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?

I also used to work with a woman who was about 30 and her DH ran off with a 50 year old and she lost the plot. She was my manager and she made us go out every Friday night with her and clients she fancied. They sexually harassed us as we had asked them out. She threatened us with the sack if we didn't go.
I moved dept because of this and didn't say anything about her but all her friends at work turned on me as she ultimately got into trouble as it all got back to management. I left soon after.

Can I speak up for the stationery nuts as a former controller of the magic stationery cupboard?!
I worked in a charity, PA to a manager with about 10 sub teams below him. The charity easily had another 15 sections like this.
In these 10 sub teams, everyone had their own stationery cupboard, full and overflowing. You couldn't have a pen from one, oh no, you'd have to get it from your own. So I seized power and took control. 10 became 1 and I saved us £10k in the first year.
Do not get my started on the battle of mechanical pencils.
Then I moved onto printers. In an office there could be upto 10 printers, all different sorts, lots of different inks etc. So I got rid of them all, leased multiple photocopiers and saw a saving of £22k
That's £32k of charity money saved, yet I was hated! Many actually tried shouting at me telling me how stupid I was, I smiled explained that whilst there were ongoing redundancies if I could save enough money to cover someone's salary I would. Soon after though the use of individual printers was banned across the company and everyone went to photocopiers, procurement claimed that as their own saving not acknowledging someone else had thought of and trialled it!!!
I own my own company now and we're paper free, not a pen, mechanical pencil or plastic wallet in sight. Bliss

In a previous job we had a kitchen where a lot of the staff (not me) used to eat breakfast before work. Given we didn’t start until 9, the senior partner developed a bee in his bonnet about this and told staff that breakfast had to be all eaten and washed up etc by 8.30. No idea why. He wasn’t even in by that time

I was fairly new in post, had come in on my day off to bring home Meade cakes for charity bake sale.
Female boss "jovially" and publicly sidled up next to me and SPANKED ME REALLY HARD ON THE ARSE. It hurt!
My 11 year old dd was shocked but I just brushed it off and made excuses for her. I should have resigned on the spot because boss turned out to be a highly toxic bully.

Don't let folk spank your arse at work folks.

AmIAWeed I oversaw an office move last year and found desk drawers and cupboards full of hoarded stationery. Most desk drawers are used to store food these days as far as I can see. As for the mechanical pencils - is that people getting a new one instead of replacing the leads? I had a conversation with a co-worker who claimed they don't work with replacement leads. Well, no they don't if you put the wrong size in. I have been asked to provide a vegetable peeler, a grater and a set of 'good, sharp knives' for the kitchen. We have cutlery, crockery, fridge and a microwave and drinks, including from a swanky coffee machine, are provided. I said no.

We had a “stationery manager” and if your pen ran out you had to take it to her and show her before you were allowed a new one God forbid if you lost your stapler!!! But it was quite fun because we used to go in twos so one would distract her with a biscuit and chat whilst the other nipped in and nicked the stationery they needed!!

"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."

But then you get 'did we receive the letter from x?' Nobody can remember because it's not logged and nobody knows who it went to and who just got a photocopy. There was a reason for the system.
With email now, you have a trail of who it was forwarded to so not necessary.
When I was first doing it, the emails (all printed on a certain colour paper) were also logged.

However, in another place I had a horrible bully of a boss, in fact pretty much everyone over the years who has left (and there’s been a lot!) have left because of him.

I was signed off with trigeminal neuralgia (excruciating pain if you don’t know what it is- like someone is taking a knife to your face then sprinkling salt and vinegar on the wound) and was on a cocktail of strong drugs (tramadol, amitriptyline etc). I had been signed off for 2-3 weeks (can’t remember) and went in anyway after a couple of days. He said to me (whilst on our own) that how dare I be off as I’d left him in the shit and that unless I was dead he expected me to be working as I could still check emails from a hospital bed. Then started making noises about how he was going to retrieve my interview notes from file as he considered I’d misrepresented how competent I was!!!

Then he called HR in and said that we were having a meeting to check I was ok as my “health was obviously the most important thing”!

It took me a long time and my almost driving into a bloody wall to convince myself to leave. I was always getting sick with the stress and actually started losing my hair!!! Was almost another 5 years before I left - wish I’d done it sooner now!!!

wowfudge nope, their issue was it had to be the best branded most expensive one. Would not even consider any others which were a quarter of the price and when I suggested a pencil and sharpener I'm amazed I didn't get punched!!
They wouldn't trial anything else to see if it was any good, total narrow minded this is what I've always used and I don't care if it's £3 a pencil

Had a post book in a job 4 yrs ago.. we sometimes checked.. did we receive x from y.. quite useful. Not sure it was useful enough to justify all the time it took though.

