did it twice during a pandemic
I left my job this past May during a pandemic. It was a tough decision that I struggled with making during the entire month of April. After working for someone who was verbally abusive, extremely passive-aggressive, and just all kinds of bad, I decided I just wasn’t willing to put up with it anymore. The “agency” I worked at was small and made up of 1 guy and 3 women in the office (it was the size of a utility closet in a We Work) and 2 other women on the east coast along with an SEO and Google Analyst in Iran. I got this job on Halloween after a rushed interview and an even more rushed hiring proposal. The guy literally asked me to work there after I shut the door to the interview room. Not. Joking.
The team of women I worked with were amazing and beyond talented. Our slack channels were often filled with all caps texts and eye-rolling emojis whenever our boss over promised something to clients or made us seem incompetent because he'd be OOO for days at a time only to return, just in time (well thirty minutes late) to the conference call we had been waiting for him to jump on. Always late and never knowing what to update clients on, thus making them feel ignored and frustrated, the girls and I were always left to calm them down and go beyond our usual deliverables to make sure they were pleased with our agency.
In crowded elevators on the way down to the parking lot, he'd discuss threats of firing one, two, or three, of the girls I worked with (basically the whole team), I quickly realized this guy was - to quote Jason Manzoukas, bonkers. We'd been doing all the work while he had been causing a lot of alarm with clients, and we were all getting tired of constantly cleaning up after him. After my team members decided they’d each had enough of the Dr. Jeckle & Mr. Hyde routine, especially during the unpredictability of the pandemic, they quit one by one in April. We all eventually got together on Zoom to congratulate them for leaving and moving on to bigger and better things, but I was left to wonder, when would I call it quits? I was constantly getting panic attacks for things that didn't need to be panicked about, but the lack of communication at this place made it incredibly easy for your blood pressure to shoot up at the ping of a Slack notification.
The night before, I agreed to take on another client to add to my roster. The following morning, I was greeted to a flurry of slack messages and voicemails from my boss about not delivering something we had briefly discussed doing for this new client the night before at 7pm. Meanwhile, I had to prep for another conference call we had scheduled with my favorite jewelry client. After the call went just as I'd planned and they sang nothing but my praises about the copy, the content creation, the ideas for email campaigns, and website redesign, I received another biting slack message: "great work for CLIENT. They really like it". Nope. After being jerked around for the last 24hrs and encouraged to take on a client last minute just so I could make a few more dollars this month, not knowing what this pandemic would hold, I simply responded "I'm out". I soon received a "What?" and typed back "I quit". On a Monday morning, I had just quit my job during a pandemic in May of 2020.
After being fun-employed for a month, I found a job at a lifestyle clothing brand where I literally had one of the healthiest job experiences of my life. It was a lot more manual labor than I had done in most of my recent jobs but it was great. I didn't have to work from home or spend hours applying to jobs that were listed as temporarily remote and would of course, have over 200+ applicants already applied listed beneath it. I was so excited to talk to people again (through our masks) and socialize while we packed orders and sorted through returns. I worked there through the rest of the Summer, drank a lot of Mate, ate more salads, and even cut out 90% of the sugar I was eating in my diet (I had no idea massive amounts of sugar was in almost everything I ate and drank, even my healthy juices). After becoming healthier in both body, mind, and spirit, I came to realize I had to make yet another change. I had to commit to working for myself once and for all. I had this urge to write, create, plan, strategize, and get back to doing what I was good at again. I left another job during a pandemic to pursue myself and my career. So far it’s been working out alright ♥️
