Is this Catalonia? They love their tunnels to an astonishing degree.
I don’t know if this really qualifies, but my company has had some mild financial difficulties lately. By “mild financial difficulties” I mean “if it wasn’t for our parent company giving us a major infusion, we’d be bankrupt”. This led to the company cancelling its Christmas party, which is a very nice party where we rent out a local restaurant and have a lovely dinner and drinks for the company and celebrate the past year. It’s not cheap, a couple thousand bucks for sure, and it’s entirely unnecessary, so it was canceled.
That’s not the stupid part. That’s just fine. I can understand that.
The stupid part is that now we’re getting a new CEO from the parent company. And that new CEO has to have a company car. And he’s not taking the one the old CEO used, even though that was already a very nice car. We’re dropping probably ten times what the christmas party cost on a brand new car we don’t need for the new CEO. Oh, and the laptop we gave him was “too heavy”, so instead he gets one that costs five times as much and weighs a lot less, for all the heavy lifting of “reading emails” and “writing spreadsheets” and “showing powerpoint presentations” that his PC needs to be able to do.
Not great for morale, that.
Yup. I tip my hat to you 
I see what people are talking about in terms of weird decisions on travel spending, but if you think about it, setting a travel expense policy can be a lot more difficult than you might think.
I’ve worked in jobs involving travel, and been a supervisor approving travel stuff, for years, and there is no set policy that will always work. There will always, without exception, be employees who abuse any policy you create.
It is, of course, a very quick solution to simply have all travel expenses agreed to in advance on a case by case basis, and not have any set policy; if you do it that way you can come up with a perfectly logical solution for every trip. But beyond a certain point that’s insanely unwieldly in itself. At my last job I was supervising eleven people, all of whom did at least some travel; I would have had to discuss hundreds of individual trips every year (and have discussions with MY boss about MY travel.) That just would not have been possible, I had other things to do. So we had a travel policy, and expected people to follow it. But the travel policy was vague by necessity. How do you tell someone how good a hotel they can stay in in a policy? You can’t set a dollar figure, because every city has different standards, and the standards can change in the same city depending on the time of year. $150 will get you the best room in town in a small little industrial city but won’t get you a broom closet in Manhattan. It’s more than you’ll pay for a good room in a tourist town in February, but the same room is $220 in July. You can’t tell a professional to stay in the cheapest possible room because that simply is not fair. I don’t expect an experienced person I’m paying $750 a day to to stay in a fleabag. But I also can’t ask the customer to be paying for the Presidential suite, either.
Of course there were always exceptions, and I was completely fine signing off on them, especially if it increased safety. But there’s always a goddamn dickhead, and of course I had one. He’d go to a customer literally an hour from his home and stay in a damn hotel for two nights. We never had a policy on “how far it has to be from your house to stay in a hotel” but I had to create one because of Dick Head, and of course, such a thing is inherently arbitrary - do you do it by distance or time of travel? 200 kilometers takes less than two hours in some places; if you need to drive across Toronto at rush hour, it could take four hours. So of course once we created a policy that created all kinds of situations where a person I’d never once had to talk to about expenses was calling me saying “Hey, geez, 200 kilometres but it’s the winter and the customer’s in the boonies…” and of course I’d have to say “hey, John, I trust you, just do what you need to and I’ll sign it, this policy really is not about you.”
But I was in a smallish company and I was the only gateway between their expense reports and the person who got the checks ready. So actually it was an easy situation. Try it in a company ten times larger. You get ten times as many dickheads and it’s ten times more likely you’ll find a manager who is NOT as understanding and honest as I am.
Interesting trivia note; if you look at pictures of American warplanes in World War II, you’ll note towards the end of the war they stopped camouflaging them and they just flew around all shiny.
It’s not that they ran out of paint - it’s just that by the end of the war pretty much all the planes in the sky were Allied so there was no point painting them, and if you didn’t camouflage them, they flew faster.
Part of my job at the big airplane company is testing the passenger oxygen system. The test equipment we use is old and expensive to fix. That equipment needs to be fixed often. A bright young engineer designed a new tool that could replace the old equipment, each new tool would cost $950 to make and repair parts are readily available. The company has spent $35,000 repairing the old equipment over the last 10 years. The request for new test equipment was denied, the old expensive to maintain equipment is still considered serviceable. This is the same company that wants to charge the US government billions of dollars for a new Air Force One.
Perhaps it comes from the days when they used rivets when skinning a plane. The paint would seal the riveting and smooth out any other irregularities in the surface. One plane for which the paint affected performance was the Concorde: the paint affected heat dissipation from mach speeds; they painted one of them blue for a promotion and the boffins warned against exceeding mach 1.7 for more than 20 minutes to avoid overheating.
