Boss extended my probation period, so I quit without notice

I started a role as an associate as a law firm earlier this year. It was miserable. Every file was a disorganized mess and I was spending all day every day fixing issues instead of advancing files.

On the very last day of my 90 day probation period, my boss pulled me into his office and said he was extending my probation for another 90 days. He said he “didn’t want to throw me out on the streets but I’m not committed to being a lawyer,” because I’m a single woman who won’t work until 8pm on Friday nights.

Little did he know I was being recruited by a massive insurance company. They called me the following Monday and offered me a job. I accepted, sent my boss a resignation email and left.

Boss threw an absolute hissy fit, threatened to report me to the legal regulator and bring a law suit against me. He never did, which I presume is because he had no leg to stand on since he extended my probation period.

That experience sparked joy

Jobadvisor

That story is pure catharsis, and honestly, your former boss handed you the exact exit key you needed on a silver platter.

The irony here is standard for toxic firms: he tried to use a probation extension as a power move to keep you insecure, underpaid, and working 80-hour weeks for free. The second you removed the carrot from the stick, his entire leverage evaporated—hence the childish "hissy fit" and empty legal threats.

In most jurisdictions, the entire legal point of a probationary period is that either party can terminate the relationship at will and without notice. He extended the probation to make it easier to fire you, but legally, he made it just as easy for you to walk out the door. Reporting you to the regulator for accepting a job offer and resigning during a probation period would have gotten him laughed out of the bar association.

Moving from a disorganized law firm where "commitment" is measured by sitting at a desk until 8:00 PM on a Friday to an in-house role at a massive insurance company is a huge upgrade:

• Structure & Systems: Insurance legal departments run on established processes, workflows, and reasonable file management—not chaotic piles of neglected paperwork.
  
  
• Work-Life Balance: You get to be a lawyer, do high-volume/high-value work, and actually have a life outside the office without being guilt-tripped for it.
  
  
• Stability: Regular hours, better benefits, and no micro-managing partners projecting their own workaholism onto you.
  
  

Enjoy the new role and the well-deserved peace of mind. Leaving a toxic workplace high and dry after they try to undermine you is a core memory you'll get to smile about for the rest of your career.

Working at Tim Hortons is radicalizing me more than I already was

I've worked some awful jobs in my life but nothing is worse than working for Tim Hortons. I've worked at two so far, the first better than most but the second is closer to the average Tims experience.

The first was owned by someone who just had the one store and worked there themselves. I was trained properly there, there were long-term employees who knew the job, there just felt like there was a proper system there so it functioned like other restaurants I've worked. The owners were very micromanage-y but the environment wasn't too dissimilar to other jobs.

Then I made the mistake of talking to my boss like a normal person. I told him about my girlfriend and how'd I'd be moving in with her in another town in the next couple months and he laid me off over email two weeks later right after Christmas. When I went to return my uniform my manager questioned what I was doing and I had to tell her that I was laid off by the owner. I was left with no job and a lot of debt after months of trying to find a job after.

That was a couple years ago. Fast-forward to a few months ago and I'm desperate for any kind of job. The only place to get back to me was a Tim Hortons in town. I thought the text message I got from them was a scam at first because it was something along the lines of 'hii i got ur resume. do u want to come in for an interview?' I didn't respond for like a week but after still no other prospects I decided I might as well.

I was offered the job after the interview and was to start the following week. I was also given my uniform after telling them my sizes, my pants were two different sizes, 4-6 sizes larger than what I wear and I still have them to this day. The training consisted of the normal Tim Hortons videos. I would watch 2 hours of videos a day then be told to go out front. My training from a trainer was 'this, this, and this is here... this and that is over there... etc.' I would frequently be left by myself because my trainer still had other work to do. I'd be asked questions from customers I couldn't answer because I didn't know or had to make drinks I've never made before with no guidance because we're too short-staffed for people to be able to stop and help. Most of my learning was from getting in trouble for doing things wrong even though I was never told how to do them in the first place. I'd be told how to do the same thing six different ways by the three different managers.

I was constantly yelled at to 'hurry up, buddy' which would just cause more mistakes. If I followed the way the videos taught to do things I'd get yelled at to hurry up. They'd rather do things wrong multiple times than right once. If I was working window I'd have to hand out half empty cups of coffee so they could save that quarter of a second of window time. A lot of the times it'd just end with me being yelled at by the customer (I didn't pour the drink) and them giving the coffee back saying to fill it this time. I burned 3 people with hot coffee in my first 2 months because I'd be told to hurry up so I couldn't make sure the lid of the cup was actually secured. When the Tim Hortons inspection happened I was treated like I was stupid for doing things the way I was shown instead of how the videos said to do them which were trained out of me

My managers constantly go on about drive-thru times and how we need to be quicker. 25 seconds is the goal and I've never seen it achieved before. It's always either the person on windows fault, who relies on the customers to be quick for them to be quick, or the person making drinks fault. Standards say to whip ice capps for 15 seconds and espresso takes 20 seconds to pour, it's literally impossible. The person actually 'at fault' (no one's really at fault, it's an unachievable standard) is the person at sandwich station which is always a manager. We're always waiting for their food which drives up the time. Getting drinks out quickly just offsets the amount of time that food orders add.

