From marching bands to TikTok takedowns, employees are resigning in spectacular fashion. While going viral seems risky, some find it opens new doors .
From marching bands to TikTok takedowns, employees are resigning in spectacular fashion. While going viral seems risky, some find it opens new doors .
In 2011, Joey La Neve DeFrancesco had been working in room service at a luxury hotel in Providence, Rhode Island, for nearly four years, whisking delicacies on demand to guests’ rooms, when he reached breaking point. He was paid a measly $5.50 (£4) an hour, made to work punishingly long shifts and, to top it off, had managers taking a cut of his hard-earned tips.
The poor treatment ratcheted up after DeFrancesco and colleagues tried to unionise workers at the hotel. In response, managers would berate those involved for making tiny mistakes. Things got so petty that workers on shift who had to take calls from guests were banned from sitting down.
DeFrancesco decided to call it quits. On the day he finally bid farewell, he snuck into the hotel’s employee quarters with a seven-strong marching band and surprised his boss with a musical ambush. “I’m here to tell you that I’m quitting,” he said, before walking out to the triumphant soundtrack of his band in full swing and chanting “Joey quits”.
DeFrancesco, who was 22 years old at the time, hastily organised a friend to film the encounter. After sitting on the video for a few days, he uploaded it to YouTube where it quickly went viral. Thirteen years on, the video has amassed nearly 10m views.
“We really didn’t think it was going to get much attention,” says DeFrancesco. The 36-year-old labour organiser and musician, who lives in New York, says he felt “liberated” after he quit and turned the tables on his managers. “Now I’m going to embarrass you for treating everyone terribly here,” he says.
Did leaving in a viral blaze of glory hamper his ability to get another job? Not in the slightest. Soon after leaving, DeFrancesco began working in a museum. He says the incident has “honestly never come up” in job interviews since. In fact, he says it might be something to “put on the résumé”.
While DeFrancesco’s tale holds a strong position in the job resignation hall of fame, it faces increasing competition from a new generation of workers leaving their jobs with viral aplomb. The phenomenon of revenge quitting, where frustrated or unhappy employees show how they really feel about their workplaces, is on the rise. Even clergymen are not immune to such temptations: in July, Father Pat Brennan provided a “parting gift” to his congregation in the form of a poem that doubled up as a resignation letter, where he took aim at “disgruntled, unlikable” parishioners who spread “gossip” from their “holy lips”.
The employer-rating site Glassdoor warned late last year that “a wave of revenge quitting [is] on the horizon” in 2025 amid falling employee satisfaction. In the UK, a survey of 2,008 workers released in July by the recruitment company Reed found that 15% of British employees had revenge quit their jobs. The firm’s chair, James Reed reckons that social media was accelerating the trend after a flurry of revenge quitters shared their stories online. Brianna Slaughter was one of them, with their video ending with the rallying cry: “These corporations will fire you in one day and leave you with nothing. If you want to leave, leave babe.”
The 26-year-old American, who lives in Kyoto, Japan, was two hours away from teaching their next English class when they quit on the spot. For a while, things had been manageable, but everything changed with the arrival of a meddling new manager.
