The quitter

Over the years I've had plenty to say here about workers who quit and the obnoxious management that drives them to do it.  But I also have a fair bit of experience with such matters myself.  In particular, one job stands out in my memory, one which I quit almost two decades ago.

The employer was a government agency.  I had been working there for five years.  At first things had been relatively OK there, but over time new, toxic people came to power at the executive level, and the decent middle-level managers for whom I'd previously been working left.  The atmosphere that came to prevail at that place seems surreal to think back on now.  Upper management's attitude toward employees was adversarial and bullying and often seemed deliberately cruel.  The agency head (selected after a year-long search process) sometimes came to work upset after fighting with her girlfriend and vented her anger by snapping at the first person who caught her attention.  There were yelling and screaming arguments between executives that you could hear through the closed doors of their offices.  Everybody hated working there and regarded the upper management as an unavoidable malignancy, like a frightening pandemic.  Because the onset of these conditions had been somewhat gradual, I didn't truly realize at the time how abnormal it was, or how much stress I was under.

After the original middle managers left, a new manager was hired over the accounting unit where I worked.  I'll refer to this guy as SA.  He was mean, short-tempered, and weird -- the executives had managed to find a person in their own image.  It was his explicit view that it was actually good for subordinates to be yelled at sometimes.  He wasn't as bad toward me as to some of the other employees.  I think my sense of humor appealed to him.  But there were plenty of unpleasant incidents.

As an example of SA's eccentricity, there was a woman (I'll call her AD) who worked there at a higher-level job than mine, also reporting to SA.  She was very smart and had, or was working on, a science degree -- I'm not sure why she was working in accounting.  She often went out for exercise on breaks, changing into casual clothes and leaving her office clothes at her desk to change back into when she returned.  One day I happened to be passing AD's desk and noticed SA crouching under it.  He said to me in a sort of conspiratorial tone, "I'm going to steal one of her shoes."  He removed the shoe and hid it somewhere, so that when AD came back, she was not able to put her office shoes on.  She had a presentation to give at a meeting almost immediately, and didn't have time to investigate.  She ended up giving her presentation barefoot.  The next time I ran into her, I mentioned that it was SA who had hidden the shoe, and opined that he had some kind of kinky sexual interest in her (there had been other signs of this).  She was not happy about it.  I don't know whether she ever made a complaint.  Probably not, since all of us were basically intimidated by the management.

At one point, the agency carried out a massive internal reorganization so confusing that I actually went through a whole fiscal year not sure who my boss was.  After seeing the new organizational chart which seemed to show each employee with two direct managers, I e-mailed SA to say, in brief, "I don't understand this -- who am I reporting to?"  He replied, "Assume it's me until somebody tells you otherwise."  He obviously didn't understand the situation either, but we got through the year on that provisional basis.

Eventually SA left the agency, for reasons that were never revealed.  Given all the infighting among managers, I assume he got on the wrong side of somebody more powerful.  A regular employee, a good man, was promoted to temporary accounting manager while the agency looked for a permanent replacement.  So for just a few months, the place was transformed.  The atmosphere of fear and intimidation vanished.  It was actually pleasanter than most jobs are.  I began to realize how abnormal the last few years had been.

Then word came down that a new permanent manager had been chosen -- a manager from a different department of the agency.  We had some people in our unit who had worked under her years before, and they said she was even worse than the executives we already had.  The stories I started hearing sounded scary.  I decided to quit.

My job was very complex, since over the years I'd taken on more and more duties, and there were quite a few things that no one other than me really understood.  Knowing how much work it would be to train a replacement, I gave the agency four weeks notice of my departure, not just the usual two.  I judged four weeks to be just about enough to train somebody.

The agency did absolutely nothing to prepare until three days before my last day, then brought in a temp for me to train.

I did the best I could, but it was hopeless.  In three days I was barely able to cover even the most basic outline of the job.  When I left, the temp and I both knew that she would have no idea how to handle things.

A week after I left, I was on a bus and I ran into an employee from the accounting unit.  That person told me the temp had quit -- she was in an impossible position, after all.  I never heard what happened after that.