Depending on how fidgety the guy is, sitting next to someone who swivels and twists and turns all day long could drive me nuts. It sounds like they don’t sit too much, but if it’s enough it could be very distracting.
This sounds like a plot from Seinfield.
Instead of New Guy, he would be called Squeaky Chair guy. And it would probably be Elaine complaining about him, and he’d be overly friendly and clueless.
I’ve never worked in a dilberty office or a cubicle zone but I find it really amazing that a chair that swivels will create that much disruption in the workplace. Do these people have difficulty keeping friends? Because if a swivelling chair will make them lose their shit, I can only imagine what will happen the 15th time Nancy googles something on her smartphone or Brian uses his dashboard GPS to find the restaurant.
(I’m totally on board with not allowing the chair on account of size though. There are some executive style chairs that are really too big for anything other than Montgomery Burns’ desk and let’s face it, if the rest of the office is bluey beige, plastic and cubicle wall, a big ole brown leather desk chair will look like ass and everyone will be sniggering about the colorblind new guy. I can definitely see that as being bad for morale.)
Love it. And Jerry would do a bit on it in his stand up.
Your personal smartphone or GPS aren’t the problem; it’s the stuff that is supposed to be company supplied to everyone that can be problematic. And yes, people will lose their shit if they get stuck with the stapler that won’t staple more than two pieces of paper; it doesn’t take much to push office drones over the edge. Next time you’re in an office, go over to someone’s desk and take something, then don’t bring it back. See if they notice (hint: they will).
Oh Lord yes. This thread keeps bringing me back to my first and only Real Job (I’m freelance now, and have been for 16 years, and I’ll never go back). One of the company-provided tools we used was semi-consumable; eventually it would wear out (or get trashed if misused) and have to be replaced, but if taken care of it could last for quite a while. There were several available in a common place, where people could grab one when they needed one (almost daily). But because everyone else was careless, most of them were half trashed. This was unacceptable to me (I was one of the best workers in that department, and I had the accelerated raises and promotions to prove it), so I took a new one, put my name on it, and tucked it away, so that I would always have a good one available. I took good care of it and kept it in pristine condition.
Good Lord, I started World War III. How come Scarlett gets to have her very own whosenwhatsit? Never mind my protestation that people (including the boss) were always complaining about the trashed states of the whosenwhatsits. If everyone did the same as I had done, everyone would have their own whosenwhatsit in perfect condition, and we wouldn’t have to be replacing them all the time (which was a hassle and kind of expensive).
My co-workers actually would have preferred that everyone use the trashed ones all the time. I guess it was evil elves who sneaked in when no one was looking (in a 24-hour operation) and trashed the whosenwhatsits, because none of my co-workers would cop to it. And my boss actually could not see any connection between my higher-quality work and the fact that I organized and took care of my tools (even bringing in my own personal tools as I saw fit – and keeping them under lock and key, of course). Eventually I won the right to retain my own whosenwhatsit, but the fight got ugly before it ended.
This is why I’m freelance. sigh
White-collar workplaces are the breeding ground for First World Problems.
So I feel like we should all guess what the whosenwhatsit is. Typewriter ribbon?
Company provided schmumpany provided. I lived in some campus apartments that furnished a living room sofa, end table and chair. A lot of people brought their own chairs and shit instead of or in addition to the already provided stuff. I never did and my nose was never out of joint because Robby two doors down had a barcalounger and I had a ratty armchair. In the situation talked about in the OP, there is a perfectly acceptable company provided chair. Some dude wants to swap it out for a chair from home. There are several legitimate nay answers here, size, liability and such, but fairness to other employees seems at the very least out of place to me.
I thought that was twitter. “Couldn’t find the apple slicer. Had to use a knife. #FML”
The personal stuff CAN be a problem - it depends on the office mates. Sharing a cube with someone who spends all his time surfing on his smartphone WILL get annoying. Or someone who spends all his time with earbuds in (or someone who spends all their time chatting at you when you have earbuds in :)). So will those lovely folks that like scents (like lavender lady mentioned above - lavender gives me migraines, I’d have lost it). In some offices resentment can build up because one person dresses nicer - at a previous job I worked with a woman whose husband was well off and she was always dressed to the nines - and that caused a lot of resentment in the rest of the staff who needed to work to pay bills. I’ve known people who have coworkers who get upset because of other people’s VACATION plans - as in “must be nice to go to Hawaii…”
People are really petty.