A cafe in central Brighton owner by a couple who had money to invest but no idea what they were doing. Tight as a gnat's bum.
Managed by a lazy, rude cow of a woman.
I had just left a job managing a coffee shop for something that fell through so I was overqualified but in need, so I did a 'trial shift'. I was obviously good so they hired me - I later discovered they used unpaid 'trial shifts' to cover the lunch rush and would hold them even if they had no intention of hiring.
Too cheap to buy an industrial dishwasher so there were never enough clean cups and as well as not enough staff one person would be having to wash up, bring clean cups to the coffee machine whilst also somehow bussing tables completely on their own. The person on coffees would also have to be on tills etc. Chaos.
One day the lazy cow manager asked me to cover her Saturday morning (she did 8-4, I did 12-8) as she wanted to go out. This would mean a 12 hour shift for me, but it was hourly pay and I was broke.
She rolled in at 11.55 and requested a coffee in the middle of the shift from hell. I hadn't stopped moving, literally. After she deigned to join us I sat down with my coffee and sandwich for my lunch break. Finished them in 5 minutes, and sat for a few more minutes flicking through the paper. She came over and hissed 'you don't get a proper break on Saturdays! Hurry up'. I finished the shift and quit.

Sadly this sort of thing is going to increase again - there is a strong drive to get rid of workplace rights etc (one of the big motivations of the Brexit instigators) and the point of petty bullying is to crush any autonomy or self-respect out of staff so that wages can be kept low to boost profits. What many CEOs and big business organisations want is a potential employee pool of people who are so desperate they will accept anything in the way of low wages and unsafe, unhealthy work conditions, because the alternative is starvation.

It's bad enough now if you think about it - if you walk out of a job because you're being treated like shit, the DWP will delay you getting any benefits because you are 'voluntarily unemployed'. All very well if you have savings or a working partner, but for people on the minimum wage it makes it a lot harder to stand up for yourself.

When l was younger l was a designer in the fashion industry. Horrible horrible industry to work in.

A well known company sacked their marketing manager when he was in hospital with cancer. Someone went to the actual hospital and told him😡

I worked in for a company that was in a very 'cool' industry (think along the lines of MTV) but was the most officey place I have ever worked at. The office manager was insane. First they brought in a branded TShirt that everyone had to wear - black, collared airtex thing that made everyone look like they had a Saturday job at Homebase and must have made the uber cool people that visited us think they had walked into the wrong office. I had a very senior position and refused to wear the shirt for weeks but in the end had to put it on to save my job.

You had to use an ugly branded mug to drink from even though nobody could see you - you couldn't bring one in. There was a pointless Monday morning meeting that meant you had to get in 90 mins earlier to talk about NOTHING of any relevance to you, your department or job and on Friday there was an enforced '30 minute social' where people whereby people who just wanted to go home had to stay late to make small talk with someone in accounts.

The straw that broke the camels back was when during the hot summer, when the temp of the office was in the 90s, the office manager tried to ban open toe shoes (we were in a carpeted office not on a building site), after a few protests she decided that we had to Whatsapp her a pic of our shoe choice before 7am and she would 'sign it off' before we got dressed and left the house....

Fuck that.

I also worked somewhere recently where to get any stationery, you had to fill in a paper form saying what stationery you wanted, get it signed by your line manager, and then take it to the Office Manager who would give you the stationery you wanted.
I would not have minded if it was only used for high cost items, but stationery was heavily controlled and you could only get what you needed. So I had to do this for a pen and pad of paper.

I mentioned this thread to a colleague yesterday, she's not on MN but wanted to contribute. Her Father passed away suddenly and she took 2 weeks bereavement leave. Returned to work and got an instant bollocking from the manager because she had 2 weeks outstanding paperwork and if there had been a visit (there hadn't been) to check compliance the office would have failed. She reminded manager of exactly why she'd been away and just got "Right. Well, get it done right away now please" no apology or asking how she was etc She left 2 months later.

I once worked as a temp in the offices of a very large national charity. It was in the early days of computers so the person who was on holiday had a computer and I had been specifically employed because I knew how to use it.

However, the office manager decided I was not to use it. So, I was paid quite a high hourly wage to type out individual sponsorship forms (typing boxes too - very, very hard) to send out to children who were doing sponsored events for the charity.

There was no photocopier so they were done on carbon paper.

I worked out each form was taking me about 3 hours and totally wiping out the usual amounts these (predominantly young) people were raising.

I tried to raise it with her - went over her head - went to my agency and eventually left after day 3 because I just could not work out how they were wasting so much money. The agency refused to send them another temp.

