Ever had something stupid or wrong on your permanent work record?

In My Humble Opinion
1

That is, was there ever something on your work record that kept coming up in perfomance reviews that was completely wrong, idiotic, or petty?

I’ve had a couple.

The first was when I was a bank teller. Business deposits were often really big, with a stack of cash sometimes 4 or 5 inches high. From some businesses, most of those bills were ones. We instructed all of our business depositors to band up ones in stacks of 25. We still counted them, of course. But one day some mental colossus decided that most business owners were not only smart but scrupulous, so we should just assume that each stack of ones had exactly 25 bills.

You can see where this is going, right? And yes, I protested this new policy immediately.

So one day a business client came in with a huge stack of ones. I could tell by feel that they were banded in all sorts of crazy amounts. I began to count them out when a manager walked by and ordered me not to count them. Idiot. Anyway, when I balanced my drawer that night, I was short by $13. Any shortage or overage of $1 went on your record. (Too many in too short a time meant termination and possible investigation.)

From that point on, whenever I got a review, I would always hear something like “You show up on time, you’re always kind to the customers, you treat your fellow employees with respect, but there was that incident with the $13.” Arrrgh! That followed me around for about four years and three different branches. The fucker would never go away.

The other time was when I worked as a programmer. (I still do, just at a different place.) I needed to put some new feature in an application I was writing. On little thing was taking forever, because it was really odd and took some serious thought into how it was going to work. The project manager was getting concerned that I was taking so long to write code that she figured should take no more than an hour to write. I estimated that it would take three days.

She didn’t like that. She told me to type up an explanation of the situation and to e-mail it to all of the programmers in the company. Surely someone else has faced the same problem, right? Nope, I tried to explain to her. It really was a unique situation. I absolutely guarantee that no one in the history of programming has ever faced this particular situation. (Yes, it really was that weird.) She didn’t buy it. She pretty much ordered me to e-mail my collegues. I explained again that that would be a waste. I just needed to plow through the problem until I had it solved.

She persisted. I tried explaining that just typing up a description of the problem would itself take three days, and by the time I finished, I would have the problem solved anyway. 99% of the problem was simply defining the problem. Being that she was not a technical person, that was about the best explanation I could give her.

In the end, I plowed through it and came up with some code that was a true work of art. But at every performance review since then, I always got the old “Refuses to ask others for help.” Arrrrgh!

Ever have something like this happen to you?

2

Don’t even remember what it was anymore, but one of my bosses from about 16 years ago hit me hard on my annual review with something that had happened 6 months previously, and had never been mentioned until that time. Using it as an excuse to give me a bad review and no raise. I refused to sign it, then took it straight to our Director. He agreed with me and told my manager to take it off my review.

My reasoning was that if it was as serious as my boss was making it out to be, it should have been addressed at the time it happened, rather than being completely ignored for six months.

I was fired from a Security job for “making false and misleading statements” to my co-workers about what my bosses were telling us. They were blatantly violating policy. I have a digital audio recording of my supervisor telling me these things in a 45 minute disciplinary meeting. When I reported it to HR, they all closed ranks and I was suspended and then fired for lying about it.

Regardless of actually having a recording of them doing it.

Two years later, and I still have that recording. My former Director is a retired cop who also holds an appointed state position. And she’s a lying piece of shit with no personal integrity who is incapable of handling basic aspects of her job. I have no respect for her professionally or as a human being.

3

Sure, there’s always stuff that shows up on your reviews that’s either flat out wrong or totally crazy. It just depends on how big a deal they want to make out of it.

I worked at one place where, at my first review, they asserted that I had not done something that was in my job description. I responded in writing with what I had done, and asked them to specify what their expectations were. Nothing more was said, until the next review, where it showed up again. Whereupon I again responded and again asked them to specify what their expectations were. And it showed up again a year later.

4

I think all of the erroneous and/or misleading information in my employee file is in my favor. I decline to mention the details for fear they’ll go away. :eek:

5

Yeh.

This was in the days of Windows '95 and the taking on of word processing tasks by attorneys. The firm’s policy was that you should never refuse to help any attorney if they requested something of you, even if he wasn’t your direct boss. I was a little better with word processing and computers than a lot of the secretaries, so I was often asked to help one of the partners figure out how to work the newfangled program. I knew better, I thought, than to say no to any partner.

Of course, at review time, they used this to ding me and my raise. My own attorneys complained that they saw me helping other attorneys, looking like I was having fun (I was - I like computers), and that I should stick at my desk doing real work and not just enjoying myself elsewhere.

Then at my next review I got dinged for refusing to help out another attorney. Shitheads.

6

I was subbing for a 4th grade class, and the class jerk had ticked me off again at the end of the day, and because I had a good idea he was about to make a break for home, I took his wrist (not painfully at all) and took him up to the office. The principal wrote me up for “manhandling” him without even mentioning it, on the word of the kid who’d lied to me three times that day. I found out only when the district mailed me a copy.

