I worked briefly for Computer Associates during a cost-cutting phase. One of the rules that was implemented was that you needed VP-level authorization to send a fax. So to send a local fax that cost nothing, you had to call Boston long-distance to get authorization. Dumbasses.
OK… a couple questions. Well, a question and a comment.
First, what about sheaves of paper you didn’t want to (or that you couldn’t) staple? How were you supposed to keep those together?
Second, the bit about the blue pens makes sense. I used to work for a company whose president signed certain documents like payment vouchers in non-reproducing blue ink to make sure there weren’t illicit copies running around. The original was valid, but since copies wouldn’t be signed, they couldn’t be presented for payment. (Said president learned this lesson the hard way when a couple of subcontractors hit on the idea of turning in copied payment vouchers so they’d get paid more than once.)
Of course, now that copier technology has improved, it really doesn’t matter which color you use to sign documents.
Robin
You used one of the paper clips from your static-sized collection. If the papers were to be permanently attached, staple them. If they were temporarily attached, they were paper clipped, but because this was, by definition, a temporary attachment, at some point in the future the clip would come off and rejoin your static collection, to be reused later.
That was the pea-brained CEO’s rationale, anyway. The fact that he spent so much time thinking about shit like this instead of running the company is probably a factor behind why and how he steered us into a huge ditch. In painfully slow motion.
I worked for EDS also and the account I was on (in Alabama) had identically the same problem, same way around it, and same “please excuse while I screw you” managerial way around the way around it. Grrrr!!! Just remembering it still pisses me off.
Another thing they did that I’m not even sure is legal: all employees were salaried employees and thus did not receive overtime- okay, no problem. BUT, when said employees worked more than 40 (or 50, or 70, or 80) hours per week EDS billed the Federal Government (who the contract was with) for overtime (the overtime that, to repeat, the employees did not receive). I used to consider reporting this as a Fraudulent Claim violation but thought better of it.
Then there was the salary matter: I was hired there along with dozens of other employees making in the $17-$20K range- not a lot of money obviously. Later the company doubled their workforce and decided that $17-$20K wasn’t enough for this type of work, so they upped the pay to $23-$28K… for the new employees (the older employees [who were training the new ones to do the exact same job] didn’t get the raised salary, and management seemed to have no idea why this upset us.
AND when we learned that the account was to be filled at least 80% by non-white employees by terms of the contract (in a city in which roughly only 50% of the population is non-white) we weren’t too happy either. (Non white employes didn’t take long to notice that at least 80% of management was white).
And when my boss (who was also a Baptist minister and [I wouldn’t type this if it wasn’t easily verified] who not only bragged about his sexual conquests but impregnated one of the employees [ahem] under him[/ahem] at the same time his wife was pregnant [the kids were born within about three weeks of each other]) used to hold prayer meetings on his cubicle row and I refused to participate he called me a troublemaker and referred to my lack of team spirit. While management backed me in my “preference not to” pray, I was given the job of basically delivering and logging faxes (minimum wage grunt work essentially). Ah, how I hated that &*$@9ing company.
IT’s a specific shade of blue ink that copiers didn’t used to pick up on. The dark blue that your everyday blue Bic uses is perfectly copyable and I’ve never, ever had any problems with it. It has to be a particular shade of pale blue to cause any trouble. The blue pen thing makes no sense at all.
Shilling charity for the March of Dimes or Give Kids the World at KrapMart. I HATED doing that. One woman once lectured me on soliciting for charity, even after I explained that I HAD to, (my supervisor threatened to fire me if I refused), and another woman went into a tirade about how the March of Dimes supported abortion and it was evil.
He wasn’t getting a cut in that guy’s black-market paper clip action, was he?
Black-market paper clips… band name!
Oh, God, I think I had her too. I was managing a couple of English schools in Japan, and at a managers meeting the subject of teachers’ sick days came up: I jokingly remarked that 40% of all sick calls at my schools fell either side of the caller’s days off {the schools were open seven days, so two day “weekends” for different teachers were staggered throughout the week}: on hearing this, she went apoplectic - 40%? This was outrageous! Who were the culprits? Why hadn’t they been disciplined? Why hadn’t she been informed earlier?
