At the car dealership where I once worked, all employees were charged $2/week, deducted from their paychecks, allegedly to recoup the expense of coffee in the break room. When the non-coffee drinkers asked that a for-charge machine be put in the room so they’d not be unfairly dinged, the story changed that the charge was to pay for the providing free coffee to the dealership’s customers. When the salespeople pointed out that only 1 customer in 10 actually took the free coffee we always offered them, we were told to shut up.
Not only does RyanAir not let their employees charge their phones, they also won’t allow passengers to plug in anything in the outlets in their main airport in Stansted. Actually I just read that it’s owned by BAA. Whatever. If you’re going to have to stay there for 12 hours, I don’t consider it unreasonable to allow people to charge their electronic devices.
I certainly hope for his sake that there was no parsley racket in that town! (Supposedly, crime syndicates would/may still require restaurant owners to purchase parsley and other garnishes from “the produce guy”, or face the consequences. If a “representative of the neighborhood association” saw a new eatery open, he’d stop in and explain the rules of the game to the proprietor, and check back a week or so later to make sure that the plates were properly adorned.)
As the Borscht Belt comedians’ standard line went: “The food here is terrible! And such small portions!”
Tea would generally come by the pot, and you would have to squeeze as many cups out of it as you could before it got cold.
Coffee would definitely be charged per cup.
in 2004, I had a job at a small “biotech” company (they actually cold-called companies to sell instruments and various lab supplies) that consisted of me and the owner. Occasionally weneeded to send or receive some technical documents by e-mail. Some of these docs were several MB each.
We had dial-up internet.
Even better, we had the dial-up that made the phone busy while you were connected. The owner’s brilliant solution? “Maybe you can stay late and send any documents when there’s less likely to be phone traffic”. Of course, I was salaried.
And maybe you can, oh, I don’t know, F*** off and die?
At one point I actually took some stuff and sent it via my cable modem at home.
When he found out I did that once, he insisted I keep doing it. I told him I wasn’t going to use my personal resources for company business, and that he should spring for high-speed at work. He then said that he wasn’t sure if I “had the right attitude” to work there.
So, I quit about two weeks later.
The day before he left on vacation.
Awesome! I love it.
I work at a store that closed one entrance specifically because it had a sagging door that scraped the sill and they wouldn pay to have it adjusted.
Worse, they won’t let me put up a sign saying use the other entrance “because that would make us look like we don’t fix things.”
But when people try the door and realize it’s locked they know that first hand.
Eh, you should’ve quit the day after he left on vacation. 
And you wonder why England is no longer a superpower.
Seriously, the no free refills thing in England is stupid. Non-alcoholic drinks are cheap. If some chain offered free refills, they would make a killing.
Everybody thinking nickel-and-diming management really cares about nickels and dimes is sorely mistaken. Penny pinching is about as much about money as rape is about sex. It’s purely and simply a show of power.
You work for me, you live in my world. If I say up is down, black is white, or right is wrong, you act accordingly or you pack it up.
Whoops!
True dat. I’ve worked for a few “restaurateurs” whose employees were extremely experienced and knowledgeable about the business, and yet these bosses wouldn’t listen to a single suggestion. They felt they were more knowledgeable, simply by virtue of owning the business. The owner I mentioned in my earlier post? Her previous “experience” in the restaurant business consisted of 20 years of being a bartender. Nothing wrong with being a bartender, except she bought a non-alcohol-serving diner, not a bar. In the three years I worked for her, she never did figure out that you don’t run a diner like a tavern. The previous owner had built up a huge customer base. The new/current owner ran most of 'em off.
The IRS could catch that kind of cheat in 10 seconds. No accountant would be that stupid. Really, if one know’s anything about double-entry bookeeping and/or tax law they’d wouldn’t think to make this sort of claim. The delivery company might as well claim the imaginary elephants they don’t own as depreciable assets. :rolleyes:
But perhaps you’re right about the cheap-ass TP. 