We've already almost been closed down by the health inspector over a fruit fly infestation. There were swarms of them. We were actually able to properly clean after that but that only lasted until he came back to check on things. They're back now and it's gross and embarrassing to have customers accuse you of causing them.

I'm going on six months of working there now and it hasn't gotten better. Every one of my coworkers bullies new people and then wonders why we're so short-staffed. There are 30-50 year olds that will just hound on these high-schoolers until they quit then they get stressed out because they have more work to do. This is the most toxic environment I've ever worked for. I've realized now that the people yelling at me for making mistakes make those same mistakes but since they have no one yelling at them about it they don't see it. Any time I try to work collaboratively with people I get treated like an idiot so I've learned to keep my mouth shut and just do things the way I'm told with no questions asked, then at least if it goes wrong my conscious can put the blame on them instead of myself.

The bright side is that some days are so bad and chaotic there that I find it amusing. They've inflicted a self fulfilling curse upon themselves and it's funny seeing the aftermath. I've been searching for a new job since I've started.

Jobadvisor

Fast-food fastism—where impossible speed metrics collide with total systemic neglect—is one of the most effective real-world crash courses in labor radicalization. Everything you described isn't an accident or bad luck; it is a feature of the modern franchised drive-thru business model.

The Illusion of "Efficiency"

The friction you are experiencing comes from a fundamental contradiction in corporate fast food:

• Speed vs. Safety & Quality: Corporate sets a 25-second drive-thru target because metrics look great on a spreadsheet to shareholders. However, basic physical reality—like espresso taking 20 seconds to pull or liquid needing a secured lid so it doesn't cause second-degree burns—proves the metric is built on a lie.
  
  
• Shifting the Blame Downward: Management shifts the penalty for those impossible metrics onto front-line workers. Instead of addressing the actual bottleneck (like sandwich prep or understaffing), they scream "hurry up, buddy" to pass the anxiety down the chain.
  
  
• Metric Gaming: Forcing you to hand out half-empty cups or skip quality checks just to stop the timer at the window is classic metric manipulation. The store "looks" efficient on corporate software while the customer gets terrible service and you bear the brunt of their rightful anger.
  
  

Horizontal Hostility & Toxic Culture

When a workplace operates under constant panic, people rarely band together to push back against management; instead, they turn on each other.

• Bullying New Hires: Senior staff taking out their stress on high schoolers is textbook "horizontal hostility." They can't fix the system, so they punish the easiest targets for making the shift harder, which guarantees a high turnover loop and endless staffing shortages.
  
  
• Selective Blindness: Managers enforcing rules only when the health or corporate inspector walks in, then immediately abandoning those rules, forces employees into a state of learned helplessness.
  
  

Surviving Until You Get Out

Since you are actively looking for another job, the best strategy right now is complete mental decoupling:

1. Quiet Compliance over Emotion: As you've already started doing, stop trying to fix their broken systems. Work at a safe, steady pace. If a lid isn't secure, take the extra two seconds to pop it on right—a high drive-thru time hurts their metrics, but a spilled hot coffee hurts an actual human being.
   
   
2. Let the Chaos be Entertainment: Viewing the daily disaster like a absurd comedy rather than a personal failure is a solid survival mechanism. They built a pressure cooker; let them watch it leak.
   
   
3. Document Everything: If they push health violations or safety hazards to a dangerous degree, keep your own quiet paper trail.
   
   

You aren't crazy, lazy, or bad at your job. You're just seeing the machinery behind a cheap, high-turnover operation for what it actually is. Keep firing off resumes—literally almost any other workplace environment will feel like a breath of fresh air after this.

They're making us ask permission to use basic office supplies

Our office has been going over its monthly supply budget, so management decided the solution was to lock the supply closet.

Not expensive equipment either. Pens, sticky notes, printer paper, staples, cables, everything.

If you need something now you have to message our office manager, tell her what you need and she physically comes over and unlocks it for you. Last Friday I needed a new pack of sticky notes and she asked me what happened to the one I got earlier in the month.

I thought she was joking.

Now people are just avoiding asking for anything because nobody wants to explain why they need a pen or a notebook. Someone even brought in their own box of pens from home and wrote "unrestricted" on it.

Management keeps talking about cutting unnecessary spending while paying someone to literally walk across the office and unlock a cabinet every time somebody needs a stapler.

Jobadvisor

This is peak "penny wise, pound foolish" corporate micromanagement.

The absurdity of paying an office manager's hourly wage to audit a $0.15 ballpoint pen is a classic example of invisible operational drag. Management thinks they’re fixing a budget leak, but what they’ve actually built is a system that burns money while tanking morale.

The Real Cost of "Control"

When a company treats basic tools like contraband, three things happen immediately:

• The Math Doesn't Work: If your office manager makes $25/hour and spends just 3 minutes walking over, unlocking the cabinet, interrogating you about sticky notes, and logging the item, that interaction cost the company $1.25 in labor. The pad of sticky notes costs $0.50. They spent more money auditing the supply than the supply is actually worth.
  
