If everyone did this then there would be no more fires. Just always keep one person in the bathroom.
Ah, the old global warming caused by a lack of pirates gambit.
It’s amazing how so many bosses don’t seem to get that. My dad had a similar story about a new boss at the Canadian National Research Council. NRC was the main government research lab for many years, and employed a lot of academic types in research. And anyone who knows people like that, knows that they typically actually like coming to work, and will often work extra hours completely on their own initiative.
Well, the new boss wanted everyone to fill out time cards for the first few months, and was horrified to find out about all these extra hours. He made a point of announcing that NRC would not be paying to cover these overtime hours.
Which of course none of the people ever even asked them to do. But his reaction was so over the top, a lot of people decided to stop doing any overtime work at all, just to spite him.
Killed the goose that laid the golden egg, he did, just because he couldn’t leave well enough alone.
It depended. They found out that fresh air and sunlight worked well to get rid of the virus, but still, if you were in a crowd, like a concert, masks were a must. So, at the beach, not in a crowd, or on a trail without a lot of people, you could just bring the mask along.
Terrible for that person, but still: the greatest good for the greatest number. Someone has to be the fire-prevention-bathroom-exile scapegoat.
Ooh, I’ve got a radio-in-the-workplace story.
When I started as an air traffic controller in the early 90s, we had a radio on in the tower pretty much constantly. It was just for background noise, listening to local music stations - we’d have a polka program on Sunday mornings, for many years there was a Saturday night dance/disco mix, a guy I was paired up with for a couple of years always wanted a Christian light rock station on … we all got along and enjoyed having the music in the background.
In 2006 or so, the Bush administration decided they’d try to bust the ATC union, so they stalled negotiations on a new contract until they could unilaterally declare an impasse and impose non-negotiated work rules. This included dress codes (for federal employees who never interacted with the public, being in secure, nonaccessible workplaces) and a bunch of other restrictions … which included the banning of radios in the tower or radar control rooms.
The stated reason for the ban was some story about fistfights at some facility where they couldn’t agree on what to listen to, but since they didn’t just address that particular location and instead banned radios nationwide, I’m pretty sure it was another petty management move to try to show the union who was boss.
Not terrible, but inane and silly:
I was working in a location with fewer than 200 people. At some point they decided to be extra cautious about security, so all visitors (not employees) were issued little ID tags that said “Visitor”. Down among the programmers we had 15 or more contractors who included people who had retired, then come back for a few bucks, people who had been let go under RIFs (I was among them) who had been brought back to provide otherwise lost knowledge, and outside contractors who had proven themselves so valuable that they were constantly being brought back. Now programmers did not interact with everyone in the building, so not everyone knew everyone else, but with passing in the halls or seeing others at the lunch room, most folks had an idea of whose faces were familiar in the building. When the rule was announced I dropped a note to the author that about one in eight of the people in the building could simply remove (or forget to pin on) the “visitor” badge and they would “become” employees. I was told that that would not happen.
On the other hand, on several occasions, someone noticed that I was wearing a “visitor” badge and exclaimed “I did not know that you were not an employee!”–as I walked around in “secure” locations in the building, never being challenged.
The latest harebrained scheme at my work is that some idiot complained people who showed up to work early were “taking all the good parking spots” and they hated that they couldn’t park in the first 10 parking spaces next to the entrance and instead had to go to either two of the larger but slightly farther away parking lots (which really just adds a minute more to your walk).
So now work decided to start creating “Assigned Parking Lots” where now depending on your job you have to park in a specific area, and all that’s really doing it making it so you can’t just park in the closest 10 parking spots anymore. The other problem is, there’s no enforcement at all and the parking lots aren’t labeled anyway so I still park where I’ve always parked in the past 10 years.
We had a similar rule when I worked for the Feds - we had to use the approved travel agency, no matter how ridiculous they were. Once I had to go to Baltimore, but there were no hotels available at government rate. So they tried to book me a hotel in BOSTON. When I protested, the response was “they are both on the East Coast, and everything is close together out there!”
I guess that was marginally better than the time they told me I had a hotel room in Indianapolis the night of a Pacers game, which was news to the hotel when I arrived late that night.
I love people who complain that they get less than someone else, who think this will get them more, and then they get less.
This happened to me once, about my cubicle space. At the time, we occupied 3 floors in our building, 6, 7, and 8. I was on 7. Nominally, all the floors were the same design, but because 8 contained the top brass offices, some of the cubicles were arranged a bit different. Well, the guy who had the “same” cubicle as I on the 8th floor discovered that his version was slightly smaller than the equivalent cubicles on 6 and 7, and complained that this wasn’t fair.
So of course they shrank my cube and the one on the 6th floor. Fair!
