DaveC
Blue Crack Addict
I have totally had a moment like that in my life, where I just got super caught up in being emotional, and walked out on a job. As soon as I got home and could breathe I was like, "Holy shit...what did I just do?" But that was a fast food gig, just out of college that was destroying my pride....not a TV Reality show where a life-changing career was at stake. I can't even imagine what she must have been feeling, if it was, in fact, reality.
Yeah I did that in a restaurant kitchen twice. The first time though was with the entire dishwashing crew (I was 16) as the lady who owned the restaurant was crazy and would berate the dishwashers as if we were the scum of the Earth every day (not in a Ramsay way where if your food sucks he'll tell you, but in a very personal, attacking way - ie she once fired someone outright during service because the cook was too short to reach the top shelf of the pantry, and mocked her mercilessly as she ran out sobbing, laughing about it for hours afterwards). It was infuriating and demeaning but when she threw a pan (full-on overhand fastball) full of hot, still-sizzling oil directly at the head of the 15 year old kid on his third day at his very first job (sending him to hospital with major burns on his back and arms), simply because he put the pans three inches to the right of where they usually were on the shelf, we'd all had enough and left in the middle of service. She ran after us weeping but we weren't about to be sent to the hospital when she snapped and decided to throw a knife at our heads or something for minimum wage. She ran after us begging and pleading for us all to come back in to the kitchen and that she was so sorry (she wasn't), but we'd all hit the end of our ropes by then.
I didn't feel too bad about that one but once I walked out of another kitchen I worked in when I showed up for work and despite having been promised for two months that I would start getting full-time hours "on the next schedule", I went in and saw that I had one four-hour shift in a week and simply said that if they were never going to fulfill their promise, despite me working extra hard and volunteering for overtime to show that I "truly wanted to earn" the hours (as was requested by the Kitchen Manager), I was done. I was again told "oh the next schedule I promise you'll have 5 shifts" but was tired of hearing it and walked out. I felt like an idiot afterwards though as I actually liked the job and the people I worked with and also felt that I had screwed myself for a future job because I destroyed the reference. So I have some idea of how she felt, again as you mentioned, if it was real.
Turns out the KM actually got fired three weeks later for being brutally awful at his job (one of my friends from there told me they had 3 people scheduled for a busy Saturday night - on a usual Saturday there should have been at least 8 - and that they completely ran out of food for two days and had to close down because he forgot to put in the food order for the week), so it actually didn't screw me over too bad in the end.