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?

@Boyskeepswinging the ban on blue pens used to be quite common.
It stems, at least partly, from the early days of photocopiers, for years lots of them couldn't scan the blue so when documents got photocopied that were in blue ink lots of important information failed to get copied. I worked in several offices in the 80s/early90s where that was a problem (though handy when you wanted to lose some info!). None of them allowed blue ink pens. Lots of forms used to ask you to fill in in black ink too. Of course, that's not a good reason nowadays but some people learn rules early on and don't know the reason then keep promulgating the same rule even when it no longer has a purpose.

Thank you, I have always wondered about the ble pen thing!

We once had an Eastern European line manager. She was as mad as a box of frogs.
She'd burst into the office at half nine on a Monday morning when we were all virtually catatonic as it was our fourth early shift (she only worked Monday to Friday). One day she beamed at me and asked "katseyes, are you glad to be at work!?"
l replied "XXXXX, l weep with joy every morning at the thought of coming in here!"
All l heard was my team sniggering. Apparently Eastern Europeans don't 'get' sarcasm.
On another occasion l was 'summoned' to her office. "katseyes, do you understand how to use the search facility on the system?" (l was a manager, and l'd been using the system for 10 years before she came to England!).
"Well l think so, XXXXX but l've only been using it (and training staff to use it) for 10 years, so l may possibly have missed something"

She used to ring us (managers) at home on days off. She persistently rang the permanent night shift manager at about 10am when she'd just got to sleep. And it was never about anything important. Always just something that had already been discussed, or could have waited. l managed to get that stopped by putting the duration of the phone calls on my TOIL sheet at time and a half.
"You can't do that!"
But l did. And so did the other managers, so our senior manager 'had a word.'
She once rang me at home on the landline when l was on rest days and began with the question "Where are you?!"
Erm.... l answered the landline. Take a wild guess.

lf one of the managers sanctioned any of our staff a half day when it was quiet, she'd have us in the office, telling us that they (and we) should "plan their leave." No understanding of the fact that surely it was better to let them off when the workload was quiet, and we were otherwise fully staffed. lf myself or one of the other managers asked for time off at short notice (the rule was, over the early/late shifts, one manager had to be on duty. lf one was off, the other one had to be in work), she'd demand to know why we wanted the time off.
Strangely, that stopped after l looked her in the eye and announced that l was ovulating and needed to go home to have sex.

Our senior manager was furious with her. She said that she trusted us to manage our staff and resources, and that there was no reason to ask why we wanted time off unless more than one person requested leave at the same time.

One place I worked you weren’t allowed out of your chair. My back was sore one day so I stood up as sitting was making it painful. I stood up, stretched and shook out my arms and legs then sat down (30 seconds tops) saw my manager glaring and got an e-mail to say ‘the only reason to be out of your chair is if it’s on fire!’ We also could have no food, drinks, stationery, jackets, bags at our seats. Phone and pc only.

I worked in one company setting up new accounts.

One day head of department came running up to my desk and told me to set up a new account for a company.
No I didn't need to do the usual checks, no I didn't need an address as he would take full responsibility for it and they had promised to pay after the Rugby World Cup.

Knowing the guy was an idiot I added a few lines in Customer Details saying exactly why the account was set and who had told me to do it.

6 months later the MD, the Finance Director, my supervisor and the idiot came marching up to my desk asking me to put in an account number and explain why I set this account up.

Staring back at me was the account with no address
Clicked on Customer Details for all to read.

Idiot told me to set up this account. No checks to be done as Idiot said they were going to pay after the Rugby World Cup.
Didn't say which World Cup.

Idiot looked very flustered as he suddenly realised that he was responsible for the £750k missing equipment they had taken and not paid for.

Apparently they had been discussing calling the police on me.

Gwenhwyfar In theory everyone was supposed to save all emails to the shared drive. However the two family members who ran the company were both technophobes. So they made us all print off every email with clients and file them in date order, because they were worried that the equipment would fail and we would lose that correspondence. So I suggested just printing off important emails. But no I had to print off and file in date order every single email, "just in case". So it was not just me.
This meant that each paper case file was incredibly thick and totally useless if you actually wanted to find anything in them.
I am old so have worked with people when computers were first coming in, and some of them really struggled. So I would have understood if this was 10 years ago, but it was last year.

The systems to record incoming and outgoing post used to be fairly common in offices in the distant past. But anywhere with any commonsense has got rid of this a long time ago. Some places though seem to cling on to the way things have always been done.
Not sure about other offices, but I know I had to do it when working for the council for all outgoing post. It was because there was a lot of stamps used and it was a procedure to stop stamps being stolen by employees or employees sending lots of personal letters out.

I was once offered a bottle of Frangelico to come into the office early and hoover because the boss decided the cleaner was shifty. Same boss insisted anybody with a "foreign" sounding name had to have an alter-ego for client calls, so Pembe became Jessica, Ahmed was Dave.

