What's the most unreasonable, pointless, inane, illegal, or just plain insane policies you've been subjected to in the workplace?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

In 78-79 I worked for an up-and-coming company called Federal Express (you DID NOT call it FedEx). This was boom time when there was a massive increase in employees and new stations being opened all over the country. People were often promoted beyond their abilities. Stories of crazy things happening were legion.

I worked in the warehouse where we supplied forms, office supplies and uniforms to all departments and stations. It was a huge warehouse with several isles of three-level shelving running north-south. One day we got word that our boss’s new boss (who we had never seen) wanted us to move the shelving so it ran east-west. That seemed like a pretty pointless thing to do but it meant overtime. We came in Saturday, took all the pallets off the shelves and dissembled them. Sunday we put the shelving back together running east-west and replaced the pallets. A few weeks later we were told that we had to put the shelving back to run north-south. No explanation. We got another weekend of overtime. That was one of the most insane work things I ever had to do. But that overtime money was sweet.

62

I work at a warehouse and we have those giant wall mounted “200 in 1 Medical Kits” in every single work space. The kits contain Band-Aids, cotton balls, gauze, burn medicine, anti-infection spray, and various generic OTC pills for headaches, common colds, allergies, and other common ailments. The kits were open to employees for emergency use.

Well at some point an employee went around to all 30 or so medical kits and took ALL the OTC pills out of the kits and left the rest in a single day (presumably they were taking the pills to either make meth with them, or sell them to get meth). Management noticed and their immediate kneejerk reaction was to lock ALL medical kits with a padlock and then hide the keys in the Managers office. So now it you cut yourself on the job you’re now supposed to track down a supervisor or shift leader, have them walk all the way to the Managers office, get the key from the manager, walk back to the medical kit to unlock, then retieve the band-aid.

As you can expect most people now for minor cuts just get some toilet paper and wrap it to your body with tape since it doesn’t require so much footwork to do.

63

Did they ever figure out who took all the pills?

64

Your work comp carrier would insist do not dispense internal medicine. imagine what a lawyer could do with “I was having chest pains. My employer gave me a ibuprofen and told me to get back to work.”

We didn’t lock out first aid stations, but we did really really push for every small cut that was bandaged be reported. This marked the incident as work-related in case an infection set in and a work comp claim had to be filed.

What really bugged me was how the first aid station vendor Cintas would come in every month: stock bandages, ointments and wipes all at the verge of expiration, then replace them the next month and bill accordingly. We fired them had had an employee assigned monthly restocking duty and bought them lunch.

65

This reminds me of another story. We wanted to have a computer in one of our offices. We were willing to bring one in so it wouldn’t have cost the state anything.

But there was a lengthy process for bringing a new computer into the workplace, even if it was a free one. And we were told we wouldn’t get the approval. We couldn’t just sneak one in because each approved computer had a numbered sticker on it, indicating it had been authorized to be there.

But I knew there were some old non-working computers in storage. And while they didn’t work, they had been authorized and still had their stickers on them. So I asked if we could use one of these computers if we were willing to repair it to make it operational. I got approval for this.

I know nothing about computer repairs. To fix the non-working computer, I simply replaced one hundred percent of its parts. In other words, I took the sticker off the old non-working computer and put it on the new working computer which we brought in. But according to the records, that computer was now the old authorized one.

66

During my first career the Sheriffs Office had a dignitary detail doing things like escorting the county executive and setting up security at his home and such.

The schedule for that was beyond insane. It was a sliding swing schedule of 8 hours on, 8 hours off. In otherwords, it was impossible to get 8 hours sleep during your work week. Here is an example:

Monday: 8am-4pm
Monday: 11pm-7am (Tuesday morning)
Tuesday: 3pm-11pm
Wednesday: 7am-3pm
Wednesday: 11pm-7am (Thursday morning)

So come Thursday at 7am you were done working until Monday at 7am, but you were completely fried from lack of rest. You also had no time during the week to take care of anything personal, your kids, spouse, appointments. Nothing. And if the next shift was late, called in sick, etc, you were double extra super screwed. I ended up pulling a 24 hour shift once (4 hours longer than allowed per union contract under emergency clauses) because we had so many out sick with crypto. And the richardless Lt had the gall to ask if I wanted to work the next shift yet. A bullet would have been more humane.

The Captain who set up this schedule was an absolute rooster inhaler who needed to be beaten severely until he begged for death.

67

I’ll go you something just as ridiculous. Last fall, I was offered a job. Not exactly in my field, but I was certainly qualified; the company heard about me from somebody for whom I’d worked before, and recommended me highly. They got in touch with me and basically offered the job to me outright.

