I quit my job today
When I made this account a week ago, this is not what I planned my first post to be about. I had grand humble designs on writing about some other topics I have in my head, but this is all of a sudden much more relevant, or at least immediate.
Until today, I worked at company that manufactured electronics. I liked the job when I started, I liked and still like the people I worked with. I will miss some of them. But for my physical and mental health, I had to leave.
Over the past month or two, my discontent with my job slowly grew. I felt that my department was under-supported. We were asked to do too much - with the resources and manpower we had - to meet often unrealistic delivery date targets set by a sales team on another continent. Sometimes we had to redo work that we had done because the instructions we were given were either incomplete or incorrect. Other times it was because parts that were manufactured by a different department failed.
Overall, this doesn’t seem so bad. But when you tie it into an ERP system that tracks hours worked on a task vs. expected hours, and then we are told that we aren’t efficient or productive enough (even though overages were often something beyond our control), I all of a sudden started feeling guilty for not living up to expectations, even though I was working my hardest and best.
On top of this, the job was more physically demanding that I had expected. I spent more time standing that I would have liked, and was often expected to move/lift objects up to 40 lbs by myself, and up to 60 lbs with help. Both of these aggravated existing physical injuries (knee, back and ankle), and I would often come home from work and have to apply heat or ice to one or more of these areas. We were told “safety first”, and while I felt this to be true in terms of keeping us safe from dangers such as large machinery or loud noise, I found it to be less true in the general routines of production, when I would often be on my own, unable to easily get help from other employees. Or even when I was with other employees, it was still easier/more efficient to do the lifting ourselves (and we were told that they were tracking our efficiency).
My dislike of my job hit a high last week, when another instance of being given incomplete instructions occurred. We followed the given instructions, only to be told after assembly was completed that assembly was actually the last of 5 steps. And while it was never explicitly stated, it was definitely implied that “we should have known”. I spent most of my weekend wrestling with what to do, because I knew for sure that this job was no longer a good fit for me, mentally, physically and emotionally. And that emotional investment over the weekend meant that I wasn’t getting the rest over the weekend that I need to be able to go back to a week of work.
I arrived at work yesterday morning with the strong inkling that it would probably be my last day. I got to work to find out what the correct instructions were for the items in question (which meant, yes, undo a bunch of work, and do some work that totally wasn’t in my job description, but I happen to have the skills for). I went through the day, seeing if I could make it through, and realized by the end of my shift that I was done. At the end of my day, I quietly cleaned out my locker and grabbed a few other belongings I had brought to work.
This morning, I called my supervisor and said, “I won’t be in today, or any day in the future. I am resigning, because I am done.” My supervisor suggested I stay on at the company, and could swap departments or to what is called “light work”, saying “I don’t want to lose you, you are my best team member.” While that shows my work habits were noticed, what does that say about how hard I worked compared to the other people on my team?
But I can’t stay. After the phone call, I sent a resignation letter outlining more concretely what I have described above, and why I decided I needed to leave.
I am going to feel bad for a while that I left my immediate coworkers in the lurch. They are in the same boat as I was, having to deal with the issues I have outlined. But I do not feel bad for leaving the company, because I was giving more than I was getting back, and no company is worth the level of exhaustion and shame I felt over the last few weeks and months. And overall, I feel as if a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.
(A note: I am in the position that I could choose to just leave my job. I know a lot of people aren’t in that position, and I wasn’t always here. Do not feel bad for having to stick out jobs you don’t like. Also, I am not saying that the company I worked for was awful. There were a lot of good things about working there, and most of my coworkers were happy. I just wasn’t happy any more, and couldn’t continue to pretend to be so.)