How was there a company left?
At the beginning of the year after I left that job, my previous employer got a new health-insurance plan that was so bad, lots of employees were purchasing their own insurance, often at a huge expense, rather than use that plan. The reason was because the new plan, which was “cheaper”, did not have fixed deductibles; instead, the deductibles were a percentage of the fee, meaning that people would not know how much they had to pay until after the fact.
That was changed quickly because the benefits office got so many complaints.
What’s really bizarre about this is that the company was a hospital!
Boss: In order to reduce costs, we are not providing you all with desk calendars.
Me: But we use them to keep track of mailings and timing of bi-weekly phone calls!
Boss: I know what calendars are used for.
Me: So why are you not getting us them?!
If they spent a large amount on maintenance it would have been difficult to show it was negligent of them to keep using the old machinery. And anyway, insurance…
This was years ago, and public sector: if a department didn’t use its whole annual budget, it would be reduced the next year, as obviously it didn’t need it.
For the department that dealt with road repairs, most of the annual need was smaller bits of equipment, but there were some larger very expensive machines that would typically break down every four or five years, so if they didn’t break in any given year, the department would come in under budget, so would then have next year’s budget reduced to the point that they wouldn’t be able to replace the most expensive gear if it did break.
The solution to this was to buy a bunch of utterly unnecessary gear to fill up the annual budget, then hire a bunch of teenagers (including my Dad, I said it was a while ago) to smash it up, because they didn’t have space to store it. Then it could all be reported as broken, and when the big stuff did break, the amount of broken gear they had to replace annually would be consistent.
One that used to drive my brother Jay crazy and which happens in too many companies: no retention policy at all. The idea that if you hire people for 3-month contracts and spend 1-month training them it really isn’t worth the savings in salaries just doesn’t get through some people’s skulls.
Same for highly-qualified positions. There have been several instances where I’ve been let go from a company and they were calling me back within weeks. In two of those, my manager had been trying to keep me (as he could see that my profile was going to be needed again in one month, plus I was doing things outside the official profile) but the mindset from above was that workers are like milk boxes, you get them from the supermarket.
Current Barcelona mayor Ada Colau got elected with, among others, promises to lower public expenses. One of her decisions was to close down the fairgrounds at Plaça Espanya: the satellite fairgrounds which had been built in next-door Hospitalet to handle overflow from the main ones are now The fairgrounds. Since these aren’t big enough to handle all the Fair traffic of Barcelona, sometimes they spill over to the high school across the street. Other times, some fair will be held in the old fairgrounds in Barcelona. These are also where the central facilities, mainframes, storage, etc. are… so ok, they’re getting less income and there’s hotel stays that have hopped to Hospitalet, but hey, we’re saving money by having the lights off one of the fairground buildings!
The people of Hospitalet think that Ms. Colau is a wonderful mayor and Barcelona should keep her a long time. And Castelldefels wouldn’t mind if she decides to close the harbor… (Hospitalet isn’t at the sea shore).
For what Filbert mentions about budget reductions, my dad used to have what he called the bedsheets budget. His initial budget for the new hospital had included lines to purchase furniture, TVs or bed linens, which weren’t needed again in those volumes. Later years needed a lot more bandages or medicines, but alas, the budget for each year was created by taking that of last year and adding X% to each line. So he used the linens budget to purchase bandages: “it’s all cloth, isn’t it?”
Not corporate, but still remarkably silly;
I once worked in a bar owned by a Chech man, nice enough guy, ran a sweet and successful bar and restaurant.
But often, after closing as we were counting the receipts, etc, he’d turn up and proceed to remove any leftover ice in the bar’s speedwell, and return it to the ice making machine in the hall closet!:smack:
No matter how many times we explained that it did not save him a penny, he couldn’t ignore what he perceived as waste!
Most wound dressing changes aren’t sterile. Some are, but for those we need to use sterile gloves, in their original packaging, and they’re in packages of two from the manufacturer.
She wears gloves while the counts the gloves, so they’re as clean as they were in the box, unless the inside of new Ziploc bags is somehow not clean. But this has been observed and not dinged by the health department, so I think we’re okay on that front. Just seems a bloody waste of Ziplocs and time. Seriously, if you can’t trust your nurse with a $6 box of gloves, why are you handing them a $50 bag full of $100 of nursing equipment?