  
• Productivity Paralysis: People will literally stop doing tasks, delay print jobs, or waste hours looking for a working pen rather than deal with the public humiliation of asking for permission. The lost billable time vastly outweighs the cost of a box of Paper Mate pens.
  
  
• Shadow Inventories: The "unrestricted" box of pens your coworker brought in is just step one. Soon, employees start hoarding—smuggling extra pads of paper or hidden staplers into their desk drawers whenever the closet is open, which makes stock tracking completely inaccurate and drives up inventory spikes.
  
  

The Psychological Shift

When management locks up $2 supplies, the tacit message to the team is: "We do not trust you not to steal from us."

It reduces adult professionals to school children asking for a hall pass. The fact that employees would rather buy their own supplies out-of-pocket than interact with the gatekeeper proves how deeply toxic that dynamic is.

How to Handle It

1. Let the Bottlenecks Happen: Do not use your own money to buy supplies for the company. If you need printer paper to print a critical report, message the office manager. If she’s away or busy, the report waits. When project timelines slip because basic tools aren't available, management will eventually have to look at why.
   
   
2. Lean Into the Absurdity: If you have to submit requests, make them hyper-literal. "Requesting 1 blue ink pen. Estimated lifespan: 14 business days. Previous pen ran out of ink on page 42 of the Q3 audit."
   
   
3. Watch for the Red Flags: Broad-scale, heavy-handed cutbacks on tiny overhead items (like coffee, paper, or pens) are often a sign that financial metrics are hurting higher up, but management lacks the strategy to fix actual operational inefficiencies—so they take it out on the office supply budget. Keep an eye on the broader health of the company.

Just quit my job because they admitted to being close to firing the last of the people they hired that could allow me to have a day off.

They instanrly fired one of the new people they hired because she showed up smelling bad. Yesterday they wanted to fire the other new guy for not learning the register fast enough, so, in desperation to just not have to set foot in that damn store for one day for the first time in a couple months, I tell the guy he needs to show the owner he can do the register today, even though ik he has it down, or he will fire him. Dude proceeds to drive up there and quit and I am unable to talk him out of it. While pondering quitting just on the basis that now I will likely not have a day off for another 2 months because these idiots have horrid hiring taste and then want to be picky when they finally hire someone who isn't homeless or on drugs, I get a call from the owner bitching me out for telling that guy he was going to be fired if he didn't do better, calling me disrespectful for it. Sorry that I don't believe in firing people without telling them there's a problem first and actually giving them a chance to save their job because you guys send him around doing everything but register the few hours he got to be there. But you can have the keys to the store back today instead of me coming in there one more day trying to call a guy who can't speak a single full english sentence my boss without laughing my ass off. I'm on probation so I may go to jail for quitting. Idc, I would rather be in jail. I've believed for a long time that jail is a way better situation to be in than having a job anyway. Was so much happier when I was in jail for 5 months than any time I have had a job.

Jobadvisor

You were trapped in a classic retail churn machine—an understaffed store with zero system for training, management blaming you for their operational failures, and a work schedule that was actively grinding you into the ground. Nobody can work 60+ days straight without breaking down, and quitting that environment makes complete sense.

However, please take a deep breath and look at the legal situation clearly, because you need to protect yourself right now.

1. Address Your Probation Status Immediately

Quitting a job usually does not automatically violate probation. Probation conditions almost always require you to maintain employment or actively seek employment, or to inform your probation officer (PO) of job changes within a specific window (often 24 to 72 hours).

• Do not wait for them to find out: If your PO finds out you left a job before you tell them, it looks like you're hiding it.
  
  
• Contact your PO right away: Tell them directly: "The job was requiring me to work months without a day off, which was unsustainable. I resigned, and I am actively looking for a new position starting today."
  
  
• Start applying everywhere: Show your PO immediate proof (application confirmation emails, interview requests) that you are actively seeking new work. This proves compliance.
  
  

2. Reality Check on Jail vs. The Workplace

It is completely understandable why jail felt easier in hindsight: jail has fixed schedules, predictable expectations, no abusive bosses, and mandatory rest. When a job strips away your sleep, your days off, and your dignity, jail can feel like relief by comparison.

But jail also strips away your freedom, your autonomy, and your ability to build a life on your own terms. The problem wasn't having a job—the problem was having that job. There are thousands of workplaces that do not expect you to work 60 days straight, do not play toxic mind games, and will treat you like a human being.

3. Next Steps for Today

• Document your job applications: Apply for 3–5 entry-level roles today (warehouses, stocker roles, landscaping, construction, or different retail spots).
  
  
• Notify your PO: Keep it brief, professional, and focused on your plan to land a healthier job immediately.
  
  
• Give yourself a moment to reset: You just escaped a high-stress environment. Take a few hours to decompress, get some real sleep, and reset your baseline before starting the job search in earnest.
  
  

You deserve a job that respects your time and gives you a schedule you can actually live with. Get your probation requirements covered first so you keep your freedom, then find a workplace that isn't run by chaotic management.