Things you've been surprised you've had to explain at work

Thank god it’s not yet another global warming chart…or is it?

Which was my point. I had to explain to HR that if I’m exempt and an emergency came up on a workday that they cannot dock me 8 hours of pay since I didn’t have “comp time”.

If you mean you were absent for a full day for personal reasons , that’s one of the reasons they can dock your pay , but not if you missed a couple of hours

Said another way:

Cursive is a method of making marks on paper that no one else will be able to read, and the author will be able to read only so long as they remember what they were writing.

Or at least that’s how it seems to me. :wink:

That our Hotel Manager is not here working 24/7. Cue shrill “why not??? It’s his job!!!”

“Right, his job…not his PRISON!

Cursive’s entirely legible when done well, at least for anyone at all used to reading it. Many people used to be able to, and a few people still do, write a very clear cursive hand; I used to be able to do a passable job of it myself.

The problem is that anyone out of practice, in too much of a hurry, or just overly careless is indeed likely to produce a scrawl that may be illegible later on even to themselves. I haven’t had enough practice at it in years, and my handwriting is now half print, half cursive, and entirely a mess. It’s not much better in non-cursive printing, though.

I too can hardly operate a pen or pencil any more. I probably sign my signature 100 times for each other word I write. And I don’t sign all that often any more; e-signing has eliminated most of that.

I sometimes have to take sorta-shorthand notes at work, but that’s a highly specialized vocabulary & format, just a couple sentences worth, and the info is only needed for a few minutes until it’s been acted on or transcribed into a computer.

I gave up cursive by the time I left grammar school. It was never any good, and I began to print faster than I could produce cursive that I could read right after I’d written it. In the ancient past, IOW the 20th century, cursive still made sense as a means of recording words. Here in the glorious future that is now the present we type and read Helvetica. Yes, there are other fonts, but the further they get from Helvetica the harder they are to read. Common fonts are no longer art, they are intended to be utilitarian. Luckily the magical ability of computers allows us to produce text in any font and even in cursive if we feel like annoying people… er, I mean expressing our individualism.

‘Mark’ reminded me of one. This wasn’t strictly a job: I was volunteering for setup at a festival in Australia in exchange for a free ticket and being fed. I’d signed up as site crew, which involved lots of stuff like banging in fence posts, shovelling gravel and the like, and the team lead was a little concerned about English female me doing that in Aussie midsummer heat, and pressured me into swapping to the office team in the aircon, as they were also short. There was an Aussie girl in there who had also been loaned to the office as she’d been passing out from the heat on her original team, and we were paired up. I can’t remember her name, I’ll call her Marketta.

The office team was running way behindhand as the IT system had not arrived on time, and when it finally did there were no instructions. One major job was logging all the phone calls and assorted contacts with outside agencies, contractors and the like- who they’d spoken to, a summary of what was said, to make sure there was a record any agreements made and when. Fair enough.

For the first few days before the computers arrived, they’d been keeping it all on file cards, but this was obviously a pain especially with more than one office on site now. The first task we were given was to sort through these file cards and organise them by number, to check if any had duplicate numbers or were missing (at the gate mini-office or somewhere), prior to typing them in to the shiny new system. We were given a box each, what should have been roughly cards 1-400 and 400+

I had mine done in about 30 minutes, chased up the strays and duplicates and was starting to wrangle the software.

‘Marketta’ was still sitting surrounded by paper, chatting happily to everyone, looking intent and occasionally handing me a card and asking if I could read someone’s handwriting.

We got to lunch break, nearly 4 hours later. She breathes a sign of relief, and tells me she’s nearly done, could I just check it? And wanders off to find food.

I pick up the pile of cards: top of the pile was #4. Second was #327. Third was #336. At no point in the pile was there any kind of discernible pattern.

So yeah; I didn’t have to explain the order numbers go in to an apparently intelligent woman in her 20s who had cheerfully signed up to work in an office, but only because I sorted the cards myself over lunch.

I begged my way back on to the 30°C+ gravel-shovelling team after that. Far, far easier.

When the primary aspect of your job is the enforcement of court orders, one would think knowing the differences between types of court orders could be kind of important.
In fact, it’s one of the first things taught upon starting.
One of my coworkers, otoh…

Another part of the job is locating people. We have access to all court records for a person, including criminal court records. We can also access most public assistance records. Logic would say use all available tools. Logic. Ha.

The golf terms are easy for me to remember. A hook is a shot that hooks around your body to the opposite site from where your club is.

