forgot to add, with PCS I had to furnish receipts, but not temporary trips–Go Figure!
My last government job before retiring was in a secure facility containing separately locked office areas accessed according to need-to-know, where we pretty much sat in cubicles all day doing research, running models, and writing up reports. On very rare occasions, some of us might be required to visit other agencies for meetings, or we might have visitors in one of our conference rooms.
From the time the command was created, there was a rule that whenever an employee had to interact with someone from outside our command, business attire was required. Other than that, they really didn’t care as long as essential bits were covered, and t-shirts with graphics were prohibited. So jeans, polos, sneakers, sweatshirts were all fine in cubicle land.
That is, until this gung-ho Marine general became our head honcho. No more jeams. No more sneaks. He didn’t go so far as to require women to wear dresses or for the men to wear ties, but I’m pretty sure that’s what he wanted. And the kicker was - he wasn’t even located at our site - his office was several hundred miles away. And there had never been a complaint about any of us dressing inappropriately for meetings and such.
But, yanno, black jeans look a lot like black pants, and black sneaks look like black oxfords… 
Right after I retired, the command was reorganized and came under the Air Force - I have to wonder to what degree things relaxed.
When I was a baby Ensign, assigned to the Pentagon, working in the Navy Communications Center in 1980, we had a similarly gawd-awful schedule - two 12-hour mid shifts (7PM-7AM), then 24 hours off, then 2 12-hour day shifts (7AM-7PM), then 96 hours off. I don’t think I got decent rest the entire 6 months I worked that schedule.
And it was a joint Comm Center - the Army and USAF managed to do the same job with three normal 8-hour shifts. I certainly hope that when email became widely used, that stupid schedule went away.
So, if you really liked the (within-budget) dinner you had at some restaurant, you couldn’t go back another day and order it again?
Big corporate job -
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You couldn’t expense meals if you were in town. Which means that my boss would come in from overseas and if I went to dinner with him, it was on my own dime. I usually did it once per trip because I know sitting in a hotel room alone is a bummer, but really, part of the reason that you have people travel from site to site is to gain personal connection - meals help with that, does it kill you to expense a few meals.
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when I joined the company you could carry over two weeks of vacation. After the first six months I was there vacation became use it or loose it. Their fiscal year end was a calendar year end - that meant that not only did you have to use all your vacation by the end of the year (great, Christmas!) it also guaranteed anyone doing any work that was on a fiscal cycle (like getting software installed so they could be capitalized) had their vacation requests for the end of the year denied. So most of the IT department ended up losing vacation while working through Christmas. I did not work through the next Christmas season.
They did a lot of other stupid nickel and dime sort of things.
One solution would be a slightly different tip.
I work in a factory and management has knee jerk reactions to incidences/occurrences where people had a minor injury or accident.
One of the latest is we use 4 wheel flat carts (like in home improvement stores) to haul garbage or cardboard to the dumpster/compactor. A worker was pushing the cart down the hallway and another worker abruptly stopped in front of them causing the cart to hit the other worker and to fall back onto the cart. Some minor bruising was the injury. In the 20+ years I have been here this has never happened before. Probably never happen again. So instead of just reminding everybody to be aware of there surroundings within the plant the new “law” is that you had to pull these carts instead of push to eliminate the possibility of running into a person. The carts were designed to be pushed, rear swivel wheels, so they don’t track straight behind you and also now your heels/ankles hit the cart as you are walking.
Yep. But thankfully they dumped that system after a while.
Maybe two days but not for a whole week. Just change the tip by a dime.
After leaving the Regular army in late '91, I went into the Army Reserves as a (at that time) a 67U Medium Helicopter Repairer. This was the maintenance MOS for the Boeing CH-47 Chinook - Wikipedia.
My unit in Dallas was an “Intermediate Maintenance” Company, so we had techs for everything in the Army inventory that could lift, but only had Hueys and Kiowas for our own integral aircraft, and the policy (which actually is a pretty sensible one, if you think about it) was that you had to be type-rated to work on any aircraft. So as a Chinook tech, I couldn’t touch the Hueys or Kiowas. I could assist, in that I could pass tools to the Huey or Kiowa tech as they were working; I just couldn’t turn a wrench myself.
