I worked with someone who did this. It was the HR person. She just didn’t show up one day, didn’t answer her phone or door. For a solid week. After a wellness check by the police, it was revealed that she was fine, just couldn’t go back in to work because she hated her job so much.
I was young, and it was a shitty grocery chain filled with shitty management and shitty customers. I 100% thought she had killed herself, or skipped town for some other awful reason. It was a relief to hear she was OK. Fuck that store.
what if we organized the workers but instead of striking we all just don’t show up and gaslight the regional management into thinking everything’s fine
Are you ok yourself? Do you still work there?
You sound like a good person, wish you two were friends so she might not be as depressed.
I am in a much better environment! This was about 10 years ago, and that particular store closed. I also ghosted that job. They had been harassing my trans coworker friend so we just stopped showing up. They did NOT try to call me :)
people think I died
receives flowers
Checks note that came with them
“Get well soon.”
I had an assistant who didn’t really need the job, but her parents forced her to have one. She was the youngest, and only girl, of a family of 5 siblings. All her older brothers worked at the race track that their family owned, and she was dating someone they didn’t approve of. I liked her boyfriend, he seemed friendly and soft-spoken, but her folks were like “if you’re going to date whom you want, you better have a job and live on your own.” Well, one day, she got mad because I asked her to work a shift she didn’t want to. So she simply didn’t show up, which really fucked me over. So I called her up, pretty pissed. No answer.
She didn’t show up for 3 days. So I fired her for job abandonment. She didn’t really need the job, right? Her parents owned a racetrack.
A week later, her folks called me, and asked if I’d seen her. No, she didn’t show up for work ever again. They panicked. “OMFG WE DON’T KNOW WHERE SHE IS!” They immediately assumed her BF kidnapped and/or murdered her. The police were called, an investigation was opened up. Her BF’s address showed he’d moved away. I had to sit with the police and go through an interrogation about her last whereabouts. She became a missing person, and once a week for two months, her parents called and asked if I had heard anything. The detective called with more questions. Then her car was found in an impound lot: it had been abandoned and looted in a New Jersey parking garage. Then the calls petered off and stopped.
A year went by, and I assumed the worst.
One day, one of the employees in another store in the mall told me he saw her with her BF. I didn’t believe them, but then other people said that they’d seen her, and corroborated some stories she told them. Apparently, she had been planning to run away for some time, and just ran away with her BF and went NC with her family. That didn’t work out so well, because both had trouble finding jobs and then their car got carjacked. Both of them were forced to return home, and her parents were forced to reconcile that she was never going to leave her BF.
I was pretty pissed, though, that I thought she was dead.
Many years ago, a woman that worked at the same place, just didn’t turn up one day. I think they (the closest thing we had to HR at the time) let this slide for a week, then called her. She just said “Oh, I didn’t work to work there any more”.
I don’t think they pursued it any further and let it at that.
I just don’t understand that mentality. You burn a bridge, when you could just send an email or something saying you quit and keep the possibility of coming back sometime open. Or if your boss actually liked you, you could have gotten a recommendation, but instead decided to make their life suck.
Just send an email saying you quit, it’s really not that hard.
You burn a bridge
Yeah, that’s kind of the point
keep the possibility of coming back sometime open
If I wanted to work there I wouldn’t be quitting, especially not just dipping out
Or if your boss actually liked you, you could have gotten a recommendation
Usually people doing this aren’t in that situation, being on good terms with someone usually means you don’t just vanish on them
instead decided to make their life suck.
The vast majority of times this is, again, the point
You do you, but a little professionalism goes a long way. Maybe that manager moves to another org that you want to apply at, and they reject you because of how you acted the last time. Or maybe they just tell someone at the new org how you left.
Doing this has zero benefits to you, sending an email takes almost zero effort and might have some benefit for you. The rational thing is to send the email.
Maybe that manager moves to another org that you want to apply at, and they reject you because of how you acted the last time
Good, I don’t have to work with them again, win for me
Doing this has zero benefits to you
Catharsis comes to mind, on top of the schadenfreude
sending an email takes almost zero effort
Yeah, and thats part of why not doing it sends a point
If your workers hate working for you so much they won’t even send an email then you should evaluate your management and work culture, yakno?
Yesterday, I (sort of) learned the phrase “implication arrows,” from which I learned that I should assume that this story is not true, though the arrows… Imply that it’s true. I still don’t really get it.
Anyway, I’ve never held a job where the employer would do more than the bare minimum required by law if I disappeared. Certainly not so much as contacting my family unless there were extenuating circumstances like me verifiably disappearing mid shift. I suspect this is true for most people.
