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.

You'd have been a TS (Training Ship)! Fellow sea cadet here!

ha ha ha, real "Hot Fuzz" vibes "you're making US look bad"

I used to work at a university and in our department there was a very strict hierarchy when it came to staff room seating arrangements. Lower grade people had to sit on the low seats; higher grades were permitted to sit at the table. If you were a lower grade, and had something like soup, you were still expected to balance it on your lap. Even more ludicrous, lower and higher grades had breaks at different times but even then, the table was completely out of bounds for lower grade staff.

Jean had to have a particular chair in the staff room. If you sat in Jean's seat (say if you were new and didn't know this unwritten rule yet) you were done for.

I moved universities and ended up working with someone who'd worked at that place 15 years before me. It was the exact same situation then, right down to Jean's seating preferences!

To everyone who hasn't heard of washing your bum:
• Have you heard of a bidet? It is French and therefore très chic.

1. Now imagine countries where you can't flush loo roll, or loo roll is expensive. Or you prefer a wash for your own reasons.
2. This image is a lota. You might have seen them for sale in the corner shop that also sells buckets and washing up bowls. If you provide them in toilet cubicles, some of your colleagues would probably really appreciate it.

Thanks for pointing all that out, how kind of you. I have heard of all of them, and used to have a bidet in my home. But I've never heard of anyone having to wash their arse whilst at work. And this thread is about the workplace.

I used to work at a place where the senior men would bring their children into work on the morning of Christmas Eve “so their wives could get the house ready for Christmas”.

They would then wander about trying to find a female member of staff to look after them. I said no (because I had some provisional numbers to send out, which was the only reason I was in on Christmas Eve) but it was sort of uncomfortable.

I wonder if it still happens? This was in 2010 so not eons ago.

We have a programme that allows us to input and store raw data. This programme is connected to another programme that will collate that data and do everything to turn it into useful data and colour code it so we can do our jobs quicker. My manager however does not know how to use the second programme so had IT disable our team's access to it. Now we have to input all the raw data into the programme, then onto an excel spreadsheet then with that excel we have to create another excel where we do all the data analysis ourselves. It has turned a 50 min job into a 6 hour job. But obviously upper management will still only allocate 1 hour to this task and when we complain as it means masses of unpaid overtime, we get told to manage our time better.

Same company, we moved offices. The owner (and his very domineering wife) decided that to save money, we would do the move ourselves. We had to pack up the entire office, dismantle furniture, load it all into vans and then set it all back up in the new place. This was after we'd finished for the day

And I bet you weren't insured for personal injury, either.

Had that YEARS ago at avery big American bank - time and motion study, I think. A team worked out the best and most efficient places where everything should go, marked out with tape. The day after they left the tapes came off and everyone went back to arranging their desks the way that worked for them and it was never mentioned again. Complete waste of money.

The staff room one reminded me of where I used to work. Everyone had their ‘section’ to sit in. So senior staff had their row of chairs and so on. Quite often there were not enough chairs for everyone and it was always a lower paid less senior member of staff who had to stand, regardless of what they were trying to eat or drink. I started going home for lunch as I lived near enough and there wasn’t much traffic. A colleague senior to me questioned where I was going every day as I was not in the staff room. I told them and they replied that I should be on work premises. I replied that no, as it’s my UNPAID lunch time I will do as I please. They didn’t quite get it.
Another place I worked had a voice message facility. The office was so busy with both face to face customers and telephone queries that every day we ended up with lots of voice messages. We had to ring everyone of them back. Most of the time they had telephoned again and had their query dealt with but we still had to put it on a spread sheet, record their detailed query, the time we had called them, who had called them and how we had dealt with their query. If they didn’t answer we had to record this on the spread sheet and highlight it and they had to be called repeatedly until they answered. It was batshit. We were spending time doing this instead of actually answering calls. Nobody could leave until every single one had been called and the spreadsheet completed accordingly.
The manager used to message us all repeatedly throughout the day telling us exactly how many voice mails there were waiting to be called back.

I've visited your company! Also at a boring office very far from the sea with nice carpeted stairs. The best bit was the stairs were proper ballroom stairs 10m wide made for sweeping down, with a line of people inching up the edge

Oh I see what's happened here. You think I'm stupid enough to be unable to work that out for myself.

’This door must be kept shut at all times’ reminds me of a door at a shopping centre where I used to work. ‘Caution: this door swings both ways’, underneath someone had written ‘so does Steve’.

Choose 'Silent'

I worked in a well known bank in the 1990s (Nigel doesn’t like it) when things were turning really crap (redundancies for long serving knowledgeable staff replaced with young cheap inexperienced staff, pressured to badger customers to sell products, & lots of branch closures). They provided notepads & stickers with huge toothy smiley mouths to be put by/on all phones, and stipulated that we must ‘answer with a smile’ (within 3 rings) as customers could tell if you were smiling or not.