Okay, fair enough.
BUT! The entire Chinook section (six of us) always got detailed to the Supply Room on Drill Weekends. And the Supply Sergeant would have us spend Saturday mornings moving everything on THIS side of the Supply Room over to THAT side of the Supply Room. Then we’d be released to KP Duty for lunch. After lunch, the Supply Sergeant would have us move everything on THIS side of the Supply Room over to THAT side of the Supply Room. So basically, we just put everything back where it was before we started that morning.
Sunday was Rinse/Repeat of Saturday.
For some reason, just about every 67U in that unit (including me!) wound up with Work Exemptions (real-life work schedule conflicts with Drill obligations) for Drill.
My current job is working maintenance at an agricultural research facility; my department and job duties supports the greenhouses and grow chambers (as opposed to general facility and utility work), and we run 24/7/365, so we have a rotating weekend work schedule.
Weekends are easy duty; watch a computer monitor to observe greenhouse and grow chamber conditions (which are automated, and will throw an audible alarm and phone text message if conditions vary too far from setpoints), and light PM duty (Is it on fire? No. Has a water pipe broken, spewing water everywhere? No. Everything is good!). As I say, easy duty.
TPTB decided we need to be doing more work on the weekends. Including assigning work orders that require more than one person to complete (like a two-man rule for any rooftop work, even on a flat roof with adequate coping and safety rails). Or a 12-hour job for a one-man, 8-hour shift.
I was on the cybersecurity auditing team for a DoD agency. We helped get systems their security approvals before going live, as required by Federal law, and DoD regulation. It’s a very bureaucratic process, but it’s the only security review these systems got, so that’s not what I’m complaining about.
The process required special security documentation, some of it was a couple hundred pages of dense technical analysis. It was our job to develop all that in cooperation with the Project Managers and technical experts. It was also reviewed by security experts at the overarching agency. So that’s not what I’m complaining about.
What I mostly came here to complain about was that the unit commander got it in his head that no document could leave his organization without his signature. Which would have been fine if I or my manager could play Radar O’Reilly and say “Sign this, Colonel”. But he decided no, he wasn’t going to sign anything until all his department heads signed first. That’s only part of what I’m complaining about.
Before the department heads would sign, each of their admins would have to review it and made recommendations. Several hundred pages of technical docs out of their area of expertise. Which took days, and we were on deadline. So we on the cybersecurity team had to walk each document through from one department head’s admin to the next, waiting for the department head’s signature. But even that’s not what I came here to complain about.
This was in the late aughts, so all this was on paper, no electronic signatures. Which is also not what I came here to complain about.
What I came here to complain about was the Colonel’s admin, who would look at the printed and signed signature page, and mark in red pen the end every Oedipal sentence if it looked like there was only one space at the end. He’s gotten it in his head that there was a DoD policy requiring two spaces at the end of every sentence, like these were typewritten documents. We tried explaining to him that MS Word used proportional spacing, so when printed the width of spaces would expand or contract to fit words on lines. His clue-repellent field could not be penetrated. So we had to reprint the signature page of the document none of the department heads read, get them each to re-sign the signature page, take it back to the Colonel’s admin and beg him to have the Colonel sign it. So we could submit it to the security group at the overarching agency.
This all started in my last 6 months working for that agency. In that time of the dozen or so computer systems my team worked on, maybe two got their security documents signed by the Colonel.
And the process was utterly useless. We submitted the docs to the overarching agency “provisionally” without the Colonel’s signature, so we could get our security approval for the systems by deadline. The uber-agency didn’t care about signatures, and approved the systems. The system managers cared about approval, not signatures and certainly not how many coprophagic spaces were at the end of a sentence. Everyone was happy, except my team had a boatload of extra work for no reason.
A couple of years later that agency was dis-established, and parts absorbed in other agencies. I was not surprised.
