Ridiculous demands from work

[marymarkle]

What ridiculous demands has a workplace made on you?
I left a job a few month ago that insisted I print off and file every email with clients, even though all emails with clients also had to be saved in files on a server. And it really was every email, including emails arranging meetings.
Surely there must be other ridiculous workplaces out there?

Most of my office jobs have been quite sensible but I had a Saturday job with a heinous boss in a pharmacy. He only ever employed girls, we had to wear skirts and no tights (bloody freezing in winter) and he was an arse I’d epic proportions. If there were pricing errors (generally done by the staff in the week) he’d threaten to take it out of the Saturday girls’ pay. He wouldn’t let us talk to each other and if there were quiet times we had to dust the shelves in silence.

Strangely though, one of the other girls needed the morning after pill (I would have never got it there!) and he was absolutely lovey to her. It was like he had a personality transplant.

I was working in a large team implementing a complex new accounting system and accompanying process changes. We brought in one of the Big Four management consultancies to help. They brought with them some whizzy project management software and a young woman whose sole job was to print off the 200 sheets of A4 paper that the project timeline covered...and stick them up with sellotape to a wall in the office in the right order. As all the sheets looked almost identical it was a tricky jigsaw to accomplish and required a small set of steps to be purchased so she could reach the top of the wall. As the project was continually developing, the timeline was printed and stuck up every week...but was always out of date by the time she had finished. It was easier and more accurate to look at the timeline on our computers.
However her boss, the senior consultant, had (according to him) been trained to kill people with his bare hands and his hobbies included shooting fish with a bow and arrow...no one argued with him.

Management Consultancies - all smoke and mirrors bullshit in my opinion!

The snuff rule seems to be quite standard in nuclear facilities, I think more likely because they all date from about 1950. Still wonder who would take snuff in a dirty zone where it would quite literally kill them.

You might be right about ridiculous rules being due to a previous pisstaker. I worked in an org where the head of finance had once worked in a different org where someone bought something expensive and inappropriate on the company credit card, so finance guy banned company credit cards everywhere he was employed after that. As a result I have more than once had to pay thousands of pounds of conference costs (dining, venue hire, catering, equipment etc) on my personal credit card. Which is a bloody nightmare for personal financial management when the expenses aren't paid in time.

@Boyskeepswinging at my high school we were only allowed to use black pens. I'm now in my thirties and still feel just wrong writing in blue ink!

I think the preference for black pens comes from early photocopiers and scanners. Documents written in blue didn't copy well.

I was disciplined for being "too friendly" on the phone. Apparently my male supervisor said it could be misinterpreted as flirting and he'd be keeping an eye on my friendliness

I was nothing more than helpful, polite and yes, fucking friendly!

I eventually made an official complaint about him, as he frequently targeted female employees, and he was given an official disciplinary for sexism....

But was then promoted only 2 weeks later.

The sexism disciplinary was all for show just to shit me up, and I was continuously hounded for being too friendly. I was even accused of "leading on" a lesbian colleague simply because we got along

All women in a former office of mine were told to dispose of all sanitary products in the bins outside the Co-Op about a five minute walk away. No matter rain or shine. It was a hot office, so if you kept it in your bag, 9/10 it stunk. But the manager insists we went out of the building to dispose of them.

Stupid rule that was instigated because some twat set fire to the sanitary bins on three occasions

We had this Christmas thing a few years ago. Thankfully they realised the error of their ways ! We had to soldier on for no extra money or leave while HQ was shut at noon on Christmas Eve. They wanted us to come in on Boxing Day as well if it was our usual day on, until they realised what we would be getting for working a Bank holiday ! Now we all shut early.

I worked in a well known optical company’s call centre whilst I was at uni. The list is endless.

We were told to face the front and not to talk to each other, even when there were no calls.

We were told to raise our hands to ask a question, or to ask permission to go to the toilet, or to get up for a drink (both of which were sometimes not allowed if the phones were busy)

We were only allowed 6 minutes PER DAY to go to the toilet, even on a 12 hour overtime shift (no joke), and we had to log the time we went to the toilet and returned on a sheet every day (I got to the stage of writing ‘minute over allotted time as I needed a shit) etc just to annoy them.

