My 7th grade English teacher told us about the time she got called in to speak with the principal. It turns out one of the parents witnessed her drinking a beer at a restaurant in another town. (I still have no idea why she told us that story.)
This is within the realm of the inane: When my company started calling employees back to the office part of the reason was facilitate collaboration. But we were still in COVID mode and all meetings were still taking place in Zoom. Several employees rightly brought this up and all I could do was shrug and kick those questions upstairs. They’re right.
In the middle of the century’s first decade, I worked for a telecom support-services company that was headed by a CEO with delusions of culthood. He wasn’t without charisma and managed to create one of those enthused rah-rah “we work at the cooooolest company evvver” workforces. Company t-shirt, company sports teams, company trivia leagues, company songs, company mottos and truths and sayings and magic phrases.
One of their things was how they wrote out dates. None of this 6/1/2007 stuff, nor 06/01/2007, but instead every date anywhere, in spreadsheets or in filing cabinets or on the top of memos, took the form 070601. Databases had “date” fields containing 070601 type entries. It was just utterly uncool to have a date in any conventional format anywhere except in external-facing correspondence. Which required translating the 070601 stuff a good portion of the time. But kindly note that this was less than a decade after the late great Y2K bug furor. And note the lack of leading digits to indicate century. Not 20070601 but 070601, got it? Well, naturally one of the pieces of info that got tracked were people’s birth dates. Twentieth century birth dates, this being an era when only nursery school kids had 21st century DOBs. And some trademark dates and patent dates were late 20th century too.
An amazing waste of time, all that converting and configuring and storing dates in text fields and needing to do text parsing to snip out the month or the day…
Fortunately I don’t work there anymore! This is a store that regularly brings in over a million dollars in sales every week but feels their workforce isn’t even worth a bandaid.
I worked at a religious school, teaching a secular class. I was called at home by the librarian, who was a convert of the very zealous type. She had some vaguely described administrative helper role. First she leveled the accusation that some of the students had seen me mowing my fenced backyard while wearing shorts. This was a religious offense. I pointed out that they shouldn’t have been looking in my backyard in the first place. She then wanted to know who the man was who had answered my telephone. I told her it was none of her business. I did not say, it’s cool, we’re both gay.
Those were government rules back in the day. We were openly told it was okay to fudge- as long as you did spend something like what you claimed. One guy took peanut butter, sardines and saltines with him and never ate out except for the free donuts, claimed the whole $50, and was fired. We all thought that firing was justified.
We had “non-smoking areas” which of course the smoke obeyed.
The company I work for used some kind of centralized, managed travel service that supposedly saved us a lot of money in the aggregate. I guess somehow we booked fares for a given price, and then got some sort of bulk discount on the back end? Largely, I think, because the company system only had a subset of airlines that I suppose we had an arrangement with. But even if it did save the company money in the aggregate, my department didn’t get a kick back for whatever the end benefit was, and there was a lot of travel in my department, including international.
The problem of course was that we could often find much cheaper flights ourselves, particularly those of us who were comfortable with aggregators, or if we were willing to use an unapproved airline like Southwest. The company rule, however, was that you had to use their service.
For the longest time we worked around that by having managers approve exceptions, but they eventually caught onto that and we would get an email following up if we booked a flight outside the system and then charged it back on expenses.
Back in the days of giant mainframe computers, working for a huge railroad company on their computer online systems, management put out a new policy to all computer employees, with copies posted on all bulletin boards, containing this epic statement: All emergencies must be scheduled at least 48 hours in advance. No exceptions!
People went around highlighting that sentence on the bulletin boards. But management wouldn’t rescind that until an employee had their spouse, who worked at a local TV station, call the company PR department to ask permission for a camera crew to enter the building to film that memo. Then they responded fast.
[Actually, there was some justification for the memo. The company operated 24/7, and had trains running all over the country, with scheduling, loading, traffic, etc. all controlled by computer systems. But to install an update fix to any of those systems required a bureaucratic form needing a dozen signatures from different managers scattered over many floors in 2 buildings, and could only be installed on the scheduled 2 days per month. But many fixes couldn’t wait that long.
So programmers discovered that “after-hours emergencies” required only signatures from your supervisor & his immediate manager. So after thoroughly testing your fix, you got those 2 signatures, stayed after 5pm, and called it in to operations as an emergency fix, and did the install right then. So much cleaner than the normal process that soon 75% of updates were being done this way. But when management noticed this, rather than fix the bureaucratic process for normal installs, this was the management response!]
I just remembered another travel-related asininity.
Back in the late 80s, when frequent flyer programs were still relatively new, the company got the genius idea “we’re paying for your airfare, so you need to give us the miles you earn”. After about 2 years they announced a new perk - “You can keep the miles you accrue on business travel for yourself!”
It turned out after an audit they finally realized they were spending more money administering the program than they were saving on airfare.
Oh yeah I forgot. At my government building the GSA discovered it could save $1.99 per line per month if they switched to GSA run telephone numbers. So of course, thousands of staff hours were spend changing things, and tens of thousands of dollars were spent changing directories, business cards and the like. But the GSA didn’t care if the Treasury lost thousands while the GSA saved hundreds. Different budget you see.
About corporate travel policies – oh, boy.
Twenty years ago, working for a nationwide grocery wholesaler, flying a team of a manager, a high-level employee, and 2 computer consultants to various shipping warehouse centers for a week-long system installation. Airline flights had to be reserved by the company travel department for us. They were absolutely fixated on minimizing the ticket cost (they were evaluated on that) and could care less about the salary cost of the employees’ time.
