Not only did we go through that, but our cards were sent to our orderly room. A few days later, another envelope with the PIN went to the same orderly room.
And yes, someone took advantage of that and made several cash withdrawals. He was later court martialed.
On another trip to San Diego, I was to fly home Friday. I found one flight that left around noon or so, which I liked, because it meant I’d have a lot of time to wake up in the morning, have breakfast, and make it to the airport with plenty of time to spare.
But no, I couldn’t take that flight, because it arrived home at about 11:45pm. The person booking the flights said we couldn’t do this, because if there was a delay, I might get home after midnight, which was technically Saturday, which was apparently verboten, even if I was the one asking for this particular flight.
So they booked me on the first flight out at like, 7AM, which meant I have to wake up at like 5AM, which of course meant I couldn’t really do much my last night in San Diego, because I had to go to bed early. Plus, no time to spend getting a decent breakfast, or taking my time, or any of that, nope, it’s “Out of bed, quick shower, dress, find a taxi, wait in line to check in, and maybe they’ll have something not absolutely disgusting on the plane to eat.”
All so I’d avoid even the possibility of getting home late, when I had Saturday off to begin with.
I can’t be a superior to Japanese co-workers because I’m not Japanese.
This one is just kind of fun.
In the 1950s, the dress code at IBM was notorious - conservative suit, tie, black socks and always a long sleeved, pure white shirt. This policy was never put in writing. I assume this had to do with the IRS definition of a ‘uniform’. Some sartorial rakes sought an identity with colored shoe laces or socks, a slightly off white shirt, bright tie or other small deviation from the norm. This always produced a memo that began:
“It is not the policy of the company to dictate what the employee will wear, however…:”
At the time I was a Customers Engineer supporting IBM computers at Lockheed Burbank. Someone committed a heinous dress code violation, like a dull green sport coat instead of a matching suit coat. And, that drew the usual memo:
“It is not the policy of the company to dictate what the employee will wear, however employees will use, as a guide, the senior resident manager at their facility.”
The senior resident manager at Lockheed came to work in an Aloha shirt, shorts and tennis shoes. When this was pointed out, the memo was amended to “resident IBM manager”.
I briefly had a job at an aquarium, which had been recently taken over by a company who, until then, had run such closely related companies as a jewellery sales company and a furniture manufacturer. Although they did keep many of the previous staff in place, they added a few extra levels of management, filled with people from the furniture company, including the boss of my department- the talks team. To say she had no clue what she was doing would be a charming understatement.
It would seem obvious to anyone within the typical sanity range that the role of the talks team was to ensure that visitors to the aquarium had a nice time, by means of giving talks and passing on interesting information at appropriate moments. Not according to her. Our job was to talk, dammit, and if we weren’t talking, we weren’t doing our job. If there was a single visitor in the centre, and she saw them walking round without one of us talking to them, she’d write us up.
Even when they had shown no interest in what we were saying and had actively told us they’d rather look round by themselves, we were not to allow this, for our job was to talk.
Even if they spoke no English, we were to talk, though I was informed that in this situation, it would be an acceptable alternative once all lines of verbal communication had been tried and failed to ‘follow them round and point at things’.
We advertised talks at a set time at the main pool. These talks were to happen precisely at the scheduled time.
Even in the absence of any visitors.
I don’t mean that we had to be there for our scheduled talk even if we didn’t think there was anyone in the building, in case anyone showed, no, that was far too reasonable; we were to deliver a 15 minute talk at the correct time, even if it was to an empty room. She’d hide behind the staff door to check. One colleage would regularly deliver a convoluted and totally deadpan mic-ed up speech, including telling the imaginary crowd how to arrange themselves for optimum visibility, complete with warnings about the crush reaching dangerous levels, and would make up ridiculous and clearly impossible facts about the fish- this was apparently fine by the manager, for he was Talking. You could just about hear the talks in the shop when it was quiet- the staff in there would all stand by the door to listen for the sheer stupid entertainment.
