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#1
03-07-2005, 04:07 PM
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What is the stupidest/most unfair employer policy you've ever had to enforce?
Some that come immediately to mind for me:
1- When I was working at a hotel (major chain) they had a thoroughly stupid "Enjoy your stay 100% or it's 100% free" policy. I would NEVER allow this policy at a business, even though superficially it sounds good, because a) any decent well run hotel is going to do this anyway if the guest has a legitimate complaint (e.g. air conditioning wouldn't work in mid-July, couldn't sleep because of noise from neighboring room, etc.) b) this encourages deadbeats and horse's asses to demand and (almost always) receive 100% refunds for the stupidest reasons (e.g. [all real] room service was 10 minutes later than it should have been, a hurricane caused the power to go out for 20 minutes [duh!], hotel not convenient to restaurants, steak underdone in hotel restaurant, etc.). While some of the complaints were legitimate, they didn't warrant 100% refunds (refund the price of a meal perhaps or take a percentage off, but not 100%). Unfortunately the hotel's masters refused to reconsider because they felt the 100% guarantee was a great calling card that brought in more business than it refunded. Personally I felt that they could have saved hundreds of thousands per year (that could be used in employee salaries and benefits) by being fair and reasonable but not ridiculous in what would comp a room. 2) Another hotel I worked for insisted that we call X number of guests per night at least one hour after they checked in to give them a poll ("how efficient was your check-in? How friendly was the staff? What can we do... "etc.). The regional supervisor would not hear the absolute truth, which was that guests didn't want to be interrupted to take a poll- perhaps they're sleeping, perhaps they're watching TV, perhaps they're making sweet love, but even if they're just vegetating they don't want to rate the friendliness of the Coke machine on a 1 to 7 scale. 3) This is one I always felt guilty about: when I worked for a large mortgage company we always charged for anything we sent a client. If they wanted a copy of their mortgage or a copy of their appraisal or a copy of their title or abstract etc., we had to charge. Now, while I understand recouping printing/postage and even a modest fee to defray the cost of the employees in records, the fees were ridiculous (minimum of $20 and could run as high as $100) for printed records! We were specifically told to not mention the exact fee unless asked but rather to ask if we could put the fee on their monthly mortgage (and many borrowers, assuming that the fee was a rational $5 or less, agreed without asking the price). Incredibly unethical place (I was also told point blank, though never in writing, to outright lie to the customers on a number of issues as well, and I had a boss so stupid that she was furious when she learned that half of her employees were performing at average call volume or below and would not hear of it when somebody tried to explain STATISTICS FOR COMPLETE FREAKING OYSTERBRAINS to her. What are some of your asinine or unethical policies that you've had to carry out? 
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#2
03-07-2005, 04:23 PM
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Working at Subway:
"You can get a footlong for only a dollar more!" "Chips and a drink?" I HATE when people try to shill extra stuff like that to you. The customer can see the prices right behind you. If they want it, they'll ask! It pisses the customers off, it wastes time...arrrgh.
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#3
03-07-2005, 04:40 PM
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Asking every person going through my checkout line whether they had (or wanted) a Target Card. "Would you like to get 10 % off your purchases today by getting a Target Card(or later Target Visa Card)?" Most people don't want to get such a card (or already have one) and if the purchases are under $20, the guest is not saving enough money to make getting the card worthwhile. (in my opinion.)
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#4
03-07-2005, 04:42 PM
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My previous school: Student must wear button-down shirts (fine) and those shirts must at all times be tucked in. School board members made frequent visits to see if students in the halls had their shirts tucked in.
Current school: While we encourage our students to express themselves creatively through their clothing, and have a wide range of goth, punk, hip-hop, and eclectic homemade styles- students are not permitted to wear pajama bottoms to school. Mind you, this is a school where I had a girl dress like Jack Sparrow for four months straight, another frequently wears a tiara, another has a Keanu-in-the-Matrix-Reloaded cassock, and one occasionally wears a wispy skirt and gauze wings. But no pajama bottoms.