Then there was the company that never actually stated how long our lunch break was. We decided to nip to KFC for a sales day lunch and came back to a SCATHING company-side email about how people who weren't hitting target shouldn't be taking lunches, including doctored images from Glengarry Glen Ross that read Coffee KFC is for closers. That and the unspoken "yes, we know it says 9-5:30 in your contract but if you're not in from 7-7 we're going to fire you"

Ohhh! And the snow day where the entire country shutdown, one of my colleague wrote off his car (and has to take his trip to hospital as unpaid leave) and we had to, and I quote "work longer and harder because that's what we do", then sent the other half of the company home. I had to walk home 4 miles in the dark in blizzard conditions thanks to that.

Also the local paper who insisted we needed to keep cold calling for newspaper ads on Christmas Eve. Yes, because sorting your marketing out is going to be your priority today.

I was working for minimum wage in a shop and they demanded I stayed behind for a further 4 hours after my shift to serve refreshments at an event they were hosting. They gave me two days notice and it was unpaid and no time off in lieu! I left a couple of months later after I overheard the business owner get into an argument with my boss which resulted in him slapping her!

Several call centre jobs which were just awful. Managers putting you in for 'compulsory' overtime as you're the newbie and noone else wants to. Getting disciplinaries for toilet breaks outside the regulation 3 breaks a day (if you had heavy periods you were screwed!) I once had to get a colleague to verify I was indeed really ill and needed to leave work and seek medical attention (despite having taken no previous sick day in the past year). I spent the next 3 days in hospital on a drip due to severe dehydration from being told off for taking breaks to get some water during a heatwave at work.

On the flip side, I'm now a joint business owner, pay the upper end of average salary for my region for counter staff and have had someone insist they receive a promotion or will leave. Bizarrely they, (unprompted) tell customers how much they love the job compared to anywhere they've worked previously. They want me and DP who own the business to put them in charge so they can get a payrise. Oh and they've also called in sick/asked to leave early for at least one shift a fortnight since last July (which we've not brought up with them to date as they're otherwise pretty good at the job!)

In my first job, the creepy owner used to come and take my bin, leave it in the safe overnight and go through it. In the old days with cassettes from the electric typewriter... he used to go through the cassettes to see what I'd typed, and what I had wasted rubbish-wise. He also used to go through my (not shared) desk drawer and told me off for having tampons in there.

melissasummerfield How the hell are they supposed to enforce that?! I never wear matching undies or shave my legs, (and I wouldn't even if I was told to.)

The most stupid rule I can think of is we're not allowed to wear gloves, even if our hands are cracked and bleeding, as it spreads germs. I'd have thought bleeding on people's food was worse? Although it seems that rule has changed because we now have to wear gloves if we're touching raw burgers (but not when handling raw bacon, sausages or fish.)

We had a manager who didn't like us talking or listening to music because it meant we weren't concentrating, didn't like us drinking water because it would spread germs, would tell us off for not smiling enough, once questioned me about going to the toilet, the list goes on... She seemed lovely outside of work and was really kind when my nan died and I'd found out just before my shift started, but working with her was a nightmare.
I also had a team leader who expected us to justify why we wouldn't do overtime, (because 'I don't want to' apparently wasn't a good enough reason,) and I once got put down for overtime I hadn't agreed to and only found out when I'd phoned in the day before for something completely different! Then there's them phoning me when I'm off sick and pestering me, or asking me to come in on days when I've phoned in sick, or phoning me on my days off and asking me to come in. Not going to happen, I need time to plan a disruption in my routine.

It was suggested that I ask to go to the toilet or wait till my break time my response was I'm 40 and I've had three kids he stared at me I stared right back at him I really didn't stay there too long and I never asked to use the loo either

Long time ago. 1970s. I was about 18. Worked in engineering company. Part of my job was to get old or standard drawings ( technical drawings long superseded by cad cam and the like) out of the large drawers and take them over to the Drawing Office. To do this I had to cross the shop floor as the tech drawing boys lived in a windowed room above it.
Called into the office of Hilda, head of the typing pool. She was very cross and handed me a large, shapeless cardigan. I was to wear it every time I went on one of these journeys as I was “distracting the men”
We were not allowed to wear short skirts, or trousers, had to wear a bra (1970s remember) no bare legs and “discreet” make up only.
One coffee break, after another telling off from the mad old bat my friend and I got out of the window. It was 1976, we had another job by the following Monday.

I used to work in HK.

Owner of company made us work on a Sat until 4pm. When lobbied to drop it he said his employees wanted to be there on a Sat. 13 years later I see their office is still open on Sats.

Same office - whenever anyone got a pay rise HR told everyone and then you were expected to take your department out to celebrate. Depending on how big your pay rise was, decided the restaurant. No point to the pay rise then as you ended up spending it.