It really hurt in that this was the biggest cube I’ve ever had at work. I could have put a couch in there! Every since, cubes have just gotten smaller.
Years ago I quit my job for a “better” job that a headhunter had hooked me up with. I had a one year contract. On my first day at the new job a woman “from upstairs” brought me a paper to take for my urine drug screen. My jaw dropped, this had never been mentioned.
I crumbled the paper, threw it to the floor, and told the woman I would have never accepted the job offer if any kind of drug screening were a part of the plan, and now I had no job! I stormed out and drove home. My phone rang off the hook but I ignored it. The headhunter was calling, the CEO of the business was calling, everyone was calling.
Longstoryshort, the CEO of the business eventually convinced me to have lunch with him. He apologized. The random drug screening was because of a contract with the city and he thought there was a way around it. He really needed me for a year, and if I could somehow pass a single, scheduled urine test he would promise that I’d never get picked for a random. I came back to work and didn’t use cannabis for six weeks. I passed a test and never heard another word about it.
So, whenever I read about random drug screening, I always read it as “random”.
I worked as an office/building manager for an I.T. division. We moved into a new facility that had been warehouse space now built out with offices and cubicles. Trying to keep the temperature consistent was a nightmare. There was a set of cubicles in the corner of one building. One row was by the windows and the other by an open space. A guy by the windows constantly complained that he was hot. A guy in the open area constantly complained that he was cold. My suggestion was that they swap cubicles. But, no. They each insisted that the temperature be perfect for where they were. Every time they complained, I had to call the heat/air company to make adjustments. It got to the point that when I called, the dispatcher would say “Bill and Dave?”. They both would send me long emails about how they knew how to fix the problem, usually involving adjustments of 1.25 degrees or some shit. Tech guys. Can’t live without them, can’t kill them.
I have worked in large IT companies in India. Over there labor laws are lax and companies can arm-twist employees to accept highly unreasonable labor policies. For example, most IT companies in India had a 90-day notice period, as did mine. And you could not take a single day off for any reason! Ostensibly, this was to ensure a smooth transition to the person replacing me, ensure business continuity and minimize any impact to the client. In reality, it was just a way to harass leaving employees for the unforgivable crime of bailing out of an often-toxic workplace.
And so when I resigned I got hit with this policy. I made the best use of it by spending large amounts of time in various cafeterias, the library, gym, and gleefully ignoring calls. Learnt the tech needed to succeed in my next job. Worked as little as possible.
Maybe it was not such a bad policy, after all.
Where I work, every year upper management hands down several goals that we’re all supposed to be working towards. Everyone is supposed to go in to the online system and tailor them to their specific jobs and add some verbiage about what they’re going to do to accomplish those goals. And then you go over them with your manager. And then no one ever talks about them again for the rest of the year. At performance review time, none of my managers said anything about whether or not I achieved any of those goals. At most maybe people will write some BS in their self assessment about how they met this goal because they did X, Y, and Z or something. But it really just feels like pointless bureaucratic busy work.
But it is aligned pointless bureaucratic busy work, with everyone pulling together towards a nebulous goal.
In the same vein: one of our customer companies has this convention of starting every meeting with a safety message. The meeting leader has to recite one of the safety messages, a few paragraphs, from a company list of available messages. This is a company that has technicians in the field, but we’re all engineers and programmers and most of us are working remotely (from home) at our respective companies; so very few of their standard safety messages apply to us. The net effect is “today we’ll be reading from Matthew, Chapter X, Verse Y, again”.
I’m reminded of a brief TV PSA from years ago in the Quad Cities.
It showed a photo of a guy not falling out of his tractor, while the voiceover intoned “Think Farm Safety”, followed by a clunk as the announcer dropped his microphone (which they didn’t bother to edit out of the spot).
We’ve got one thing in our annual reviews like that. It’s the “Personal Learning Plan”, which is supposed to list all the training you plan to do for the year, and record what you actually did, but for about 10 years now, all I’ve put down is a generic, “Do all the mandatory training and reading I’m told to do”, followed up with a year-end, “Yep, did that.”
So far no one has mentioned that this is just about the perfect opposite of “personal”, and just barely qualifies as a “plan”. And the “learning” is a bit iffy. Things like sexual harassment training, in which, even if you personally were in favor of sexual harassment, you’d have to be a brain dead slug to not immediately know what the “correct” answers are on the test.
What I’ve noticed with required development plans like that is that they tend to be all or nothing. Didn’t meet your goal of achieving a PhD by year-end? You get points off your review. Met your goal of taking one minor class? Congratulations, you get points added to your review. Never mind that one goal is ambitious while the other is not all.
And then there is the case of a goal becoming obsolete. Like the goal could be ship 100 units to Customer A. What if Customer A goes bankrupt?