I quit when my wife(mother of my four young children) passed away, I simply couldn’t focus on work at all and needed to focus all my time on my kids during this time of grief. The company were quite gracious about it, and a couple years later when they needed an expert on the system they were using and could work on getting rid of it in favor of a newer better system, they called me up to see if I would come back, and I did. Stayed there another 9 years until the company was bought by a conglomerate and I was laid off due to COVID. I’m glad I got laid off, the conglomerate was like all really large companies, with zero interest in individuals, only in workers.

New one got bought out 3 months in and they sacked my entire department. Old one had been struggling to replace me and offered me a 20% raise to come back.

Contract is up at the end of the year, and we’ll see how things pan out then.

Necessity, multiple times. I had incredible luck out of college - and by that I mean that places I worked at kept closing or getting bought out by other companies and doing major layoffs. I kept going back to my fast food job I had in college because it was better than nothing. I went back 4 separate times before I found a job that didn’t close within a year.

So it wasn’t exactly by choice!