I worked in nurseries and most treat the staff terribly. One place our staff room was outside under the verandah next to the nappy bins, we also had to pay to use the urn for hot water for tea. I not being allowed to call in sick, being threatened with management going through our phones to make sure we didn't have any of the parents phone numbers incase we babysat for them. The worst moment was the manager shouting across the yard, I couldn't hear what she was saying so I walked over to her, she was telling me a child had got out the gate. The nursery was next to a cliff, and rather than get off her arse and quickly get him, she risked his Life.

I have done projects on how from the beginning of the tube toothpaste stripes start. This involved taking lots of old fashioned film of squeezed out toothpaste on rulers, to Boots to be developed. Learnt nothing though, for the record seems totally random.

I worked for a company as an audio typist/administrator there was only three of us based I the office all women on low wages about 10p above min wage and five directors who came in from time to time. They were so stingy we had to clean the offices including the toilets. The heating wasn't aloud to be higher than 14 degrees. They had tonnes of old paperwork that needed shredding so gave us a home shredder to do it by hand the complained it was taking to long. You were only aloud a week off at a time and god help you if you asked for one day extra. Obviously the directors went off for weeks on end but not us.

The stupidest thing was I asked one of the directors if I could have my replacement phone delivered to the office and he said fine. All the directors got their Amazon etc sent there. When it arrived he happened to be there with another director who went mad in front of all of us saying that I shouldn't get things delivered to the company as they can then be lumbered with any debt I have and "you know what these single mothers are like!" I left soon after that even with him trying to get me to stay as in his words "i was the most reliable member of staff they had in a long time" I just replied "I wonder why!"

I was seconded to a different department for a few weeks. It was in a very old building and the tea/coffee making things were in the basement down a steep stair with a rope rather than a banister on one side - nothing on the other.

I was on crutches with a ruptured knee at the time and right outside my office was another tea making station ( provided by the company) so I decided to use these instead. I got caught by the HR director who raged at me and informed me that these were only for the use of HR!

I was only in the office as they didn’t pay sick pay!

I worked in a factory in the early 90s on an industrial estate far out of town with only 1 bus that came once an hour.

Got there at 8am by 11am the snow was a foot deep and not stopping. The radio was giving out constant warnings for parents to collect children from school and if you could leave work to get home do so asap.

We were a kitchen making factory and I worked on the shop floor. We were told we had to stay but all the office staff were sent home.
By midday the bus company announced they were stopping all buses within the hour but still we had to stay. The snow by this point was knee deep.
By 2pm we all downed tools and left. The supervisor said we would be sacked and we were panicking over nothing as we could stay overnight in the factory and work overtime.

It took me 6 hours to walk home that day.
It should have taken 4 but we all stopped at the halfway house inn to warm up

Nobody could get to work the next day as all buses were cancelled and roads blocked. On the third day we made it in to be told we had to work 16 hours each of unpaid overtime to make up for the day and a half we could not work because of the weather.
Office staff did not have to make up their time just shop floor.
It was an awful place to work.

Same place. I was the first aider for our shed and one day I was called to packing for a man who had collapsed. He had a heart attack. I knew he was dead when i got to him but I preformed cpr until the medics came. I was traumatised I knew this man and I was only 19.
I was taken in to the managers office told to have a sweet tea and 10 minutes then go back to my station. I was shaking and crying, I had never seen anyone die before. I asked to go home as i was too upset to work. My manager told me to stop making so much of a drama and get on with the job i am paid to do.

I left after being constantly sexually harassed by my supervisor. Who you to shout me in to his office as if i was in trouble then ask me out/make sexual remarks. All the staff thought i was shit at my job as i used to be called in 4 times a week.

Honestly, I'm so interested in the group dynamics at work. I've worked in some places that had really great positive supportive atmospheres, where everyone gave 110% because they genuinely wanted to. And then dreadful places where micromanagement and general weirdness broke everyone down. And abnormal things became normal!

Why is it so hard to just hire good people and treat them well? Most people come to work with a genuine desire to do a decent job and feel like they're doing something worthwhile.

As a manager I remember that whenever I started getting overexcited about pens or coffee, it meant there was something bigger that I was trying to avoid (like the budget)!

"I had a manager and she absolutely forbade us to talk about our boyfriends or husbands or children"

I actually knew someone who bullied her subordinate when she found out she had a boyfriend.

I was working in an office when there were a series of transport strikes. We were told that this was no excuse whatsoever for being late, and that on the dates in question we would have to sign in with the office manager and disciplinary measures would be taken if we were late. On the first occasion we did it, with much grumbling which, combined with the time lost queuing up to sign in, lost many working hours. The second time, without anyone doing anything to plan it, everyone just decided to ignore the edict. We heard nothing more about it, and we suspected the office manager just decided to tell the overall manager that everyone had signed in on time.