The circle completes itself.

One of the more unusual developments in the Japanese business world in recent years has been the advent of job-quitting services, called taishoku daikou (“job-leaving proxies”) in Japanese. For a fee, these companies will contact your employer and break the news that you’re quitting, and then act on your behalf for any other correspondence that needs to take place to sever your professional ties from your place of work. Considering that an unpleasant workplace atmosphere is one of the most common reasons for wanting to quit your job, it’s not so surprising that there’s demand for a service that lets you sidestep the possibility of being yelled at by an overbearing supervisor, given a guilt trip about quitting, pressured into staying, or any of the other potential awkwardness that can occur when you put in your resignation personally.

Among Japan’s job-quitting proxy companies is Momuri, whose name is a sympathetic play on words with the phrase “Mou muri” (“I can’t take this anymore”). The company recently had the script flipped on it, though, when Momuri was contacted by a different job-quitting proxy, who informed Momuri that they’d been hired by one of Momuri’s own employees who’d decided to quit.

Momuri, which has acted as proxy for over 20,000 resignations, related the story through a post on its official Twitter account. According to Momuri, before becoming an employee the person, who we’ll call A-san, had been a Momuri customer, hiring Momuri when they quit their previous job. A-san then applied for a position with Momuri when the company was looking for part-time staff, and despite A-san having a history of frequently changing jobs after short stints, Momuri decided to hire them.

A-san rarely showed up for their shifts, though, often saying that they were feeling unwell and needed the day off. A-san was scheduled to work this past Monday, but on that day Momuri received a phone call from the other job-quitting proxy instead. When Momuri asked why A-san had come to that decision, the proxy relayed that the pace of their work assignments was faster than A-san felt was a good match for their personality.

“We have always maintained that, no matter how great of efforts they make, there will always be instances in which certain companies and workers do not mesh,” says Momuri in the tweet, and that it will not be trying to talk A-san out of their decision. “All we can do now is reflect on this valuable experience and put that knowledge to use to lessen such mismatches in the future,” the company says, while reevaluating whether it did all it could to recognize a worker’s concerns and address them and continuing to try to improve its workplace environment. Momuri also hopes that the new perspective of having been on the receiving end of a job-quitting proxy service will help it improve how it deals with companies when it contacts them to tell them their workers are quitting.

Source: Twitter/@momuri0201 via Otakomu
Top image: Pakutaso
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