“If You Don’t Like It, Leave”: 50 Times People Left Arrogant Folks Speechless

Grade 8 language arts class. To preface this, I was never an aggressive student, generally the teachers pet, the person who if a teacher was away for the day would be tasked in their notes to the sub to be able to assist & give them directions.

The time: 20 some odd years ago shortly after the Columbine shooting (this context is critical to the he story.)

Location: middle of nowhere Alberta, a small country school.

So our regular teacher was out for the day and had left a note directing the sub to ask me if she had questions about what had been covered. Sub comes in reads note and opens the teacher's Weekly planner. Then begins writing our words for the weekly spelling test on the board; except; she opened the wrong week, instead of the current week, she had opened the prior week. At this point being the goody two-shoes that I was (and much to my classmates dismay, although our teacher would have corrected us when she was back so it wouldn't have helped them) I raised my hand and politely informed her that I believed she had gotten the page wrong as we had previously covered this material.

What happened next, I couldn't make up. She lost her c**p, she started ranting about how teens in general and me specifically were a danger to her, how she didn't know who were her friends and her enemies in the class (we'd never had this sub before), how she had every right to fear for her life. She then capped it off by saying she was the teacher and if we wanted to think in her classroom, well there was the door, we were welcome to leave.

I was never a popular child so I wasn't really expecting one of the popular kids (and my sometime bully) to stand up collectively with everyone else, pull me to my feet and we all walked out.

Now I mentioned above that we attended a small country school, there was no place to go, so we just sat in the hallway until the principal came down to chew us out for not being in class. The sub was gone by the start of the next period and the principal taught the rest of our teacher's classes that day.

Youre_late_for_tea:

The sub's behavior was unacceptable, I do not mean to defend her, but maybe she just had bad classes over bad classes and reached a point where anything could've ticked her off. I hope she got help.

Ok, maybe not everyone left but...

My mother in law got me involved into a charity. First I was a volunteer, then a secretary to the Board and back to volunteer again. Things started changing, people who got on the Board were no longer true to the organization’s mission and at times ethically challenged (i.e. using high school volunteers for the charity in a political campaign, using artwork obtained through contest beyond scope of the contest rules without pay).

Anyway, during one of the meetings, which was meant to be planning for a big annual event but was more like hazing to be honest, I asked myself why the hell am I allowing anyone to treat me like whipping girl? So I openly asked the Board members if this tone is the new standard of the organization’s interactions with people volunteering their time and talent to them. The President told me I was being impertinent and rude, and if I “could not stand the heat to get out of kitchen”. To which I replied that I quit volunteering. He told me then I had to submit my resignation in writing in order for it to be acceptable. I sat down, scribbled my resignation on a notebook page and presented him with it. He told me he won’t accept it because it was not submitted according to the bylaws. I told him he was incorrect and reminded him I wrote the bylaws (they were to cheap to hire a lawyer to write them), and they clearly state that volunteer resignations do not require Board approval. And I left. I was to pissed to drive home, so I went to a cafe across the street. Few minutes later two other long time volunteers and all the high school volunteers walked in... They all did quit effective immediately as well.

The annual event did not take place. The Board was sued by the entity it was supposed to be solely supporting for mismanagement and misappropriation of funds. The charity later involuntarily dissolved by the state due to reporting failures. Custodian was appointed who allocated the remaining funds.

In hind sight, it was the right time to jump the ship. For me best part was, the Board let the insurance laps (guess who normally kept track of the renewals?), so the legal expenses and part of the judgement went out of their own pockets. Talk about heat in the kitchen...

When I was in high school I was part of a FRC Robotics team. The coach decided that no one who missed a practice during the last week of the season would be allowed to attend the tournaments. Of course the band class had a mandatory concert during one of the meetings. So when I brought up that I wouldn't skip the graded band concert the coach gave the ultimatum. About a third of the team got up and left, including all the captains. Coach backed out of that really fast.

I had a college professor do this once - was lecturing us about how poorly we all did on the assignment, how we all sucked and called us stupid wastes of oxygen.

We tried to point out that his emails were confusing in some cases contradictory, and the scope of the assignment changed 3 weeks before it was due.

So he said it and we all left, and in the class next week the assistant dean for the program was there, took down our side of the story, and then dismissed us for the day.