I said that I’d accept conditionally, but I did want to see the paperwork and the offer. They sent it. It was about ten pages of very small print. Now, as you may know, I’m a lawyer, and reading the small print is my business. So I set about reading it, adding marginalia with questions I’d like to ask, should we speak on the telephone.

About every two hours after I received the paperwork, I got an e-mail from the sender, asking if I had signed it yet, and urging me to hurry up and sign it and return it. (Ironically, one buried clause urged me to take the time to have a lawyer review the paperwork. Unnecessary in my case, but I’d hate to be under that kind of pressure when I can only get an appointment with a lawyer a week from Thursday.) Anyway, was the sender an “HR recruiter”? No. Was she a “talent acquisition partner”? No. Instead, she was an “onboarding coordinator.” :roll_eyes:

In the end, I declined the offer. Some of the provisions were plainly illegal under Alberta’s employment law (why yes, I do practice in the employment area and know local employment law quite well). And the pay, which was in small print at paragraph 46 on page 5, was an insult. I e-mailed my onboarding coordinator with my refusal, and offered that if she wished, she could contact me as to my reasons why.

Never heard from her again. To stay in the spirit of the thread, what corporate policy could possibly cause one to agree to be called “onboarding coordinator”?

68

No, despite cameras being everywhere inside. In fact 5 years ago we had an incident where someone in a forklift wasn’t paying attention and crashed the forklift forks first into a wall and knocked a water fountain off it’s foundation. The driver jumped out and instantly ran away and apparently work didn’t find out who the culprit is since for a month after there were signs EVERYWHERE that basically said “Will the forklift operator who hit the wall please turn yourself in we promise we won’t fire you”. If we had working cameras they definitely would have caught them. I’m assuming the cameras either have TERRIBLE angles or they just don’t work.

69

I had a night job that had some bizarre rule where if you had jury duty, as long as the hours didn’t directly overlap with scheduled reporting time you were REQUIRED to go to work as well. So basically you’d work a normal 11pm to 8am shift, then go home and get ready for jury duty from 9am to 4pm. Despite this I was never called to jury duty during the time I worked this job and everyone else I knew just lied to get jury duty off, so I never knew how enforceable this was for my job.

Similarly if you had a doctor’s appointment and were on day shift you were required to come to work AFTER the doctors appointment and “make up” your time but the schedule for the next shift wouldn’t be adjusted for this, so now at night we suddenly would have people hanging out with no assigned task since they were killing time due to a doctor’s appointment earlier and had to work their full 8 hours but their jobs were already being done by the next shift crew.

70

In the “Completely Unenforceable” section of rules for my current warehouse job, you can’t use your phone or wear headphones/Bluetooth headset while using the toilet.

Is this because work doesn’t want you taking a bathroom break only to use your phone during the break instead? No that would make far too much sense. Instead the literal stated reason is because some guy was once taking a shit while listening to loud headphones, the female custodian was knocking on the bathroom door to see if anyone was inside so she could clean it. She heard no response so she used her master key to open the door and walked in and saw the guy completely naked because he was also the type who took all his clothes off while taking a shit.

71

Is this something that any normal people actually do?

72

For several years, the policy at the grocery store I work at is that any time an injury had to be documented, no matter what its nature was, the supervisor had to call a 1-800 number, report the injury over the phone to a consulting nurse, have the nurse talk to the employee and give them a treatment plan, then talk to the supervisor again to repeat the treatment plan to them. This usually turned what should have been a 5-minute process into an hour-long phone call (since the nurse hotline would always leave us on hold forever) just for the nurse to tell them “put a bandage on it and ice it and take some ibuprofen”. In one case this lead to an employee who had broken his own foot with an electric pallet jack taking off to drive himself to the ER because the very by-the-book assistant manager didn’t want to let them leave until they’d done the phone call and scheduled them for a drug test (because corporate also required drug tests for ALL injuries at the time.)

We fortunately dropped our contract with that nurse hotline at the beginning of this year. The drug test requirement got changed to “reasonable suspicion” only a few years back, because the company started having to fire too many people after recreational marijuana was legalized in this state.

73

I guess I have been lucky with my many employers over the best part of 50 years.

At my first job driving a truck (in London) the company was run on a shoestring. When we bought fuel, we had to hand in the Green Shield Stamps. They did not pay overtime rates and Saturday removals were a regular thing - the tips were supposed to compensate.

More recently I was working for an agency and they sent me to a local chilled and frozen food distributor. Because of the restrictions on driver’s hours, it usually meant that you were stuck on the same shift all week, and this one started at 2 pm.

