but mentally check out. Instead of making a scene, they simply set strict boundaries and refuse to do a single task beyond their job description.
Gallup’s global workplace tracking reveals that quiet quitters actually make up at least 50% of the US workforce. These aren’t underperformers, they are employees doing the exact job they were hired to do, but nothing more.
They’re defined as workers who are “not engaged” — physically present, but psychologically detached.
Studies show it is often a coping mechanism for chronic stress and lack of recognition at work.
#7
#8
Anyways, I guess he was expecting a promotion. One day we got a phone call and the manager gave him the phone at the desk in the middle of the store. I guess it was corporate telling him that someone else got the promotion. Really calm, he was like "Ok... Yeah... ok..." then hung up the phone, removed his work shirt and walked out of the store shirtless without saying anything. Never saw or heard from him again. Godspeed, Jason.
#9
Yeah they fired her for taking time off.
If you think mentally checking out is a tad too dramatic, wait until you see what the “loud quitters” are doing.
Unlike quiet quitters, these folks make sure everyone knows when they are done. They aren’t afraid to post their resignations on social media or call out bad bosses publicly. They are also not scared to drop an out of the blue “I quit” message in the team group chat before walking out the door.
According to Gallup, around one in five workers are overtly pushing back and loud quitting.
#10
They only found out because she had to go by the original twin's name, and that twin updated her employment status to the OTHER job on Facebook.
They fired her, but I mean, she did a good job and was a pretty cool person, so I would have just hired her instead.
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#12
One day he called her right after we had a fight about it. She told him she couldn't go in because she had an eye problem. He pressed her, so she told him she just couldn't see working for him anymore.
Loud quitting stems from a deep wave of workplace burnout, especially as strict return-to-office mandates after the pandemic disturbed work-life balance.
And workers with high-demand skills aren’t hesitating to make a scene on their way out, believing they can land a new job almost instantly.
The fallout from loud quitting can be severe for an organization. These employees often resign without notice, create public disruptions, or criticize the company on social media. In extreme cases, they refuse basic job duties or actively disrupt daily operations before walking away.
#13
They all would hide $10 or $20 at a time, and surveillance always caught them. Surveillance would notify the gaming regulators, in my state they were highway patrol officers on gaming assignment. Gaming would order a constant monitor, which meant for their entire shift, that employee was recorded. They (surveillance and gaming) would allow the employee to keep stealing until the grand total reached in excess of $500, which was a state felony.
Every time, gaming would call the manager on duty and security. They'd let the employee count into their bank, and as soon as they were on the floor working, would come in, place the person under arrest - in front of their co-workers and customers - and walk them out thru the casino floor in handcuffs.
It was meant to be a lesson for us, but I couldn't imagine the shame and embarrassment of being called out as a thief and a liar in front of my friends. The looks of hate those people got were awful.
#14
I texted the guy that there was a pic about him on FB he might want to check it out. After a couple "who the [hell] is this" texts, I sent him a screenshot of the post (with my info blacked out). He brought it to the head of HR at the company. She got fired. He got the job he was applying for.
You think that would be taught in HR 101, but I guess people are still idiots.
#15
To understand how we got to quiet and loud quitting, we have to look back at “The Great Resignation.”
Coined by organizational psychologist Anthony Klotz in early 2021, the term describes a massive wave where millions of workers voluntarily quit their jobs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the US alone, a record 47 million people handed in their resignations in 2021, followed by another 50 million in 2022.
#16
So a couple years ago my husband worked for a security company. One of his main security sites was a very secluded equipment yard for the gas and electric company.
He worked a 12 hour graveyard shift by himself every night out at the yard. Strange things started happening around the yard, namely a few of the big (and very expensive) generators started to go missing.
Then one night, my husband and I are sitting on the couch watching a movie (on one of his rare days off) and he gets a call from his boss. Apparently, some woman had just called my husband's boss *from my husband's phone number*, claiming to be my husband's girlfriend and chewing out his boss. His phone had been on the table right in front of us the entire time, and he wasn't on it at all.
So then we find out that my husband's coworker had been calling his boss telling him that my husband was doing all this stuff that he wasn't doing at all.
The climax of this all happened when the boss finally started getting suspicious of the coworker, and decided to search Craigslist for the generators that had gone missing from the job site.
Lo and behold! They were listed for sale, and the contact name and number were none other than the coworker himself.
The next day, they had police waiting for him at the job site when he arrived.
We found out that this guy had been plotting and working over the boss and my husband the entire year, hoping to cover his tracks and make my husband look guilty and like he was the one that was stealing equipment.
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Months of remote work, health scares, and severe burnout during the pandemic caused a fundamental shift in how people viewed their lives. However, millions didn’t just drop out of the labor force. They actively upgraded their careers, took new roles, or started their own ventures.
“As organisations make changes, employees are migrating to the work arrangements they want at this stage of their lives. We could see an unsettled labour market as people move around and companies try to provide solutions that bring out the best from their employees — and that takes a while,” says Klotz.
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