Please tell me batshit things about your work.

[TheLightSideOfTheMoon]

I am unwell and hunkering down with MN and TT for the day.

I’ve just started a new job (today is a day off), it’s all new, I’m not settling in as well as I’d like (I’ve gone from a tiny place to a HUGE one) and I’m kind of hyper-focussed on different work practices right now.

Funny stories will cheer me up.

I’ll start.

At my new work they use poly pockets/polywallets UPSIDE-DOWN!

They go in upside-down and they slide the paperwork upwards into it.

I find it so, so weird. Each time I look at them I’m like, WTAF?

Anyway, that’s mine. Please share yours. Entertain me with batshitness. I beg you.

A colleague regularly rearranges the kitchen. Want a cup? Go look in the cup cupboard but now it’s full of plates. Want a teaspoon? The cutely drawer is now filled with tea towels and the teaspoons are on the other side of the kitchen a mile away from the coffee, tea & sugar. The toaster, microwave, sandwich toasted machine re regularly moved around the bench, as is the coffee, tea & sugar. Glasses that should be in the cupboard near the water cooler could be located in the cupboard under the sink this week and then next week be found in the cupboard above the fridge or in some other random place. It’s like a friggen scavenger hunt some days. Thank fuck the fridge is to heavy to move.

I love this thread!

A bitshit thing about my work, is my bosses archaic time-management and to-do list. It's all hard copy (every thing, including email, is printed off) with a "Master Spreadsheet" that is treated like the holy grail, printed out each day. He gets us to file his to-do notes/emails/anything/everything in a A-Z folder, every item individually labelled A1, A2, A3 etc, and then a register of these documents are added to the Master Spreadsheet, which is printed off first thing each morning so he can then read through his Master Spreadsheet and choose, seemingly randomly, what he wants to do that day.
It's been like that for at least 2 years and "that's just how it is". Suggestions for more efficient ways of working are turned down without consideration.

There's a reason for this. Shore establishments are still classed as ships. As an Armed Force routine and discipline is really important, you know because of like 'war' and shit??

School - we had to line all our display boards in a particular colour, then it had to be outlined within other stated colour. All work had to be double backed. One summer holidays I got ahead of myself and did it over summer holidays as had to be all fresh for September- couldn't keep the old lot up. Head changed the colour scheme so had to rip it all off and start again. We had a colour for everything. So much time wasted but the big things which we missed were shocking.

Even in a “war” and shit, it is still mental to pretend you’re on a boat when you’re not on a boat, unless you’re three and in a cardboard box with your teddies and the dustpan brush for an oar.

I had a micromanager who demanded that I reply to every email that I have received her email.
She also loved to make you feel stupid by asking questions you didn't have an answer to, but the questions were always totally irrelevant to the task. We actually had a competition with colleagues who gets the most insane question that day. As an example, when you were discussing a transport damage, she would ask you what colour the truck was, or similar.

About people who have nothing to do - I used to work for a massive multimillion dollar company, where the profits were dropping, so they brought in a new manager to turn the business around. Second week, my manager gets an email from the new manager: why is G5000's phone bill this month 50% higher than last month?? Please explain!

Well, first I had been abroad for 3 weeks, that's why. But considering company was losing millions, I really don't think it was my phone bill that would save it.

He didn't last long. However, he moved on to a similar position with another company, with no doubt a massive salary..

I once had someone daily wash their dick in the toilet sinks in front of all the other men. They had to be spoken to by management.

I'd report your concerns and the fact you think it's mental to the Chief of Staff, Whitehall, London, I'm sure he'll take it on board. Excuse the pun!

I love how those people who are in or familiar with the navy are a bit defensive or confused about why people would think this odd. Just goes to show how we become socialised into a language and situation and it seems totally normal when to the uninitiated it’s really strange.

I can think of a few jobs like this that I’ve had where stuff seems normal to us but weird to everyone else.

@WeetabixTowels No. it's most likely a fire door that creates a fire compartment that needs to remain closed.

It's not weird though, a Naval shore establishment is as much of a ship as a sea-based vessel. HMS stands for His Majesty's Ship, HMS Nelson is in Portsmouth, HMS Neptune in Scotland, etc.

It's only weird to those who don't actually know what they're talking about.

Also, no Naval ship I was ever on pretended to be a ship with cardboard boxes and teddies?? Typical Mumsnet nonsense comments.

But it’s not a ship in the layman’s sense is it?

So it’s not that people don’t know what they’re talking about, it’s that a very specific group of people use the word differently from the vast majority of the population.

Surely you can see why it seems odd to people, even if there are very legitimate reasons why the concept exists.