As a manager I would definitely contact an employee’s emergency contacts and then request a welfare check if one of my team dropped off the face of the earth. Medical incidents happen and a couple of the team live alone that I know of.
In that case, you sound like a good manager to have.
I like my current managers, but I think if I stopped showing I’d eventually just stop getting paid. There was a period where I wasn’t attending daily meetings because I hadn’t received the invitation to them. Eventually I made a comment to my manager that I was glad the current contract didn’t require a ridiculous number of meetings and he said something like “what are you talking about? There are daily meetings. We just thought you were out sick or something.”
3 month bullshit for resign? What kind of work contract is that?
Let me introduce you to Europe
To be fair this is a counterpart for being harder to get fired compared to some USA states. It makes the economy less fast to adjust but it makes people’s life less stressful.
IDK my man, having three months of forewarning for resignation sounds pretty cool to me. I don’t really see it as a downside. Especially in Italian law, where you can avoid making things awkward by agreeing with your employer to make the resignation time as short as you both want, as long as those three months are paid out. Blessed.
It could make you miss you a job opening that needs someone earlier. Hadn’t have the issue myself, but I guess it happens.
If you’re hopping within the country, usually the local culture is adapted. I never had issues with it, employers expect you to have a resignation period.
Plus as I was saying companies don’t really like to have a working quitter, so they will usually negotiate for that time to be shortened. Maybe one month so you can transfer your knowledge to somebody else, then you’re out - with the three months money, naturally.
You wouldn’t because everyone is expecting you to do the right, corporate thing, so they’ll gladly wait for you to gracefully terminate your old job.
In tech anyways.
I don’t know what are you talking about. In my country the standard is two weeks and max one month in special cases. I’ve participated in the hiring of multiple people from different European countries and they never asked for more than one month to join in, except when they wanted to relocate.
In France, the standard for software engineers is 3 months. Verified with this official source https://code.travail.gouv.fr/outils/preavis-demission. With convention “Bureaux d’études techniques, cabinets d’ingénieurs-conseils et sociétés de conseils”.
That’s crazy. So if they present a same day resignation note they have to pay a three month salary penalty? That’s just companies stealing workers’ money.
No, not at all.
If the company fire you they have to pay you, e.g., three months notice, regardless of if they want you to do the work or not.
If you quit without notice, you might have to pay the costs incurred by you quitting early, but that’s not your salary -because they now wouldn’t be paying you.
Costs might be something like the company having to refuse an order because they now don’t have enough people to do the work, or the increased cost of an expedited hiring process.
I don’t know how common costs are in France, but the UK has the same rules and essentially no one ever claims costs. You need to really fuck over your employee in a very explicit and well documented way for this to even be considered.
The main disadvantage is you will have a bad reference if you leave without notice.
So a company with a higher revenue may reclaim higher costs, even if they paid like shit? Doesn’t look fair to me. In Spain that penalty for not complying with the notice period is automatic. Also companies hiring don’t care for references unless they know directly the person that wrote it (so only useful for small indistry sectors).
In theory. It’s just standard contract law. You violate the contract, so you have to make the other party right.
In practice, the court is likely to go, “You should’ve hired someone else to do the work. No costs”
That reminds me when I missed the first day of teaching because of a really bad flu causing me to lose track of the dates, I got a very concerned call from my advisor who thought I offed myself. Apparently not too uncommon for underpaid adjunct professors, unfortunately.
When I was in grad school I knew a guy who just simply didn’t teach for half the semester. No contact with students, no classes held, just didn’t show. He gave everyone a passing grade on the midterm and came back halfway through. No explanation. He was not fired. Of course, like the rest of us, he was grossly underpaid and didn’t have health insurance. I guess they get what they get if they’re gonna treat us like cogs, right?
Sometimes I wonder how people get away with stuff like this. I recall that story from Spain, I think, where a guy was getting a paycheck for like 20 years but not working at all. I guess they did a reorg and his new ‘boss’ didn’t know about him and he never got work assigned and he just stopped showing up…for years.
It has to be a pointless job to start with, right? If I just didn’t work at my job for a week it would probably get noticed. If I no-showed completely it certainly would.
I’d probably be given the benefit of the doubt for a few weeks if I just stopped producing work. I could maybe make it a month before someone said something about my performance but only because sometimes the things I work on take a while to come to fruition. And missing meetings isn’t uncommon because of conflicts/being super busy.
Id probably also get the benefit of the doubt if I no-showed too. But after a two days they’d call my wife or come by my house, or send the police department to my house to check on me.
