Depends on your experience - when I worked in fast food restaurants in high school and college, we didn’t have 10-15 minute breaks. and we just called the 30 minute break a “break” - I guess it didn’t seem like a lunch break at 10am or 8pm.
It was so long ago I don’t even remember the procedure for going on break. I did whatever I thought the rules said, maybe I just announced it.
Either way, that’s not the point. The point is that when I said I was going on break, the manager stated verbatim that “there are no breaks in the restaurant business”. That much I do remember.
…couldn’t someone ask for the combination on Monday, and then use that combination on Tuesday, to stash their trash?
But let’s be honest here - the biggest WTF? of all this is people randomly using lockers as (permanent?) trash cans. There are just some ideas you can’t wrap your head around.
At one hospital where I worked, I’d had a few potted plants in my office for years. One day a manager passing through spotted them and I was informed that they had to go. Apparently, plant cooties could travel through several walls and contaminate lab cultures 100 yards away (who knew?), but people tracking potential pathogens in to the lab from all over the hospital were A-OK.
The plants ultimately received a stay of execution.
Another favorite was when I was waiting at the gate area to board a commercial flight, and an airline agent passing through informed me that I couldn’t bring a couple of small potted plants on the plane. Why? Because the “dirt” could spred all over the plane during flight. Ma’am, if the turbulence gets that bad, there’ll be a lot more than my plants to worry about.
Things have loosened up since then, at least at Yale.
“Former Yale administrator Jamie Petrone, 42, pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in Hartford, Conn., to two counts of wire fraud and a tax offense for her role in the ($40 million) plot.”
“Petrone’s ploy started as far back as 2013 and continued well into 2021 while she worked at the university, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut.”
“Until recently, her role was the director of finance and administration for the Department of Emergency Medicine at Yale. As part of this job, Petrone had the authority to make and authorize certain purchases for the department — as long as the amount was below $10,000.”
“Starting in 2013, Petrone would order, or have a member of her staff order, computers and other electronics, which totaled to thousands of items over the years, from Yale vendors using the Yale School of Medicine’s money. She would then arrange to ship the stolen hardware, whose costs amounted to millions of dollars, to a business in New York, in exchange for money once the electronics were resold.”
Yeah, I read about that. To me, that’s a big sign that despite whatever rules and such were in place, nobody was actually paying attention to what was happening, just that the right form was filled in. Or more succinctly, nobody was watching the watchers.
In the Yale case, she had to have been buying $10,000 in stuff per day, or something like that. Of course, the $40 million number could be greatly inflated, just like the “street value” of drugs and such.
We had an employee try to run a scam, but it didn’t work out nearly as well as the person at Yale. Setup a shell company. Create a website for the shell company that has it selling lab equipment. Write sole source justifications for buying lab equipment from your shell company. Then resell common lab equipment with a 200% markup.
In that case it was the a combination of the sole source justifications and the inflated prices that lead to getting caught. The fake company didn’t withstand even cursory scrutiny, and prices were way out of line of what the finance people expected. Also, lying on the conflict of interest report (not reporting you’re buying from your “Dad’s” company), is a major offense.
On the same lines, last fall I had to travel to the East Coast from California. Company travel policy states that we must book the “lowest fare that meets your schedule requirements” or something like that. The flight with the lowest fare left at like 7:00 am. There was another flight that left a few hours later that cost something like $4 more. I figured I’m not going to bust my ass to get the the airport at 5:00 am for the earlier flight (that’s peak time at the airport when the security lines are longest – you definitely need to get there two hours before your flight that time of day), since for a trip that distance the entire day is taken up by travel anyway. So I booked the later flight. But then I had to provide justification as to why I didn’t take the cheapest flight (It was approved, BTW). I later realized if I’d simply narrowed the search window in the booking tool to exclude flights that departed before say 9:00, then the later flight would have become the cheapest one that “met my schedule requirements” and I wouldn’t have had to provide justification.
Since I work for a government contractor, they are always drumming into our heads how important accurate timekeeping is. Timesheets are to be completed accurately, down to the tenth of an hour, in the timekeeping system at the end of every day. Do not charge a project for work you haven’t done, that’s a big no-no, they could get audited and fined or worse.
Except for every other Friday when your timesheet needs to be signed and submitted by noon. Then you wind up having to guess what you’re going to be working on the rest of that afternoon.
You sound like you work for the same company as I do, or at least another defense contractor that evolved the same dipshit rules in response to the same dipshit labor reporting regulations.
(I don’t care to identify my employer and I understand if you choose not to as well.)
The extra bit of dipshit goodness is that if you discovered you guessed wrong Friday morning, you can go back, reopen the time card Monday, correct it, and notify your approver to approve the modified report. And, by so doing, restart the entire time report validation process. 