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#6
03-08-2005, 08:35 AM
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It's okay if your kids can afford cool clothes. Personally, I'm in favour of school uniforms.
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#7
03-08-2005, 09:00 AM
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An employee may not write a letter of recommendation for an employee applying for a position outside the chain of newspapers at which I was working.
I would tell my reporters the rule, then anytime they applied to another newspaper I would give them a recommendation. It was one of major reasons I was fired from paper. I repeatedly did it after I was told not to.
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#8
03-08-2005, 09:40 AM
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I used to work for EDS (I won't say where, though). I worked at a tech support helpdesk. We were organized into teams of about 15 people per team. Our department had a policy that no more than 2 people on any one team could request the same day off. This usually resulted in people requesting time off over 1 year in advance of the days they needed. Now if you happened to get sick and couldn't come into work on a particular day, then that was ok as long as you called into your team leader and let them know.
Vacation day policy was assinine enough, but management then started screwing people out of their approved-by-management vacation time. There were people who had been approved for vacation days, then were told they had to come in anyways... usually with the excuses of, "We didn't know you had those days off and scheduled somone else to be off," or "Yes, we know you were approved to have these days off, but there are too many people on other teams that have those days off, so we need you to come in." A lot of people suddenly started getting sick when they couldn't get their time off that they wanted for vacation. I am so glad I'm out of there.
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#9
03-08-2005, 09:55 AM
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<sigh> Bathroom passes.
I worked as a supervisor for a LARGE corporate travel agency in the DC area several years ago. There were several supervisors each responsible for a team of 7-10 agents. A new office manager instituted a policy that no more than one agent on a team could be away from his workspace at a time. So, If Thaddeus was getting a refill on his cappucino double-latte, then Gomez had to await his return before going to the potty. As another slap-in-the-face, we were instructed to have a physical item (the "pass") that the employee had to have with them when away from their workspace. Ostensibly to ensure that the policy was enforced. However, if New Office Manager happened to see an employee up and about, she would demand to see the "pass". I often was involved in a conversation with her that started with the words "Where's so-and-so?" When I responded with "I don't know", I'd get the lecture about not being a responsible supervisor and how my team's not at it's fullest capacity and what if we get hit with a swamp of incoming calls right now. I had to remind her that we're all adults here and how's about we start treating them like that? Yeah......THAT went over well! Come to think of it, I'm not really adhering to the spirit of the OP. That is, I never DID enforce that policy.
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#10
03-08-2005, 10:18 AM
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I had the fun task of managing a bunch of teens at a mall music store.
What I would personally expect out of a teen working part time at minimum wage: Run a register, put stock away, clean and straigthen stock, smile and say "hello" to customers and ask them if they needed help if they looked lost, help customers find cds and dvds, keep busy, come in when scheduled, dress neatly in uniform. What corporate wanted me to have the teens do: Strike up conversations with every customer asking them about their cellular service and telling them how Virgin Mobile was better and they should buy a new phone from us, badger every customer to sign up for a $8 membership that will save them $5 for every $100 they spend, badger every customer to sign up for Entertainment Weekly, badger every customer to buy a cd case, badger every cutomer to buy an extended warranty on their walkman or playstation, badger every customer to pre-order their cds and dvds at our "mall" prices, badger every customer into buying a gadget that fixes scratched cds. In other words, turn them all into annoying pushy little salespeople. If they're not constantly harassing everyone that walks into your store to buy extra crap, they're a disposable empoyee.
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#11
03-08-2005, 01:00 PM
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We had recently instituted a policy that said you could wear denim on Fridays (ie - jeans and jean skirts).
One of my employees came in wearing jeans and a denim shirt. A passing VP went aploplectic whilst passing my team when he saw the shirt and told me to send him home to change as a denim shirt was not allowed. I approached the employee and told him he'd have to go home and change because denim shirts were not allowed. Yes, this made me look like an idiot in front of my employee. He then had an apoplectic fit and stormed off to HR. He came back all smug and said that the VP of HR had said he could stay. She later passed by me and my team. She was wearing a denim shirt. Yes, this made me look like an even bigger idiot in front of my employee. Dueling VPs should belt it out amongst themselves and not involve middle managers.