I wrote a letter back to be filed in my record (she never responded to my other letter). I got over it because I realized no one would see that writeup, because no one would know to ask for it. The whole record’s probably been shredded by now as irrelevant.

Oh, then there was the teacher who officially complained about me on the basis of what she heard from the most immature 6th grade class I’ve ever met, and checked the box that she’d observed this behavior, when the entire point was that I was taking her place at work. Liar.

7

I had a woman employee who claimed that I had called her in the middle of the night and talked dirty. She said she didn’t recognize the voice, but kept asking “Bob is that you? Fred is that you? Steve is that you?..” And eventually she chose my name and the guy said “Yeah”. Why not- stick it to the boss I guess.
I had to take a lie detector test to continue working. And I had to change companies before it was out of my file. But at least I knew the personnel manager believed me because he’s the one who hired me away when he changed companies.

8

That’s hilarious. Isn’t that what is called a self-starter or an independent worker?! Turn that negative into a positive!

9

Earlier on this year, my assistant resigned unexpectedly. We were on a hiring freeze, so the upshot was that I had to do his job, as well as mine.

This was in the run-up to the relaunch of the seven corporate websites that I run - which are in five different languages. My job encompasses instructing the developers how it should work, doing the system architecture, doing the information architecture, instructing the designer, delegating coding, writing the copy, coordinating the translations of the copy into different languages, etc. etc. - in addition to what is meant to be the core of my job, which is marketing the company through online channels. Because of the loss of my assistant, I found myself also having to do the design too, as well as all the coding. I had instigated a three-week content freeze while the new sites were being rolled out, with their inherent new functionality. On launch, I received an avalanche of urgent change requests from every other office, that had been building up due to the content freeze. These were genuinely urgent requests, as there were crucial sales and marketing campaigns hanging on all the requested updates and additions to the sites.

What with having to do every single thing myself, as well as post-launch changes, and all the testing too, I was a bit overworked. Thanks to the draconian security policies of the company, which would suit a large financial institution such as, say, the Bank of England or Fort Knox, rather than the medium-sized private company I actually work for, the only way I could do any of this work was physically to be on the premises - rather than working remotely - which I was, from 8.30am until usually 9 or 10pm, every single working day, for three months.

Then I went on a much-needed vacation. On my return, my boss and I had a catch-up meeting. It began pleasantly enough, but halfway through the meeting, she said “you seemed a little stressed before you went away”. I replied in the affirmative, with an “but it’s all over now” grin, indicating that I forgave her and the company for leaving me high and dry.

She asked me what the problem had been, so I said, honestly, that as I had told her at the time, I was criticaly underresourced, but I managed to hit the deadlines anyway, though at great cost to my personal life. The response was “well you should be a bit more organised”. I replied that, while I may have appeared to have been working in a chaotic fashion, I had managed to hit every deadline, and the improvement to the online offering was staggering because if it. Her response was, “why didn’t you ask for help?” I replied that I had indeed asked for help from the only other person in the company who could do any of this work, directly to her, but had been rebuffed. Then I reminded her that we had discussed hiring a temp - but that, given the deadlines, the amount of time required to train the temp would have exceeded the number of days we could actually afford a temp for, in addition to removing me from actually being able to do any work while I trained the temp.

I was told that had I prepared status reports during this period, she would have had a clearer idea of what I was doing. I responded that such reports would have served no practical purpose, since there was only me who could do the work, and would have eaten further into the time required to hit the deadlines; and since there was only one person doing the job, and that every single piece of work had to be done by me alone, what the hell did it matter in which order I did it, given that nobody else had the technical abilities to do the job?!

Response? “Fails to take criticism.” On my employment record.

Sweet.

10

I used to be a pilot. One time they were short of people & called me to fly a flight on very short notice. I rushed like hell to get to the airport & we departed a bunch late, but much less late that would have been expected for the normal response time.

A week later I got an attaboy note in my mailbox from the scheduling department, praising my hustle above and beyond, etc. And also a separate note from my boss to come in and “explain” why I caused such a huge delay (i.e. please come see me on your day off so I can berate you for your slovenly work.)

I made a copy of each note & sent them back to the other department. Never heard another thing about it.

I suspect the notes are still in my personnel file somewhere.

11

This reminds me of my current boss. There is no position she can be talked out of, and no preconception she’s not willing to run with.

The thing that lets me put this out of my mind is that last year her boss asked for a report card on administration, and I’ve been mentally writing my her evaluation already, which includes “worst boss I’ve ever had.”

12

Preconception seems to be a real problem with some people: me and other coworkers may have had, say 30+ pieces of positive feedback, and, say, 1 piece of negative, but guess which one we’re tarred with, changing from “one person said yadda yadda about you” to “you are always yadda yadda”.

