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.

We have a lot of ex servicemen and women who now work with us.

I've often wondered why. It's a fairly regimented and in some ways strict. So perhaps that's the appeal?

I might ask someone one day.

This is completely batshit! I take my hat off to you just for starting each work day let alone getting through your day. I hope you get a new job soon.

Some of mine:

worked for an anti bullying charity where the CEO was a massive bully, it was not unusual to see people leave her office in tears

current company - my team has two different ways to contact us, but they are supposed to be used for different requests. So if someone contact’s us to do something but they use the wrong email we have to let them know to send the request the other way, which I find really embarrassing as it’s the same people answering. Complete waste of time for everyone

I worked somewhere where the head of IT would put my head in a headlock and rub my head whenever he saw me. He did it in front of the ceo once and she looked horrified, though didn’t challenge it

I’ve just remembered a batshit boss I had who kept on asking me if my husband wanted to earn some extra money with some DIY jobs in the office.

DH is a highly paid software designer. And shit at DIY anyway.

Boss was a privately educated sexist pig who had us all pigeonholed as wives of low paid labourers, living on the poverty wages he paid us. Despite any and all evidence to the contrary. It was so weird.

When I put in a request to go part time he went on a rant about us being able to claim more in Tax Credits to make up the shortfall.

When we moved house he was adamant we were doing a council house swap and kept asking questions about how it worked. It didn’t matter how many times I said no, we’re selling our old house and buying this one, he kept bringing it back to council house schemes.

I think it was a weird power play. He also used to ask us to move his BMW from one car park to another and framed it as a huge treat to drive such a lovely car. Absolutely batshit.

It was all about his being considerable richer than us, and anything that challenged that assumption was hand waved away.

@RoyKentsTieDyeTop awful but hilarious 🤣.
I can imagine David Brent doing something like that re BMW.

We've got someone stuck in this blindness in my work and this makes me feel better, thank you.

I’m pretty certain I experienced something similar in my first job out of uni.

I joined a small agency and was earning around £16k. A few months in, I was hauled into a meeting room and asked why I hadn’t ‘owned up’ to being overpaid. It was only a couple of days after pay day.

At the time I was living with my parents and had no financial responsibilities (oh to be that age again)! I didn’t check my bank account religiously and this was before the days when online banking was so easy to access on phones etc. I was completely dumbfounded and apologetic (even though I had no idea) and said I’d pay the money back straight away as it would just be sitting in my account. I was told in no uncertain terms that my card had been marked. When I actually checked my account they’d overpaid me by £2k!

Got chatting with a friend who also worked there a couple of years later once we’d both left, and she said the exact same thing happened to her within a few months of joining.

"His wife (we were all American) was working for a German bank and they always addressed each other as “Herr”, “Frau”, “Herr Doktor Professor” etc with their surname. When they went to meetings that were going to be conducted in English (with Americans and Brits) they had to get together beforehand to remind each other of their first names."

This is so typically German/Swiss/Austrian, and workplaces there are rigidly hierarchical. There's the additional "Du"/"Sie" minefield there as well, based on age, relative position in the firm, and social standing. This would even extend to meeting people outside work, and it's unlikely you would ever socialise with someone of a higher grade than yourself in any case

I hate Teams too, the company I work for use it for all communication (apart from emails). Took me a while to get to grips with it and I hate the fact that I can still be called when I work from home!!!

I worked in the sticks for a Council where the tech was bang up to date but the people...

I was hauled into the manager's office once because I'd sat next to a Councillor (or rather, she'd sat next to me) and discussed a local A road bypass whilst we were waiting for a presentation. This was - so far as he was concerned - beyond the pale. People of my grade should not be talking to Members of the Council. To be honest, if it had been work related (I did not work in Highways), I would have agreed with him, but for him, it was the very concept of a peon like me having the temerity to talk to a Councillor that upset him.

We had a small canteen for all staff, and I would regularly do the crossword and talk about non-work related things to the Deputy CEO and the Director of Finance - it sadly made my boss extremely uncomfortable when I did so, and he would frown throughout and would refer to it in my 1:1s.