Something that I just had to explain at work. Because medical offices do not run precisely on time, we have a 1 1/2 hour break in the middle of the day from patients but the staff is allowed a 45 minute lunch. If we finish early and I allow you to leave 30 minutes before the start of this break and you return at the very end, you have taken 2 hours. You must subtract 2 hours from the total working hours that day. If you worked from 9-6, you can not put down that you worked 8 1/4 hours because you were there for nine hours minus your 45 minute lunch break. You do not get paid for the 2 hours you were gone even though your lunch is supposed to be 45 minutes and this applies even if I told you it was OK to be gone for 2 hours.

Also, when submitting PTO, if you worked 4 hours in a day, you cannot claim an additional 6 hours of PTO for that day. There are 8 working hours in the day. You only get overtime if you actually work more than 8 hours, not if you “would have worked” more than 8 hours if you had actually been at work.

And one more from today. You cannot claim unemployment for a week where you called in sick 3/5 days. You were still technically employed, even if you have already used up all of your PTO. (I am currently trying to figure out how to deal with the forms I got).

How about the Alt & numeric key pad to type special characters? I’m a Ham and use Alt 0216 to make the slashed zero for call signs.

Strictly speaking, that’s not true. According to the Department of Labor, deductions from pay are permissible if the exempt employee is absent for a full day for reasons other than sickness or disability. Employers are also not required to pay the full salary during a terminal week of employment. i.e. If the employer fires a salaried employee on Tuesday they don’t have to pay that employee for the entire week. The same is true if someone goes on FMLA that week. i.e. If I work on Monday, go on FLMA Tuesday, and return to work Wednesday the company doesn’t have to pay me for Tuesday.

As long as you worked at any point during that day they have to pay you. But if you didn’t work at all they don’t necessarily have to pay you for the day.

I work in survey/GIS; Alt + 0176 for a degree symbol (°).

(Forgive my purposeful vagueness.)

I worked for a security and safety consulting firm. It was sold to a guy who had to take an early retirement from a security guard force management position. As he later explained, he took his lump sum and decided to buy our company as opposed to getting a Jersey Mike’s franchise.

I cannot tell you how many times in the first couple years we had to tell him, “No, this company doesn’t do that or provide that service.” Several times he actually signed contracts with customers and we had to explain that we were not licensed to provide alarm system or guard services. The contracts had to be cancelled. In fact, we could have been fined simply for having offered to provide those regulated services. OTOH, we sometimes billed customers for work and he would come into our offices stating, “I didn’t know we could do this sort of thing.” We would explain that we had revenue of more than $300K a year doing exactly that.

After a couple years, he would start telling clients in a humorous manner that he bought the company without knowing what we actually did. The clients would laugh a bit, but I don’t think that they actually believed how truthful he was being.

This is really specific, and requires a bit of set-up, but:

At my work, we use dry ice for freezing and transporting specimens. We have a big bin delivered every Monday, and then every morning drivers take dry ice out to coolers in their cars. To carry the dry ice, we have plastic bags, which we keep in a tray next to the bin. We have two sizes of bags, a larger size that’s a good size for filling the coolers the drivers use, and a smaller size for the smaller quantities we sometimes need for other uses. There have always been two sizes of bags in the tray.

Stocking items like that is part of my job, but I don’t always notice when someone takes the last bag, and they almost never tell me that they took the last one, or, heaven forbid, refill the tray themselves - there are cases of bags right next to the tray.

Whenever someone takes the last large bag, and I don’t notice in time, the next person will make a comment/complaint/question about how “they” changed the size of the bag and the “new” bag is too small. Every. Single. Time. This is not an exaggeration. It literally happens every time, and literally every time it happens I have to explain to drivers that have been working there for years that there are two sizes of bags, there have always been two sizes of bags, “they” haven’t changed anything, and there are cases of the large bags right next to the tray, where they always have been.

That’s funny. I suppose it’s a kind of selective vision. If there’s a large bag, they see that and only that (because that’s what they want) - the only time they’ll notice the small bags is when those are the only kinds of bags there are, and it’s like a magic trick - the small bags had been invisible before, and now are there - so it must be that “they” changed something.

We have a production line made up of several different machines.

Each machine has different capabilities in terms of “processes-per-minute.” One machine, up at the beginning of our line, can do 300 processes per minute; another, at about the mid-point of our line, can only do 120; it’s the slowest of all the machines on our production line.

I had to explain to the plant/production manager that the very best he’ll ever get out of his production line (ETA: in our current machine configuration) is 120 processes per minute.

You could tell him that joke about Stalinist Russia schemed to have nine women cooperate to have a baby in one month only in this case it just might work (for two of the slow machine, anyway).

To one of our long time computer programmers the first time I took her into the server room:

Her: So this is a mainframe?
Me: No. That’s an air conditioner.