My maths pretty much stopped when the X’s and Y’s crept in, but I swear I spent 30 minutes in front of a whiteboard trying to explain why, given a five day working week, 40% of sick calls either side of the two days off was actually a pretty good batting average - although glove-puppets would have probably helped my explanation, and I’m not even sure she believed me at the end: I learned one important management principle at that meeting - never make jokes in front of a boss too dumb to understand them.
Man… the boyfriend and I were shopping at Target right before Christmas, and I was over in the holiday section trying to find a tree-scented candle to go with my cheap plastic and metal tree, when one of those girls came up to me and asked me if I wanted a Target Visa card. I told her I already had a Target card (I have their department store one, not the Visa) and she went on and on about filling out the app for the Visa card. I told her I didn’t want one again and we had to walk away to a different section, then come back about ten minutes later when she’d moved on to harass someone else, so I could finish checking out the candles. She popped up again almost immediately, and started harassing my boyfriend, “Well, what about YOU?!” He tried telling her he doesn’t have any credit and didn’t want one anyway, but this girl would not take no for an answer. Cripes, I know your boss probably said “Get X number of apps filled out and you get a bonus or something,” but this girl seriously needed to take a hint.
I feel really sorry for anyone whose job puts them in the position of having to do that, but sometimes it’s really hard not to get nasty about it, especially when they won’t quit. FTR, the little cashier spiel never bothered me, 'cause usually I say “I already have one,” and that’s the end of it.
It wouldn’t make sense to you, because you’re used to newer, more sensitive copiers.
It used to be that copiers had a harder time picking up any shade of blue. A black pen would copy just fine; a blue pen would make fuzzy copies.
Later on, as copier technology matured, it didn’t matter which color you used, as long as it wasn’t non-reproducing blue. Blue now copies just fine.
Robin
Dragwyr, I had that problem with a previous employer. Until the day my boss’s head exploded. I was part of a two-person team. My partner’s wedding was scheduled for the same time as my divorce hearing. My hearing was in Minnesota, which meant I had to be off for about three days to allow for travel time.
The boss didn’t know what to do. It was against the rules (her favorite phrase, BTW) for both of us to be off, but she couldn’t tell my partner to re-schedule her wedding. She told me to talk to the court, which I did. The court said they couldn’t reschedule without a hassle, and a telephone hearing wasn’t possible. The clerk, in fact, had some rather choice words for my boss. My boss honestly had no idea what to do.
I solved that problem by quitting, for that and similar reasons. (I was pregnant at the time, and didn’t need to deal with fifty thousand “rules” that could never be broken for any reason.)
Robin
I used to work for a large retail store and one day one of the managers decided the sales staff would have to “ask permission” to leave the sales floor to use the bathroom and the floor manager would decide if they could leave. I had no problem telling someone (a manager, another salesperson) where I was going, just so they knew where I was, but I was a freaking adult. I was not going ask to go potty. There were always enough people on the floor for coverage anyway.
In another job, the sales staff were given beepers so the office staff and the boss could get in touch with them easily. (this was before cell phones were as common as they are today). The day they were given out, the boss laid down some rules. One of the rules was that if you broke it or damaged it, you would be fined $50. Losing it incurred no fine. The salesmen all looked at each other and just laughed. The boss never did figure out why that was so funny.
I’m another former EDSer. The dress code was unreal. Pulling data cable in an automotive plant in a wool lend suit was unreal. Called in to the same plant at 3 AM because of a system crash, and I had to wear a suit again.
The biggest insult was “Well, you’re just not a team player”. 20 years later, I take that phrase as a compliment.
The one that drove me nuts was the leave policy at my last job; we had two different accounts - “vacation hours” and “sick hours.” The thing was, you could only use sick hours if you missed three days (or more) in a row. If you were just sick for one or two days, you’d have to squander two days’ worth of vacation hours.
Naturally, this led to most people taking three days off when they really only needed to be out for one.