I sort of assumed the whosenwhatsit was chalk/colored pencils/super fancy colored pencils/charcoal. Something artsy that could be used for design and architecture (two fields of which I know nothing so I could be talking out of my ass and probably am).
sigh Okay . . . I’ll spoiler this for the folks who want to keep guessing what a whosenwhatsit is.
[spoiler]The whosenwhatsits were 24-by-36-inch clear plastic sheets with grids on them. We used them on our light tables to lay out film flats to make printing plates. They were supposed to be covered with plastic on both sides for protection, and we were NEVER supposed to use a knife on film when there was a grid underneath. But people used knives on them all the time, cutting them into shreds. Everyone complained about the crappy grids, but no one ever admitted wrecking them.
But I was the jerk for adopting one and taking care of it. :rolleyes:[/spoiler]
In this same workplace we used Xacto knives, and quite often an operation required a sharp blade. But it was easy to dull a blade within one shift, if you were doing a lot of cutting, and the boss kept the blades in his desk to issue individually. :rolleyes: The first time I asked for fresh blades, he gave me TWO. I bought my own blades from then on. It was just easier.
In the same workplace I’ve been describing, one woman (I’ll just call her Bitchcakes) got bent out of shape because (among other sins, such as doing my job better as a new employee than she did after five years) I used my breaks to sit in my car and READ A BOOK instead of sitting with her and her gossipy, bitchy friends. (Dunno why this pissed her off; I’m quite sure they spent a fair amount of time bitching about ME.) She actually complained to the boss about this.
I’m really curious about this whole story. Did you take one and keep it locked up at your desk all the time? If that’s the case, then the issue is more that you’re depriving your co-workers of the use of company property, or making them go through you to access it. Why should everyone have to go to you (or anybody specifically) to use a thingamajig, when the office culture has been to leave them out for communal use?
And even if you weren’t as bad as that, it still sounds awfully presumptuous of you to take the responsibility for a company problem. There are only 20 staplers in my entire department of 100 people. Most people don’t need a stapler at their desk, and nobody needs one ALL the time. If one person took a stapler and hid it at their desk, that means there are now only 19 staplers to go around an entire department of 99 people. So on down to 0 staplers and 80 people. Now fuckin’ everybody has to go bug someone to find a fuckin’ stapler.
If you’re THAT concerned about the state of your communal office thingamajigs, buy your own and keep it locked up. Or talk to your boss about buying one out of company money for your team’s private use. Or propose to management that each team gets one, to be kept at their boss’s desk, which is a money-saving effort and you’d even get brownie points and shit for suggesting it. If you’re unwilling or unable to do any of these things, then suck it up and go with the flow of the culture. Just leave the stapler where it is, ok? :smack:
The difference is that in a workplace, the employees need to get along well enough to be productive. Everyone is putting in their 8 hours, everyone is doing the same grunt work, everyone has to share the same space, and everyone has to deal with everyone else.
So, yes, when it looks like Bob is possibly getting preferential treatment when he lacks seniority, or isn’t as productive, or even just does the exact same amount of work Chuck does, Chuck gets a little resentful. Some folks take it a little too far, like the ones who get resentful of others’ vacations, but it’s perfectly understandable that one employee would get upset when an employee on the same rung of the corporate ladder gets nice stuff for his workspace and the other doesn’t.
Obviously, the rational response to a perceived imbalance is to go and talk to the boss about it. The problem is that if a coworker is enjoying a benefit, then it was implicitly granted by the boss, which means you’d basically be asking the boss why they’re being unfair. If the boss really is playing favorites, that’s not going to win you any points and might even tag you as a troublemaker.
So depending on the atmosphere at your office, you might not feel like you can complain about it. You can try to get over it, but the other guy is right there. You have to work with him. You can’t ignore him or his chair. It’s not difficult to start resenting in that situation.
Yes, it’s all a little fucked up, but folks spend 8-9 hours a day or more at the office. That’s a lot of time for petty things to gain traction. It’s not much different from family life, really, where small things can turn into big arguments if the parties involved aren’t perfectly calm and rational.
