Did anybody ever tell him about bananas?
I believe anyone even mentioning bananas near someone from this office was beaten into silence with a scoopula.
I suppose that would be marginally better than beaten with a speculum.
I’m going to try to tell this without identifying the company I work for.
We recently moved our equipment services facility, as well as the admin offices for engineering. TPTB decided we must not need one major part of our old facility. Now we can’t build our long (think 50 feet long) equipment vertically. All our procedures are having to be re-written to build things horizontally, or we are sending things out. Overhead cranes aren’t tall enough, etc. So many things they didn’t think through! And who does it fall on? Engineering. And then TBTB wonder why everything is taking longer, and costing more money. Sheesh. PLUS - they laid off all the shop guys that knew all this equipment!
Facilities
That’s like two guys…
This isn’t an example of a “unreasonable, pointless…” rule, but it is sort of an interesting rule that had odd side-effects.
I worked as a contractor at a pharmaceutical company for several years. The campus was fairly large, with about 10 separate buildings. A very strict rule was that you could not enter the antibiotics building (actually called by the name of the specific antibiotic they produced and packaged) after being in any other campus building that same day. If, for example, an employee in that building needed to meet with an HR representative, the representative would have to come in first thing in the morning and meet with you before he/she went to any other building. Or, you had to go to see the representative at the very end of your shift and then you had to leave without returning to your workstation.
Of course, this meant that it was difficult to take something to another building. You couldn’t take the item to another building and then go back to the antibiotics building. There were special “couriers” who would go between the buildings. They received items from the antibiotics building through a special pass-through chamber in the wall. Employees in the antibiotics building also entered the campus through a special vehicle gate and parked in a separate parking area.
I had responsibilities in all the campus buildings and it was not uncommon for me to have to say, “Sorry. Can’t go to the antibiotics building today to look at that problem. I’ve already been in one of the other buildings.”
I’m guessing the rule was to prevent contamination somehow, but how would visiting another building on campus be any different from visiting McDonald’s on your way to work?
Let me guess. There was another rule disallowing off site contaminants so they’d have to fall off when you entered the facility.
Maybe they scanned the McDonald’s food and found no organic matter.
No, it sort of makes sense, assuming that at least some of the other buildings are involved in production of other chemicals or biologics. Depending on what they’re making milligrams or even micrograms of material, far less than you can see with the human eye, can be enough to contaminate a batch. It’s not exactly like regular everyday McDonalds contaminants. The rule eliminates primary contamination (ie. person A goes from a building to the antibiotics building), but it also eliminates more distant contamination (ie. HR person meets with someone from another building; HR person gets contaminated; HR person meets with someone from the antibiotics building who then gets contaminated). It’s unusually strict, but if they were working with really potent chemicals or biological material, and if they had prior contamination issues it might make sense.
Right now, a lot of employers are making unreasonable, pointless, and inane demands for people to return to workplaces on a full-time basis when the last couple of years have proven that teleworking is not only viable but also benefits both employers (in terms of productivity) and employees.
I’m going to be working full time at home (it’s absolutely great) been doing it since the start of COVID. Some folks are going to do some sort of hybrid thing, and our offices are being completely redesigned.
I work for a good place.
Anyway, I just ordered this book - The Nowhere Office
“As remote working becomes the norm rather than the exception for many office workers around the globe, The Nowhere Office proposes a radical new way of thinking about work both now and in the future. Offering a strategic and practical guide to negotiating this pivotal moment in the history of work”
Luckily, most (?) employers now go with a per diem policy. You get x dollars a day to spend any way you want on meals and incidentals; your expense report just shows “40 a day per diem” or whatever - it varied by city. So you could eat Mcdonalds 3 meals a day and keep the difference (eating cheap could get pretty lucrative), or eat at 4- star restaurants every meal and pay the difference out of your own pocket, or drink vodka for breakfast, lunch and dinner. In theory, if your hotel included breakfast, or a conference provided lunch, you were supposed to reduce what you claimed by a certain percent; not everyone did… All in all, it was great - saved a huge amount of paperwork, receipts etc.
And the Federal per diems (and hotel maximums) were higher than my employer’s. So even when we traveled for a Federal client, we were supposed to use the company per diem - even though it cost the company nothing. On one, the contract explicitly said we could charge the government rate, and the system always threw up red flags that had to be explained.