Yes, this did mean that bewildered tourists would regularly walk in in the middle of enthusiastic speeches given to no-one.
Okay. I believe we have have our winner for the insane category.
But obviously we have to wait for all submissions to be reviewed before we can confirm this.
Oh that was another thing the new manager implemented at the store. He wanted to be sure we never talked to anybody so he came up with a great, new idea for breaks. He wrote them all down on little post-it notes and you were expected to come to the front desk and silently take your post-it note and return to your work station without talking to anybody and then, when it was time for your break, you could silently leave at the time written on your post-it note.
That reminds me of a issue I had when I was working. I worked on the night shift, from ten pm to six am. We received our annual schedule of fire drills we were supposed to run. One of the areas we were supposed to run fire drills in was the education building, which was of course totally unoccupied during our shift.
So I told my officer to draw the keys, go to the building, test all the alarms, and check all the fire exits. This was as close to a fire drill as you can run in an empty building.
No problem for about a year. Then at some point one of the education people complained that people had been entering the offices when the building was supposed to be closed. I think the issue was they suspected somebody was stealing their office supplies.
The administration launched an investigation and checking the records, found that the keys for the building had been drawn in the middle of the night on several occasions on my signature. So they called me in to ask why I was sending people into the education building in the middle of the night. And I gave them the explanation.
They just couldn’t believe it. Why was I running fire drills in an empty building? I pointed to the written orders - with their signatures on it - telling me to do it. They were telling me it made no sense. And I was thinking “Well, why did you issue the order then?”
It sounds like we work for the same people! LOL
My dad (who was probably one of the first “computer guys” in Canada) often claimed that the only reason he didn’t get a job with IBM right out of school was that he didn’t own a blue suit.
https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html
When I started at IBM there was a dress code, that was an informal oral code of white shirts. You couldn’t wear anything but a white shirt, generally with a starched collar. I remember attending my first class, and a gentleman said to me as we were entering the building, are you an IBMer, and I said yes. He had a three piece suit on, vests were of the vogue, and he said could you just lift your pants leg please. I said what, and before I knew it he had lifted my pants leg and he said you’re not wearing any garters. I said what?! He said your socks, they’re not pulled tight to the top, you need garters. And sure enough I had to go get garters.
Around the time IBM finally relaxed the dress code, I saw an article in which one employee described being sent home for wearing slippers to work. (He was wearing unlaced slip-on dress shoes.)
I think mine had to be the company policy that the company facility (a manufacturing plant) “shut down” for two weeks at Christmas every year, meaning that we weren’t allowed to actually work, but it wasn’t paid holiday time either- it came out of our vacation time. Which wasn’t a huge deal- a majority of the salaried workforce had worked there for at least 20 years and got months of vacation time each year, and most of the other workers were contract assembly people who were paid a flat rate and weren’t full-timers anyway.
So as a fresh-out of college worker, I had to go and basically take NO vacation time for the entire first year I worked there just to accumulate enough time to be able to take off that two weeks at Christmas.
The absolute worst part was that I still had to support the jerkwad execs who would work in this two week “shut down” anyway, and had to go in a time or two.
The other one was just more of an example of rampant assholery than anything quite so insane. At the time I worked for a healthcare company that ran medical clinics. We were bought by a major insurance company headquartered in Kentucky. This insurance company was actually a fantastic corporate parent- they liberalized a lot of things- we got to work from home, for example. We got bonuses, we got a lot of money for the IT department- no more duct tape and bailing wire solutions.
Then, sometime later we got sold by the insurance company to another operator of clinics and hospitals based in rural Pennsyvania. These dickwads revoked the work from home policy, and basically reverted all the HR policies back to 1980s type stuff. The exodus of workers over the next couple of years was something to see- people with 20 years in service leaving, and the like.
Buying computers was the stupid one at the university I was at. In the 90s computers were some kind of special entity. Purchasing a whole computer, regardless of cost, required approval of the dean or vice-chancellor or something, and could take months. Buying parts only counted as supplies, and could be done immediately. So whole departments ran on systems cobbled together out of the back of Computer Shopper.