He later admitted to a colleague that he yearned for the days when there were separate canteens (and toilet facilities - the keys to the executive washroom!) for low graded staff and managers. He'd worked his way up from being a multi-trade in a big nationalised company to his present position, and had a whole potato field on his shoulder.

It’s pretty grim for sure. If they had any idea of the things that get pulled out of hot water tanks they’d never run a hot water tap again…

I worked in an office in the UK for a global oil exploration company for many years, and remember all that you have mentioned.

The holding the hand rail on stairs had to be with the hand held on the underside of the rail rather than the top because if you tripped that was a better holding-on position.

Also went to many safety lectures & films the same that were for field personnel who worked out of the office or on rigs etc.

Had to attend a day’s ‘Defensive Driving’ course in our own vehicles every 2 years even if we didn’t ever drive for or on company business, we were told that the company wanted to make sure that we commuted safely to & from work, no pass or fail as such but a written report on the standard of driving was sent to line managers, just in case any recommendations were needed for improvement. I remember one particular report where the instructor/observer (ex police driver) commented of the poor standard of driving of one individual (non UK national) & had wondered how that person had passed the UK driving test. The company did step up though to provide that person with some confidence boosting driving lessons.

And all of the above & more had to be checked & signed off✅ as completed & kept in a small log book/passport which we had to keep with us at all times.

After all that though, the in-office environment was excellent, the best company I’ve ever worked for.🙂

The reality is that it is really badly managed, and that people who do similar work to me (I work in local government) get paid a fraction of what I am paid. Managers in the civil service are vastly overpaid. Billions are wasted on useless initiatives for political reasons.

I hated being a manager. In many (most?) workplaces you would be really good at a (usually technical) thing so would be promoted and told that you were now managing other people.

You ended up doing less of the thing you were good at (and enjoyed) and more relaying company messages / sorting out seating / doing appraisals.

Ooh that reminds me- crosswords! Civil service (again!) and one of the senior people did the cryptic crossword every day from the Times. If he got stuck he'd wander into our office to see if he could get it finished.
A woman there, (hated me on sight for some reason) was relatively good at it, but I'm very good at "finishing" clues, IYSWIM but admittedly I'm not good at cryptic crosswords from the start. He'd talk to everyone generally, reading out the clues and I usually could get them and shout the answer over. He started coming to my desk first in the mornings as I could usually get them very quickly but it put her nose out of joint. Words were spoken apparently, and in the end he'd photocopy the crossword after he'd done as much as he could and leave a copy on everyone's desk.

In the 90's I worked for a Womens Refuge. I ran a separate Drop In centre, so only went into the Refuge itself to collect things, consult with other staff etc. Other staff were great. Probs about a dozen of us in total, small midlands charity. But the boss was absolutely mad as cheese, but nasty and micro-managing with it. I would organise stuff for my centre, and then she would phone up and regularly want to know the details, fine. Would then object to some of the details, and you would need to rearrange with other organisations, making me look mad and incompetent. So next I organised something, I would ask how she wanted it done. She would refuse to say, just demand that you did it. Then the whole sorry process would start again. Rinse and repeat. She would regularly scream at me and other staff. This was a Refuge for women in crisis, usually escaping abusive relationships. The staff who stayed and tolerated it had in many cases escaped abuse themselves in the past. The manager had become their new abuser. Very sad and toxic. Tried to adress some of the issues, including her syphoning off charity funding with the charity comittee who were meant to oversee the project. Not interest. Gaslit me about the problem and tried to bribe me with a better job within the organisation. Seemed a bit suprised when that wasn't the answer to the problem. Contacted directly the charity who were paying for my role (well known charity, major tv comedy night every year) They werefn't interested either. They've never had a donation from me since. A very stressful and sad part of my career. It was totally batshit how Emperors new clothes the whole thing was. And we hadn't got to mention that Batshit Queen in charge was naked.

