Wellll, back in the early nineties I was still working in nursing homes.

Having left the first one for better pay, and the second one due to fuckery over benefits, I applied to a couple more.

One of them hired me on the spot, as soon as I handed in the application. Not as weird as it looks in that industry. A young, muscular man with experience? You didn’t have to wait long at any facility.

So, they scheduled me orientation for the next day. Orientation was one part paperwork, one part a facility tour coupled with introductions.

The tour part was… bad. Patients in the halls with feces on them being ignored by staff that was most definitely assigned to that hall. The smells were horrid. That’s a bigger sign of trouble than you’d think. Most nursing homes, they do everything possible to control odors. But you could smell urine as soon as you reached the residential sections. Poop, that’s not as big a deal because it spreads and lingers more. But urine? You don’t smell urine until after it’s been sitting, unless there’s something going on.

It was a nightmare.

So, still not rage quitting because if things are that bad, they must be super short staffed. Like, that’s the only thing I could figure. No way could that be the normal. It all made me doubt I wanted to work there, because how bad could the place be to have that many vacancies in their staff? Couldn’t be a good thing at all. But, it’s about the patients, so maybe effect change from the inside; I’d done it before.

Welllll, I finally said to the HR person to slow down, and stopped to help a patient that was sliding out of their shower chair.

And I caught a bigger blast of shit than any that was on the floor. For daring to slow them down and waste their time in this stench.

Now, I was still a young man, not even 21 yet. But I had just quit one job because of fuckery, and I had other non-healthcare work available, so while I was more polite about it than I would become later in life, that shit did not fly.

I got that patient sat up and secured, then told the HR person that I didn’t think this place was right for me and walked the fuck out. I was cussing the whole way out, which is what makes it a rage quit rather than a regular quit.

Which, I wish that chain of facilities wasn’t so regional that it would pin my location too close, because I would name and shame them. Over the years, every single facility in that chain had some kind of major shit happen, often dozens of times, enough to make the news. Just absolutely fucking inhuman patient conditions. And the truth is that every chain cuts corners and sacrifices patient care for profit.

You can usually find charitable homes that treat patients well because as long as they get donations, they don’t have to worry about cutting corners, only what services they provide beyond the basics. They’ll cut corners on supplies too, as well as pay, but you can usually rely on the patient care being at least standard if not great.

State or county level homes are similar, they cut corners in places other than patient care. Which still indirectly effects patient care, but at least it’s indirect

I used to work for HHGregg selling appliances. I didn’t want to work there, but needed a job and was pretty good at it. We were pushed pretty hard to hit our numbers, including selling the extended warranties. About three months in the sales manager was taking each sales person into the office to have us agree to how we would sell these warranties, which included some using some misleading tactics and language, to the extent that it was outright false. I told them that I refused to lie to customers, and they said anyone that didn’t sign their name to the new program could not continue to work. So I walked out. First and only time I’ve had to do that, and now HHGregg is out of business. Fuck that place.

I wore a hoodie on accident for getting that it was against dress code. And the security officer called me out by my last name and said that what I was wearing was against dress code and that I couldn’t go into the office. So I just said you know what fuck this through my hands up and drove back home. Got another job like the next day

I’ve told this story before on here and there’s some logistical information necessary for it to make sense, so bear with me. Long story short: I feared for my safety with reason, and they wouldn’t do anything to accommodate that.

I was in my last year of undergrad and had just broken up with my ex, so I moved out of the apartment we shared with our roommate. He seemed to be really emotional about it, and really wanted to stay friends. I agreed, and three days after I broke up with him, he asked me for a ride to his dad’s, because he didn’t have a car.

The town his dad lived in and the one we did were situated along both a highway and a train line, and I closed four nights a week alone at a diner in a third town, between them, but the trains didn’t run much outside of mornings and nights, so he would have had to wait several hours to get a train. I had to work that day anyway, so I just left a little early.

While we were in the car, our roommate called me, and though we didn’t know the details at the time, we knew that he’d been in prison for many years and that he’d killed someone as part of his crime. He realized during the course of our call that I knew and she made me take his key when I dropped him off.

Turns out my ex had beaten his mother to death, gone to prison for 15-20 years, and lied to everyone we knew about everything. Someone who is willing to brutally murder their mom is definitely willing to kill an ex girlfriend, so I was pretty terrified for a while there. I called my job to ask about changing my schedule, but they were completely unwilling to give me any flexibility or schedule anyone else to close with me. Given that he could easily take the train from our town or his dad’s to the one I worked in and I was completely alone in the last business open in a commercial area for an hour each shift, and that I had been the one to essentially on the spot evict him, I didn’t want to take the chance. I quit just before my shift and mailed them my key.

I have a google alert for his name, and a few years ago, he went to prison for violating a restraining order and beating another ex girlfriend into a coma. Thankfully, I live in another country now and he’s definitely not allowed to get a passport.