I doubt it - an employer has to allow (unpaid) time off for jury duty, but my guess would be most of the laws were written without consideration of shift work. So if your work hours don’t overlap, then the law doesn’t care?
So after working the overnight shift, you were expected to go to jury duty during the day? I was on a jury for a criminal trial and much of the day is spent sitting in the jury box while boring stuff happens. I suspect I would get drowsy if not fall asleep if I had to do that. I suspect the judge would not be happy to see a sleeping juror.
About half of those watchstanders had family and home life responsibilities as well. Probably the chief advantage we had was, living in a barracks on on-base housing, the commutes were short, on the order of ten minutes. Dad wouldn’t be available much when working a string but then was available for three days.
I heartily agree about your schedule being insane.
I am with Senegoid here- Huh-wuh??? 
Step two in smoking rules, was allow smoking only in the hallways, where the elevators were, etc. Which had no ventilation. Thus to get anyway- restrooms, breakroom, out for lunch, etc you had to walk through a smokescreen.
Too late to edit.
And talking about rotating shifts, when I was working for an aerospace military contractor we had a space computer for a classified project that was too large for our environmental chambers when it came to the tests. So we hired a chamber an Honeywell where it would be for about a month. Thing was, being classified we couldn’t trust those evil Honeywell employees so someone had to be there 24/7.
The manager for the project was trying to figure out how four of us could do so without paying any overtime for the week. “Can’t be done, boss – there are 168 hours in a week,” I told him. “I’ll figure it out!” then a couple days later asked for my advice and I told him of the navy schedules I’d worked which wound up being adopted.
It was really dull work, reminding me of the punchline where the astronaut’s instructions are, “Feed the monkey.” The test would cycle between hot and cold in a vacuum chamber with it taking about ten hours before it had settled at the new temp and an automatic test would be started by – yes – pushing a button. It would run for about 20 minutes reeling out about six feet of tape which we would look at to see if there were any anomalies and log them. There never were.
Being a ten hour cycle we had a few shifts where we didn’t even get to push the button. TPTB desperately tried to find something we could do for the company but never did. The test gear had a PC built into it but this was the Win 3.11 era and about the only games on it were Minewseeper and Solitaire. I bought a book.
I was a consultant with a firm that was purchased by a couple who was fairly religious. (Not outrageously, but it came up from time to time.) As part of marketing, we often attended trade and technical shows, even setting up our own booths to sell our services. Obviously, we entertained both current and potential clients.
One day, the co-owner (wife) told us that we could not be reimbursed for entertainment expenses that included alcohol. And she meant, “Any alcohol at all on the bill and you don’t get reimbursed for ANY of it.” If we took a client out to dinner and he/she ordered a drink, it had to go on a separate tab and we would be personally responsible for that expense.
It took many discussions for us to make her understand that this just wasn’t practical. Her husband didn’t care at all, but she simply wouldn’t believe that clients might choose to go to dinner with someone else at the shows because of this rule.
I worked for an asshole once who felt that could tell female employees what they could and couldn’t do on their own time. He frowned on alcohol consumption and women going to bars unescorted. The policy didn’t last long. He actually called a young woman into his office and scolded her because he heard that she had been out drinking the night before. We could clearly hear her response throughout the building. It included words like “fuck you”, “can’t tell me how to conduct myself after hours”, “discrimination complaint” and “lawsuit”. The guy was a sanctimonious perv who liked teen girls.
There was a LOT of stupid going around with computer purchasing back in the mid-late 90s. The company I first worked for out of college actually considered them assets, and depreciated them. Which sounds reasonable, until you realize that the accountants weren’t up with the times, and depreciated them over some absurdly long time like 5 years.
What this translated into is that everybody was using ancient, ramshackle computers far past the point when they should have been replaced. Even when we DID actually convince the CEO to let us go buy new ones for about 40% of the company, they just shifted the other shitty ones down the chain, and we only actually got rid of the most busted and fucked up ones that should have been retired in about 1992.
Everywhere I’ve worked since has treated them as an expense- you buy them, you use them, and you replace them on a schedule. None of this “Oh, we can’t get rid of that; it’s not depreciated yet.” nonsense.
Not quite that bad at a public university. There are lots of rules about which money can pay for alcohol and which can’t, so if you want to get reimbursed for a dinner that had alcohol, you’d better have an itemized receipt. That doesn’t count per diems, nobody cares how you spend that, so this only comes up when entertaining visitors. Usually the senior person will just buy the juniors’ drinks (aka not get reimbursed for them), and not worry about it.