The guy who manned the desk at night hated agency drivers for some reason. One evening I got back off a run at 1130 and after refuelling and paperwork I gave him my timesheet to sign. It was 1155 and I had entered midnight as the finish time. He insisted I change it. Naturally, after that, I would hang around long enough to make the times match.

74

Good grief. How many sections were working those insane hours? When I was in the navy at direction-finding sites running 24/7, about half of us were “watchstanders,” one of four sections working interlocking rotating shifts. Most places were what we called 2-2-2-80, two day shifts, eight hours off, two mid (grave) shifts, eight hours off, two eve (swing) shifts, then eighty hours off. Essentially it was working six shifts in five days and the day the “string” started would advance by one day each cycle.

Yeah, the eight off between shifts, called double backs, left us short of sleep – that’s what coffee is for – but those 3 days+ off were sweet.

In places where that much time off would hang heavy on your hands like Diego Garcia, it was 1-1-1-56 I never did that but people who have told me your tour goes by really quick.

75

But being in the military is different than civilian life. We had family and home life responsibilities at the same time tying to work the ridiculous schedule. I bailed after a while and got reassigned to courts, then the airport, then finally getting promoted to the detective bureau. . The captain who came up with that schedule was the biggest donkey pipe you ever heard of. And he was around forever. He was already a senior deputy when I came on in '82, he was a captain when I retired in '07, and he himself didn’t retire until 2015. There was nothing endearing at all about that rose thorn. He had not one single friend. Even his peers of equal rank disliked him.

76

I’ve only seen onboarding coordinator on job postings, this position is typically responsible for ensuring that all aspects surrounding the onboarding of new employees was completed. Things like making sure all pre-hire steps were taken, all legal paperwork completed (like the I-9 here in the United States), policy acknowledgements were signed, etc., etc. Titles like HR Coordinators are still somewhat common in many companies. Mine stopped using those a few year ago because we could have three different HR Coordinators all doing something radically different. i.e. One working Benefits and the other Compensation. My title is lame, I’m an HR Generalist.

77

As a teenager I worked at a restaurant and clocked out for a break. I was told “there are no breaks in the restaurant business.” ???

I could understand “time your breaks to avoid the rush.” But you’re just gonna tell an illegal lie like that, unconcerned that you might accidentally hire someone who knows their rights?

78

This reminds me of one of my most favorite employment stories.

I was in sales, I had just been hired by a manufacturer’s representative agency. The product I was tasked with selling, a product that was mostly used in new construction, had a long cycle…….after I “sold” the product, it had to be designed into the project, which was then sent out to bid to multiple contractors, one of which who was eventually awarded the job….at which point contracts and eventually, money would change hands, then the company I worked for would actually receive their commission.

The product I was selling was new to this company, but I had considerable experience with it - which was why I was hired.

The people that hired me KNEW this, because of that I was put on salary for 6 months before I started working on commission. And I was working very effectively during those six months.

The company had multiple owners and apparently there had not been complete agreement regarding not only my hire, but the feasibility of the product I was selling. And one of the owners got impatient because I wasn’t bringing in any commissions after 2-3 months, and he continued to get impatient.

So, right at 6 months, they fired me.

I asked for a severance package and they laughed, saying I was only there six months and I had cost them money.

But they offered me two things. One, they signed off on me working directly for company X as their sales agent after I left their employment.

Then they gave me the pipeline. Normally, if I started working for directly for company X, I would not be entitled to the commissions on contracts that had been negotiated while I worked for my old employer, the business that was in the pipeline.

They signed all that over to me, mostly because they were so down on me at that point that they had convinced themselves I hadn’t been working and had nothing in progress. They didn’t even look into it.

I was smiling as I left the meeting. No severance, except for the business in the pipeline. That business was worth roughly $50,000 as it came into my new small business over the next several months.

That company was a miserable place to work, but it ultimately funded my start-up and they never even knew it.

79

I imagine in most areas, this “rule” would be in direct contravention of the law. It’s possible that if somebody had dropped a dime on your employer they would have been in a world of hurt.

80

I used to work for the EPA. One day, I couldn’t start my Pathfinder, so I went over to security and asked if anybody could give me a jump. None of them would, because it wasn’t in their job description. I finally found an office mate willing to help, but he had a sedentary body and was wheezing while walking through the parking lot. Luckily, I managed to start up after remembering that one of my battery connections tends to loosen when the outside temperature heats up, so I retightened it. Nothing like government work to define “not my job” so acutely.