Normal prof returned for the following class but had a grad student attending all the classes for the rest of the semester and all emails were cc’d to the assistant dean.

I once worked at a plant that sorted pallets. I worked like 16 to 18 hours a day (sometimes more off the clock) as time went on they demanded more and more work from us. By this time i was a manager. Well people were getting burned out getting sick or just plain stopped coming to work, so keeping workers was nearly impossible. The straw that broke the camels back came when a higher up came in from out of state and informed us out pay was going to go down and we were expected to put out 20 percent more work (this not only was an impossible feat but was asking way to much of people sorting 50 to 70 pound pallets by hand for 16 hours a day) we said that it wasnt fair amd was there any way to at least keep out current pay. Was firmly told if we didnt like it then we could leave. We looked around at each other grabbed our name badges and threw them at this higher up and walked out and went to a local bar. Last i heard that plant was shut down for overworking staff and underpaying them.

My boss said "don't like it? Try finding a job like this one with better pay and benefits!" So I Google it and now I just had my 14th year anniversary at the "new" job.

Broke up with bf/fiancé of four years that way.

Him: “Well if you can’t change, maybe we should break up!”

Me: “actually yeah, I do think we should break up.”

And that’s how I left (after years of emotional abuse and gaslighting, of course).

When Hastings Entertainment was committing s*****e, many of us in corporate raised the alarm about new short-sighted policies that would doom our stores. Our CEO sent out a corporate-wide email that more or less gave some spiel about the brand needing only "bold" people in leadership positions and if we didn't like it we should email his assistant for a professional reference and resign.

Something like 40% of corporate resigned within the first month following this email (including myself). I think it was close to 65% within 6 months. Dozens of stores closed, they tried to sell the brand, and declared bankruptcy several years later.

When I worked third shift at Walmart the management tried to change a shirt policy overnight. They all the sudden decided that we HAD to wear blue collard shirts, and not blue t-shirts anymore.
One of the managers named Jackie(who was a total b***h) came up to my two friends, and myself, and told us we had to either go buy new shirts right then or go home. We left. Frozen/Dairy didn't get done that night, and we got to go home and play Destiny all night. Next day they never said another word about our shirts. F**k Walmart by the way.

jpropaganda:

You still went into work after that and kept your jobs? Nice.

Had a teacher nobody liked pull the old "if you don't want to behave, you can leave my classroom" on a classmate. The whole class got up and left.

Things hadn't been going well in this class since he had started teaching us. The main problem was that he was a really bad teacher - like, he seemed to have no knowledge on his own subject (History), or at least was incredibly bad at transferring his knowledge. We didn't have any respect for him, and he tried to keep us in line by being extremely strict, but in an unfair way. Wouldn't let anyone ask questions anymore (because he could never answer them), screamed at students if they quietly asked their neighbour for a pencil, that sort of stuff.

I don't remember what my classmate did that angered the teacher, but it was something minor. We were all fed up with him. So when he told my classmate to just leave, we all did. Felt really rebellious and like I was part of a bigger plan or something, it was great.

We got into trouble for it, but also got the teacher fired so it was worth it.

We had this college teacher who didn't do his job diligently, always making us do projects and stuff but he never makes the effort of teaching us, so us student made a pact, we would talk to him during next session, if he agreed to start teaching the right way then good, if not we would all stand up and go out. He ended up saying "if you don't like the way i teach you can go out", so we did just that, needless to say he wasn't expecting everyone to go out. We talked to the college principal, he then offered us the possibility to change the teacher.

When I was still in school, we had this great and fun teacher that really did his best for us. Unfortunately, we had some serious bulls**ts in our class, not paying attention and just talking through him. I felt so sorry for him.

One day he had enough and, still kinda calmly, tells anyone not interested to just leave. Those s***s didn’t think twice and just stood up and left. What’s more sad is that almost everybody blindly followed those s***s. Even people that I never expected that to do.

I sat there probably with 2 others. That’s the moment I realized I’m never ever going to follow blindly like sheep anymore. I never really done this, but I was often afraid to walk a different path.

Even 18+ students, literally paying for their study themself, can be serious ungrateful s***s. I know it’s bad but I secretly hope they end up without certificate and a sh**load of debt from that study.

