I’ve burned CDs on my PC. And used our plotter to print out large maps that were not relevant to actual work needs.
There is a guy at work
Who is a sexist jerk
And he made a lady cry.
I make the on-call list
And he is pissed
'Cause now he works the 4th of July.
I make sure that I take a dump at work and use their paper - Big time eh?
My main revenge is to turn up and work, and if I’m really feeling the wrong way out, I’ll do my job in just the way I have been told - tends to screw things up.
I’m basically a Database Administrator for a corporate website. A couple years ago, the company decided to add search-engine-baiting text to the site’s pages, hidden from normal humans by <noscript> tags. I protested loudly and long, but was told to do it anyway, so I named the field to store the text in my database “Spam”.
Months later, word came down that we had to remove it all, in a hurry. Someone had found an exposé on-line about well-known companies (including mine) that were using techniques that were likely to get a smaller company penalized by Google. One of the companies (I think it was BMW) was penalized afterward.
Please remember not to come clean if anybody asks you where this quote came from. Say nothing more than that you read it in someone’s email signature and thought it was cool.
I have a really short food chain at work in my new position. Myself, my unterboss, the middle boss, then the department head and then a vice pres of the company [we get along great, and are on great terms.]
When I get peeved at an account manager for lagging in getting back to me, I will resend the original email 1 week later titled ‘second send’ and add the middle boss. The next week I will resend, title it ‘Third send’ and add the vice pres to the list. I figure that if I havent gotten any response in 2 weeks, they need to be shaken up. Amazing how fast I get any response after that third resend…and I started that policy after I queued something back in October in my previous position, then someone requeued it in January … I am seriously sorry. They have anywhere from 3 to 7 assistants helping them. Answering the question of ‘did that mall decide to change out one preferred vendor for a different vendor’ is not rocket science.
Many years ago I worked in a state government office. My boss insisted that all the people who worked under him had to put bumper stickers on their cars. The sticker was red, white, and blue, and it said JOBS FOR VETERANS.
It irked me to be forced to do this, so I put the sticker on my bumper only after I cut off the letters J and O, leaving the message BS FOR VETERANS.
OH, more stories like these, please. I’m not nearly subversive enough at work - I need more ideas. The worst things I do is printing my non-profit organizations mailout at work, and often taking a little break (I don’t get any breaks - I only work four hours a day).
ETA: One of my and my husband’s proudest moments at his job was when his entire department had a 0 percent participation rate for United Way! W00t!
My coworker periodically updates his signature bloc to reflect either the latest management jargon or the latest incident proving management’s disdain for us, the workers.
Not me, though. But now that I think about it, I have recently started printing up help desk messages such as, “We’ve known about this problem for years and we’re not going to fix it,” and posting them on my cube walls.
I really don’t know how “subversive” it is, but on my last job working University Security, we were supposed to routinely check IDs for everyone we let into buildings and for everyone we encountered in buildings when we closed them.
I generally did not bother. If you get a call to let someone into a classroom, you’re given a female name and then you show up and low and behold, there is a female student standing there waiting to be let in, changes are extremely high that this is the correct person. Fact is I never, not one time, got a call saying that I’d let in the wrong person and the correct person was still waiting for me.
For people in buildings, I relied on Instinct. Two students in the Student Research Lab at 3am obviously working their tails off? “Have a good night, make sure to close the door on your way out.” Whereas one of my co-workers would laboriously call in the names and IDs of every single person to see if they had permission to be there. On the other hand, two people standing around BSing? Sorry, the building is now closed, please be on your way. When finals week came around, I got even more slack about it. Those kids were working hard, I wasn’t going to be the dickwad who got in their faces about being in the building (working on their legitimate assignments) past closing because of ‘The RULES’.
A slightly more direct subversion was simply failing to go through and check IDs in the athletics building, as we were supposed to do at least once every night. The front desk was supposed to check people’s IDs on the way in, and they not only seldom did, but when issues came up, they blew it off and failed to cooperate with us. So screw them, if they can’t control their own front door, then I’m not going to clean up after them. Call me if there is an incident or complaint.
On a previous job, the Asset Protection Manager, our client boss, was a prick who would change procedures at the drop of a hat because of some minor error or some foolish assumption on his part. Basically, he was a micromanaging jerk. After a while, we just ignored his “new procedures” and kept doing things in a more reasonable fashion. If he complained, which was rare, we usually blew it off with “But this works better”, “Oh yeah, we forgot”, or we the supervisors would straight out tell him “No, we’re not letting you punish our people like that. We don’t need people quitting because you get a bug up your ass”.
On a very short-lived armed position guarding a (bad neighborhood) liquor store front door, I let two guys who obviously had several bottles of liquor in their coats go right past me. Heard the bottles clink. When called on it, I explained that due to my position when I noticed them, I could have at best, gotten between them and stopped the second one from getting out the door, but there was NO WAY I was going to step between them in the doorway and risk being attacked from behind. (For $12 an hour, no benefits and no health insurance? No I will not risk my health and safety.)
I hated that job and only did it that one day. Stand here, watch everything, get called on it if you miss ANYTHING, one very short restroom break ONLY in 6.75 hours. No meal break, not a single chance to sit down. Oh, and two bottles of very expensive liquor went missing and I was asked to “explain how it happened” several times, despite there also being several employees in the general vicinity, including the floor manager. Oh, but I’m supposed to catch everything. Yeah, you can shove this job up your ass.
