Quiet quitting is a phenomenon that is shaking today's workforce like a punch to the jaw. While nepo-baby executives quiver in their leather chairs up in their ivory towers, quiet quitting provides a refuge for employees that many have never felt before. Minimum effort for minimum pay offers solace and peace to employees, especially when our alternative reality sets in.

As employees, we're all just tools in the toolbox of our company. For utility purposes, we perform our function at work and then we clock out–it's simple. But as every worker knows, we all have one coworker on the roster who's not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Quitting a bad job for a good reason is the best feeling in the world. After enduring the trenches in the workplace and slogging through trash tasks and terrible management, sometimes you just need to cut your losses and cut loose. For some employees, however, they don't always have the best reasons to quit their day job.

$2 off margaritas–Here I come!

Back in the day, people with stage fright could conquer their fears by imagining the crowd in a more vulnerable state than themselves. Picturing an audience of strangers in their whitey-tighties is far more embarrassing than stumbling over your words into the mic, right? But nowadays, stage-scared people can no longer use this timeless tactic because we have a new beast to tackle: Zoom calls.

Would you rather work a 10-hour shift or a 4-hour shift? At first, it might seem nice to take the shorter shift but then think of all of the lost time spent getting ready for work, getting there, getting back, and decompressing. By the end of the day, your 4 hours is looking more like 6 and at that point, your entire day is lost. So when we're faced with the choice to lose a full day of our lives to our jobs, wouldn't you rather be paid a little overtime?

Time may be a construct, but it's the same for everybody. We're all bound by the 60 minutes every hour and the 24 hours in a day–and when you're paid by the hour and working on a strict schedule, time becomes law. For the retail employee in our next story, time became more than just a means to collect their paycheck, it became a great way to get payback on a salty micromanager.

This is what a fall from grace looks like

Trying to keep up with an increasing workload on an understaffed team is a lot like trying to drive a car that only has three wheels. It's difficult to keep things moving forward without veering off course; things operate extremely inefficiently, and there's probably a lot of noise and scraping going on. Of course, managing these situations is no easy task—not impossible for a talented manager, but only through a great deal of effort. For this reason, managers who manage to protect their alread…

Feeling stuck in the workplace? Sometimes our job has a way of suffocating us, like you're handcuffed to a sinking ship with no prospects of breaking free. When you're underpaid and overworked, it feels like water is filling in around your ankles and the walls are closing in. Perhaps, if you're lucky, you'll find a kind stranger on the Internet to throw you a lifeline.

The hiring process is asinine these days. After 8 rounds of interviews, 4 different cover letters, and losing your will to live, the application to your dream job may still be lost in the trash bin of some flippant hiring manager.

Company loyalty isn't really a thing anymore. Our Boomer parents can boast about their pensions and their work ethic, but when a company has nothing to give you after years of service–not even an inflation-covering raise–why would you stick around? Contrary to popular belief, you CAN buy loyalty… especially in the workplace.

After every exhausting week of work, weary employees uncontrollably count their hours and calculate their expected pay. We can't help it. The shining beacon of hope of every working citizen is their bi-weekly paystub, rewarding their hours of indentured servitude to ‘The Man'. But when you get that glimmering check and the total balance comes up short, your ever-wavering shift resilience fades.

Loopholes can be so sweet. This former department head now knows this all too well after they gained more than two weeks PTO! Reorganizations aren't usually a positive sign. No matter how much the company insists that workers won't be impacted, they'll all feel the differences in some way. At this university, a reorganization caused the loss of several highly-trained personnel. That's an issue in a specific field, and a major loss for a university. But when the only thing that matters is “pinch…

As someone who sports sweatpants and a hoodie for most of the year, I certainly don't have an aura of intimidating professionalism, but the guy in our next story realized how quickly our stylish social stigmas can derail a couple of employees.

When was the last time you got tattle-tailed on?