Your dumbest workplace rules/policies here

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

Not always. Usually once or twice a week I had this exchange:

Me (10yrs ago): Hello, this is Beaver Falls Dodge. How may I help you?"
Them: I’d like a large with sausage and extra cheese for takeout.
Me: I’m sorry, this is a car dealership.
Them: What? This isn’t Pizza Outlet?
Me: No.

Oh how I wish I had taken their phone number and told them it would be ready in 20 minutes.

Stupid workplace policies? During my very short tenure as a cashier at a local fruitmarket we were required to restock the store when we weren’t waiting on customers. This makes total sense on the surface. Until you learned that even if you had a customer just about to walk up to the register, you were not to stand behind the register. Ever. You had to walk out from behind the counter, around the shopping customer, and restock the produce. Then when the customer was ready to check out, you had to run back around the customer around the counter and back to the register. If there were more shoppers, you could not stay put after that transaction unless they were already in line.

And what did stocking the shelves mean? When I worked there, strawberries were in season. If there were 40 pints of strawberries out and someone bought two, after that transaction you had to run around the counter and put up two new pints of strawberries from under the cooler. At no point were there permitted to be gaps in the strawberries. One time there were six pint missing and one of the other cashiers flipped out. “Oh no! The strawberries need put up! If Dave sees them like this he’ll have a fit!”
That was the most anal retentive place I’ve ever worked. (and one of several reasons I quit after a month)

62

Oh one more comment on the lengthy “timesheet” policy. There are a couple of new people that started here recently, and when we explain to them the “procedure,” they look at us like we’re crazy, because it’s so long and redundant. It seems no other professional office environment does it this way.

63

I work in a restaurant. There is the front door, the back door, and the side ‘emergency exit only’ door. As per corporate policy, the back door is locked at 11 AM (when we open, though the prep cooks are there at 6 AM or 8 AM,) and unlocked only for trash runs, deliveries, and for 15 minutes between 4:00 and 4:15 when most of the night shift people come in. However, lots of people come in at noon…and now have to walk all the way around to the front (parking lot is in the back,) and the same for people who come in at 5. Also, if you need to run outside for whatever reason (forgot something in the car, running to catch a customer who forgot something at the table, etc…) it’s a hassle because you have to find a manger and convince them to unlock it. As far as I can tell, the only reason for keeping the damn door locked is so people don’t take too many smoke breaks. :rolleyes:

There’s one manager who doesn’t care and leaves it unlocked most of the time, and you know what? People don’t take too many smoke breaks. The kitchen staff don’t do it because the rest of us will get pissed at them for leaving the line and making a shit load more work for us, and the servers don’t do it because they have tables to take care of and don’t want their tips to go down for taking too long. It’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

And now one of the newest policies to ensure our food stays cold is to put a lot of ice and some water in the cold trays. But…those damn trays are already refrigerated! I never noticed any of the greens wilting, or the cheese sweating/melting. The veggies, butter, etc… was always cold, yet now we have to have ice in there. The result? Our dressings and veggies freeze. The tomatoes especially end up becoming like ass. Super mushy, ugly color, etc… Plus, at the end of the night when we have to clean, some of the ice melted into water, and then most of that water freezes along the sides of the trays, requiring us to chip out the damn ice with a hammer. Another solution to a non-existent problem.

64

I work with someone who will not call the other agents. He will call me to tell me to all one of the agents to call him. He also will not give you a direct answer to any request for a phone number:

Me: What is Ted’s phone number?
Him: Call Bob and ask him for the number that his ex-brother-in-law use to have, then call that person and ask him for his cousin Jerry’s number and get Jerry to give you his mother’s phone number cause she use to work with Ted’s neighbor’s ex-wife.
Me: Oh.

65

For all of you that have to give a long spiel when answering the phone, none of them sound as long as the ones we had to give when I was in the Navy.

“USS Enterprise CVN-65 Weapons Department. This is a non-secure line. How may I help you sir or ma’am?”
Man, that took a long time to say

66

The “thank you for calling Our Business; this is Alberto, how may I help you?” tends to become “thnkyofahcallinahbisnsizizabehtohowmayahelpyu?”

My current workplace has so many stupid rules it’s hard to pick one. But let me propose this:

  • any ticket to the help desk has not one priority, but three. Each of those means a different thing. The minimum time to create a fix for a bug and move it through all the servers until it’s usable by the customers is 3 working days, because that’s how long it takes to get all the signatures in the 3 different e-forms needed; and yet, the times set by the ticket system on “normal” priority are… 1 working day.

Basically the dumbest policy this company has is never analyzing reality before setting a new policy.