Public university again. Assets were anything over $2000 or something, and they had to have a yellow inventory tag. Anything with a tag had to be tracked and appropriately accounted for in the inventory system when it was disposed of. This was terrible for computers.
A professor would buy a laptop for $2500, it would get a tag. A couple years later it would be handed down to a grad student, who might use it for a few more years. By then the computer is worthless, and nobody knows where it is. Eventually inventory time comes around, and nobody can find this 8 year old computer. Multiply that across many departments, and the “university lost $100,000+ of computers” when actually everything lost is worthless, and would rightly cost money to dispose of.
Fortunately practicality prevailed at some point, all tagged computers were stricken from the inventory. Asset value was increased to $5000, and then maybe done away with completely.
Speaking of. I still have two 25+ year old computers in storage in my department with Veterans Affairs asset tags on them. I’m sure nobody cares, but we’re afraid of some audit resulting in the VA asking for either their computers or $8,000 back.
That was one of my more memorable emergencies in workplace safety. An employee was so constipated that, when he called us for help, he was stark naked and drenched in sweat in the stall.
Upon his request, we handed him cups of water with Epsom salts. Glad I could post this here, since Readers Digest’s “All in a Day’s Work” is out of the question
About 25 years ago, I worked for a company that sold 3D CAD software along with Silicon Graphics computers to run it on. I remember once the auditor asked me to show them the computer listed as an asset, along with several thousand dollars of computer memory, which was separately listed. The problem was that the memory was in the really expensive computer so it wasn’t possible just to look at it separately,
If I’m traveling or at a conference or whatever and go out to dinner by myself I have to put my single beer on a separate tab. Made me feel like an untrusted child. Gotta put the lock on the liquor cabinet.
This company is not filled with teatotalers at ALL. But thems the rules.
Oh, and when we got the credit card, we had to bring back the receipt from the restaurant.
It used to be - Here is your per-diem check for x-days. Do what you want with it.
I luckily don’t travel at all anymore. So I don’t have to deal with it.
Apologies for the brief hijack, but the whole point of per diem expenses is that you don’t have to track meal expenses; you’ve just got an allowance for each meal that you may spend as you please, or not spend at all. Thus I see nothing unethical about what that guy did, and it wouldn’t be against the per diem rules of any place I’ve worked that used per diem.
Think of it this way – if you’re allowed up to $35 for dinner in a big city, but you decided to just grab a $6 gas station sandwich one night, do you owe your employer $29?
That said – it’s totally justifiable to fire anybody for eating sardines, so never mind. 
The sardines are okay, bit the whole sardines and peanut butter on crackers thing is the sign of a disturbed mind.
Well, remember. We had to justify $50 or so by claiming three meals and no meal over $25. While no one cared if your breakfast was really cheap and your dinner was $35 or whatever, and maybe the total was $45 or something- he was claiming three meals a day, like $10, $15, and $25, but spending far less. So he lied.
Later when it was pure per diem, then doing this would get not you fired but maybe a talking to.
Back in the day, when traveling with a more junior associate who hadn’t travelled before, I would let them know that we need to regard the per diem as subsidizing our meals, so we wouldn’t be looking for the nearest McDonalds come dinner time. (everyone traveling was a well compensated employee)
That is a different system than the per diem system. In true per diem (as I’m sure you know) you don’t have to claim any meals at all, they just give you the money. If you have to even tell anybody how much a meal cost, let alone show receipts, under the per diem system that would be defeating the point. It costs the company more to do the accounting than it does to just hand out the standard rates and never think about it again.
To contribute an actual story of my own: I once had a word processing job with a boss who was an idiot, and a micromanager. She had been a secretary in the typewriter era, and thought she knew everything about Microsoft Word. She wouldn’t allow me to use the text centering function or center tabs; it had to be a set number of spaces. She was a foul piece of shit in many ways, but just astonishingly dim as well.
Why would you clock out for a break?
There’s a difference between getting a per diem and being reimbursed for up to $X for breakfast and $Y for dinner. I was always given a per diem equal to the GSA rate minus the lunch portion - and my employer would have no idea if I had the free breakfast , spent $10 on lunch and $40 on dinner , because my expense report wouldn’t have separate listings and or receipts for how much I spent on each meal. There was just a line that multiplied the per diem by the number of days.
Depends what kind of break it is - but there are lots of jobs where you clock out for a 30 minute lunch break.