There is research now into coatings that are microscopically ribbed. It turns out sharkskin is that way and it reduces drag by keeping the so-called “boundary layer” energized which reduces turbulence. Competitive swimmers can buy suits made of a micro-ribbed fabric to obtain the same benefits although they’re silly-expensive.
The challenge for aircraft is keeping the surface clean and free of dents, bugs, and dirt at micro-scale. That’s a tall order just now.
Fly Trojanair - Comfortable for all, but ribbed for her pleasure!
I worked for company A for many years. They always provided coffee.
Then we were acquired by company B, which had been around for decades. They had a corporate policy that they did not provide coffee. Instead, they had some crazy-expensive brew-by-the-cup vending machine setup.
Now, I’m not a coffee drinker so this affected me not at all. But really - how much does it cost you to provide a Mister Coffee-type setup for the employees? If it’s 10 dollars per employee per month, I’d be shocked.
Now, at government sites, coffee isn’t provided either, but they provided a place to set up coffee makers (may have even paid for the hardware, I dunno) and you could pay a few bucks a month to be in the coffee club.
Back in the 1980s, I worked for Burroughs (now Unisys) in Camarillo, California, which is about 50 miles from Los Angeles airport (LAX). We were responsible for the operating system development, and our sister plant was in New Jersey was responsible for the hardware development.
We had a regular stream of people that were flying from California to New Jersey on a regular basis. Whenever we made arrangements, we would always book a non-stop flight from LAX to New Jersey because it was so much easier on the traveler.
The powers-that-be came up with a new plan called “Least-fare Routing”, which mandated that all cross-country flights for people less than VP level had to have a minimum of two legs. Naturally, we called it “Least-fair Routing”, since it was only applied to the lower-level folks.
The grumbling about how trips that took at least 8 hours (2 hours to get to LAX, 1 hour of boarding/waiting to taxi, and then 5 hours of flight time) were killing the engineers fell on deaf ears.
However, one of the leaders in the software development group had a brilliant idea. About 10 miles away from Camarillo is the town of Oxnard, an armpit of a town with but a single virtue: a tiny airport. Specifically, this airport had direct flights to … (wait for it) … LAX!
On his next trip, he told the booking agent that instead of booking his flight from LAX to Newark with a stop in Denver/Chicago/Minneapolis/St. Louis/Dallas/Atalanta, he would like to fly from Oxnard to Newark. The booking agent looked, and, lo and behold, there were no direct flights between those two cities. The only way he could do that was to have a layover … at LAX!
Oh, darn!
So, that’s what we started to do. Of course, it cost about 15% more to route the flights that way, but, by golly, we were following the letter of the mandate. Actually, it may have been either break-even or slightly better, since we didn’t have to pay for expensive parking at LAX.
It took about 3 months before management found out and the excrement hit the impeller blades.
In the 1990s, I worked for a company that provided software and services to the financial service industry. We were given the task of integrating our software with Microsoft Word. Our company, however, was a Lotus Notes shop.
We put in a request to purchase Microsoft Word so we could develop the interface. It got rejected because it was not a Lotus Notes product. We kicked it back to procurement, telling them that we weren’t getting the software because we wanted to do things differently than the rest of the company, we were getting it because we had to develop the code for out clients (you know, the folks that paid the bills so we could buy Lotus Notes).
We did this dance for about 3 or 4 months, wasting hours and hours of time, eventually escalating to the C-level. Seriously, when someone who is at a level that is one or two steps removed from having “Chief” in his or her title spend 30 minutes in a meeting, the costs add up pretty quickly.
In the interim, one of our developers had bought Microsoft Office so he could start making progress on his development deadline. He submitted the expense for reimbursement, but it got stuck in the same NOPE loop.
My boss estimated that, all told, the company probably spent over $10,000 over a $300 expense.
One of our developers
I was doing some computer work for an insurance agent back in the 80s (writing code to use for making quotes). Aetna hired McKinsey to look at their operations. At the time, the branch leaders got an override on every deal. A good one could make up to $250k a year (that is what the guy I was working for was making - which is why he could afford to pay me to write code on a TRS-80 to do automated insurance quotes).
McKinsey decided that they were overpaid, and should be salaried instead. They would get a salary, commissions on their own business, and a couple of pennies in override. It took his pay from $250 to well under $100k. He quit, as did the top producers in several other markets according to stories that I heard. An office with over 200 agents turned into one with a manager and 5.
