Steven Slater, the fed-up JetBlue flight attendant who quit his job by opening the airplane emergency hatch and sliding to the runway at JFK airport on Monday, seems to have touched a nerve with disgruntled employees, perhaps wishing they could follow in his footsteps.
The incident became a trending topic on Twitter and a Facebook fan page was created that had over 20,000 fans by Tuesday afternoon. Most expressed their approval.
We at Global News have discovered some other “˜take-this-job-and-shove-it’ stories, and we invite you to share your own with us below.
Andrew Lahde
Lahde was a hedge fund manager at California-based Lahde Capital Management LLC at the time of the financial crisis in 2008.
He bet heavily against the sub-prime mortgage loans and ended up making about $80 million.
With his sudden pile of cash, Lahde decided to quit the hedge fund business in dramatic fashion: a letter to clients posted on the website of Portfolio magazine.
“I was in this game for money. The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking.”
Strangely, the letter ended with a call for the legalization of marijuana.
Adam Smith
British reporter Adam Smith caused a stir on YouTube when he was caught on video drunkenly resigning from his job with the Birmingham Mail and saying he was plagiarizing the story he was in the midst of filing.
Smith admitted he was “just a little bit pissed” near the beginning of the video, taken of him sitting on a bench in Miami. The reporter was in the United States covering the Barack Obama election victory.
“Thank God for the BBC, because I’m cutting and pasting, baby," he says.
He uttered expletives at the end of the video as he declared he was resigning from the Birmingham Mail.
The next day, Smith (seeming much more sober) appeared in another video posted on YouTube.
"Right, the thing is, right I’ve just woke up and this video, which I don’t really remember. I’ve been told to phone the Birmingham Mail because I am in trouble,” he says.
Smith finally revealed in the video that he lost his job.
Pete Pelegrin
Pelegrin was another reporter to quit his job in epic fashion when the Miami Herald reporter listed his grievances in a post on the publication’s website.
The reporter was incensed at the fact that the publication did not place as much emphasis on his stories (primarily covering Florida State University sports) as it did on other teams such as the Miami Dolphins.
He also complained that he was assigned stories that dealt with teams and events not relating to the school, and that his photo and name were removed from the FIU blog photo and logo.
“They even took my photo and name out from the front of the blog and replaced it with some hokey logo – not even the FIU sports logo. At least, get the FIU sports logo right if you’re going to do this,” he wrote.
The Miami Herald removed the blog as soon as it was discovered.
Matt Green
A 30-year-old engineer walked out of his Queen’s, New York office in March to clear his head, and just kept on walking. And walking, and walking.
Matt Green said he just “wasn’t really satisfied with a desk job,” so he left his salary position in Rockaway Beach and set out on a walk that has taken him 4,023 km across the United States.
In a journey reminiscent of that of Forrest Gump, Green is now in Washington, almost the entire way across the country. He intends to end up in Rockaway Beach, Oregon.
Green documents his walk on a blog titled “I’m just walkin,” where he states “I’m just doing it for the hell of it. Or, more precisely, I’m doing it for its own sake, for the value inherent in the act itself.”
Green says he walks for most of the day, pushing his cart full of supplies, and then knocks on people’s doors to ask to pitch a tent on their property.
“Jenny”
Just a day after Slater slid to freedom, the online universe had a new disgruntled darling calling herself “Jenny.”
Sure, it was all a hoax, but that likely didn’t keep other disgruntled web-surfing employees from being amused at the buzz generated by the fictional epic job exit.
The prank features a character named "Jenny" (she revealed the next day that her name was actually Elyse Porterfield), an aspiring broker who exposes her made-up boss as an oppressive bigot who spends half the work week playing the online Facebook game Farmville.
The character is featured in a series of photos where she holds up a dry erase board with various messages.
The story claimed that Jenny emailed the photos to the entire office, and then to the website thechive.com.
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