This is so true. And so many public sector managers think if we only adopted "private sector practices", this will be successful.

A friend who was TUPE'd over to a private firm would be asked things at appraisal like "What have you done today to increase our share price?". Annual leave was cut and it was frowned on to actually take your full entitlement. Working late unpaid and at the weekends was the norm, even for lowly graded staff. Staff were expected to be accessible 24/7 and come in on their days off if they were in the country (unpaid, of course) if there was an emergency - which there almost always was. When droves of staff started to leave (having been told "you should be grateful to have a job" - never a good negotiating stance), managers berated the remaining staff members for not "having a private sector attitude" - also freezing pay whilst paying whopping bonuses to senior managers as "this was the going rate for the job". When they became unable to recruit at peon level, this was blamed on "applicants being too greedy" (!).

Eventually, the Council who had outsourced this department quietly terminated the contract, as performance was abysmal - mainly due to a lack of staff.

Someone I know interviewed for a job where they had no limit on holiday days - it was up to the staff member how many they wanted to take. I think he got it but took another job in the end - at least partly because he’d find not knowing whether he was taking “too many” holiday days really stressful.

I think it was the sort of place that had a pool table / free drinks but where all the people were young and worked 10+ hour days.

This is like where I work. I take about 30-35 days a year. I get the stress though.

I would definitely be doing the things you quoted that your manager didn't like if for no other reason than to wind them up! If it is a procedural thing that means everyone works to the same standard (such as putting poly pockets in the file upside down), that's one thing, but how dare they tell me which hand I am allowed to use the phone with!

Background:
I worked in sales when I first left school. I had to effectively cold-call people who had populated their contact details on the retail website and try to convince them to part way with thousands of pounds to buy the product. It was truly a shit and unrewarding job. I earned commission on top of my measly low salary so getting sales was really key to earning money each month. I worked under a young, immature, twat of a male manager who had this air of importance about him. He was absolutely vile and was the type to trample over you to the top.

Everyday we had to work our way through the same list of customer contact details to "cold call", as it was a shared list once we had contacted somebody we had to flag it on the system to indicate we had contacted them so any sales could be attributed to the salesperson. Sometimes if a customer had made a few different enquiries their contact details would be on the list a few times. I happened to call somebody and then noticed further down the list that my manager had flagged this person as someone he had spoken to. So I said "Oh I see you've already spoken to my colleague, Jon and you've also just bought the product". The person asked who Jon was. Said they'd never spoken to him. The sly twat had seen the sale and noticed the same customer in the list and so flagged it as his. He had flagged several sales in this same manner, falsely claiming commission as his. He never made a single phone call...any day. I obviously dobbed him in with senior management.

Sounds great to me - provided I continued to get the full package of benefits, pension contributions and salary for these extra days off. 🌹

Oh yes, I forgot about my first job when I left school in the 70's. Went to work in a small family firm, Father, office lady, one other bloke, and me. They supplied office equipment, typewriters (back in the day) and serviced them. All would have been well, except Father Boss, and the office lady were having a long term affair, and had a child together, whilst still living with his wife, and his wife knowing about it. Wife used to ring up and shout at office lady. I felt rather sorry for her, but she actually complained about me one day, and said I was rude (I don't remember being rude, but I was 16, and maybe it was tone. Dunno. But whatever, it can't have been quite as rude as shagging her husband I ended up being sacked. Completely outrageous, but anyhoo. I wasn't there very long, and it was very stressful for 16 yrs old me who had absolutely zero life experience of dealing with this kind of batshit situation.

SpongeBob, sorry for your experience. You tried to improve things but it fell on deaf ears.

I appreciate you cannot give the name but that is why I never donate to big charities anymore. They just waste the donations.

Sounds like the sort of thing they do at FinTechs. I went for an interview at one recently and they were very vague about holiday entitlement but made a big thing about getting your birthday off (whoopy bloody doo). But what they were VERY clear on at the outset was that “We do not pay bonuses”. But hey, there’s Diet Coke in the fridge and beanbags in reception so that’s okay!