20 Signs It’s Time To Quit Your Job
Getting out of a job is not an easy decision. There’s a lot to be said for a regular paycheck, benefits, and a blossoming career. But sometimes a job can drive you to the point of insanity. You may be so far into a downward spiral that your quirky work survival habits start to seem normal. Here are 20 quick ways to identify that it’s time to quit your job with a vengeance:
1. Sleeping in bed all day seems far more enjoyable and productive than anything that could happen at work. Highlights of your workday include refreshing your Twitter feed, drinking coffee, shredding documents, and the exercise of walking down the hallway to use the bathroom.
2. You’ve got commuter rage in anticipation of heading out for the day. You check the morning news constantly, praying for reports that highways leading to your office are closed, the trains have been suspended, the subways are shut down, or a fire broke out in your office. If it’s winter, you’re studying radar maps, crossing your fingers that an impending blizzard will prevent any possibility of leaving your home. This prayer includes the downfall of your work IT server, since even staying home doesn’t give you the day off.
3. You plan your exit from work each day by going into stealth mode. You leave an extra coat and purse on your chair with scattered, public documents across your desk and tell someone you’re going to a meeting. When nobody’s watching, you dart out of your office, find the closest stairwell and disappear into the evening. If you run into someone you know on your way out, smile and mumble something barely audible about working so much that you missed lunch and you’re grabbing some food.
4. People, including you, regularly sit with their cell phones in the bathroom complaining to someone, having a video chat or playing Candy Crush.
5. You can’t keep your eyes open at any meeting or follow any conversation for longer than 30 seconds. Your mind drifts to the TV show you watched the previous evening and what candy bar you’ll be getting from the snack vending machine as soon as the meeting is over. As the meeting drags on, your realized you’ve been staring at the mouth of the person speaking for 30 minutes without registering a word they’ve said.
6. You have a ton of work but it’s really getting in the way of your Candy Crush playing and your attempts to check Facebook despite a weak cell phone signal. You get annoyed when someone calls you with any work related question because it’s interrupting your online shopping.
7. Your company declares that you will receive a bonus. The good news is that it’s the same as the previous year’s bonus, which was decent. The bad news is that it will be paid out incrementally, so you’d have to be at the company another 5 years to receive your full compensation for the previous year.
8. Multiple times a day, you get another email from a colleague at your company entitled “My Last Day / Contact Information.”
9. The highlight of your day is buying a cup of coffee and a lotto ticket at the mini-mart near your office. While sipping on your coffee, you have an internal debate on how to handle your winnings. Would you show up to work and gradually wind down your responsibilities or would you just never come in again? You are leaning towards the latter and don’t feel guilty about it.
10. You take a two hour “working lunch,” followed by an hour of hiding out in the copy machine / water cooler area and then head back to the bathroom as it’s the only place where nobody bothers you and where your best ideas are generated.
11. One of your colleagues comes back from an industry conference completely enthused by the esteemed speakers he schmoozed with and enlightened by the latest industry information. He reminds you of a 16 year old that just returned from a rock concert and stifle the desire to ask this colleague why he isn’t wearing the conference t-shirt. You can’t remember the last time you ever felt that enthused about anything.
12. You cry at least once a week about work, your boss, or a colleague.
13. Your boss cries at least once a week about anything.
14. The juvenile, incompetent intern that you’ve been mentoring goes behind your back and dissuades one of your clients from following your advice. Your client calls to give you the head’s up on this situation as a courtesy. Your initial reaction is to leave some your dog’s poop taped to the bottom of his desk.
15. They’ve blocked LinkedIn on the company’s Intranet because they know all the employees are job-searching.
16. You’ve started printing out Pinterest recipes on your department’s color printer and hold up others’ print jobs to make sure that all 35 of them printed properly with photos.
17. You “accidentally” lost your Blackberry and nobody can get in touch with you outside of business hours. You’re also not capable of logging into work remotely once you leave the office.
18. When you are interviewing a perspective applicant for a role at your company, you tell her to “run away while she still can.” When she asks you what you like about working there, you give her a blank stare and say how the hallway vending machine has amazing chocolate chip cookies.
19. You regularly wonder how long it would take them to fire you if you just stopped showing up for work.
20. You participate in 10 simultaneous group text chats per day on your cell phone and accidentally text your boss a selfie photo of you at the beach with friends from the day you were supposedly sick at home.
While it’s always best to have a back up plan or another job lined up before you pull the plug, sometimes it’s about quitting the misery. When you’re lying on your deathbed, you’ll likely never wish for more time in the office — unless your office is a professional baseball field and you’re batting cleanup. The hardest part of getting out of a bad work situation is recognizing that you’re in one. Don’t wait until you’re a complete basket case to do something about it.