So way back in the day I was in the Navy, and I was supposed to get out December 28th, 2003. I had been negoitaing re-enlisting and had orders to a ship, a school worked out, re-enlistment bonus (something like$15K), the whole nine. The detaier and my local retention guy had been working on this for like four months.
Because of Christmas and what not, I was supposed to re-enlist December 23rd. Well, after talking to my wife, and looking at the way my orders worked out, I was going to be gone for like 9 months straight, and 11 out of the next 12 months total, so I tried to get out of the school, which would have knocked 4 months off of that. My detailer wasn't hearing that.
I walked into work December 21st (about) and told them to go fuck themselves. If you know anything about the Navy, you can't just get out in two days, so they had to extend me to January 28th, and it was still a clusterfuck trying to get all the checkout stuff done.
So like six years later, right after I had graduated from university, I had gotten a job at Sam's Club to keep me busy while I looked for a legit job. I was there for about three weeks when I got the call offering me my current job while I was at work.
At the end of the shift, I found the manager on duty, and handed him my blue vest and box cutter, and told him that I wasn't going to be pulling boxes anymore because I was going to be a Mechanical Engineer at a nuclear shipyard. Dude was cool as shit about it and asked me politely to come back the next day and talk to the grocery manager. I did, and she was cool as shit too (even put in my file that I was eligible for re-employment).