67

If I say PCAOB and Sarbanes-Oxley, promise you won’t faint? I’m going to guess your husband worked at an accounting firm. It is a major SEC violation for a firm to have an employee working on an audit client while directly invested with that client (at least it has been since 2000). It could possibly lead to any/all of the following: auditor-client litigation, forced refund of all billable hours by the firm (think Millions), loss of the ability to list the firm on the client’s financial statement as an ‘Independent Auditor’ (as well as the requirement/obligation to redo the audit for free), fines by the SEC and possibly loss of the ability to accept new clients for a period of time to be determined by the SEC. Oh, and the individual can lose their CPA license and be prohibited from any employment in public accounting too, btw. Arthur Anderson people had some ‘problems’ with complying with this requirement (and that’s why the ‘Big-5’ is now the ‘Big-4’ :eek: ).

The spouses are considered one financial unit by the SEC, btw.

(if it helps, this was all started to make sure auditors were Independent and not just bowing to the whim of Board of Enro… err the client.)

Most if not all of the ‘Big-4’ require disclosure of all of the publicly traded holdings of their managers (and spouses) so that they’ll know if they can sign with a new client or not (and report to the client tracking of all firm holders of their stocks). Signing with a new client while your managers still hold that/those holdings is just asking to be fined by the SEC. The investment data is submitted and input voluntarily and by the the manager in accordance with the AICPA Code of Conduct. A manager or his spouse can refuse, however, as compliance is voluntary. Just like the manager’s continued employment.

If someone was really unhappy about it and wanted to complain to someone, well the Area Code for DC is still 202…

68

My hospital bought the “Blah, blah, blah, I have the time” seminar also. I can guarantee that’s the only sentence you will never hear where I work.

Now they send us emails about how we are faring on customer service surveys. The emails say something like “You scored a 3.453. You need to be at 3.459.”

I don’t actually read the emails- I just scan them because I am usually busy, but two questions always pop into my head when I get the mail: What he heck kind of scale is that? And, if they are serious about making our ‘customers’ happy, then why are they so poorly staffed all the time?

69

I assure you, that I can say that and make it look and sound like you should either kill me and put me out of my misery, or run for your very life.

70

At the <now defunct> furniture I company I worked 5 jobs ago, to try and boost sales of mattresses, we had to ask customers “How’d you sleep last night?” Regardless of the reason they were in the store. Then we had to point out the advantages of purchasing a really fine mattress set.

At the call center I worked 3 jobs ago, the client had the agents ask before placing someone on hold, “May I place you on hold for up to three minutes?” If that’s not the most awkward phrase in English, I don’t know what is. What’s more, we had to check back with the customer within those 3 minutes…everytime we placed them on hold. So a 30 minute hold for a Tier 2 agent was a total quagmire.

Good times.

71

A tale of corporate idiocy. Not as immediately stupid as some of the others… but the company I just resigned from (in some anger), let’s call them HugeCorp, decided to tighten up overheads. Rather than use some intelligent process management, they went for the dumb option, and centralised and offshored everything.

Payroll? Delhi. HR? Bangalore. Accounts? Delhi.

IT support? For a massive UK-based company with hundreds of offices using differing IT systems… Delhi. The result, in the area I worked: for three offices, 50 miles apart, with about 500-600 staff between them, there was only one on-the-ground technician. Who was in each office one day a week, possibly, unless there was an emergency. If anything went wrong, it was a call to some decent but utterly uninformed call center employee. If the IP phones went wrong - well, you’re fucked. We spent days and days doing fucking nothing at all, up against really unrealistic deadlines, because the IT support simply didn’t exist.

I headed up a web delivery team, and we a) couldn’t transfer ZIP or EXE files, b) couldn’t FTP at all, and c) nor could we do anything at all about the streaming media we were meant to be facilitating for the client, because it too was blocked. No exceptions. Not even when that was the bread and butter of the contract.

I hired two staff who had to communicate with a major client on a regular basis. But for two months, they had to use their hotmail accounts to email the client, because the call centers didn’t have their shit together to issue them with the email accounts I’d ordered two weeks before they arrived.

Another ‘clever’ thing HugeCorp did - only allowing an approved suppliers’ list for everything we ever had to purchase. Everything. While this may make sense with regard to stationery supplies or logistics, it’s bollocks when you’re attempting to hire multiple contractors on a week-by-week basis. Or buying advertising space in multiple magazines in last-minute discount deals. Each and every supplier that ever had to be paid by HugeCorp had to be checked out, verified, and approved by a call centre in India, which process took a minimum of 3 weeks. The reasoning was that HugeCorp might be able to get a discount. But where, for example, before this policy I could hire John Doe direct for £200 a day, via the new system I had to hire John Doe via Contractors Inc., who would charge £250 a day (and try for more) plus 20% a day markup, plus a 20% finder’s fee. And on last-minute purchase of advertising on behalf of our clients, well, you snooze, you lose.

