Where is your workplace on the crazy meter?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I posted here before about training my replacement at a previous job. Bobbie was a nice enough lady, not very bright, but I thought I could train her to do the simplest functions of the job (night audit at a hotel. Really, it’s hitting a few buttons. Normally, if there’s a screw-up, I can fix it, but in her case, I just instructed her to leave those to the owner/manager.)

One night during training, the conversation meandered toward pets, since both of us were dog lovers. Something was said about bringing a dog to work. I had done so before - once, because the K9 couldn’t be left unattended in the apartment, and once because we’d had an armed robbery, and the owner gave me her blessing to bring one of my critters to the office. No one, but NO ONE, was going to hurt me if my great Pyrenees could help it, but he was not aggressive at all. Just a big love of a mutt who loved his mommy. At any rate, I didn’t mention these things to Bobbie, just told her that she should ask the owner before undertaking that sort of thing…

“Oh, I have Pookie with me right now. He’s in my purse.”

Bwuh?!

Turns out, Bobbie brought little Pookie’s urn with her everywhere, because she was afraid someone would break into her house and steal it. As in, target the urn specifically, because obviously, this urn of ashes was very, very valuable to everyone…

Bobbie didn’t last very long at that job. Sadly, she had lasted longer than the three previous hires…

I’m currently an at-home mom, with a 15-year-old boy, and girls ages 12, 3, and 1. Obviously, this is among the crazier places I’ve worked!

22

Thankfully, my current workplace is extremely sane. Which is why I’m trying real hard to get a permanent job there.

23

Sure – we aim to please!

Let’s see – how about the budgets this year that finally came out (2 periods late) because apparently, the bean counters couldn’t count the beans right or the executives didn’t (or wouldn’t) well, execute (or whatever they do), I guess.
So now, everyone “down below” is grappling with sales and payroll deficits that we had no idea even existed because the budgets weren’t finalized on time. (This is a fairly large corp., BTW. No excuse for not having the numbers out in time, IMO.) Our yearly PES’s (raises) are based on these numbers. Kind of hard to hit a home run when you don’t even know how big the field is, y’know? No explanation for this, incidentally, “just deal with it.”

Many businesses these days are still struggling due to the current economic situation. Our industry is holding on, but facing all the usual pressures – tight credit for potential expansions; payroll pressure; benefits pressure; etc. The squeeze is on, and it’s on hard. Right here in my own business area, IBM just laid off hundreds of people. These were high paying jobs, and their loss will reverberate throughout the community.

So what’s a company to do?

How about hire an executive level VP to a “cheerleader” position to beat the drum about how great things are and how happy everyone should be to be working, no matter how tight the budgets seem?

And maybe she could send out ebullient, smiley-faced laden daily e-mails with encouraging stories and quotations C&P’d from the ‘net. Not kidding here, folks. DAILY. (I secretly think she has a random generator that does this, but no proof). I’d copy some in (you’d laugh out loud, I promise), but I actually do need my job, as I’m the sole provider for my family at the moment. I can’t even read these things any more, they’re so galling.

And lest I be accused of “just bitchin’”, my unit was one of only two out of about twenty-ish in our entire zone whose numbers were in for the last fiscal. Both my departments were in the black for year end. I’m carrying my weight, and under near ridiculous circumstances.

There’s lots more Dilbert-esqueness: “asset recovery”; “benefits enhancement”; (note: enhancement means “cuts”); etc., etc…

I leave you with this link, harvested from a thread right here on the dope - the best folks on earth…
Despair.com

Scroll through those, if you’ve never seen them before. Simply awesome.

24

I can think of 3-4 co-workers, who, if shown this post, would immediately join me in a chorus of “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little.”

Does that count for some crazy points?

25

Oh yes, I’m familiar with this schtick. With a slight twist: We get a factory quote for some material that specifies the lead time to deliver said material. This lead time is 12 weeks. Yet the salesmen will tell their customer they can have it in 6 and then it’s up to the rest of us to either 1) beg, plead, threaten our vendors to make it happen or (the more likely scenario) B) get yelled at by the customer & salesman for the “extra” 6 weeks it takes to manufacture and ship the product.

