‘F*** You and Goodbye’: The people who quit their jobs in style

ADMIT it. At some point you’ve wanted to tell your patronising boss to shove it. These people did just that, with panache.

C’MON, admit it. At one time or another you’ve wanted to tell your patronising, micromanaging and socially inappropriate boss that he or she can take his job and shove it where the sun don’t shine.

Take it from me, you’re not the only one who has thought about quitting. Some of us actually go right ahead and do it with panache.

There’s the bloke who quit his hotel job with the help of an entire marching band, the CBS presenter who proclaimed “F*** it, I quit” live on air and then there’s those that like to add a touch of sweetness to their resignation. That’s right. Resignation cakes are a thing.

British journalist and historian Matt Potter has charted the history of resignations for nearly 30 years. He believes we’ve got plenty to learn about ourselves and our society by studying quitters.

In the prologue to his book about quitting, Matt explains “history is written by the winners” and yet “the official version is never the whole story”.

“The quitter’s tale offers a far more compelling, and often a more honest version of history,” he writes.

Matt first released his book, F*** You & Goodbye two years ago. This year the title has been re-released with the slightly more sober name, The Last Goodbye.

Speaking with news.com.au from the UK, Matt says he first got interested in the notion of quitting when he was working in Germany as an unlicensed labourer in the early 1990s.

“I was on this building site in the snow, shovelling somebody else’s human waste. And I just thought, ‘Enough, I’m not going to do this anymore’,” he recalls.

“So I walked up to the foreman and I just gave him a piece of my mind.”

In response to him quitting, Matt’s then-boss “looked at me like he’d seen a ghost.”

For Matt, this gave him a sense of power. He uses the word “jubilation” and describes it as an “electrifying” experience.

“There is something hugely life-affirming in the idea that we can take back our own definition of ourselves,” he said.

“People call it a career suicide or people call it … falling on their sword as if it’s a death. But actually, it’s a moment of birth.”

Author Matt Potter.

Needless to say the joy Matt felt after quitting his German labouring job didn’t last. He later learnt that the spooked foreman had “backed away because he thought that I was going to try and shake his hand wearing the gloves that I’d been shovelling the shit with”.

Putting human poo well and truly aside, every quitter news.com.au spoke to for this story agreed resigning gave them the freedom to pursue their dreams.

Daniel Battaglia, chief executive of online parking marketplace ParkingMadeEasy.com.au, used to work in London as vice president of the now-defunct global financial services firm Lehman Brothers while it was in administration.

Despite his high salary, Daniel says: “The work was soulless and futile.”

“I saw my directors earning huge salaries with average intelligence and thought if they can achieve establishing a huge company, maybe so can I. It’s what led me to my start-up business,” Daniel said.

“I took a crazy leap of faith to [create a] start-up but its been the best thing I ever did!”

Daniel Battaglia says quitting is the best thing he ever did.

Writer and author Sandra — who prefers just to use her first name — was once a legal secretary for a prestigious law firm. She recalls that one Christmas Eve her boss insisted his staff would work until 5pm, even though other law firms shut at midday.

Sandra had 12 guests coming for dinner and decided to leave at lunchtime in any case.

“On the first work day after the Christmas holidays I was raked over the coals for my crimes against HR [Human Resources],” she recalls.

Sandra kept working as usual but told her colleagues she was going to lunch and not coming back.

“They all came with me, I bought champagne for everyone and told them not to mention anything about where I was to my then-boss,” she said.

“They later told me that the HR manager was furiously looking for me, asking where I was and everyone claimed no knowledge,” Sandra says with a laugh.

Sandra quit over a champagne lunch.

This kind of resignation is what Matt would call a “Kamikaze Protest”.

Altogether, Matt has uncovered seven distinct categories of resignation. Some acts of quitting are explosive and others more graceful. But his favourite category by a long shot is the one his book was originally named after — “F*** You and Goodbye.”

“That’s the one where people actually lose all control. So it’s the point where effectively it’s just the explosion of rage, and inarticulately,” he says.

Matt gives the example of when Roy Keane, the former Republic of Ireland football captain during the 2002 World Cup, turned on his then-manager Mick McCarthy, with a profanity-laden verbal tirade.

“I didn’t rate you as a player, I don’t rate you as a manager, and I don’t rate you as a person. You are a f****** wanker and you can stick your World Cup up your arse,” Keane famously blurted out.

As a consequence Keane was sent home from training preparation in Saipan and he missed the World Cup.

“In that moment, he had no choice but to do what he did,” Matt says, “even though all reason was against it.”

Or you could write your resignation on a matchbox, like this anonymous person did, before sending it into Found Magazine.

During Matt’s long and exhaustive study on resigning, he unintentionally became a kind of agony aunt for quitters. People who were considering quitting asked Matt to ghost write their resignation letters, some keeping a draft in their top drawer or pocket just in case.

These days Matt himself has thrown in the towel. He’s stopped collecting and analysing resignations. But even so, he likes to think he’s helped a few people who were who were “trapped in a terrible, terrible situation” along the way.

And if that’s you and quitting is on your mind right now, Matt closes his book with this sage advice: “If you wake up at night, remember no matter how trapped you feel, there are other jobs.

“Walking out is OK: you’re not leaving the story, you’re writing your own version. Take care.”

Follow Ginger Gorman @GingerGorman