Tell Us About the Best Time You've Ever Quit

The new year is a great time for new beginnings, sure, but sometimes an ending is the best beginning of all. That’s why we want to hear your most mic-drop worthy quitting stories.

To get you started, we rounded up a few from our own staff.

From Anna:

One of the worst parts of working at the record store was the snotty hipster UC Santa Cruz fuckheads who’d told me I rang them up wrong and would make me re-do their entire purchase because, I guess, they didn’t trust that I could be trusted to scan bar codes?

So my very last customer after five years at that job was One of Those—hair in his eyes, Portishead t-shirt or some shit. I gave him his total and he was like, “Uh…that doesn’t sound right. Do it again.” No please, no nothing.

I said, “You are a pain in my ass,” got my coat from behind the register and walked away. Went in the back, got my purse, said goodbye and left.

From Kate:

The year I realized I didn’t have to go skiing with my family because I was old enough to say no was amazing.

From Kara:

Can it just be a name?

For the record, yes! Quitting people, quitting sports teams, quitting jobs—we’ll take any quitting story you’ve got.

From Erin, hero to a finance stranger:

I cried in my boss’s office during my last performance review at Merrill Lynch. Got offered a job at Jezebel a month later, and instead of just telling him I had another job, I asked him to lay me off and promised I’d never work in banking again. Hours later, the boss found out from corporate HQ that they had to let one person go from our office. I wasn’t on the chopping block, but I had volunteered. I got paid for 6 weeks. I have no idea whose job I saved.

From Julianne:

Quitting smoking sucked for sure…that’s why I started again.

Mine isn’t so much a best quitting story so much as a gut-wrenchingly awful quitting story, but here goes! I went in to give notice at the restaurant job I worked at and, while I was talking to the owner in her office, a buser got a call telling him that his brother had died and he (understandably) burst into very loud tears, right outside the office’s open door. I told my boss that I could come back at a better time, she told me to keep going, so I said that I was giving my two weeks notice. There was a silence (as we both continued to listen to this poor kid sob) and finally she goes, “You’re telling me this now?” And that was that.

Now the winners of New Year’s Eve’s champagne vomit-splattered Pissing Contest!

The Family Enema by litigiousmind

When I was in high school I had knee surgery on December 26 and the combination of immobility and hydrocodone made me super constipated and my mom had to give me an enema. At age 18. Worst NYE of my life.

The end.

Black Eyes by DBG

My birthday is in late December, and the festivities for my 21st got a little out of hand. The end result of this was that I ended up with a black eye, and subsequently with a new drivers license picture featuring said black eye, since my license expired on my birthday, and the nice lady at the DMV wouldn’t let me just reuse the old picture from when I first got my license when I was 16. This is an entirely different story, but becomes relevant later.

NYE rolled around about a week later, and I went out with some friends for a bar crawl. I’d been drinking pretty regularly for a while prior to turning 21 so knew what I was doing on that front, but getting into bar s was still novel and exciting. At this stage, the black eye from the aforementioned trainwreck of an evening had mostly faded, but was still faintly present. We went to a couple bars and were having a nice time. As stupid 20-somethings are want to do on NYE, we proceeded to get quite exceedingly drunk over the course of the evening. One of the friends I was with started chatting with a group of young women about our age at the bar, and they came over to join us. I start talking to one of the girls, and we’re seemingly hitting it off, though at this stage I probably could have been convinced that I was hitting it off with a microwave. Our little party decides to move on to a new bar once more, and we’re carded at the door. The bouncer looks at my drivers license, laughs, and asks my new acquaintance if she’s seen it. She of course had not, so I show it to her, and begin to explain the story and between my combination of intoxication and distraction from said story telling, trip over the stoop walking into the bar and hit my face on a barstool.

I woke up the next morning alone and brutally hungover with a second black eye and no recollection of what happened after I tripped. Apparently in my drunk and probably concussed state I proceeded to throw up on the girl I’d just met as she rushed over to see if I was okay, which she understandably took poorly, and fled the scene. We were promptly shown the door, and some friends got me in a cab, took me home, and took turns keeping an eye on me (while also comprehensively sloshed) until it was clear I wasn’t going to die.

Ocean’s(pray) Eleven by tuxedocatherine

I stand by the fact that this wasn’t so bad, but it was funny, and it did get me kicked out of a big gala/party.

I was at one of those big to-dos where you pay $100 per person to hang out in a museum in Washington, DC with a lot of other drunk, young people in fine clothing. And we were all promised an open bar until midnight and then a champagne toast. That promise was not kept.

Around 10:30, I go to the bar and order a whiskey coke. They’re out of whiskey. Okay… How about wine? No wine? Ok… How about a vodka soda? “LADY, WE’RE OUT OF ALL ALCOHOL.”

So, of course, I do what any logical (and already very drunk) young-twenty-something would do in that situation. I grabbed the bottle of cranberry, yelled, “Well then you won’t be needing this!” and stormed off, chugging the cranberry juice as I went. Seconds later I was nearly clotheslined by a security guard who promptly escorted me from the property for juice thievery.

Of course, the real winner is BurnerWhore, a commenter who didn’t find tuxedocatherine’s exploits cute, not one bit:

You understand why that type of conduct isn’t allowed in a museum, right? Because even if it was a crap D.C. gallery-cum-museum like the former Corcoran, the collection is priceless (the word “museum” being a tip off). Someone exhibiting unruly unpredictable behavior, let alone carrying a large container of a stain-making beverage, needs to go someplace else, per social convention and the institution’s insurance. If this had happened at my museum, the “someplace else” would have been jail.