Ooh, ooh, I work for a government contractor, too. We don’t have that rule about timesheets, but we have another silly rule. We’re allowed flex time, so if you have to leave early one day, you can make it up by working extra time another day, as long as you’ve put in 80 hours by the end of the 2 week pay period. But the timekeeping system expects you to enter your full scheduled hours every day. So if you have to leave an hour early on Monday for a doctor’s appointment or whatever, you have to have to put an hour of PTO (paid time off) on your timesheet to account for the missing hour. Then later in the week when you’ve made up the time you have to go back and remove the PTO, which the timekeeping system will now allow because now you have enough hours on your timesheet.
Come to think of it, the fact that I have to go through this whole timesheet rigamarole even though I’m salaried is itself kind of inane, but that’s how the government wants it done.
I had a similar one. We were strongly encouraged to come up with ideas.
I suggested that “Bring your daughter to work day” be changed to “Bring your child to work day”.
I got back a four paragraph screed of why my idea was bad and against all common decency, etc.
Two years later, they changed it… to “Bring your child to work day”. The HR person who came up with that gREAT idea was publicly honored and given a cash reward.
Regarding IBM dress code. I remember reading that IBM did not want their employees to stand out when visiting client’s sites, so the safe option (for offices back then) was a blue dress suit.
One of my co-workers used to regularly show up wearing a white blouse and a navy blue skirt. Back then the books that Microsoft shipped with their PC software were uniformly (pun intended) white tops and blue bottoms. We used to ask her if that was her Microsoft uniform…
There was a smoking rule where you couldn’t smoke within 20’ of the building entrances. The idea being that non-smokers shouldn’t have to walk through a cloud of smoke to get into the buildings. So folks would go outside and stand around the corner of the buildings, away from the doors, and smoke there. They even had those butt disposal things positioned at the corners so that the areas didn’t get littered with butts. But then someone in management decided it didn’t look good to have people standing around the corners smoking, so they changed the rules: smoking only in the smoke hut between buildings, or in your car. Which led to non-smokers having to walk through clouds of smoke in the parking lot (but not at the doors!) and of course parking lots littered with butts. So much better!
I understand why your company is so persnickety. Anecdote time:
In the 80’s I worked for a very small division of a very large defense contractor. About 70% of our division’s business was making a component for a single large government program. One day, we were all summoned to a mandatory all hands, where we were lectured on time card rules and discipline and a new set of policies and internal audits was announced.
It seems that auditors from the major program had been to our site and done a time card audit and found so many problems that they let our division management know that they were considering shutting down the contract our division had to supply the program, and maybe eve debarring the division, which would have meant shutdown of the site and, of course, layoff of the entire workforce.
It turns out that time card errors in favor of the company are considered fraud and time card errors in favor of the government are considered unfair business practice. Both are federal crimes and can lead to fines and debarment.
At one time, the hospice nurses where I lived wore white blouses and socks, with navy blue pants and shoes. It was not a uniform, just a dress code for street clothes. I saw a woman dressed that way, and it was a situation where it wasn’t inappropriate to ask if she was a hospice nurse, so I did. Nope - she was simply dressed that way.
Six of us traveled to a week-long conference, and our per diem was really a “per week”: Here’s X amount for your food this week.
One older guy had a great idea: “Okay, everyone save up $150-200 for the last night. If I can find it again, I know a little French hole-in-the-wall that serves the best steak you’ll ever have.” We loved having cheap dinners all week, dreaming of that steak.
(Oh, by the way, we found the bistro, and the steak was worth it).
The contractor I mentioned in post #56 had similar rules (naturally) but we didn’t have to to the final submission until Monday morning the wee after (hooray). We did have trouble accounting for all those bits and bobs to get to 40 hours though. One guy discovered the serial number on the soda vending machine matched the format of our timekeeping inputs so he started using it, ten minutes here, a half-hour there per week.
They always went through without a challenge until he left a couple years later. Being chicken I never had the nerve.
At my previous employer, you could expense the actual cost of your meals instead of just getting per diem, but there was a daily limit. I think it was around $50-60 per day for domestic travel. So what most people did, including myself, was:
Breakfast: Free continental breakfast from the hotel.
Lunch: Something cheap from the company cafeteria.
Dinner: Someplace pretty nice (although obviously not $150-200 nice).
I hope this person got to work in a vaccination center last year - sounds like he already had the training for the waiting room.
Dumb dress code was that shorts could only be worn with tights or hose. Yes, also for men.
At first my company’s rule was that groups of employees traveling and eating together had to request separate bills, even though they were all getting paid by the same company. Reasonably, they relented and announced that we could get one bill for the table. So, we’d take turns being the one to pay the table’s bill at subsequent meals.
Soon after this change, the administrative person who would process my expense reports, apparently not aware of the change, asked if I would mind a personal question. I said no. She asked in all innocence, “So, what do you do? Do you not eat for a really long time, and then eat a whole lot?”
sorry Briny Deep, you have to work for Federal Gov’t (in my case Military) to know how petty their reports are. If on TDY (temporary assignment), no detail just flat payment. BUT if you were transferring permanently (PCS), you had to itemize each meal amount, and you couldn’t cite same amount each day, it had to be unique amount