Last year, inspired by a friend's misadventures trying to break it off with a girl he'd had a drunken fling with the night before, app developers Jake Levine and Lauren Leto created BreakupText, an app that could quickly generate an overly dramatic text message breaking up with any prospective dumpee in just a few taps. Now, Levine and Leto have teamed up with online job seeking site The Ladders to bring the same tongue-in-cheek approach to telling your boss to sit and spin: Quit Your Job, an app that does exactly what it says on the tin.
Essentially a re-skinned version of BreakupText, Quit Your Job makes pulling the trigger on a potentially disastrous career decision extraordinarily easy to make. Loading up the app, you are invited to specify a reason why you want to quit your job, with options including "I found a new job,""I'm sick of the corporate world," and "I want to get rich." Once you select a reason, you are asked to elaborate upon the dream you are leaving your current job to pursue, which range from going back to school to writing fortune cookies to becoming a yoga instructor. Choose who to send it to--boss, friend or loved one--and voilà! You are now gainlessly employed.
Here's a career-ending letter of resignation that the Quit Your Job app generated for me in just a few seconds.
I've always been a bit of a romantic. And running off and joining the circus is such a poetic escape for us dreamers of the world. For me it wasn't so much of the whimsical calling I thought it would be, as a last-ditch effort to escape the long arm of the law. I can't go into details, but let's just say some men in suits are looking for me. So I quit my job, and am joining the circus. I think I'll do well there - I'm already used to being surrounded by a bunch of clowns at work.
Given the tone of the generated messages, it's clear that Quit Your Job is meant to be more of a joke app than a serious tool for professional advancement, but as developer Jake Levine said last time we interviewed him: "Here's the scary thing. If five to ten thousand people use our app, and even half a percent used it seriously, that's like a couple people who may have actually used it." And in the case of Quit Your Job, those two people will now be filing for unemployment.
You can download the Quit Your Job app free on the iTunes App Store here.