I kind of had that happen last year. At goal planning time, I was working on Program A. So I wrote a bunch of sub-goals about how I was going to meet the big goals by doing X for Program A. Then Program A got its funding cut, and I was reassigned to Program B, where those sub-goals were no longer applicable. I never updated my goals, and my manager on my performance review my manager didn’t care that my goals no longer applied (and therefore I couldn’t meet them).
One of the good things about our plan is we can amend it during the year. A course you planned to take is no longer offered? DELETE! Did you just take a new course today? Add it to the plan, and look! I’m meeting my goals!
Not sure if this fits but …
That’s sales people had to attend the monthly store meeting. Why was that stupid? I won a sales contest that the store sponsored and got minor-league hockey tickets that happened to be the same night as the meeting. I was not excused from the meeting and when I said that was asinine because it was the company itself that knew it would give those tickets to someone in sales. Their response was that they were going to give the tickets to someone in a different department. I said, “No. I won them and I want them. I’ll give them to a friend.” The manager stared at me not understanding why I would want the tickets I won but couldn’t use.
The first stranger I met that said they liked hockey got the tickets.
When my dad retired from his job he faced a similar situation.
Normally for retirements on their last full day of work they host an hour long lunch where the management brings catered food and drinks to the lunch room and everyone wishes the soon-to-be retiree good fortunes. However they always arranged theses good-byes on Fridays despite the fact a fair number of my people (including my father) were off Friday/Saturday and worked Sunday instead. My dad told them, his final day was Thursday so if they could arrange it to happen on Thursday as there was literally no reason they couldn’t do it on a Thursday. Nope though, management refused because “We always do it on Fridays” and they expected my dad to show up on Friday unpaid just for the lunch hour then immediately leave.
My dad told me “I’m not showing up to work unpaid and wasting the first day of retirement” so he told them to cancel the lunch and never stepped back into that place again.
View from the other side
I assembled my field engineering team every year of two for an international education, communication and motivation meeting. It was enthusiastically anticipated. One year I found I could get a major cost reduction by scheduling the meeting to include a weekend and by using a conference planner for all of the airline tickets (over 400 attendees). So, I set it up and announced a date six months ahead of time. The ground rules were: four day meeting over a weekend, all travel arranged by Conference Planners, employee only no family, no rental cars. I sat back and waited for the phone to ring.
Got a few calls from orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians about the Sabbath. I told them as long as they were participating in local worship they could drop out of the meeting for the time required. And they could use cabs for travel.
Then I got the major whines because their local travel contacts could get great better travel rates. They could take vacation and visit relatives in Chicago or someplace at a lower total ticket cost than I was getting. And, if I wouldn’t let them do it I really wasn’t interested in saving the company money. I OK’d scheduling around vacation but they had to use Conference Planner tickets to and from the meeting. They said that didn’t work because they only got the rate with a combined international flight. Answer was that I had committed a fixed number to get the conference rate, so that was it. Much whining from Australia and Europe.
Then I got the fear of flying guys, all domestic. I told the local managers to get them in Fear of Flying school. And, no, nobody can drive across the US to the meeting.
Then there was the guy who only travelled by train. The answer was no!
Everything worked out and the meeting came off very well, with just a few bumps. The train guy took vacation and tried to make it by rail. He missed the meeting due to rail delays. Left the company a while later.
Two guys came a few days early and rented a car. They tried to make a fast tour of Vegas and Yosemite and ended up in a hurry to get back for opening night of the meeting. They rolled into a canyon off Pacheco Pass and totaled it. I got a phone call. They were OK but wounded and wanted me to send someone to pick them up. I told them to take a cab. So they had to pay a few hundred for the cab, but one of the product groups got the bill for the car.
And during the meeting I got the usual, sometimes good natured, earful rehashing all the complaints - alcohol enhanced. But, tough shit, nothing personal, just business,
I remember my father back in the mid 80s, they forced him to retire at 65. It was a union job, he worked in the heating and cooling plant of a university.
As they forced him to retire, he had accumulated weeks of sick leave and felt he deserved compensation. The contract said they wouldn’t pay sick leave left over upon retirement. So the last year or so, dad called in sick about half the time. As someone needed to be there 24/7, someone else had to take dad’s shift. Of course, his buddies accumulated overtime so in the end, the university’s cost was higher than if they had just paid him the accumulated sick days. He also wanted to work a few years beyond 65 but they wouldn’t allow it.
This isn’t really a stupid or pointless policy, but you reminded me of my former manager who retired at the end of last year. As with most companies, the longer you work here, the more vacation days you work per year. He’d been with the company so long he had accumulated so many vacation days that he was taking a vacation day every other Friday for his final year here, just because he could. Here in California employers are required to compensate you for unused vacation time when they leave the company, so he obviously just wanted a bunch of three day weekends because he could.
I had a problem like that. My boss said he needed to park an employee in my department for one month. Just paper shuffle during reorganization, no actual management involved.
Turns out the guy is a 20 year manager with 8 weeks of accrued vacation. As soon as the transfer hits the system I am debited for the total value of his vacation time, about $20,000. So, I’m stuck with a budget over run for the quarter and my boss gets all upset over it!
Oh yeah, the following quarter I tried to get away with claiming I was $17,500 under budget (the department he went to had to credit me). That didn’t sell.
Are dangerous policies OK for this thread?
In my UPS days, I delivered frequently to an ore processing plant. The exit from the plant had a giant car wash that hosed down every single vehicle upon leaving – truck, car, everything.
I asked a supervisor about it and was told the dust produced by their process would eat the paint from cars fairly quickly. But that it was OK to breathe and wouldn’t hurt humans. And that was why no one in the workforce wore any type of mask or protective gear.