As to re-fills, there’s a family owned pizza place here in San Jose. It makes interesting, super-thick, square pizza, which is quite spicy. The sodas are small, expensive and no free re-fills. I don;t eat there anymore and have mentioned this in a letter to them and a couple of on-line restaurant reviews. But still, I guess they figure they make that extra buck when someone orders a second soda. :rolleyes: As opposed to the $20 they lose by being cheap.
fluiddruid, I wonder if your former company and mine are the same, because your lists sound so familiar. Did they also refuse to replace the page-a-day wall calendars after 2003? Our managers started printing up calendar pages on the computer using Comic Sans font. Reeel professional. We also had vertical blinds that looked like crap–many blinds were missing or would fall out. This was a 24 hour call center, and we complained many times that this was a matter of safety and security, as well as the fact that it makes the company look extra bad and cheap. Nothing was ever done.
At my current company, my boss, after hearing the our division was losing money, asked us to turn off our workstation lights when we went to lunch. (I really don’t think that’s the problem.) The clock at your five-year anniversary is out, too–now you get “points” in the employee reward program. Points are given at such a glacial rate that they are pretty much worthless–this summer, they were hyping the program by posting a picture of the kiddie wading pool that you could get with 2000 points on the bulletin board. A co-worker got 200 points for his ten-year anniversary. After 10 years, you get 1/10th of a wading pool! I figure at that rate that my daughter’s grandchildren will really enjoy that pool. Another employee came to the same conclusion, and actually posted a little note next to the picture of the pool that said, “I will not live that long!”
I used to work at a family run roofing co. that had this same problem. Remember the (I think it was) Folger’s coffee “pods” that you could buy? It’s appeal was supposedly that you didn’t have to premeasure the coffee grounds. You’d pop one of these pod thingies in your coffeemaker and it would make a perfect cup of coffee.
You were supposed to use TWO for a 12 cup coffee maker. They’d only use one. And then they’d reuse it a few times. :rolleyes:
I recently watched a rerun of Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, where he tried to help the Walnut Tree Inn in Abergavenny, Wales. Lots of stuff got better, but the owner absolutely refused to lower his prices, which topped out at 70 pounds (at today’s exchange rate, that’s $144) for an entree. He didn’t want to “cheapen” the place. 
For some reason he couldn’t see that with high prices repelling customers, he was going to make negative money on the expensive food he was buying and throwing away.
So anyway, I looked up the place on line, and see that last year it went into receivership, closed, and has now been bought by a hotel corporation. I’m betting that unlike the previous owner, they charge less for an entree than they do for the average night’s stay at a hotel.
This doesn’t approach the paper clip black market or hoarding electricity, but it drove me nuts that my ex-boss only gave a certain number of days off per year, whether for vacation or sick leave. Of course, everyone hoarded their days off till the end of the year - heaven forbid you go on a trip in May, then get a flu in November and have no days left. Then he got mad because everyone wanted to take vacation time around Christmas.
This didn’t happen to me, but to another Doper who posted this experience in an old thread.
He worked at a McDonald’s. The McD manager was incensed to find that some customers tossed their unused little pull-top individual creamers into the trash. The manager dug through the trash to retrieve them, but the creamers would be covered in ketchup and other goo. He couldn’t talk the employees into hand-washing them, so he ran the creamers through the dishwasher to clean them off. The heat of the dishwasher cooked the cream into curds.
I doubt it. We English don’t have the soda fixation that Americans have. I’ll rarely even finish a regular-sized Coke with my meal - why the heck would I want a refill?
When I’ve been in the US I’ve been astonished at the sizes of the soft drink cups - 20oz seems to be a standard drink, and people go and refill them, sometimes more than once! :eek:
I don’t drink that much fluid in a day, let alone at one mealtime.
Maybe I should start another thread: “Do Brits drink enough fluid in a day?”
We don’t need to drink it. We eat plenty of it. 