Because I was a broke ass carpet cleaner
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I worked for years and years as a tech for a franchise company. My last day there I worked 14 hours on an underpriced job. The job had been priced by the company salesman. I sat there thinking about it as I was exhausted at the end of the day. I worked on commission and the pay I made that day came out to less than $6 per hour.
I sat their thinking of my average take home pay. I was driving an hour and 15 minutes each way to work 6 days a week. When I added in my drive time and deducted all the money I was paying for gas (which was over $4 per gallon at the time) I realized I was putting in 80 hours a week and not even making minimum wage. I realized if I worked for McDonalds I could make more money, work half as much, and not have to drive to Vegas every day. Sad.
I called my wife and told her to come down and bring all my uniforms. I drove back to the shop which had been closed for hours, I had put in 14 hours that day and not even made $100. I parked the truck by the front door, folded up all my uniforms and placed them on my drivers seat along with my route sheet for the day and my keys. I locked up the truck and got in the car with my wife and never looked back.
I didn't even call to let the office know I had quit. They knew I was pissed about the underpriced job that day. The next morning they started calling about 20 minutes after I was supposed to be to work. They called dozens of times over the next few days. I never answered.
This was the scariest thing I ever had done in my life. We were literally broke. We were months behind on all our bills, our house was in foreclosure, and we were going through the bankruptcy process. The only thing that saved our house was the income tax return I got, had it not been for that and it coming at just the right time we woud have lost our house.
I had picked up a 25 year old broken down truckmount I had planned on someday fixing up. That someday came sooner than I had planned. We used every last dollar we could round up to get the machine running. I didn't even have a van to put it in so I set it in the truckbed of my 1978 Ford pickup truck. From there we started to build a business. That was 6 years ago. Things are going much better now. I can actually pay all my bills at the first of every month without a problem and have a few dollars left over. We are by no means rich now but we make enough to live comfortably and enjoy life.