Oh man, at my last job. I was salaried, and already working 8:30-5 five days a week, plus 20 or so hours of overtime. the boss decided to “change our roster” which was basically changing it to 8-6 Every week day, along with every second Saturday. When I asked if he was going to pay me for those extra 8-10 hour a week, he said I was salaried and he didn’t have to, so if I don’t like the hours I can always leave.

So two days later I handed in my resignation, moved interstate and life is way better now.

I was working at McDonald's. I wasnt a manager but I convinced all the crew on my shift to show up at the meeting because they were discusing Corona Virus hazzard pay and there was a rumor that only the managers were getting hazzard pay and we were 3 months into this covid c**p. At the meeting she said crew were only getting $50 and every manager was getting $450. Now that's not fair, i understand then getting mkre because of their position but I starting banging on my table and shouting FAIR HAZZARD PAY!!! And everyone, including a fair amount of the managers started hitting the tables. And then here comes our boss with the line "IF YOU DONT LIKE IT THEN LEAVE" I got up and everyone followed me out that door and i shouted DAIRY QUEEN IS HIRING and we flooded Dairry Queen and filled out paper applications lol.

I was once at a pep rally in high school where the vice principal said, "If you're not going to stand up and cheer, then leave!" So about 20-30 students walked out and went home.

They were somehow surprised people did it. The rule after that was changed to requiring students to sit in the cafeteria, which I enjoyed.

The boss telling us we still had to work 16 hour shifts.
The ENTIRE workforce just dropped tools and left. It cost them millions for that little "f**k you" from the bosses. By the next day, shifts were reduced and more staff hired.

Back in the mid-90s, a co-worker was under a great deal of stress. He was performing a low-skill role in a high-skill industry during a tremendous crunch that was very important to the company. Entry-level stuff. More a job that's a stepping stone than a career. Despite that, he was an integral member of the team with institutional knowledge/background that couldn't be replaced overnight. Actually, it couldn't be replaced at all. During a team meeting to go over status, progress, etc., he asked our boss for some help as he was overwhelmed and simply couldn't keep up anymore. Boss said, "If you can't handle it, there's the door." Dude just stood up and, without a single word, he walked right out.

Boss ended up having to do his job until completion of the initiative.

A math class in high school. All the math teachers were pretty chill, they knew the majority of kids hated math so they’d try to make it ‘fun’, wouldn’t be as strict as other teachers, and would treat us like adults - happy to just chat about any old thing as long as we tried our best and did the work. One day we had a student teacher come in and teach the class as part of her studies. Up until that point she’d been observing for a couple weeks, she wasn’t bad and she’d try to emulate the other teachers, and as an assistant teacher she was good.

Well, when it was her turn to teach alone it all went to s**t, she constantly lost the attention of everyone and was generally being a hard a*s and not really helping people who didn’t understand. Halfway through she flipped, didn’t like that she couldn’t control the class and just shouted at us all saying “If you don’t like it then you don’t have to be here!”. So there we were, it was a few seconds of us all thinking “wait, did she just tell us we could leave??” Then everyone got up and left. Our regular teacher was sitting at the side observing, he just looked exasperated af, and didn’t stop anyone, just told us all to have a good day and he’d see us next week. I don’t remember ever seeing the student teacher again.

I once witnessed a couple on the street fighting. The woman was going on and on and the poor fellow looked so dejected. He said something that I couldn't catch, and she screamed "Fine! If you want to then just leave!"Well, he turned around and walked away in the opposite direction. She stood there with her mouth open, in shock.

This is actually pretty much the way that me, my sister, my mom and I managed to get away from my father.

Me and him had gotten into an argument (a rather stupid one but it blew up nonetheless) which resulted in him grabbing my arm and throwing a whole pitcher of iced tea at me.

This was apparently the last straw for my mom, who had already been planning a divorce. Fast forwards a few *weeks* of later, and he tries to kick my mom out of the house. At two in the morning. Absolutely screaming his head off, throwing stuff around, trying to pack my mom's clothes into a suitcase. My mom basically told him that me and my sister didn't want to be there either, and he said that we could leave too if we wanted.

Somehow he was actually surprised when we left. I also *distinctly* remember him saying "I don't want this." as we walked out the door.