Madness.

In my very early 20s (in the 90s) I worked for a tiny company that mended a specific type of machinery. I was the only woman. My little office had no window to outside: only one to my scary, lecherous and bullying manager's office.

I was super busy on a Monday, less so the rest of the week and normally bored shitless on a Friday. Scary boss insisted I sat in my tiny office with nothing to do and bollocked me for hanging around talking to the mechanics. He'd often be out for hours at a time so the lads would take it in turns keeping watch for his car so I could leg it back to my office before he came in. Tiny victories and all that!

This wasn't a usual petty rule - and maybe my, normally sane, boss was just having a bad day - but on once occasion signing off the expenses for one of the directors who had had to replace two worn tires on his company car told him that he should have brought the two old tires into the office for inspection

Oliversmumsarmy Oh, l know that feeling! My line manager would as me to do things which l wasn't happy about doing, but she'd insist. So l'd always put a flag and an explanation on the system.
And almost invariably, it came back to haunt her. The problem was, she was well versed in management, but not in the specific systems our department used. She'd suggest something, and my shift (or whichever shift happened to be on duty at the time) would look at her incredulously, then explain why it wouldn't work, or wasn't appropriate. She'd dig her heels in and insist. So before doing it, l'd email her, the other managers at my level, and our senior manager, outlining her request, stating this was what she had asked us to do.
More than once, she'd either come back within half an hour (having been hauled over the coals by the senior manager) or l'd get a swift response from the senior manager saying something along the lines of "Disregard that discussion, katseyes, l've discussed it with XXXXX and we've agreed it isn't going to work".

I worked in a job not long ago which no one spoke to each other. On my first day, I was sat at my desk and told to watch this video. No one said hello, showed me around or chatted at all.

It was a recruitment office though. I probably should’ve walked out that very day as I went to dh and said how much I hated it. We were encouraged to not phone people. Just email them. If they didn’t have the skills-who cares-smudge it to the client. Meeting people was not encouraged at all as our time should’ve been spent trawling LinkedIn.

Lunch break was not allowed to be moved from its slot of 1-2 and tough luck if you had calls /meetings scheduled as I always did as you know, it’s lunch time and people could talk.

I didn’t care and went for my hour lunch as and when I could.

The weirdest thing was the not talking at all. And if worked in recruitment for years and we all bounced ideas offf people.

This company is still going but go through staff. And they portray themselves as these really HAPPY people

Thanks for the explanation about the blue pen ban Boom but unfortunately that wasn't why we were banned from using blue pens. Our office was so lo-tech we didn't have copying machines, it was simply that my boss had a phobia of blue ink. Other teams were free to use black or blue ink, which is why pens of both colours were in the stationery cupboard. It was just us who had the blue ban and we all thought it was weird.

Manager left, relief manager from other region seconded in to cover. First thing she said was 'I am a nonsense Yorkshire woman and you'll all abide by my rules." This to an experienced, successful and award winning team.
She then set about demanding we tidy the office, implementating the rule: 1 pen, I sheet of paper only, nothing personal on your desk. The second screen saver picture on all 20 PCs.
On her second day she decided my desk was particularly untidy (no shelves or storage available) and to make a point to the whole office, she dramatically swept everything off my desk into the litter bin.
I wasn't in work at the time. When I was next in, I couldn't find the brand new, expensive, still boxed Samsung work phone I'd been issued with and which had been left on my desk by our support person.
You've guessed it ...it had been swept up with the contents of my desk into the bin, and then off to landfill as our dustbins had been emptied overnight
My wry smile may have been a smirk. I could never respect the woman and was thrilled when she returned to her beloved Yorkshire.

This is from dd.

Dd manages large events on an ad hoc basis.

Agency that she gets work for told her to go to one large venue and shadow the manager there as she was leaving and they needed a new manager.

Dd spent the day shadowing the manager as well as being instructed to look after 4 tables of diners.
End of the day she had notes on exactly what the manager did, £150 of tips and glowing praise for her service from the diners.

She was told never to return as she was not up for even working as a waitress.

Then she found out through a few people that also had worked there that they had the same response

They are still looking for managers. Dd was booked on a shift there but she had to tell the agency that she couldn’t do it as they had banned her.

Agency said they didn’t have anyone else as they had banned everyone.

The thing no one can quite get is the management company of this event also own the event that dd works regularly as a manager at and they say she is their best manager. Consistently gets top scores and mentions in their reviews.

Also they underpaid her.

Said she was only worth minimum wage not the payment agreed.

Dd ended up threatening to take them to the small claims court.

Same screen saver