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#12
03-08-2005, 03:07 PM
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And for the boys AND the girls, you had to ask permission to remove your wool sweater and always have it on in the hallway (with no breeze at-tal) at all times. 
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#13
03-08-2005, 03:09 PM
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Flogging.
What?! Hasn't anyone here ever been support staff onboard a pirate ship?
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#14
03-08-2005, 03:25 PM
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When I was working for the State of Oklahoma, I once had to inform a frail, blind elderly man that his tiny check from the state was in jeopardy unless he reduced his net worth by cancelling a small life insurance policy whose cash value had grown until it was in excess of what the law allowed as an "asset" for a recipient of Old Age Assistance. (Old Age Assistance was the state's equivalent to Social Security, largely used by people whose former employers did not pay into the Social Security fund. )
When I delivered the bad news, the poor old man burst into tears. He had been paying the premiums on this insurance policy for decades. It was a matter of pride for him that his burial would be paid for, and that his children would not have to go out-of-pocket to give him a decent funeral.
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#15
03-08-2005, 04:03 PM
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 On the other hand, my stepson worked at a call center for a short time where, on a particular contract, between calls the CSRs were not allowed to stand up, walk around, read, do crossword puzzles, surf the net, talk to each other... basically they had to sit in their cubicle and stare at the wall when not taking a call. It wouldn't have been so bad except that the dozen or so reps on the contract took a total of maybe five calls in one week, so there was a LOT of sitting around doing nothing!
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#16
03-08-2005, 04:27 PM
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I used to work for a computing center in my dorm. We were told that if a user had a problem, we were to listen to them describe it and tell them the appropriate action. We were not allowed to get up and go look. Mind you, it was 1 room with 10 computers. You could easily see your desk from anywhere in the room. The number of times a frustrated user would say, "I don't know what's going on, couldn't you just look" I left there to go to the University computer center and the policies were much better.
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#17
03-08-2005, 04:31 PM
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Yeah, flogging lead to mutiny. It's very stupid.
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#18
03-08-2005, 04:32 PM
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I didn't have to enforce these facilities-related policies, but as an HR drone I had to explain them to incoming new hires. I use "explain" loosely; it might be more accurate to say I tried mightily to justify the policies to new hires and make it clear the company was serious about them while at the same time not jeopardizing my position by letting on how completely stupid I thought the policies were.
The policies were simple: Both blue pens and paper clips were forbidden. Okay, well, maybe the paper clips weren't "forbidden," per se, in that they were still around the office, but the CEO had dictated that no additional paper clips would be purchased and there would be no boxes of paper clips in the supply closet or anywhere else. His rationale? Paper clips can be easily moved from one set of paper to another. A paper-clipped set of paper going into a file drawer wastes that paper clip. Before filing said set of paper, remove the clip, staple the set of paper with a regular stapler, and put the paper clip back into your personal stash for later reuse. It didn't take long before there was a vast black market in paper clips. One enterprising fellow had recognized the potential immediately and began collecting them even before the policy went into effect. He had thousands of them in a small bucket locked in his desk drawer. The blue pens, on the other hand: those were, in fact, forbidden entirely. Seems that the CEO had read somewhere that blue ink doesn't photocopy as cleanly as red or black, so he made the entirely rational decision to completely eliminate blue ink from the workplace on the off chance that whatever was being written might have to be photocopied some day and would be somewhat less than legible on the resulting copy. Not only were blue pens not stocked by the supply people, but you could actually tattle on someone if they had a blue pen, and someone from facilities was supposed to come and take it away from you. I never saw this myself, but that's what the original memo suggested. These two policies were the first things to disappear after the board fired the CEO for unrelated malfeasance.