There were enough for everyone. I just designated one that I would take care of. Did you also miss the part where I DID supply many of my own tools, because the ones that the company supplied were insufficient (not enough blades to keep sharp ones on hand) or crappy? And I DID keep them in a locked toolbox. People bitched about that too. They were like toddlers. Everything was theirs to trash and lose as they saw fit.
Do you actually support the idea of communal trashing of company property just because no one can prove who did it? If we each had our own assigned grids, then maybe people would be more accountable if they were asking for a new personal grid every week because they’d trashed the old one. The only way to trash a grid was by deliberate misuse (cutting on it and/or not replacing the cover(s) as needed). But if you can just throw the trashed one back in the pile, they all end up trashed. Not cool in my book.
I will also add that speed was of the essence. I was one of the fastest workers BECAUSE I kept sufficient tools and supplies within reach and/or in my locked toolbox (and yes, again, there was enough to go around, and yet people always felt compelled to borrow from other workstations). I also used my downtime (waiting for a new assignment, and thus unbillable) to prepare supplies (cutting down ready-to-go trim marks, for example, that I also kept in my toolbox) that also helped me work faster, instead of having to go hunting around for such things on billable time, like my scattered co-workers. I never had to borrow tools or supplies and I could often reach for and find a tool in my toolbox without looking because I knew where everything was. I rarely had to stop in the middle of a job to do something unbillable, because I was always prepared. At my workstation I had one of everything that I needed, not three half-empty cans of Spray-Mount and no tack cloth, like my airhead co-workers. I will repeat again, everyone could have had the same arrangement if they cared about the work and were not just marking the clock until Miller Time.
(Jesus, I can’t believe I’m having this argument again!)
Also, as I said above, it’s been 16 years since I had to deal with co-workers, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I do again. The problem has been solved.
There are still complications with OSHA, and if something happens with the chair, the OP could still be liable. (Depending on the exact rules, I’m not familiar with them)
They’re already provided with office equipment, the snowflake guy doesn’t need to bring in his own just because he likes it better. Waaaahh, I don’t like the uniform! Waaaaahhhh, I don’t like the chairs we have here!
(And most office environments I’ve been in have had swivel chairs. We even used them at the Science Center)
I don’t believe I said anything impugning the quality of your work back then, Scarlett67. Sorry for the assumption that the thingamajigs were of limited quantity. I was trying to analogize the situation you described into a situation I was familiar with.
I don’t disagree at all, and I imagine your co-workers at the time would have agreed that everyone having their own would have improved the extant grid situation. But until you’re at management level in an office, you can’t make these decisions on your own. The friction you speak of was caused by your failure to understand your “place” in the office hierarchy. You can suggest improvements like this to your boss, or at a meeting–if the opinion of non-managers is even valued at your workplace. My opinion on stapler re-distribution is not valued at my workplace, and I’ve made peace with that. That’s what a good front-line office worker does. “$deity grant me the serenity to know the difference,” etc. What’s the point of raising the department’s collective heart rate about these issues? Saving a few bucks or a couple productivity-minutes over the space of 8 hours, at the expense of being labeled a bitch or a troublemaker by your coworkers or bosses? That fight is **so **not worth it.
If I were you in that environment and disliked the company policy on razorblade rationing and grid storage so much, I’d have found a job that was better suited for me. Which you did, so now you’re happier, and your coworkers were probably happier when you left. Nobody loses. But what you shouldn’t do is assume that something is wrong with everybody else, and nothing is wrong with you. I stand by my previous assertion that it is awfully presumptuous of you to take the responsibility for a company problem. The way you approached that situation was all wrong, and shows you’re poorly suited to be a cubicle drone. There’s nothing wrong with that, lots of people aren’t.
Also, arguments like this one:
are irrational, invalid, bordering on the hysterical, and not helping your cause.
Anyway, sorry to the OP for the derail. Full steam athread! 
Oh yeah. Absolutely.
I know what you’re talking about. It is better that you are freelancing, because a workplace like that would never appreciate the concept of doing things better. You’re supposed to just slop things together like everyone else; that’s supposed to be good enough.