I used to temp and one job I was canned after 3 days because, apparently, I tutted. Didn't even tell me to my face (probably because they were aware what a daft thing to say it was) but got my agency to call me on my way home.

Both agency and I suspected tutting was not the real reason.

Thanks for sharing that. I’d like to think it was true and she was real.

I'm not allowed to ask my boss questions - at all! I'm his Exec Assistant and run his diary.
I've tried all kinds of methods - email at the end of the day, texts, voice WhatsApps. He called me in for a disciplinary chat because I once text to ask if he would like his car to be booked for MOT as it was due, I wasn't sure if his wife would do it?
He however is allowed to call me and talk for hours on end about his personal life when the time suits.
He is a total bully and I literally hate him. I'm looking for another job.

In the early 90s I worked for a tiny start up company ran by 2 very young entrepreneurs.

I was about 10 years older than them. We were exploiting a loop in a well known IT hardware returns policy. Part of my job was to make these items unrecognisable. We used to spend the afternoon pulling wires etc and removing registration numbers etc.

We also had to type when answering the phone to make it sound a lot busier. Not actual typing - just random fast typing!

Part of my job was to exist, so that the 2 young entrepreneurs could get insurance etc for the cars etc that they were too young to get insurance on!

I was also paid in cash but my young boss was too scared to carry that amount so I used to meet him in the phone box outside of his bank to receive the cash and deposit it in my bank. I was massively overpaid.

One of the 2 chaps had a 'shrine' to Zara Phillips in the cupboard. This was sacred and only he was allowed to look at it!

The day after entertaining clients the 2 boys would be so exhausted they would take turns to sleep under the desk in the office. The entertainment would have continued until the early hours. If the clients were around when I'd have to take them to the M&S cafe across the road for coffee etc.

We were based in a small market town but had a Regis 'address' in central London so also had to pretend to be in London at all times.

It was total madness. They have both gone on to be very successful.

The civil service is completely bonkers and expensive to run!

Beyond grateful for this. I actually have two teams (work for two companies at the same time) and have to have both open. Now I can have different ringtones. One is in the browser so less choice.

Yep similar in schools. I wonder if it's also the same in NHS? I think it's a scandal. So much wasted tax.

A school one rather than a work one -

An economics teacher at my school was so bad at his job he was moved to the maths department instead. He was obviously even worse at that as he isn't a maths teacher, but he's still there a couple of decades later

We used to have two hot water urns that had enough boiling water for about 50 people to make tea for the day.

On a least two occasions a colleague brought sausages back from Germany and put them in the urns to heat them throughout the day so that staff could have them as a treat BUT they didn't specifically tell anyone until around lunch time.

People were complaining that their tea tasted bad all day until someone opened the urn and found dozens of sausages bopping around in there.

In my company once you reach the age of 57 you get an extra day off every 3 weeks. Seems bizarre to me.

I'm physically disabled and had another rough night because of it, loads of pain etc. dosed up on Co-codamol.

I'm working 7 days a week and need to be up at 6:30am to be at work for 7:30, which I am under normal circumstances no matter how I feel but this morning I was that exhausted I accidentally over-slept....very unusual for me... and didn't get out of bed until 7:22.

''Dashing'' around feeding the cat and cleaning out her litter tray and feeding the fish and skipping my own breakfast because I could grab something from Spar later. I didn't have time for a shower so just sprayed myself with perfumes.

Ended up at work for 8, came ''running'' in, plonked my handbag on my desk and remembered I'm self-employed so there's no bosses threatening to sack me for being late!

So I could have had my brekkie and shower after all!

Silly cow!

I used to work at a company where the boss made me cc her in every email.

I don't work there now 😂

This thread is helping me with my post-holiday blues.

In my last job, I got a younger male manager. He supervised five people, each of us responsible for our own distinct tasks. Mine were, let us say, alligator-wrestling and snake-handling. I was the only person in the entire organisation dealing with those areas. At our weekly catch-up, I'd explain in detail how things were going in both areas. After six months of these weekly catch-ups, he called me and said that my job description needed to be updated to take out snake-handling, as apparently that was handled by another area of the organisation. The head of that area had told him that they took care of tortoise-racing and he extrapolated that to mean they also did the snake-handling. For the entire six months, my manager had obviously zoned out during my descriptions of all the snake-handling I'd been doing. Not only that, the fact that he would be managing the organisation's snake-handler was written into his own job description.

He contributed nothing. The only effort he ever made was to negotiate his own salary upward. Nobody else's salary increased during his tenure. He was rumbled by the higher-ups and left after two years, irritatingly, to a much higher position elsewhere. I'd been denied a salary increase and had left by then, but my old job was advertised at the higher grade that I'd been denied.