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#19
03-08-2005, 04:47 PM
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__________________
"This isn't Wall Street; this is Hell. We have a little something called 'integrity.'" --Crowley, Supernatural
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#20
03-08-2005, 05:14 PM
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I once had a job where I had to do an upgrade sales pitch to every customer. Now it was a good upgrade and usually well worth it, but plenty of customers had heard it all before and it just wasn't a good deal for some customers. Our lines would move soooo slow because we had to make this long complicated pitch- complete with rebuttals- to everyone.
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#21
03-08-2005, 06:10 PM
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I worked briefly for Computer Associates during a cost-cutting phase. One of the rules that was implemented was that you needed VP-level authorization to send a fax. So to send a local fax that cost nothing, you had to call Boston long-distance to get authorization. Dumbasses.
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#22
03-08-2005, 07:05 PM
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First, what about sheaves of paper you didn't want to (or that you couldn't) staple? How were you supposed to keep those together? Second, the bit about the blue pens makes sense. I used to work for a company whose president signed certain documents like payment vouchers in non-reproducing blue ink to make sure there weren't illicit copies running around. The original was valid, but since copies wouldn't be signed, they couldn't be presented for payment. (Said president learned this lesson the hard way when a couple of subcontractors hit on the idea of turning in copied payment vouchers so they'd get paid more than once.) Of course, now that copier technology has improved, it really doesn't matter which color you use to sign documents. Robin
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#23
03-08-2005, 07:32 PM
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That was the pea-brained CEO's rationale, anyway. The fact that he spent so much time thinking about shit like this instead of running the company is probably a factor behind why and how he steered us into a huge ditch. In painfully slow motion.
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#24
03-08-2005, 08:25 PM
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I worked for EDS also and the account I was on (in Alabama) had identically the same problem, same way around it, and same "please excuse while I screw you" managerial way around the way around it. Grrrr!!! Just remembering it still pisses me off. Another thing they did that I'm not even sure is legal: all employees were salaried employees and thus did not receive overtime- okay, no problem. BUT, when said employees worked more than 40 (or 50, or 70, or 80) hours per week EDS billed the Federal Government (who the contract was with) for overtime (the overtime that, to repeat, the employees did not receive). I used to consider reporting this as a Fraudulent Claim violation but thought better of it. Then there was the salary matter: I was hired there along with dozens of other employees making in the $17-$20K range- not a lot of money obviously. Later the company doubled their workforce and decided that $17-$20K wasn't enough for this type of work, so they upped the pay to $23-$28K... for the new employees (the older employees [who were training the new ones to do the exact same job] didn't get the raised salary, and management seemed to have no idea why this upset us. AND when we learned that the account was to be filled at least 80% by non-white employees by terms of the contract (in a city in which roughly only 50% of the population is non-white) we weren't too happy either. (Non white employes didn't take long to notice that at least 80% of management was white). And when my boss (who was also a Baptist minister and [I wouldn't type this if it wasn't easily verified] who not only bragged about his sexual conquests but impregnated one of the employees [ahem] under him[/ahem] at the same time his wife was pregnant [the kids were born within about three weeks of each other]) used to hold prayer meetings on his cubicle row and I refused to participate he called me a troublemaker and referred to my lack of team spirit. While management backed me in my "preference not to" pray, I was given the job of basically delivering and logging faxes (minimum wage grunt work essentially). Ah, how I hated that &*$@9ing company.
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#25
03-08-2005, 09:04 PM
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#26
03-08-2005, 10:05 PM
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Shilling charity for the March of Dimes or Give Kids the World at KrapMart. I HATED doing that. One woman once lectured me on soliciting for charity, even after I explained that I HAD to, (my supervisor threatened to fire me if I refused), and another woman went into a tirade about how the March of Dimes supported abortion and it was evil.
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#27
03-08-2005, 10:20 PM
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Black-market paper clips..... band name!