Yeah. My favorite: everyone had half hour lunch break(which we were legally required to have)BEFORE opening for brunch shift on the weekends. This joint opened at 7am, closed at 2pm. I think the logic was that then we all got our break time and something to eat, but having to be “on” shift for a full 8 hours with no breaks after “lunch” is not healthy or sustainable.
Someone must have bruised themselves or gotten a cut from that - report it! Of course, that would probably end up getting the carts banned entirely, so probably not actually a good idea.
My eldest ran into something similar; but it was independent policies that were insane when combined.
He was a regional airline captain, and management decreed “No crewmember shall perform or assist in any duties once beyond their hours-of-service limit”. This makes sense by itself.
An FAA rule requires an aircraft crewmember occupy any cockpit seat that is vacated (pilot goes to bathroom etc.). This is to ensure no one occupies the cockpit alone (think: GermanWings) and to make it a little tougher for terrorists/etc. to get to the plane’s controls. This also makes sense by itself.
But together, these need to allow for some corner cases. While dead-heading home in the 1st class seat immediately behind the cockpit, he watched as the Captain became violently ill and had to spend the remainder of the flight in the lav. And a flight-attendant was installed in the left seat, while he, current and qualified on the jet, had to sit in back. I’m pretty sure most of us would prefer a qualified captain up there, even if he’s tired.
Disclaimer: Happened many years ago, and I could be confused on FAA rules .vs. management decrees.
What I ended up doing is shrugging and saying “OK, no breaks in the restaurant business”, and then I just took small unannounced breaks according to my judgment - either when I was caught up, or I just really needed to take a breather.
So, by the manager telling me there were no breaks, she ended up causing me to take more breaks than I otherwise would have.
That could happen or more likely “safety training” on how to properly pull carts (that were designed to be pushed) and sign off on the new SOP. So far everybody has mostly ignored this new rule so unless you see an upper management person or a safety manager the cart gets pushed. Speaking from experience in 3-6 months they will forget they made this rule anyways.
They made a rule at my job where if you “weren’t authorized to sit” you couldn’t sit down on the job or else management would scream at you if they saw you sitting down. Since I work at a USPS mail processing facility this wound up meaning management started taking chairs out of places that normally had chairs, the cases (wall of cubby holes where you toss mail in) all had their chairs taken away so you had to stand while doing it. The chairs people would sit on waiting for mail to arrive were all taken away. They even took the chairs away and raised the desks of all computer related jobs so now people who primarily worked on computers had to stand while using them.
While the first 2 have stayed, there was enough outrage about removing chairs for computer users they had to get rid of all the standing desks and put back the normal desks with chairs after only a week.
Heh. Some folks where I worked asked if they could have a standing computer desk. I was asked if I wanted one. I responded that I want on I could use while laying down.
Try a web search for “recliner computer chair”.
This seems reasonable. Our mailroom is handled in-house, but we have a policy saying employees can’t have personal items delivered to the company. A few years ago, one of our employees ordered a big screen television that was delivered and it was just a pain in the ass for the guys in the mailroom.
For several years in Thailand, I worked at a chain of test-taking schools in Thailand owned by an eccentric Chinese-Thai businessman. It was similar to Kaplan here in the US. His whims were legendary. One time as a benefit, he came up with free haircuts for everyone. You just showed up at this particular babrber shop in Bangkok, tell them you were his staff, and no charge. I had my own barber, and haircuts in Thailand are cheap, so I passed … at first. But soon the general manager kept calling me up asking if I’d taken advantage of it yet, and it became apparent that this was a non-optional requirement.
So I started going to the barber shop, and they were actually pretty good. Kind of an upper-class place, which was this guy’s style, although still cheap by Western standards. One day I went there, and the ladies all seemed kind of embarrassed. Then one finally asked me if I had spoken with this guy recently. It turns out that like the majority of his whims, he soon grew tired of it and had blown it off. He’d stopped paying them for the haircuts. They’d already given me one, and I insisted on paying for that one, them finally taking my money amid protestations that I correctly pegged as just the Thai way of being polite. I never went there again but reverted to my old barber.