The letter was typed. This detail matters. It was 1994, typing a letter meant finding a typewriter or a word processor, printing it out, folding it, putting it in an envelope, writing Private and Confidential on the front in handwriting because that was what you did. The whole process took the better part of an hour. I did not cool down during that hour. If anything I got more precise.

I had been working at the Burger King for about eight months. This is not a story about exploitation or a zero-hours contract or anything systemic; it was a fast food job in the mid-nineties and it was what it was. The manager — I’ll call him Dave Norcross, because the name feels right even if it isn’t — was not, in the broad sweep of people I have encountered in workplaces since, especially bad. He was a man who had been given a small amount of authority over a group of teenagers and had decided, somewhere along the way, that the authority was the point. That managing to people was the same thing as managing people. Most workplaces have at least one of him.

The specific incident that triggered the letter is, honestly, not that interesting. A shift change that wasn’t communicated. A public dressing-down for something that hadn’t been my error. The particular quality of being corrected in front of people for a mistake you didn’t make, with no interest on the part of the corrector in whether they have the facts right. I had experienced this before in various forms. This time it tripped something.

I went home. I found a typewriter. I wrote the letter.

The letter was, as I recall it, quite measured in tone — which is funny, because the act of throwing it on the desk was not measured at all. It said something about no longer wishing to continue in my current role. It said something about the working environment. It may have said something about dignity — I was nineteen and I had recently read some things that had given me a vocabulary for workplace grievances that I was clearly keen to deploy. It was probably two paragraphs. It ended with the correct notice period and a polite sign-off, because I had been brought up to finish things properly even when furious.

The throw was the problem. Or rather, it was the point. A normal resignation involves handing over the letter, perhaps even leaving it on the desk while the manager is out, slipping away. What I did was open the door, walk in while he was sitting there, and place the letter on the desk with a velocity that made it slide several inches before stopping. Then I turned around and left.

He called after me. I didn’t stop.

The drama of it embarrasses me slightly now. Not the leaving — the leaving was correct, the leaving was the right outcome. But the throw. The performance of the throw. I had constructed an exit and I was going to perform it, and there is something faintly absurd about a nineteen-year-old staging a resignation like it’s the third act of something. He probably went back to his paperwork within four minutes. The gesture that had felt, to me, like a definitive statement was, to him, an administrative inconvenience that meant phoning the rota office.

But here’s what I think is actually true, even now: the anger was not wrong. The anger was pointing at something real. There is a specific kind of workplace injustice — not dramatic, not illegal, just the low-grade corrosion of being managed by someone who uses small authority carelessly — that produces a very clean, very justified anger. The mistake I made was thinking that expressing it in the most theatrical way available was the same as resolving it. It wasn’t. It was just the first version of a lesson I had to learn several more times.

What I understand now is that I was recognizing a system failure mode. The system had no feedback loop. The manager made a decision, expressed it publicly, and there was no mechanism for correction. No room to say “actually that was incorrect” without being insubordinate. No way to propose change from the bottom. That’s a system property, and it persists at every level. Sometimes you can push back from inside. Sometimes you try a different approach. Sometimes the system is broken in a way that only exit works.

I have learned to recognize that earlier now. Not to jump to exit immediately, but to assess whether a system will listen. Will it respond to feedback? Will it course-correct? Is there a way to improve it from within? If the answer to all three is no, then leaving is not drama. It’s resource allocation. It’s choosing to spend your energy somewhere that can use it.

Dave Norcross, if that is not his name, is probably fine. He just thought being in charge meant never having to say you were wrong, and that’s a fairly common belief and one I’ve encountered at every level of seniority since. The problem is not the person. The problem is the system property they embody.

I still have a low tolerance for it. I’m slightly better, now, at choosing when to leave and how.