Which reminds me - right in the middle of the crazy delivery schedule mentioned above, the same boss organised an EIGHT F*&^ING HOUR team meeting. EIGHT F*&^ING HOURS. With a 1-hour ‘social’ lunch in the middle. Since I was the only person who could deliver any of the aforementioned urgent stuff, I ducked out of the lunch part, so I could actually do some goddamned work, but still attended the other SEVEN F*&^ING HOURS of the meeting. I didn’t even eat anything for lunch: I was feverishly attending to urgent business that only I could do.

“Is so disorganised that he frequently misses important meetings” went on my review notes. I contested it: “name a single meeting, other than that lunch, that I’ve missed”. She couldn’t. But it went down on my record anyway.

13

As far as I know, nothing went into any kind of record that any subsequent employer would ever see (and isn’t that the case almost universally? Most prior employers will discuss nothing beyond “yes, AHunter3 was indeed employed by us from StartDate until EndDate in the capacity of Name_of_Job” lest they get sued, right?).

But in the spirit of the OP and subsequent replies…

DESERVED

I worked for the IT Dept of BBDO /NY in the early part of this decade. BBDO /NY is part of BBDO Worldwide which in turn is part of OmniCom Group. It was the era of bogus virus threats via email with “forward this to everyone you know” attached — remember that? “Do NOT open any email with the subject line How to Give your Cat a Colonic or it will !!ERASE YOUR HARD DRIVE!!”. Most of the culprits were ancillary workers & support staff in our own department, taking it upon themselves to worry the graphics creatives and ad people with this crap, and we had to un-warn and soothe them, so I got in the habit of doing a Reply-All and calling the blithering idiot who’d forwarded the junkmail out on the carpet in front of the other recipients, along with a Snopes link. Had the dual purpose of stopping the panic and discouraging the downstairs folks from blindly forwarding the bullshit. Well, one day the blithering idiot was a junior vice president of WorldCom and the “other recipients” were the entirety of WorldCom global industries. Yep, I told something like 1/20th of the entire advertising world that my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss was too stupid to use a computer.

SOUNDS JUST LIKE AN URBAN LEGEND

I’m a FileMaker database developer and in the late 90s worked on vertical market solutions where we’d resell the same database structure over and over again. One blank file was included to incorporate custom functionality for the specific customer (at an extra $$$ charge of course) without cluttering up the main db with customer-specific code. I knew Customer X had custom functions but until I got the dump file from his AS-400 I could not built it in any useful sense, so in early development I make a phony file to represent the converted dump file and named it “Dummy.fp3” … you see where this is going, don’t’cha? FileMaker of that era did not store its external file references anywhere you could see and edit them and although I had created the real file with sample data by release time, one subscript had not been properly edited to overwrite the original storage of the external filename for a “Perform External Script” call. VERY irate customer calls because he’s got an error message on his screen saying he is a “Dummy”. (FileMaker could not find the file “Dummy”. Please locate the file “Dummy” and hit "OK to continue or “Cancel” to stop further attempts to load this file)

LIARS

A long time ago in a northern New Mexico desert far far away, I took a temp job as a surveyor’s assistant. (Walk until I yell stop. Now drive a stake in the ground and hold the pole with the painted lines until I holler “OK”. Then wait while I walk around you and shoot back and you. Repeat.). Unskilled labor, decent pay, steady income for a bit. The surveyor’s numbers must not have added up properly at the end. I got called into the Big Boss’s office and was accused of continually & deliberately tamping down the stake between the surveyor’s shot forward and his subsequent shot from ahead of me, in order to deliberately skunk the readings and thereby prolong the work and get more money out of them. WTF?!?? Surveyor said “I saw you do it”. (And you did not say anything at the time? C’mon, get real.) My ass was fired. I don’t know if the Big Boss honestly believed this shit or chose to ‘believe’ it once to see if his surveyor got his act together rather than firing the surveyor for lying. Didn’t matter. I was furious.

14

I had something similar happen. My office had a new Managing Partner, and he set about cleaning house by firing, laying off, or drivingout people hired by the previous Managing Partner who he didn’t like. I did OK for the first year or so while he was busy getting rid of the bigger fish. But then I had an evaluation in which he criticized my client relations skills.

I told him that if any client had ever had an issue with my client relations skills, it was news to me, because clients were constantly telling me that I was better at explaining complex issues than anyone else they’d worked with, that I was always available to address their issues, etc.

He told me “well, remember a year and a half ago, when we were in the [CLIENT] executive dining room? Well, you said something then that I thought was inappropriate.”

I asked him what it had been, as he hadn’t mentioned anything at all at the time or in fact until that very moment, and obviously I didn’t remember what chit-chat I’d had at lunch a year and a half before.

He said he didn’t remember what it was, and that it wasn’t a huge deal, he’d just thought it was a little…off. But apparently off enough that I got my first negative review in 5 years with the firm, which meant no raise.

I knew right then that it was manufactured BS because he was trying to get rid of me, so I decided to save him the trouble. I had a new job within a couple of months.