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#28
03-09-2005, 04:37 AM
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My maths pretty much stopped when the X's and Y's crept in, but I swear I spent 30 minutes in front of a whiteboard trying to explain why, given a five day working week, 40% of sick calls either side of the two days off was actually a pretty good batting average - although glove-puppets would have probably helped my explanation, and I'm not even sure she believed me at the end: I learned one important management principle at that meeting - never make jokes in front of a boss too dumb to understand them.
__________________
Detrimento malignitas; victoria ultio
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#29
03-09-2005, 05:06 AM
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I feel really sorry for anyone whose job puts them in the position of having to do that, but sometimes it's really hard not to get nasty about it, especially when they won't quit. FTR, the little cashier spiel never bothered me, 'cause usually I say "I already have one," and that's the end of it.
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#30
03-09-2005, 05:27 AM
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It used to be that copiers had a harder time picking up any shade of blue. A black pen would copy just fine; a blue pen would make fuzzy copies. Later on, as copier technology matured, it didn't matter which color you used, as long as it wasn't non-reproducing blue. Blue now copies just fine. Robin
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#31
03-09-2005, 05:35 AM
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Dragwyr, I had that problem with a previous employer. Until the day my boss's head exploded. I was part of a two-person team. My partner's wedding was scheduled for the same time as my divorce hearing. My hearing was in Minnesota, which meant I had to be off for about three days to allow for travel time.
The boss didn't know what to do. It was against the rules (her favorite phrase, BTW) for both of us to be off, but she couldn't tell my partner to re-schedule her wedding. She told me to talk to the court, which I did. The court said they couldn't reschedule without a hassle, and a telephone hearing wasn't possible. The clerk, in fact, had some rather choice words for my boss. My boss honestly had no idea what to do. I solved that problem by quitting, for that and similar reasons. (I was pregnant at the time, and didn't need to deal with fifty thousand "rules" that could never be broken for any reason.) Robin
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#32
03-09-2005, 06:56 AM
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In another job, the sales staff were given beepers so the office staff and the boss could get in touch with them easily. (this was before cell phones were as common as they are today). The day they were given out, the boss laid down some rules. One of the rules was that if you broke it or damaged it, you would be fined $50. Losing it incurred no fine. The salesmen all looked at each other and just laughed. The boss never did figure out why that was so funny.
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#33
03-09-2005, 07:40 AM
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The biggest insult was "Well, you're just not a team player". 20 years later, I take that phrase as a compliment.
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#34
03-09-2005, 08:17 AM
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The one that drove me nuts was the leave policy at my last job; we had two different accounts - "vacation hours" and "sick hours." The thing was, you could only use sick hours if you missed three days (or more) in a row. If you were just sick for one or two days, you'd have to squander two days' worth of vacation hours.
Naturally, this led to most people taking three days off when they really only needed to be out for one.
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#35
03-09-2005, 08:39 AM
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I was once the office manager in a small factory where the VP in charge had me ration out the ink pens. Employees could not come get their own pens; they had to have a supervisor come ask me for one and sign it out. Then they weren’t allowed to get another one for at least a week. If it broke (and these were the cheapest pens available, thanks to the penny-pinching VP), tough -- they were supposed to go buy their own replacement pen.
So the floor supervisors spent about an hour a day running back and forth to the office to get pens, and everyone was always snarling at me as if the policy were my idea. The VP tried to make me ration the ear plugs and safety goggles, but I finally convinced him that OSHA might have a problem with that. Also, he told us to fire one employee because he had too many garnishments for child support, and the corporate office didn’t want to process the paperwork.
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#36
03-09-2005, 01:12 PM
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Explaining to a $10/hr employee that she had to spend what amounted to about 1.5 hours each week tracking each and every bit of postage used for that week. Somehow explaining to my boss that "It just don't make no good sense" to spend $15-$20 per week to track $30 worth of postage didn't change the policy.
What I am most proud of at that job is ignoring asinine policies until they went away. Every month or so there would be some new policy passed down, but almost never did they make enough financial sense for me to pursue them. IF I was asked about how some policy was going I could usually say "Great! We're really cutting down waste." or something. On the rare occasion that I had to back this up with a report, I could usually whip out something in 5-10 minutes... which would be glanced at, filed and never heard from again.
