Don’t feel bad if you fire your boss; sometimes, you just have to make redundancies.
You don’t have to fire rounds at your employer’s office, but how great would it feel if you could? I’m not suggesting either that you immediately call up your boss and tell him/her to shove their job up their backside and into the seventh circle of Hell.
Firing your boss is a daunting prospect. I know because I did it. It was a leap of faith and one that paid off—thankfully. I know for a fact that I got lucky, but it was honestly the best thing that I ever did.
I was working in a café, which was inside a supermarket, and I was miserable. Within a few months of starting there, I was made team leader and I felt even worse.
Without wanting to sound mean, I didn’t like the people I was working with. Everybody knew the team leader slot was open and everybody was trying to screw everybody else over. If I knew then what I was to learn later on when I was given the position, I would have told them not to bother; that it truly wasn’t worth it.
I began to really dislike them, and the fact that there didn’t seem to be a functioning brain cell between them didn’t make the situation any more palatable.
Fire your boss to regain your sanity
My boss himself was a massive… Well, we all know how terrible bad bosses can be. Mine was particularly bad, though, and something of a bully. Half of the team (of 11) was replaced within a few weeks of his arrival—he had taken over from somebody else, my old boss going on to another store.
To say he had done little to endear himself would be a drastic understatement.
Anyway, miserable shift followed miserable shift. I’d never taken a sick day, but one night I was violently ill (I still don’t know what caused it) and I was up most of the night with my head in the toilet bowl. To cut a horrible story short, I had to call in as I was due in the early morning to open up and get everything ready.
Everything was fine, except I had to take an additional day to be sure I was fit to work in a food environment. When I went back in the boss chewed me out for “taking the piss”. On top of everything else, that was the final straw.
I worked the remainder of the shift, punched out and never went back. I needed the job and I shouldn’t have left the way that I did, but firing my boss was easily the best thing I ever did.
Onward and upward
From that day to this, I have rarely worked a ‘conventional’ job. Right after I left, I started hitting the freelancing websites. I happened across an ad from a guy looking for content writers to help with a project in the UK. Ongoing work, great pay, and flexibility. What more could I ask for?
In one week, I earned as much as I was earning in two weeks at the cafe and I wasn’t stressed, surrounded by idiots, or being berated by my boss for no reason. Or at least, no reason that I could ever work out.
This was over fifteen years ago, and I still write full-time, although for different people and companies. I’ve honestly never been happier since I decided to fire my boss.
Now, as I said right at the top, I know perfectly well that I got lucky. I could very easily have found myself in a very tight spot. That being said, I firmly believe that with a little more forethought than I put into it, if you fire your boss it can lead to great opportunities for anybody. All you need is the confidence to give that guy the middle
figure out when the time is right and march out of there.
Don’t be like me, though. Do your due diligence before you burn that bridge. Whatever your passion is, make sure you can realistically pursue it and put 100 percent into it before you fire your boss.
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