26

Not too crazy, but I do keep a file of crazy e-mails we get, and 90% of the time they are from an aol.com e-mail address. For example: “wait a minite am not bidding on something that only cost 5 bucks for nine am changing the bid to five bucks am dum but not stupid change the bid to five”

I semi-retired coworker said this to me today “And he was delexis.” She meant dyslexic. I think he may not be the only one. :wink:

27

I have a sad-crazy story. Bowing to union pressure, my employer just offered a “Living Wage” rise to hourly employees. But, since there’s no room in the budget for salary increases, managers have been instructed to schedule these employees for fewer hours in order to fund the difference.

Not enough forehead slaps in the world…

28

So far not too bad.

A few years back, I worked for a different consulting firm from the one I’m at now. They aren’t really that well known like a Deloitte, Accenture or Mckinsey, but they do make a lot of top 50 lists.

They were crazy in that they had a bit of a “work hard / play hard” mentality. Which loosely translates to lots of happy hours, followed by some managing director slapping his card down at the next bar, followed by possibly another bar, followed by bottle service at the Gansevoort Hotel, followed by bottle service at Flashdancers or Scores (strip clubs). Usually followed up by me working from home the next day.

Not surprisingly, a lot of the senior guys in their late 40s and 50s were divorced or had secret love nests and whatnot where they banged their girlfriends on the side.

29

I work in a factory, we just resumed production after our regularly scheduled summer shut-down period. Skilled trades personnel work very hard during each shutdown, as it’s the only opportunity to really rip things apart and install new equipment without disturbing production flow. Like, ‘14 days straight of 16 hour days in the July heat’ hard.

July 4 was the twelfth day of the marathon and most folks took a break at nightfall to step outside and watch whatever fireworks were happening nearby. A couple of guys had brought a few cherry bombs and bottle rockets to light off, cool. A few fellows deemed the noise from those fireworks paltry and insufficient and decided to make their own boom. By borrowing an acetylene tank from one of the welders, filling a 30-gallon garbage bag with gas and exploding it.

They forgot to account for the static electricity possible as a shiny new plastic bag uncrinkles itself as it’s being inflated. There was indeed a giant boom, car alarms went off a few hundred feet away in the parking lot and luckily no one got hurt, but that shit was stupid crazy.

30

Right out of college I worked for Mobil Oil in Dallas, and that place was all sorts of crazy.

1991 was not so…enlightened in the ways of sexual harassment. I would routinely see women get spanked on the ass as they passed by my coworkers.

Every single day for lunch the office would go to a strip club and drink, then go back to work and do basically nothing. Driving of course - almost always racing each other back. (Drinking and driving being such a non-issue in Texas at that time that I almost forgot to mention it here). It was one of these outings while I was buzzed and stuffing dollar bills into a g-string at Noon that I first decided that I should maybe find another career.

But the last straw was the ultimate in corporate waste, something I have never experienced since. Each time a purchase order was placed for one of our oil & gas subsidiaries, that office received a Telex copy of each purchase order, as well as a soft copy through CICSP4, but for some reason I was requirerd to print another copy on expensive letterhead, (heavy stock, legalese pre-printed on the back), and DHL overnight these copies. We’re talking several dozen mailed out each day, shipping overnight to Norway, Nigeria, Venezuela, Singapore, and Turkey.

Confused by this process, I checked with the people in each country using the new “Profs” email system, and discovered that in each case, the clerk in those locations signed for the package, then threw them away without opening them b/c they already had a hard copy and a soft copy. Delighted with this opportunity to present my findings which would result in saving hundreds of dollars a day, I went to my boss beaming with pride, with the email printouts from those locations confirming that they didn’t need these copies and that they were, in fact, just being thrown out.

My boss waved me away and said “we’ve always done that, so just keep doing it.” I put in my two weeks a few days later.