I got told off once for hanging up on a customer who continued to shout, swear, and verbally abuse me, despite the numerous warnings I’d given him to stop. I was told we were to take ‘whatever the customer threw at us’ and ‘put up with however they spoke to us’. I reminded my manager that they paid me crap minimum wage, so nowhere near enough to take that, so I absolutely would not be taking it!

A girl got a disciplinary for being 30 SECONDS late back from break

I could go on, they were an absolute nightmare to work for! Luckily I’ve since graduated and got a job in my field of study! Walking out of that dump was the best feeling in the world

I once taught in a school once where the secretary cut the (small) erasers In half and teachers were allowed a half eraser per half term for their class. One colleague put his on a long elastic attached to the blackboard !! (yes I am that old I taught with a blackboard 🤣!) Sounds minor when compared to some of these posts, but it was galling at the time!

I was once kicked out of an interview for asking how much I would be paid. Was told I didn't care at all about the company and wouldn't be loyal. Never seemed to occur to them I needed to know if it paid enough to cover my cost of living...

A manager I had in the shop I used to work in organised a staff meeting at 4pm for an hour every other Sunday.
He got very cross when they were poorly attended. I heard he accosted one member of staff who did actually work on a Sunday and asked why. The response was "Because I want to go home." It wasn't as if it was about anything that couldn't be told to us during actual working hours.

We did suffer from new owners booking all shop floor staff onto a "training course" that didn't tell us anything we didn't already know - i.e. be nice to customers and at least pretend to look like you want to be there.
Well, except for one thing. We were expected to eavesdrop on customers, especially if they were on the phone to someone and then offer them products to do with the conversation. We all thought this was just too creepy.

We had a deputy manager who was pretty useless. He decided that one member of staff was a pisstaking lazy good for nothing. Actually, said member of staff had a serious health condition and was taken ill at work a few times. I once received a message to pass on to the deputy manager that said that the member of staff had been found on the shop floor looking grey in the face and had been taken to the staff room to await an ambulance.
I told the deputy manager and he went mad. Started ranting on about how this person was not ill at all and that they were just lazy and wasting everyones time. I knew this staff member was in fact very ill but also rather embarrassed by it and usually had to be told firmly to take it easy and to rest when needed. They were on the waiting list for a transplant at the time.
Lucky for them they found a better job.

I have to use a PC program to download the info from the main PC program. I then have to import that info in to excel because both softwares haven't got the function I need.

Essentially, I use two programs because one can't talk to the other, and the first one can't export to excel. I waste about an hour a day. My NHS trust is still working off of a program made in the 90s .

Oh god, loads.

Some random ones. I clerked a school governing body. For which I was required to wear a shirt and tie (no-one else did, not even the staff). I was also required to make tea and coffee - no problems with that, but it took forever to wheel the urn from one end of the school to the other via the only operational lift to the library (down a steep slope !). I was also required to buy chocolate biscuits - posh ones. When I asked how I would be reimbursed, I was told "you're paid quite enough to afford to buy these". 3 months after starting, I was asked by the Head's PA to pop in for a chat, and sat down to what appeared to be a formal capability hearing. I asked why I hadn't been informed of the purpose of the meeting, hadn't been asked to submit papers in advance? They were completely clueless. I used to be a shop steward so ran rings around them. They told me they "had to have the hearing now, as the Chair has taken the morning off work" ! Their main beef appeared to be that

Oh god, loads.