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#37
03-09-2005, 01:15 PM
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I used to work for a small espresso/bagel place when I was in college. It was owned by a young couple. The husband did most of the day-to-day stuff and the wife would just pop in periodically.
Anyways, one day she comes in and decides that, in an effort to make the place a bit more "homey", everytime someone asks for a cup of coffee (about half of our customers) we were supposed to respond with... "Do you mean a cup of joe?" Arrggh. It was completely asinine and predictably invited a wide range of replys ranging from "A cup of what?" to "Is your name Joe? Are you sexually harassing me?!?!" Thank goodness I worked evenings and never had to enforce this particular policy.
__________________
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever." - David St. Hubbins
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#38
03-09-2005, 01:54 PM
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The part I concede is reasonable:
Where I work, you cannot through out massive amounts of paper in the regular trash. Things like phonebooks, manuals, and stacks of generated paper are forbidden in regular trash because there's acontractual weight limit to what the housekeepers can pick up. I work with a lot of academics, and they generate more paper than us engineers. If we have lots of paper, or other heavy or bulky items, we're supposed to scavenge boxen to put it in, and put a sign on it saying 'Heavy Trash For Disposal'. Periodically, someone with a handtruck comes through the building and collects the boxen from the hall. The asinine part: You cannot make up your own sign. 'Heavy Trash For Disposal' takes about 30 seconds to make in Powerpoint and send to print. No, it has to be an official FedGov form with the form number on the bottom, or they won't take the box it's attached to. 
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#39
03-09-2005, 02:23 PM
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I have a boss (don't we all). One day, a computer glitch caused a lot of e-mail (not just mine -- this was firm-wide) to disappear into the ether. I told my boss about it, and mentioned that she should probably re-send anything important she'd sent to me that day, because I hadn't yet read my e-mail (I'd started the day off-site, and hadn't had a chance to get in front of a PC before the glitch). She said "OK. Which ones should I re-send?" I said "Anything you think it's important for me to see." She said "I don't have time for that. You'll have to tell me which e-mails to resend." I said "No problem. Don't worry about it." End of conversation. It just wasn't worth arguing about.
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#40
03-09-2005, 02:32 PM
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Here's a policy that falls very squarely into the "unethical" category:
It is my boss's policy (to define our relationship, let's say she's a captain and I'm a master sergeant) that under no circumstances is an employee ever to be praised or thanked in writing. Or in e-mail. However, even the smallest and most insignificant complaint about any employee is to be documented via e-mail and a memo. I truly hate this. And I have to do most of it, because I have much more day-to-day contact with the people I supervise than she does. It's just plain wrong. I do everything I can to get around it. I have no objection to memorializing truly bad behavior or incompetence in writing. But I try to do the same for exceptionally good work.
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#41
03-09-2005, 03:33 PM
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I used to work for a marketing/pr agency that specialized in the beauty industry. Our clients were spas, cosmetology schools, beauty supply distributors, plastic surgeons, hair salons, etc. My boss was an extremely froggy-looking creep who was obsessed with how his female employees looked because "we work in the beauty industry and must present a certain image". Even though we worked out of his basement. Which was in a remote suburb. Even though we saw our clients MAYBE once a month. Every single day we were required to wear pantyhose, business suits, and makeup. That was written in our employee manual.
I'll never forget walking out the door to go have a meeting with one of my clients who was an hour or two away. Right when I was zipping my coat, my boss said to me, "Uh, are you going to put on lipstick?"
__________________
"You don't sound like you're very happy! I'll teach you to be happy! I'll teach your grandmother to suck eggs! It's the little critters of nature! They don't know that they're ugly! That's very funny! A fly marrying a bumblebee! I told ya I'd shoot, but ya didn't believe me! WHY DIDN'T YOU BELIEVE ME!!!"
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#42
03-09-2005, 08:11 PM
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