I was once the office manager in a small factory where the VP in charge had me ration out the ink pens. Employees could not come get their own pens; they had to have a supervisor come ask me for one and sign it out. Then they weren’t allowed to get another one for at least a week. If it broke (and these were the cheapest pens available, thanks to the penny-pinching VP), tough – they were supposed to go buy their own replacement pen.
So the floor supervisors spent about an hour a day running back and forth to the office to get pens, and everyone was always snarling at me as if the policy were my idea.
The VP tried to make me ration the ear plugs and safety goggles, but I finally convinced him that OSHA might have a problem with that.
Also, he told us to fire one employee because he had too many garnishments for child support, and the corporate office didn’t want to process the paperwork.
Explaining to a $10/hr employee that she had to spend what amounted to about 1.5 hours each week tracking each and every bit of postage used for that week. Somehow explaining to my boss that “It just don’t make no good sense” to spend $15-$20 per week to track $30 worth of postage didn’t change the policy.
What I am most proud of at that job is ignoring asinine policies until they went away. Every month or so there would be some new policy passed down, but almost never did they make enough financial sense for me to pursue them. IF I was asked about how some policy was going I could usually say “Great! We’re really cutting down waste.” or something. On the rare occasion that I had to back this up with a report, I could usually whip out something in 5-10 minutes… which would be glanced at, filed and never heard from again.
I used to work for a small espresso/bagel place when I was in college. It was owned by a young couple. The husband did most of the day-to-day stuff and the wife would just pop in periodically.
Anyways, one day she comes in and decides that, in an effort to make the place a bit more “homey”, everytime someone asks for a cup of coffee (about half of our customers) we were supposed to respond with…
“Do you mean a cup of joe?”
Arrggh. It was completely asinine and predictably invited a wide range of replys ranging from “A cup of what?” to “Is your name Joe? Are you sexually harassing me?!?!”
Thank goodness I worked evenings and never had to enforce this particular policy.
The part I concede is reasonable:
Where I work, you cannot through out massive amounts of paper in the regular trash. Things like phonebooks, manuals, and stacks of generated paper are forbidden in regular trash because there’s acontractual weight limit to what the housekeepers can pick up. I work with a lot of academics, and they generate more paper than us engineers.
If we have lots of paper, or other heavy or bulky items, we’re supposed to scavenge boxen to put it in, and put a sign on it saying ‘Heavy Trash For Disposal’. Periodically, someone with a handtruck comes through the building and collects the boxen from the hall.
The asinine part:
You cannot make up your own sign. ‘Heavy Trash For Disposal’ takes about 30 seconds to make in Powerpoint and send to print. No, it has to be an official FedGov form with the form number on the bottom, or they won’t take the box it’s attached to. :rolleyes:
Crucial. One must understand this. Otherwise career suicide is inevitable. Never expose your managers’ utter stupidity.
I have a boss (don’t we all). One day, a computer glitch caused a lot of e-mail (not just mine – this was firm-wide) to disappear into the ether. I told my boss about it, and mentioned that she should probably re-send anything important she’d sent to me that day, because I hadn’t yet read my e-mail (I’d started the day off-site, and hadn’t had a chance to get in front of a PC before the glitch).
She said “OK. Which ones should I re-send?”
I said “Anything you think it’s important for me to see.”
She said “I don’t have time for that. You’ll have to tell me which e-mails to resend.”
I said “No problem. Don’t worry about it.”
End of conversation. It just wasn’t worth arguing about.
Here’s a policy that falls very squarely into the “unethical” category:
It is my boss’s policy (to define our relationship, let’s say she’s a captain and I’m a master sergeant) that under no circumstances is an employee ever to be praised or thanked in writing. Or in e-mail.
However, even the smallest and most insignificant complaint about any employee is to be documented via e-mail and a memo.
I truly hate this. And I have to do most of it, because I have much more day-to-day contact with the people I supervise than she does. It’s just plain wrong.
I do everything I can to get around it. I have no objection to memorializing truly bad behavior or incompetence in writing. But I try to do the same for exceptionally good work.