Our expenses claims would not be paid unless the original receipts were received at a warehouse in Delhi. The warehouse or the mail lost the receipts on a regular basis. And nothing could be done about it. I was down more than $1,500 when I left. Finally I found a superb guy in India who helped me out and accepted scans of the photocopies I kept as insurance against such a fuckup, but it took about three weeks to find him.

Another ‘clever’ thing was the accounting system that was introduced, that gave senior directors signoff of £20,000 only. Anything above that had to go to the CEOs’ offices. Given that the company was dealing with billions of pounds of revenue per annum, the CEOs, if they had followed their own rules, would have done nothing whatsoever but approve payments all day. So, of course, they delegated everything to their PAs, who spent all day doing nothing but approve payments, until they in turn hired temps to do nothing all day but approve payments. Which isn’t quite the mechanism I think they had in mind when they approved their absurdly short-sighted policies.

It was like Dilbert come to life, yet in a way more absurd than anything I have ever read in Dilbert. An absolute fuckup, and I see nothing but disaster for this company in the future.

72

You’ve got to love the kind of logic that goes into this kind of policy.

Problem: Our customers are frustrated with having to wait on hold for so long without getting helped.
Solution: Don’t let the reps put them on hold for as long.

Surely that will magically improve service times!

The idiot policy that I’ve run into isn’t actually at my place of work, but at some of our customers’ offices. If you send an attachment on an email, sometimes they just… don’t deliver the email. No error message or bounce. No delivery without the attachment. Just… nothing.

I had one guy who was practically livid that I wasn’t returning his emails (giving him a patch) because his stupid IT department was throwing them away and not bothering to tell either of us. God damnit. I’m a software developer, and my customers are, too. Every once in a while we might just need to send fucking executable or zipped attachments to each other.

73

At the company I work for, the Help Desk is not just for opening tickets for computer problems, but also for facility issues. So, for instance, if a toilet won’t stop flushing and the bathroom is flooded, or the A/C doesn’t seem to be working in our section of the building, we can’t just email someone on the facilities staff in our building – we have to call the Help Desk (located in a city about 400 miles away) who will then turn around and notify someone on the facilities staff in our building of the problem.

Oh yeah. And no plants (or anything else!) on top of your cubicles. Something about how the airspace over the cubicles belongs to everybody. Luckily, the only person who cares about this rule is a VP that comes to visit about twice a year.

74

Agreed, I like this one.

I DISLIKE “How may I direct your call?” though. “I don’t know…to whomever can answer my fucking question?” :confused:

75

Our local hardware store instituted a policy of thanking everyone for shopping there. I got thanked four times in one visit. They sounded so desperate that I wished I’d gone to Home Depot.

76

“Welcome to Costco, I love you.”

  • funniest line from Idiocracy.

Does Wal-Mart have greeters anymore? I mean, there’s always someone standing inside the door when I go there, but my entrance is met with just a nod or a few seconds of eye contact. Unlike years past, they never offer me a cart or a basket and don’t ever look happy. They are still typically of Social Security eligiblity age, so the demographic hasn’t changed, but they’re a surly bunch these days.

I really wouldn’t care if they weren’t there, but what are these people getting paid to do? I smile at them every time I go through the door, expecting something along the lines of “wlecome to Wal Mart” or even “hello” but when I’m ignored or brushed off I’m puzzled: did I interrupt them on their break or is their role now more of a receipt checker / security guard? If that’s so, I’ll simply ignore them back from now on.

I’m not being sensitive here, but the greeter quality seems to have gone downhill over the years. When Sam Walton died, I remember wondering if the quality of the greetings would decline as the concept seemed tied to his living legacy.

edit: “quality of greeters” changed to “quality of greetings”

77

Huh. My working theory was that it couldn’t be a conflict of interest for him, since he didn’t know what my holdings were. He does now, though.

78

Tons of policies and rules where I work, many of them ignored/circumvented because they’re stupid or make things inconvenient for our customers.

Example: no non-work-related internet use. Every day, the corporate website, “News Now” has links to industry-related stories. So it’s okay to read the Houston Chronicle’s op-ed about cable vs DSL, but I can’t read the movie reviews there? Ridiculous.

Customers are required to notify us of incoming shipments, which they rarely do. So, we are required to notify them of “unexpected deliveries”, and they are supposed to take possession of the items within a week. Our ship/rec area is full of boxes that have been unclaimed for months.

There are also “strict” housekeeping rules that customers are supposed to follow…no cardboard in their areas, no unapproved power strips, all equipment must be secure in the case of an earthquake, etc. We have to go around every week and note violations. Email warnings are sent out…and ignored with impunity, because we don’t want to piss the customers off.

79

As a customer I’ve seen some odd things in chain restaurants. Moe’s requires every employee to yell, “Welcome to Moe’s!” every time a customer walks in the door. Other restaurants require every employee to sing “Happy Birthday” to any customer who is there on his birthday (tho thankfully I haven’t seen that one lately).

80

Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”