The employer also has a rule that you don’t charge lunches when on travel - because you’d have to buy lunches when you are at home. Completely ignoring the possibility that maybe you brought bag lunches, or you were traveling to some place much more expensive. That was more of a problem if you were on actual expenses, versus per diem.
That’s the way it USED to be. Here’s your money do with it as you please. Not anymore.
I felt that was correct in the “shit I forgot a razor” or whatever. You are away from home, you may need or have forgotten something.
It should TOTALY be “Here is your daily bucks, do with it as you please. Thank you for upsetting your life to travel to some godforsaken place and be away from your family”
We used to just got a check for x amount a day. Cash it before you leave. do whatever you want with it.
Wow much time and $ is spent by employees and HR/finance bean counters trying to reconcile all the receipts? Then they went to employee credit cards. Ok. But you had better have all you receipts (although they already show up on the card statement. And don’t you DARE by a beer even when the day is done.
The whole thing is bullshit and pisses me off.
Luckily, I don’t have to deal with that per diem crap anymore.
I worked for one company for many years. Their policy was travel advances. You would buy your travel tickets through the designated travel agency and then you would book your hotel and estimate your costs based on allowances for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and “sundries,” as well as any taxi or other transportation requirements. If there were special fees—like attending a gala luncheon or something—you would get that expense approved by your supervisor. Then you would apply for a cash advance and by the time your trip started you would have cash in hand for all your expenses. Afterwards you would reconcile everything with receipts required only for extraneous charges over a certain amount. Your meals and sundries were flat allowances that you didn’t have to account for.
Then after a corporate takeover everything moved from cash advance to reimbursement. I resented having to take work related expenses on my personal credit card or whatever and then wait to be reimbursed.
When I was temping at a state agency, they were making plans to move to another location, which would save them $10k a year in rent.
The state refused to authorize the $5k required to move the offices.
One of the many hazards of having multiple buckets of money with multiple managers. Saving 10k in this bucket doesn’t reimburse 5k in that bucket.
I worked for a nonprofit for a year. At one point I traveled to Anaheim for a conference. The woman whose job it was to plan my trip had some strict guidelines she followed.
The conference involved daily meetings in a nice hotel. To save money, my room reservations were in a Super 8 and I was expected to walk to the hotel. I wasn’t allowed to rent a car.
When I returned to work a week later I was pissed off and requested an immediate meeting with the CEO. I explained that I’d rented a car because the hotel was a 7.5 mile walk on a highway and I wasn’t going to do that trek three times a day in 99 degree heat.
He called in the woman who’d planned my trip. Her defense involved showing us a map and holding up her thumb & forefinger. She couldn’t understand why I couldn’t walk “this far”.
I was reimbursed for the car.
Many years ago - I was attending a mandatory one-week all-day class offsite. It was a 30 minute drive each way. I intended to simply skip the office and drive my car directly to the class. Not acceptable to my supervisor. I had to check in at the office, then take a pool car and drive to the class. At the end of the day I had to return the pool car and then drive (my car) back home. Repeat for the five days of class.
Then there was the time I was taking evening classes sponsored by the company in partnership with a local college. (It was a program for a Master’s degree.) If I left work at the regular time I was assured to be caught in rush hour traffic and be late to class. But if I left just 15 minutes earlier I’d miss the traffic and get to class early. Somehow my supervisor was never happy with the idea that I was “stealing” 15 minutes from the company.
My job did something similar for a very short time a number of years ago. They didn’t so much care about people using their own vehicles vs state vehicles - the executive director at that time came from a different agency, where the idea of people doing field visits all day without stopping at the office at any point was unknown. So he instituted a new rule - everyone had to start and end their day at the office.* He thought it would end people getting away with something, like people stopping work at 3:30 and just going home. And it might have ended some of that - maybe. What definitely happened was that people would get to the office and “start the clock” - and then drive an hour + from the office in Albany to the field territory in Lake George and do the same in reverse at the end of the day. After a few weeks of paying for people to drive a couple of hours a day (sometimes involving time and a half) , they finally gave in and reverted to the old rules that allowed you to start the clock when you arrived at your first visit.
* The jobs I’ve had involving regular work outside the office have had various rules regarding the start and end of the day - how to determine when your worktime started/ended if your travel to other location took longer than your normal commute , whether you had to return to the office if you would get back at 4:15 and were scheduled to end work at 5. But this was the only time in over 30 years where the rule was “start and end your day at the office”