I worked in a council department and it was flexi-time. So normally I'd go as soon as I could because I'd be in early.
Once I needed to make up some time so I stayed after 4pm.
I was then told off by the deputy manager for working after 4pm as they switched the phones off and didn't do any work. So basically they would all sit in the office doing nothing until they'd made their hours up.
I can not sit still and do nothing. It was torture.

I didn't stay long after that. The whole system could have been managed much more efficiently by training their clerks to type properly and to actually not have slack management.

It did explain why there was so much work in the mornings and why the simplest of tasks never got done. Lazy lazy CF.

Late colleague worked 8 - 4 and was called in by management as he had been seen leaving at 4pm. He pointed out his hours but was told No, it's 9 -5. So he switched and a few days later called in again. Something important had occurred at 8am, where was He? He then told them his hours had been changed, so which hours would they Like?

I'm happy to help!

A firm I worked for was going through an acrimonious partnership split. Still sharing office space until all done and dusted. Instead of an Xmas party they took our side of the split away for the day by plane (was in the days of £10 flights) We had a nice day - most people were in pubs, some went sightseeing. At the airport one young office junior was so drunk he got in a scuffle with a colleague and wouldn’t calm down so he couldn’t fly and was put in the cells. Boss stood in airport saying whatever you do don’t tell other half of split. So next few days we had to fend off where’s x queries and why has z got a black eye while boss sorted legal representation out for the lad abroad. We never went away again and just had generic Xmas parties at local hotel.

Me too - I remember those stickers well
We also had to keep a 'gossip book' at the back of the counter. So if you served any regular customers who happened to tell you any snippet of info about their lives/businesses, you were supposed to write it in the book so that the Chief Cashier and/or the Bank Manager could make note and would know what was going on with their customers. Just bloody nosey if you ask me!

I think you have become institutionalized. It’s not a ship, it’s probably just a Pre-Fab.

I’m institutionalized too- a new person asked for tippex, and I had to explain there was none, there never would be, and if he snuck it on-site at a customer he would get fired for gross misconduct! I think that’s normal but know it isn’t in other places.

@MrsDanversGlidesAgain - yep that's exactly what happened. Everything permitted on a desk had to be in the exact marked out allotted place!
Same outcome as yours too but it wasn't a bank

I've worked at a few large insurers and some of their practices are just ridiculous. My first job was at Zurich. We had to spend the first and last part of the day counting how much work we had - so every piece of correspondence, every outstanding email etc. this easily took 45 mins or so each time, so hours spent just counting work. We always had a backlog (shocker!), and my line manager, who wasn't blessed with strategic thinking, had a novel approach. If we completed, for example, 25 bits of work a day on average, and the backlog was 600, she'd have a weekly team meeting and announce that we all only had to do 120 extra bits of work each that week to clear the backlog. She just could not grasp that maybe aiming to clear it over say, six weeks, would be much more manageable and achievable. We NEVER cleared that backlog while I was there. That was the same team leader, who, if you handed your notice in, simply stopped speaking to you or acknowledging you at all. Until it came time for your exit interview, which she wanted to carry out in person, despite all indicators making it clear that exit interviews were to be completed anonymously. She still pops up on my linked in now and then, and from her job title, has been promoted well past her level of expertise. I dread to think what she's up to these days!

I have not read all the replies yet, but I'll add in mine.

I worked in an office, there were only 3 of us there. Not a customer facing role at all, just admin etc.

The owners wife would come every now and then and do an 'inspection'. She was in a fouo mood permanently, so when we saw her we would all day, now what ... So she went to my filing cabinet and took out a few files and checked through some documents. She then threw the files at me and said get this shit sorted out. Guess what the problem was? I had used too many staples. Some completed orders had a lot of papers stapled together (the po, updates, invoice, payments etc), and for eg, the invoice wasn't allowed to have a staple on its two pages, all the staples had to be removed from every page, and only ONE staple was allowed to attach everything. She had found one extra staple in one of the completed orders.

I also got sent home to change (although I never saw any clients, just behind a desk all day) as there was no not allowed to wear jeans rule. That day I was wearing a blue skirt and she claimed it was denim so I needed to go and change into something else. And she was serious. It was a 30min drive to that office from my house.

One of the ladies took 3 sugars in her coffee but none in her tea. We were allowed to make a cup for ourselves at tea time. But she was only allowed two sugars in her coffee. It didn't matter that she didn't take any in tea, so she wasn't taking more than her allowed quota.

It was so stressful working there because of her. Walked in eggshells all the time.

I wonder if there are any shore-based naval establishments which are completely below the surface, and if so would those be boats rather than ships?

My favourite day at work ever ever we got given a lunch break long enough to get the tube to Regent’s Park and go boating on the lake. Rowed to the middle then realised that was it, we had to head back, but we both panicked and turned in circles for a while. “There’s not even time for Pret now!”