My experience is that my employers have gotten more and more draconian about “no vacation carryover, use it or lose it” rules as time has gone by (for this and other reasons).
Ugh. Yeah, when I first started with my current employer (well, the company that my current employer acquired), there was one muckety-muck who REALLY had a bee in his bonnet about donating to United Way. As in, would personally pester employees to donate. It surely crossed some kind of line. Whether the threat of adverse outcomes, if you didn’t donate, was true, or merely a rumor, was never established.
When the satellite office I had worked in was being closed down (project was ending), people were allowed to take home some of the extraneous furnishings. I asked for a bookshelf. The muckety muck said I could take it, if I donated to UW.
My husband asked me: “Are you responding to a THREAT??”. I said “No, I’m responding to a BRIBE!”.
Insane stuff:
At one job in NC, some newish executive didn’t like the smell of microwave popcorn - this was when that was kind of a new thing. He pronounced it “unprofessional” and banned it from the premises.
And an earlier job, for a major health insurance provider, involved low pay (for my kind of work) and often crazy hours. We were “exempt”, but if we worked 12 hours one day, and needed to leave an hour early the next day, we had to take an hour of vacation.
I had enough of this, found another job, and had given my 2 week notice. This was just before Labor Day. I was trying to finish up a bunch of stuff, and came in to work for 10-12 hours the Saturday and the Sunday… and did not come in at all on the Monday (Labor Day, a holiday).
There turned out to be some kind of problem with one of the systems I supported, and the computer center did not have my correct phone number (their fault; I had provided it) and could not reach me… so they called my manager. Who, if I remember correctly, told them to try such-and-such which turned out to be wrong.
So the first thing that happened, that Tuesday morning, was my manager showing up in my cubicle, chewing me out for not being available on the Monday. “Look at all the time wasted where you could have been fixing this!”.
Several people came to me right afterward and said “I don’t know why you don’t just walk out right now!”.
Sadly, I did not. I wasn’t trying to help the company; it was a matter of pride to ME to get things sorted out as much as possible for my colleagues.
Needless to day, that company had high turnover.
My current employer requires us to fill out a forecasting tool saying how many hours we are expecting to work in such-and-such buckets (client billable, training, vacation, etc) for the next few weeks. I understand the purpose in terms of planning. But there was one time when I had a procedure scheduled on a Monday, i.e. needed to take 8 hours sick leave. I forgot to account for that, and forecast 40 billable hours. I also wound up supporting a proposal effort that week. So I only billed 30 hours, plus 22 for the proposal, plus the 8 of sick leave - for a total of 60 hours.
And I got a nastygram complaining about working so much less billable time than forecasted, and suggesting that proposal support should be done on top of billable time, not instead of.
This is the same employer who has use-or-lose vacation time (by December 31st) - no carryover into the next year - and then complains about their billable hours being so low in December - duh, it’s because everyone hoards it in case they need it, then wants to use it up. They also have chargeability goals (as do many consulting firms) that basically boil down to “you can take all your vacation and holidays as long as you make up the time”.
I didn’t expect to meet a heroic boss in this thread…
Think of all the burned popcorn smell that workplace avoided.
One day, some 10-15 years ago, I made ramen in the microwave at work; just heat up the water and noodles in a bowl for 5-ish minutes, add your flavor packet and stir, good to go.
Somehow, I forgot to add the… water. You think burnt popcorn smells bad?
It’s almost like they don’t understand you’re accumulating vacation days because you’re working extra days you don’t have to during the year.
I’ve mentioned this on before, but here we go again…
I was hired to manage safety for a rather large software company campus. I discovered in the first few weeks that they (1) had not inspected or tested fire extinguishers for over four years; (2) had not tested or replace emergency lights for over six years; and (3) had not replaced fire alarm systems batteries for over five years. (Codes require that fire alarm system batteries be replaced every four years (or five years from date of manufacture.) Similar requirements apply to fire extinguishers and emergency lighting units.)
I spent over $30K taking care of the most critical requirements and setting up an inspection/maintenance program. (This did not cover ALL the required service and replacements, but took care of at least the really, really serious issues.)
A month later, I was called on the carpet for spending $30K over what my predecessor did for the same quarter the previous year. I pointed out that it was the absolute minimum required to comply with state building codes and that we had been cited several times during fire and safety inspections. Also, none of our emergency lights worked (surprise!) when tested. I went on to explain that I could give them a budget number for future expenditures that would be required every two, three, and four years.
Their response: we can’t do that. I said, sure you can. For example, all fire alarm batteries will need to be replaced every four years. It will cost you about $11K each time. They explained that they had no mechanism to budget these types of expenditures and didn’t care to. Remember, this is one of the leading privately-owned software companies in the world.
Finally, I asked if my replacement next year would get praised for saving money compared to me, and if his replacement (four years from now) would get criticized for spending the money necessary to replace fire alarm batteries as I had. They admitted that it would probably happen just that way.
I told them that they were nuts and quit two weeks later. (There were other issues that were bigger problems, but this was just an example of their weird approach to budgeting and expenses.)
Thanks for reminding me to check my PTO bank. 155 out of 160. Use it or lose it. At least I don’t have to deal with year end resets.
I actually like Concur. It’s waaaaaaaaay better than the Defense Travel System.
Tripler
Shoot, I preferred paper travel vouchers to DTS.
My current employer has a very generous PTO plan. I’ve been with them for a little over 3 years, and I could do the same thing, if I wanted to.
If I took 2 vacation days every month for a year, at the end of that year, my PTO balance would be only 8 hours less than at the beginning of the year.