Speaking of ice, Mrs. J. and I ate out last night at a restaurant where management apparently decided it was fed up with the cost of soft drink refills, and the solution was to fill all glasses to the brim with ice before adding minimal soda.
This adds lots of extra trips for the waitstaff for refills and pisses off customers like me who will not be back (and mentioning it in the restaurant review).
Why not just ask the server, at the first refilling, ’ NO more ice, please! ’
Seems a lot easier than getting pissy, refusing to return, and penning a scathing review.
Just sayin’ !
It wasn’t a matter of “no more ice”, it would’ve meant asking the server to dump out at least half the ice and bring a decent amount of drink.
As this evidently was a management “money-saving” decision and staff was already distracted enough to bring the wrong food/cooked wrongly, it didn’t seem worthwhile.
Just sayin’.
Ice to the brim with a tablespoon of liquid happens everywhere around here. And I don’t drink soda. I drink plain old tap water. I still get a glass of ice with a smidgen of liquid. Which is refilled with more ice to the brim again then another smidgen of liquid.
I often ask for a glass of water with no ice. They sometimes look at me like I’m spouting gibberish. I tell them it’ll save them 5 extra trips to the table to refill my glass. *That *they seem to understand right away. 
I can probably think of worse, but to me the real danger sign is the employee coffee. If an employer changes the coffee service to something worse, or even gets rid of it all together, nothing good really happens. The employees are annoyed, the savings is minimal, and the general perception (depending on the size of the company) is that it all happened because someone met one of their “goals” for the year on the backs of all the other employees.
Bingo. That’s it, exactly.
Ices costs as much as the soda does, so it wasnt to be cheap.
Gahhhh…my second engineering/science company tried to pull that!
Fortunately, the local second biggest big boss said “fuck that shit!”
And IIRC it wasn’t just “no more free coffee”…it was get rid of the coffee and the two vending machines period…yeah, like we all just sitting around scratching our balls because we have our coffee and cheese doodles to munch on instead of working…
Somewhere in the 2007-2008 range (I think) we were installing equipment to handle wireless 3G internet access. I questioned the design engineer because I noticed some of the network connections on the physical ethernet network side were being set to 10/half, which was ancient even at that stage, particularly when talking about core ISP network devices.
I was told that yes, the parameters were correct, those connections were for monitoring/managing the boxes only, and since that’s pretty low-traffic the manufacturer saved a couple pennies on those network chips.
Worked for a military equipment contractor to the US Navy many years ago. Two decisions in particular stand out:
- Boss didn’t want to pay for anti-virus software. So our IT guys were directed to keep switching AV apps for the “first month free” benefit, then uninstall and sign up for a new app’s free month. IT kept explaining we HAD to have AV protection to do business with the Federal government, but boss wouldn’t budge. Eventually ran out of commercial AV software vendors we hadn’t pissed off by trying to get free service from, and had NO AV PROTECTION for a while. We got at least one Word “macro virus” during that time, and kept being ordered to upload Word documents to government computers despite big warning screens displaying “It is a federal crime to knowingly upload any virus to this system.”
Suddenly there was money for AV software, somehow.
- Boss asked me to order a three-hole paper punch, using money the Navy had allocated for office supplies. He approved my selection, and the Navy client approved. Order came back personally rejected by the CEO as a waste of money.
Months later, the Navy office was moved by Congressional mandate (new congresscritter wanted it in its personal district). Suddenly devoid of a client, the company flailed around for a while and went out of business.
Had the CEO been focusing on new business development instead of scrutinizing office supply orders with a red pen in hand, we might have weathered the loss of a client.
Ahhh, remembered a civilian/gubment one.
Our local military/civilian base branch answered to some big base up in Ohio?. They had a REQUIREMENT that ALL briefings/proposals/whatevers had to be done in Power Point.
Nobody in our group gave a rat’s ass about Power Point. We weren’t going to have orgasms because “hey, we GET to buy some Power Point software!”.
Our local dumb ass in charge REFUSSED to okay any purchase request to actually get the software.
I don’t drink coffee, but I always thought the company should provide it and other caffeinated beverages for free but charge for the decaf stuff.