Worked for a clipping service, bonus points if you know what that is/was. The owner decided that he was spending too much on scotch (generic) tape, so from thence on, if something tore (it’s paper, dude, it tears) we were to cut out a small piece of scrap paper and carefully glue it to the back of whatever had torn, being sure to match up all of the lettering on the “good” side of the clipping.
Tangent:
I assume this is meant to sound outlandish, but this is the normal vacation allotment most places in Europe. By law, I get 25 days off, plus a dozen national holidays which usually float to Fridays and Mondays for convenience.
Americans really do need to understand how they’re being screwed by their work-first culture.
But that’s a different thread.
End tangent.
One of my first assignments at a new job was to spend two weeks TDY at Tooele Army Depot. Which is south of the town of Tooele. DTS insisted that my TDY destination was Bauer, and that I had to stay in Bauer, not Tooele. Thing is, Bauer isn’t actually a town, the only thing there is a landfill. Getting DTS to allow me to book a hotel in Tooele was like pulling teeth. And when I returned the voucher was completely fucked up, I had to amend it four times.
Paper vouchers were ok, but where I worked both the travel orders and the vouchers had to go through a secr, er, administrative assistant, before being sent to the finance office. It was her job just to make sure everything was entered right. Any other decision was absolutely above her pay grade. That didn’t stop her from becoming office travel tsar, scrutinizing every little detail and objecting to anything, however minor, that didn’t meet her standards. Once, I was able to mix some annual leave with my travel, which is absolutely allowed, and it ended up costing $500 less than it would have had I not taken the annual leave. She was convinced that I was pulling a fast one and tried to stop my plans. I think DTS was modeled after her.
I’m here to collect my points. They still exist but obviously they no longer cut and paste bits of paper.
I’ve heard some doozies from new safety officers. At my undergrad school, one of my professors became the physics department’s official Radiation Safety Officer, and discovered that the school actually had a small quantity of plutonium, from someone’s research project back in the day. Specifically, plutonium-239. The stuff that’s used in bombs. Only about 5% of a critical mass… but still, that’s 5% of a critical mass. It took a lot of phone calls to get that dealt with, and he’s pretty sure that the nice men in suits he ended up handing it off to were from the Department of Energy.
And one of my grad school classmates had been named as chemical safety officer at his previous placement. So of course, he started by asking the manager what the facility’s biggest chemical hazard was. The answer? “Probably the 5 to 10 tons of mercury we have.” How much precisely? “I told you, 5 to 10 tons”. That was as precise as any of their documentation made it.
My work had to ban popcorn because too many people were making popcorn it was taking microwave time away from people trying to warm up their lunches.
At one point we had five people waiting in line all trying to microwave popcorn in the same microwave. Work compromised by letting people buy those popcorn tins and having it shipped to work.
My previous employer (well, the one I worked for, before we were acquired) had a similar cap. You could accrue up to 1 year’s worth of vacation time. Not “I can take the next year off”, but “I earn 4 weeks a year, and I’ve got more than 160 hours saved, I don’t accrue any more”. My husband’s job is like that still.
It’s great, because even if you need to use your pot up, you know you’ll have another day or two built up next month.
When I was pregnant with my daughter, I watched every hour like a hawk - wanted to make sure I had exactly the maximum time at the time my paid sick leave wore off, so I’d have another month of paid time off.
At my previous company, the office was really small, a dozen people in our area more or less(all programmers or programming adjacent). The room was very light even without the lights on. So most people just didn’t turn on the lights. People would even whine (jokingly) when someone turned on the lights.
Then someone in corporate read a book that said that employees would be more productive if the lights were on.
So corporate decreed that all lights must be on during business hours. Which wouldn’t have been that bad, but before the decree, they passed out a survey asking what we thought about it… then promptly ignored our feedback.
Best reason to ban microwave popcorn is to stop the fire alarms, abandon the building and having the fire department make an Orville Redenbacher call.
Back in the 80’s, I worked in showroom sales for an NYC company that sold stage lighting and special effects equipment. The job was a very good fit in some ways, because we sold a lot of stuff to nightclubs, bands and performance artists, it was an eccentric clientele that I clicked with. I was good at it and it was fun.
But I was always uneasy with the ownership, it was a family business and they were really straight-laced. And the owner ( Bob) was dumber than a bag of rocks. He was a very decent and moral man who treated his employees well, but he was a blithering idiot.
The other reason I liked the job was that I had spent several years previous working in the nightclubs, and I knew the equipment I was selling and what it could do. And what it couldn’t do. That’s what got me in trouble.
Sometimes people would come in looking for features and capacity that just didn’t exist in the low to mid-range equipment we sold. I started to get customers who really needed the high-end high capacity equipment used by large theatres and network TV studios. That was not what we sold. And they were coming in because they had called the store and spoke to Bob, who listened to whatever they said without comprehending a word, then told them we had exactly what they were looking for.
I could not make Bob understand why I was turning his customers away, and I couldn’t sell our equipment as an an equivalent to products that cost 10x as much and did 10x as much.
