I was just thinking one step further and having a button that must be pressed the whole time or the microwave won’t work.
Sigh.
Anyone notice the name of the thread?
It was never about the popcorn, or even the microwave. It was about being asked to participate in decision making by people who cannot be bothered to point out that stealing is a felony, and should be dealt with by arrest, and trial, followed by jail time. They cannot understand the concept of not hiring people who are so stupid they start fires in microwave ovens. The popcorn was not scorched, or somewhat burned and smelly. It burst into flames! It did this four times, in different locations over the course of eight months. Twice it required the evacuation of a building! The other two times it should have resulted in an evacuation, but the morons who set the fire couldn’t be bothered about why all those smoke alarms were going off.
While working today I was told the identity of one of the pyrocorniacs. It could be just a set up, but the person is the supervisor of the entire building where it happened. Being stupid enough to set fire to the microwave isn’t going to get you fired, it might well get you promoted! And the various comittees want to know why I don’t feel my participation is important. This management system responded to an on premisis injury which was caused by the collapse of a piece of equipment. They investigated it for three weeks. They discovered that someone had dissassembled part of the equipment (strictly expected, and a built in feature) and then incorrectly reassembled it. Most of the three weeks was spent on trying to pin it on one person that they should not have dissassembled it, in the first place.
Eventually one of the brighter and more reasonable managers came to me and asked how he could find out for sure who was working with that particular piece of equipment that day. I told him he couldn’t possibly find out. Then I told him that wasn’t important. The thing is, no one who works with the equipment at my level even knows that it can be disassembled. No one ever has. It could not have been any of the folks they had been trying so hard to pin this on, because they can barely turn the thing on and off. Ok, they do ok with on, but they have a lot of trouble with off.
So, the solution? Easy. They had a big training program. First they taught everyone how to dissassemble the thing, and then the told them never to do that. And of course, everyone had to sign the memo, saying they had received the training. I refused to sign that one too.
Tris
Always a possibility. Tris, does you company have one Gregory House on staff by any chance ?
Its never Lupus.
This is so very true.
Tris, do me a favor, and just do the training, please?
Why? Because we have over a thousand people in this one building, and frankly, it will cost the company less for a thousand people to do the training that for one person to figure out who needs the training, assign the training, and nag your manager to get you to do the training.
Do this, and I promise I will not train people to injure their fellow employees.
Oh, or allow anyone to microwave pop-corn.
Sure. But you will have to do me a favor, as well. Hire supervisors and managers who notice the difference between folks who cannot learn not to light fires, and those who already knew how to not light fires. Of course, then all your supervisors and managers will have to be from the latter group, huh? That could pose a problem.
Tris
I like the way you think.
Would coffee and brunch outside with appropriate bodyguards and other niceties interest you?
My treat
Magnetron… wasn’t he one of those transformers? One of the bad ones?
Robot-that-looks-like-a-truck-but-acts-like-a-dick-or-something?
I never recall a popcorn issue, but I recall issues with people who would take the last cup of coffee and not turn the pot off.
Holy shit Tris. I wish I had your job. How much are you being paid to handle this? How old are you?
Fuck.
I wish MY life was this complicated.
No wait. Fuck me with a corn-cob so I won’t have to hear your dribble.
“This committee is not the actual popcornfire control team, but another committee created to find out why so many committees created to engage folks in creating policy fail to gain any useful input. If you stop and think about it, the folks who create those committees don’t think the folks they choose to be on them are smart enough not to set popcorn on fire.”
Are you for real? No?
Please don’t waste our time. We have better things to bitch about.
Sincerely,
Cabin_Fever
True fact: socks also catch on fire in microwaves. Lil bro decided to warm his one cold winter day, and burned small holes in them before Mom noticed what he’d done.
Wasn’t there a poster who had a coworker cause a huge fire by leaving popcorn in the microwave for seven minutes? I distinctly remember photos of a burnt out kitchen.
You’re reading a pit thread, and you are asking me to stop wasting your time.
Oops, too late.
Tris
NP. I’m enjoying your rant.
Love you too…
I’m sorry. Is that word even allowed in the Pit?
It’s just that this whole drama is hilarious.
I wish I had some advice for you but sometimes management is clueless and if you need it I have an axe I can loan you. Chopping up one’s desk is a great stress-reliever sometimes.
Just don’t return it to me with blood on it. 
HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA!
ok, assuming this rant is true, you have to admit it IS pretty hard to take seriously. THEN you post these crazy company directives, making it even more insane. That is not to say it can’t be true, however. You just can’t expect a lot of real advice in a thread like this.
With that said, assuming all this IS real, then read my posts again. Take them seriously. By refusing to sign anything, what exactly are you going to accomplish? Nothing good. You are putting yourself on the radar screen, and each time you do something like “refusing to sign a paper” or “refusing to offer valid solutions” or whatever, you are just putting a big sign on your back. Seriously. You think for one minute this company, who’s upper management and HR department are as clueless as you say are going to keep one malcontent around because he is RIGHT? What planet do you live on? There are no moral victories, there is no parade in your future. No one is going to promote you and say “You are right, Tris.. This company and its management DOES have its head up its ass!”
Instead, they will do what they are doing (with the blessing of the company lawyer(s), no doubt), and be done with it. In the mean time, they will have to figure out what to do if 1) it happens again and 2) some employees don’t sign off on the training.
They will figure it out. Don’t worry. But trust me. From an administrative POV, it is much easier to cut the head off the noisy employee (you) than to try to actually solve the real problem.
I don’t care if you are the most valuable employee they have. If you don’t own the company, or are related to the owners, they have no loyalty to you. Example? The smartest technical guy my company had (and will probably ever have) was for a time stuck in a group of one. Himself. He had a boss, of course, but he was doing research and development to make the company… MONEY. Well, HR got a bug up its ass to evaluate everyone in the company on a scale from 1 to 5, 5 being the best. BUT, they also forced middle management to rate everyone under them and the average rating must be 3. You guessed it. Middle manager rates the guy a 3 and he is rewarded for following the mandate. Smart technical guy? Got a lot of support from folks, but no one willing to stick their neck out and get on anyone’s radar screen. So they made life miserable for him until he left.
There is no limit to the ignorance and arrogance of an HR department. And once they get a bug up their ass (and have legal’s blessing), you are pissing in the wind. On a paddle-less boat on Shits Creek. i.e. you lose.
Hope that helps to know I took you seriously.
PS, this was about empty coffee pots, right?
I’d like to suggest tossing management first, that way there is a chance the microwave will fall on some of them.
The Governor goes first, of course.
To those suggesting that Tris should sign the papers - if his boss hasn’t come back a second time to ask why he hasn’t signed yet, that’s a strong sign that no one is actually tracking compliance. Now, the next time there is a popcorn fire, they’ll search their filing cabinet of signed popcorn forms and concentrate the blame-storming on those who haven’t turned one in, but that’s a problem for later.
Tris, it is obvious we work in the same place. Now I’m curious which cubical you are in. I would like to point out that we have never had a burnt popcorn problem in our part of the building, it always seems to come from the upper management area.
They have created a system so sensitive that the slightest whiff of smoke will automatically cause the whole building to be evacuated, stopping work for an hour and costing thousands of dollars for the local fire department. Who could have predicted it would cause problems? We are just lucky no executive had the brilliant idea to tie in the sprinkler system.
Sheesh. How much panic and running in circles like Chicken Little occurs in HR when someone lets the dregs dry out in the coffee machine and it bakes to the bottom of the pot with that disgusting burnt coffee stench?
Or is that handled by a seperate department?