We had a similar thing, but it was a Diners Club card. This was in the 90s and 00s, not the 70s. It usually worked for hotels and car rentals, but definitely not at small restaurants. It wasn’t completely stupid, in that the car had a 60 day payback grace period, so your reimbursement would usually arrive before the bill was due. Much easier to just use your own card and collect the points/miles.
In a previous post, I mentioned working at a radio station with a strict dress code. Well, they had another inane rule: The on-the-air personality was forbidden from answering the business phone. The reason for this was that they were to concentrate on their broadcast presentation and not be distracted by people calling to report lost dogs or whatnot. One Sunday night it was me on the air and one newsman on duty. The newsman was on the phone doing an interview, and the business line was ringing and ringing for a couple of minutes. I thought “This is ridiculous” and answered the phone. On the other end was the General Manager, who sternly informed me that I should not have answered the phone. He asked to be put on hold to speak to the newsman, who was berated for creating a situation in which I was forced to answer the phone. The next day, my supervisor called me to remind me that I was never, ever, to answer the business line while on the air.
On the other side of this coin, I worked for another station where the GM would close the office at 1 or 2 o’clock on Friday afternoon, leaving the person who was on the air to answer business phone calls and take messages. This was really distracting if you were trying to do your show. We asked if an answering machine could be installed, and the GM said no, because that would be too impersonal. So, letting the phones ring and ring until the DJ had time to answer them or callers would just hang up in frustration was OK, but voicemail was too impersonal.
The radio business has always been a little crazy. You can’t make this stuff up.
One company I worked for did the first part of that – close down the free coffee – but did not put in a vending machine.
It was a military contractor and 30 - 40% of the people there were veterans, retired or got out early. Although not 24/7 for the most part it did run on coffee and when the closure was announced the memo said it was costing the company $50,000 (in the mid-80s) a year.
Quite a few brought in one-cup coffee brewers to put in their cubes which drove the safety officer nuts and most of the rest – salaried – were taking a couple breaks a day to get coffee from the coffeeshop down the street a ways.
Six months later the coffee was back.
I don’t drink coffee but I could see having free regular coffee but charging for decaf.
Mine isn’t nearly as egregious as many that have been shared; mostly just pointless.
I work at the headquarters of financial company. Fancy campus with fancy buildings and sometimes rich fancy peeps coming to visit. Obviously (and reasonably so) advisors who meet with clients are expected to wear formal business attire. My dept. is on a secured (meaning locked) floor where we have no (visual) contact with the outside world, yet up until our recent return to office, we were all required to wear formal business attire as well. Don’t even think about casual Friday. Lest you think it’s because someone might godforbid see us in the elevator or hallway, all the other depts. were basically business casual. Hell, IT folk could be seen in jeans and sneakers pretty much every day. The only reason anyone could guess at is that Executive Fat Cat decreed it years ago and no one either cared or dared to challenge it.
Speaking of expense reports, there was an incident that struck me as silly at the time, but made sense upon further thought.
I once accidentally booked a hotel stay at standard rates rather then the government rate I should have used. I didn’t notice this until I was doing the expense report and had already paid and been emailed the receipt. I called the hotel and spoke to the GM to get it sorted and a refund for the difference credited to my account. She did this with no complaints. Easy peezy lemon squeezy. (Yay Ambassador Elite membership level).
Filled out the expense report with the amounts I paid after refund and made a note in the comments section detailing what had happened and that I had been refunded the overpayment and submitted it with the original receipt. Got kicked back and told I needed to attach the refund receipt as well. My initial reaction was “Really? Whatever. OK.”
The upon further thought part was that an auditor might pull that trip for review one day and want to know why I wasn’t reimbursed the full amount of the invoice despite my note. Having the refund receipt included covers everyone’s ass.
You could have stopped right there. Somebody needs to drown that app and put it out of everyone’s misery.