I remember one trip where we set out about 9am, flew on 5 flights between 4 airports (only 2 due to weather re-routes), and arrived at our destination at 1am (with our luggage unavailable, and our hotel reservations expired).
When our manager complained afterwards, he was told that the original 3-flight airline route had saved $18 per ticket compared to the direct flight. We calculated that the amount paid for those 4 staffers time was about $3,900 – some 200 times more expense to the company. But the travel department didn’t care; that wasn’t in their performance evaluation.
Back in the mid-1980s, I was working as a technical writer at a young tech company. It had grown quite quickly, and was very successful; with offices and installations all over the world. It being the mid-1980s, like other tech companies at the time, it designed its own hardware and software. Naturally, this meant that we had plenty of manuals to keep us tech writers (all three of us) busy.
When an executive has too much time on his or her hands, crazy ideas can form, and that’s what happened. One of our executives, during a flight back from the London office to head office in Toronto, had the idea that our Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) really don’t support our customers–rather, they support our market. So they should be known as Market Support Representatives (MSRs). And he demanded that all of our manuals and printed materials use that designation.
But not just going forward. No, all existing manuals and printed materials had to be changed to reflect this. We went through everything, changing “CSR” to “MSR” (we did not have computers on our desks–those would come a year or two later–so this was all done by hand), sent to the word-processing pool to make the change in what would be sent to the printer, then sent for actual printing and binding. We had to get rid of our existing stock of manuals and printed materials, and replace it, though we could hang onto the existing stuff until replacements arrived a few months later. We ended up ridding ourselves of tons of paper.
The change went over like a lead balloon. Not only did it create a lot of extra work for people (us, the WP pool, the printers and binders), but it cost a fortune. Customers hated it; they were used to dealing with their CSR, and had no clue what an MSR was; and the poor MSRs had to correct them when they were incorrectly referred to as CSRs in phone calls and face-to-face meetings (yes, that came out in a memo too). All because some bored executroid came up with a boneheaded idea on a trans-Atlantic flight.
We had a cumbersome business case process for getting projects approved. Tons of info had to be gathered and massaged into a huge PPT template, so when the management were presented with the business case it looked the same as all the others, which is sensible. However, the process of getting every bit of info the template needed took many weeks, if not months, and cases with missing data and info were sent back. With projects stalled at the start gate, project owners were starting to complain, especially around time-sensitive compliance projects.
The solution implemented was “Business Case Lite”, which streamlined the process by cutting out all the bloat from the template and loosening demands for 100% complete and perfect data. The result was that everyone wanted to use the “Lite” process over “Business Case Normal”, so they had to put in place another bloated review process to determine which projects were justified using the “Lite” process, thus negating any time savings. SMH
Lord, where do I begin! Okay, to save bandwidth, I’ll mention just a couple. LOL
During the pandemic last year, teachers had to report here but taught remotely from their classrooms. Not a single child was in the building. However, administration forced the teachers to come in at virtually the last moment before school started in order to “limit exposure as much as possible”. Now, all the teachers were alone in their own classrooms, so there was no exposure. Administration refused to cloud the issue with common sense and logic and held firm to their “safety” mandate.
Tech needs access EVERYWHERE because we have technology everywhere, but administration refuses to give us access to the administrative offices. They have separate locks to ensure we can’t get in. It doesn’t matter that we can access their accounts and data from the comfort of our own chairs in our own office. Nope, they have to be “safe” and keep us out. The result is that admin machines are the most out of date and the least maintained. Again, don’t bother bringing up common sense and logic.
In HR, a lot of recruiters are now talent acquisition partners. I asked a manager why the change and the reply I got was a big pile of baloney about how the new title better reflects what they actually do. But the problem is that everyone in my company knows them as recruiters and when I start talking about talent acquisition they get a blank look on their faces.
When I was still working for the federal government, I applied for a promotion opportunity at my workplace. They offered me the job, with a 3 percent (I think, it’s been a while, might have been 2 percent) increase in my base pay.
Now, by taking this position I would also be giving up some premium pay opportunities in my current job, to the extent that this raise pretty much kept my take-home pay the same as I was already making (it might have even been a little less) with a significant increase to my workload. I knew exactly who the other candidate was for the position, and I knew his base pay was already quite a bit higher than mine. I tried to bargain for a higher raise, making the point to the HR person that the government would still be saving money giving me a slightly higher percentage increase as opposed to giving the other guy their 3 percent.
Nope. This was the standard promotion raise. No room to budge. So I turned them down, kept my take home pay, and let them spend more money by hiring their second choice and giving him a bigger 3 percent raise.
Flexibility and agility are not hallmarks of government HR policies.
In one medium sized company I worked for, the VP of HR set up the policy that her AmEx was used for all company travel for airline tickets, hotels and rental cars so that she got all the points.
That was eventually changed. . . so that the wealthy president got them. Yeah.
I worked at a DoD contractor that issued AmEx cards to all employees for travel & expenses. You were required to use that card. But even though it was a company issued card, the bill came to you, at your house, in your name, tied to your credit report. So you’d buy your airline tickets, pay for your hotel, all meals, etc, then submit your expense report, and wait for your reimbursement check. Because these expenses then had to be submitted to the govt, it usually took 8-12 weeks to get reimbursed. Meanwhile, your AmEx bill came in and was due in full long before you were reimbursed, so you had to come up with the money on your own to pay off the bill, or face late fees, exorbitant interest, and hits to your credit rating. So basically the company was getting interest free loans from their employees.