Some random ones. I clerked a school governing body. For which I was required to wear a shirt and tie (no-one else did, not even the staff). I was also required to make tea and coffee - no problems with that, but it took forever to wheel the urn from one end of the school to the other via the only operational lift to the library (down a steep slope !). I was also required to buy chocolate biscuits - posh ones. When I asked how I would be reimbursed, I was told "you're paid quite enough to afford to buy these". 3 months after starting, I was asked by the Head's PA to pop in for a chat, and sat down to what appeared to be a formal capability hearing. I asked why I hadn't been informed of the purpose of the meeting, hadn't been asked to submit papers in advance? They were completely clueless. I used to be a shop steward so ran rings around them. They told me they "had to have the hearing now, as the Chair has taken the morning off work" ! Their main beef appeared to be that

ooops, pressed submit too early there

cont'd

i) that I took my tie off during the meeting
ii) that I didn't send draft minutes within 48 hours of the meeting (the SLA and my JD said 7 working days !)
iii) that I didn't tidy up the library after the meeting, and stack up the chairs (never mentioned by anyone ever, and not in my JD)
iv) that I didn't empty the urn after the meeting (which would have meant me waiting 30 minutes (unpaid) till it was cool enough to tip out)
v) that I didn't call the Chair "Sir" ! and was generally "disrespectful" - after asking for clarification, this essentially meant I was "talking to governors before the meeting" - "this is not your role".

It was like something out of the 19th century. I am ashamed to admit I did a bad thing - I deliberately resigned the morning of a governors meeting, which meant they had to spend a fortune on a cover clerk.

I’ve had some horrendous jobs but the incident which sticks most in my mind is when I worked Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings for a newspaper. My dad was dying of cancer and I was told that, if he died on a Wednesday, I had to still go in! He went and died on a Wednesday and I didn’t go in because I wanted to be with my mother so I was called into a disciplinary meeting. When I found out that the funeral was to be on a Wednesday as well, I left rather than go through the pain!

I worked in a college very briefly, one morning the head came storming in to shout at me because ‘someone has used the medical room, they have left a bloody mess in there, wrappers and blood for God’s sake, you all know that room is not to be used by anyone ....ever’ not a word was said by any of us..... stunned. She walked out and we all fell about laughing. She had to have heard but I didn’t give a shit, unheard of right......someone cutting themselves and going to the medical room to sort it out.....the audacity of them! This was a highly intelligent woman, I am not sure where she would have preferred the person to bleed..... probably quietly, to death at their desk .....you know so they didn’t ‘mess up’the medical room!

A friend of mine lost her job a few years back - "not going to continue employment after the probation period". Among the reasons given were her taking her own notes when being shown how to do the job "it's all in the manual", not carrying out exceptions to the manual, not knowing somehow that certain people had moved on and been replaced when the circulation lists hadn't been updated, and apparently bad grammar (hers was perfect, theirs broke all the rules). Oh and "constantly" farting (which she did once in 6 months when she had a stomach upset). Her supervisor was the manager's daughter, in a local authority job; I don't know about these days, but it used to be a no-no to even work in the same section let alone manage a close relative.

Was told I couldn't go home sick. I almost died.

About 30 years ago in the civil service. A few colleagues and I who were very good at our jobs were taken out of our teams to deliver a high profile project where our expertise was required. We all knew each other very well and got on great. Our manager for this high profile project had just come back from long term sick leave and we were all advised to be sensitive and understanding, which we were.

It all started well enough. Us team members understood our roles and cracked on, getting things done but talking as we worked. We needed to talk to each other to progress the work. The new manager wanted utter silence, which didn't work. At about noon on the first day she stood up. Screamed at us. Called us all disloyal bastards and stormed out in tears. We never saw her again. I'm sure she was in a bad place and nowhere near ready to come back to work but that was bonkers. I hope she found a happier place.

During a meeting I called my boss and his cronies “big swinging dicks”! His face was a picture.....nuff said!!!

I had a summer job for a company of about 49 people. The women worked upstairs and the men worked downstairs and you weren’t aloud to socialise. Apparently there had been too many company pregnancies when everyone worked together!

At the same company the director handwrote his letters for the office junior (me) to type up and print for him to sign. I was warned by the office manager to type it exactly as it was written and not correct spelling or grammar. Typing his mistakes made my teeth itch. He’d sacked the last junior who corrected him because it implied she thought she was better educated than him.