‘I quit that job about 3 months later’: Mechanic is left alone after coworkers walk out on an overbooked post‑Thanksgiving Saturday, grinds through the chaos, gets praised with a fast-food gift card by management

This fun little work story happened post‑Thanksgiving Saturday at a dealership. Just imagine how joyous this must be: The service lane fills up, the scheduler loses the plot, and a quick tech suddenly finds out what rock bottom staffing really looks like. Cars keep showing up until there is literally no space left in the lot, tickets stack higher than the oil filters, and five other techs collectively decide this isn't what they signed up for. They drop a quick "we're out" and invite the oil‑change guy to join the exodus. Military brain says no, so everyone else clocks out of the story while one person stays in the bay and keeps working.

From there, it just turns into survival mode. A couple of techs get dragged in off their day off, the skeleton crew grinds through dozens of cars, and the day blurs into a mix of rotations, oil changes, and controlled chaos. Management does what management always does when someone bails the place out. Shakes some hands, says a lot of grateful words, hands over a gift card that covers maybe one good burger run, and then turns the whole thing into a "values" anecdote at the next all‑hands. The walkouts are gone, one of them tries to crawl back later, and the one person who actually held the line gives proper notice and leaves a few months after.