I write subversive (anonymous) poetry. I sneak it under people’s doors, in the staff room, by the copy machine. Been doing it for years!
It’s quite sad, actually - I’m scared to death to speak my mind to the PTB who make our lives a living hell, but I can put it in verse.
Oh yeah, I forgot some real straight forward stuff.
I wrote explanations of I Ching lines related to our management’s inability to do their jobs and put them on my locker. Of course, they were innocent explanations of the I Ching and had nothing, nothing at all to do with our management. I dare you to prove that they did.
(For those who know it, consider how Hexagram 62, Line 2 might be interpreted as instructions on how to deal with ‘unavailable’ or uncommunicative management, or how Hexagram 16, Line 3 might apply to dealing with them.)
Does any of it involve a boot to the head? 
When I worked as the copy editor for the campus paper, our staff writers were really bad. “Heinous” would not be overstating it – most of them didn’t know how to punctuate a direct quote or write a lead. After a month of the editorial staff basically rewriting 90-percent of everything that crossed our desks, I started making snarky notes in the margins along with the changes. (The reporters never saw their corrected stories unless we made a point of showing them. The stories were trashed as soon as the paper was sent to the printers.)
Examples:
“Please translate from the original hippo into English”
“Two martini story”
“Byline should read ‘Scarecrow from “The Wizard of Oz”’”
“Please remind reporter that his stories must be typed, double-spaced, and in 12-pt font, not written in crayon”
Sadly, our requests for an office bottle of hooch were never met. 
As a substitute teacher, I take every opportunity to slip the philosophy of Robert Anton Williams into the lesson plans.
Reality is what you can get away with. / A collective hunch / merely a grid to organize your perceptions.
I enforce only as much discipline as suits me.
I make sarcastic/sardonic comments over the videos "They had to subtitle that “‘New York’, to separate it from all the other cities with a large green statute in the harbor.”
“I’ve seen this three times so far, and I still don’t know what he’s trying to say.”
It helps that I look exactly like the teacher from ‘Beavis and Butthead’.
I can relate to this thread, because I have had some soul-crushing jobs in the past. Now I need to figure out how to apply your diabolical thinking to the future.
My version of this quote is
“The problem with learning from experience is you get the punishment before you get the lesson.”
Feel free to use it in a future issue.
For some ISO standard I was supposed to label every part I had in all four of my schools as not usable and for demonstration purposes only. Now mind you many of these parts have been sawed in half so the students can see the innards. So at one school I labeled parts that were obviously beyond any use on a car with labels that read:
[ul]
[li]If you think this part is good enough to put on your car, then you are dumber than a stump[/li][li]Go ahead put this on your car, I dare you[/li][li]If you can get this part to work after it has been sawed in half, you are better than I am.[/li][li]What are you an idiot? This part is for demo use only.[/li][/ul]
Another ISO standard was that we had to put a map on how to get out of the building in each and every room. At one school from every door in the building, except for the men’s room door, you could see an exit.
So I drew up maps, and typed the following at the bottom of each
Note: In the event of fire, if you are so dumb as to look at this map instead of running for the door that is visible from where you are standing, you deserve to die in the fire.
Shoulda added the letters B, L, O and W.
I charge my cell phone and my iPod at my cubicle. Also, I listen to podcasts on my iPod while filing. Plus, I make sure to spend at least 10 minutes each morning eating breakfast at my desk, when we have been explicitly told not to eat at our desks. Everyone does it anyway.
Another thing I do is, lately I’ve developed the nervous habit of trimming my split ends at my desk. I never do this anywhere else but at work, for some reason.
Back in the late '80s I was a USAF staff officer. PCs were very new & fairly rare; a Sergeant with a Selectric was the standard “word processor”. We wrote all correspondence on letterhead, which had the USAF seal at upper left, the unit name & address across the top, and the Major Command motto centered across the bottom, all printed in USAF blue ink. SAC’s motto was “Peace is our Profession” while TAC had “Readiness is our Profession”, and I neither knew nor cared what MAC had.
Tired of fighting with Selectrics & Sergeants, I bought my own shiny new PC (XT with 20MB harddrive & EEMS card!!) and a “letter quality” dot matrix printer & brought them to work. And the mighty WordStar (later WS 2000) to make it all go.
Like all dot matrixes, the printer wanted continuous fanfold paper with the perf strips down the side. Feeding letterhead manually was a real PITA & the printing never came out level or aligned properly. Surprisingly, one of the printer’s built-in fonts was a dead ringer for the one used in the letterhead, an oddly ornate serif font. Which got me to thinking …
Not long after I was printing my own “letterhead”, which was used for everything I wrote which wasn’t leaving the base. Since distro was by photocopy, nobody but the filing cabinet knew the originals had black letterhead, not blue. Worked great. The big boys liked the ability to wordsmith & get a fresh version back in a few minutes, not hours. Everybody was happy.
A vast amount of the Wing Commander’s correspondence for the next 12 months went out with the motto
“Confusion is our Only Product”.
Nobody ever noticed (or at least nobody ever said that they noticed.)
That was a long time ago. Since getting out I haven’t really had both the urge & the opportunity simultaneously.