My job suffers from the Homer Simpson Neapolitan Ice Cream problem
Basically we do a job that requires the constant use of those disposable latex gloves. My job provides them but in all sizes (Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large) and from what I noticed, 80% of the time people are using the large and extra large gloves (and people who would normally use medium will use large simply because they’re pretty form-fitting on the hand and using one size larger is more comfortable) Everywhere you go where the gloves are stocked there’s tons of unopened Small and Medium boxes but the large and especially extra large boxes are nowhere to be found and people have even begun to hiding the larger sizes around the job site so they have easy access and don’t have to wander around looking for their size.
Apparently my work buys the “bulk assorted” boxes that have one of each glove box in them because it’s cheaper but everyone has complained to management they should just buy the individual all large and all x-large boxes since they get the most use and only buy the small and medium boxes when needed. But nope, to save money they buy the assorted boxes and not only do we waste time wandering around looking for gloves or going to the managers office to request them to get a box from the supply closet, once we get to the supply closest we see a bunch of unused small and medium boxes in a giant stacked pile off to the side with a few large and x-large boxes next to them.
My stories are nothing compared to the heavy-gauge nonsense recalled in this thread, but they’re still funny.
I was using two staples when stapling stacks of paper and my boss/business owner said, “Yeah, um, could you please not use two staples? Staples are expensive.”
This from a guy who, every year, took a month-long vacation in South America, Went to Europe in the summer, went heli-skiing for a week each winter, and took a month off each fall to go mountain biking in the SW USA, all while his company generated no profit because all profit went to paying the interest on company debt. Just the interest. $80,000 per year. Flush…Swirl…Bye
I turned around, pulled out my wallet, pulled out a $20 bill, handed it to him, and said, “Here. I’ll pay you this every year if you let me staple as much as I want and never raise the issue again.”
He turned and walked away and never brought it up.
Where I work now, they changed the copier to print on both sides unless we specifically change the setting each time we print. Well, nobody wants that so we all continue to print on one side. And when we forget the setting and print on both sides we grab the whole stack and throw it into recycling and print again. Yep, lots of money saved there, alright.
Paint is definitely a protective coating - it seals out contaminants that cause corrosion of the skin and supporting structures. A very slick paint job *can *give a reduction in drag, but it requires a lot of labor-intensive (i.e. expensive) pre-paint prep work.
The overwhelming majority of aircraft in production today (not just airliners, but all aircraft in general) are still constructed with aluminum skins riveted to aluminum structural elements - composites haven’t taken over quite yet.
Yep, the Pepsi Concorde had a significantly lower speed limit due to the heat dissipation difference.
Back on-topic…
I work for an American company in an international location, supporting a foreign military customer. The company’s [country name] Programs Manager reads, writes, and speaks the local language, is a lawyer, and has been here for several years. The customer’s culture values long-term relationships, and does not like a “revolving door” personnel policy.
Recently, to the customer’s great dismay, the [country name] Programs Manager was let go by the company “to save money”.
<bump>
Thank you, SDMBers, for your responses. I enjoyed reading these enthralling posts. The tale of conductive ink causing circuit board failures is especially hilarious (Post #80).
I bump this thread for a 2nd hand story. A few years ago, I met a consultant engineer who previously worked as a quality engineer for an industrial equipment manufacturer. He was offered a ‘promotion’ to re-locate to another country to become quality manager at a factory with lots of problems: huge scrap rates (>40%), cost overruns, horribly inconsistent quality, etc. The position was tasked to eliminate quality problems with scrap rate near zero % but with zero budget for tooling modifications, new equipment, or additional hires. :smack: WTF? 
He declined the impossible challenge and left the company for a new career.
Corporate Major League Baseball. There is an intentional walk in one game out of 14, on average. It takes 40 seconds for the pitcher to throw four called balls to accomplish this, and MLB has decided to speed up the game by eliminating the four thrown pitches, and just wave the batter to first. Which means games will be shortened by 40 seconds per 14 games, or three seconds per game. There are 20 commercial breaks per game, so the same effect of quickening games could be achieved by reducing the length of the commercial breaks by 1/7 of a second. But they dare not mess with the length of the commercial breaks.
Instead, MLB chooses to alienate its legion purists, by eroding one of the most time-honored principles of baseball, that nothing happens in baseball without the actual execution taking place by the players on the field.
This story is too simple to be believable. Any idiot can figure out how to buy $800,000 worth of necessary supplies for the next year, and store them in a big Warehouse. It takes a real big idiot to waste all that money and only buy toilet paper.
You can pretty much guarantee that toilet paper isn’t going to become obsolete and it won’t go bad in dry storage; what other kinds of supplies useful at Yellowstone can you say that about? Pens and markers and the like can dry out; chemicals such as cleaning supplies can deteriorate; anything technology-related may be outmoded.
Just to be picky, in fact, there is an intentional walk about once every two games, on average. Not that your point isn’t still valid.