And Bob was one of those old school guys who treated his employees like family. You don’t fire family. If they don’t work out at one job, you find something else for them to do. So Bob sent me to work at the warehouse, same salary.
The warehouse manager - and all the warehouse guys- were my friends. They knew the whole story and were suitably outraged on my behalf. And they decided I wasn’t going to do any work, ever. So they brought in a TV and a recliner and set up a little corner for me. Bob and his son were both clean freaks so they never went to the warehouse and everyone else covered for us.
For 2-3 weeks I came into work and lounged around all day but it got boring, even though the warehouse guys would put on little plays for me, plays that usually involved them killing Bob. It was pre-internet and they didn’t have cable in the warehouse. So I talked to Bob and we agreed that he should just fire me so I could collect unemployment.
A few years I was at my next job, sales and consulting for another company, one that did much larger projects. I was bidding a job, a lighting effects system for a big museum exhibit. I saw my old employers name and a chill went up my spine.
I called the designer whose name was on the plans, which was sort of a no-no but I knew her slightly and she took my call. I told her I had some concerns and I asked her to describe the special effect she was looking to achieve. Of course, she described something the equipment couldn’t do. She was furious, because she had spoken to Bob and he had assured her……
So I found something that would work and I called in some favors to get it really cheap, then I cut my profit to the bare minimum so she didn’t have to go back to her client and tell them she had screwed up and needed more money. I totally didn’t have to do that, but I felt really bad for her.
When I was doing sales and consulting for the larger lighting and effects company, we did a lot of work with NBC in New York.
We had special vendor badges that allowed us entry into the building whenever we wanted, because it was easier for the guys we worked with. A regular employee badge had a photo ( this was in the days before scanners and such) and it was carefully checked each time you entered the building. The vendor badge was bright fluorescent card ( we got a new one every six months in a new color) with your name handwritten on it. All we ever did was act confident and flash them and the guards never looked or checked ID. And we borrowed each other badges for guests, it was cool to take an out of town visitor to the commissary for lunch.
It was much harder to get in the building if you actually worked there. I still can’t believe they let salespeople roam wild in the halls of 30 Rock, but they did.
And he was right. Because as sure as God Made little green apples, some person will burn it, and that stench is horrible.
YES!!!
Holey shit. 
Possibly NRC. Not a fun bunch.
That reminds me; some safety office at Yale decided that anyone working* with samarium had to have their work area geigered regularly. Samarium is barely radioactive. To the point where it can be shipped and (most places) stored with no labels.
*SmI2 is a mild reductant. Often purchased as a solution. But you can make it fresh from Sm chunks too.
I went to work for a nursing home that, until a few months prior to my hiring, had been managed, for decades, by a group of Franciscan brothers. However, due to age and not being able to handle it any more, they brought in new management. Employees, some of whom had worked for “the brothers” for decades, absolutely hated every policy from the new management, and would bitch loudly about it to the residents. “It was so much better when the brothers were here.” Or, “It worked better when we did it the brothers’ way.” And so on.
So the new management made a rule: no talking about anything but work! Not the weather, not your kids, not small talk about this & that. You’re only allowed to talk about work.
The policy lasted less than three days, IIRC.
There are a lot of these people
Holeee shit! Literally! I learned that before I went to kindergarten.
Me too. My reply was one of the “four?” responses.
I don’t recall ever thinking one had to be completely undressed for that.
Long ago, I worked for a shit-hole retail joint (now bankrupt, thank god!) that required us “sales associates” (that’s a laugh!) to do many stupid things that would annoy our customers. One of them was tied to some stupid promotion they were running. We had to answer the phone and deliver a Shakesperian Monolouge before finding out what the poor sap on the other end wanted. I don’t remember ver batum what it was, but it was damn close to something like this:
“Thank you for calling Shit-Hole, where your purchases can earn valuable flight miles on American Airlines for a limited time. This is (insert your name). How can I help you earn miles today?”
Lame, huh? Well, I worked with an old guy who had worked his whole stint for the Post Office, and retired. Just filling in at Shit-Hole to get some required income to boost his Social Security or some such thing. Not sure of those details. Anyway, this was not a guy who did anything with a sense of urgency. 25 years with the Post Office, and he was pretty set in his work habits. Oh, and he also had a very thick accent and spoke very slowly.
I’d break into howls of laughter listening to him answer the phone, sputter through the diatribe about stinking flight rewards for about 15 or 20 seconds, and usually followed by, “Hello? Hello? Is anybody there?”
A few times, the phone would ring right back, and I’d pick it up and simply say, “Shit-Hole” and have the caller ask “What the fuck was THAT???”
Ah… good times…
When I was transfered from the US to the UK the company paid to move over all the stuff I wanted. I knew there was a niche market in the UK for American cars so I had my Chevy Lumina Z34 shipped over. I was always first into the office so parked right by the front door. After a couple weeks the front of the office was designated management-only parking. The unstated but obvious reason was that my humble Chevy was bigger than the managing director’s Jaguar.
Is it one of those tests where you don’t even have to read the question?
Choose the correct answer:
A) Hun
B) Babe
C) Sweetass
D) Mrs. Wiggins