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.

This thread needs to go into CLASSICS

I work in a building that has a civil service dept on one floor and a council health services dept on another. On the lower ground floor there are three showers.
Someone has been stealing the shower heads. It's been going on for months - they are replaced then go missing. And apparently now the shower door handles are going too...

I have that. In reality I track it to make sure I take between 25-30 days. The work still has to get done, if I took too many days I'd just be making it up at the weekend anyway to catch up.

I had a job where this had to happen too. Bizarre

My manager used to moan when emails weren't replied to. So each time she replied to me with thank you I would reply you're welcome and I could see her annoyance wondering if she should reply or not 😂

Perhaps he was used to wfh.

A place I worked in used to sometimes be visited by a lady wearing slippers who'd get mistaken for someone's grandma. Actually she was a Nobel Prize winner with arthritis. Don't judge a person by their footwear!

I once took a job working for (unbeknown to me) a man with dementia. Even without it, he would have been vile I'm sure, but two weeks after joining the company his ex assistant called to see how I was getting on. She had transferred to a sister company, and told me that I'd set a new record, with one girl having started and left at lunchtime, another had lasted two days, another a week, and there I was at two weeks. She asked if the nightmares had started yet. It didn't take long.

I could handle him questioning why I'd presented him with a report I'd worked on for a couple of weeks, obtaining various quotes etc, as he'd asked me to do, but drew the line when after a day off, he stormed into the office and gave me a tirade of abuse, telling me that I couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery, etc etc. I was absolutely clueless as to what had happened, so I reminded him that i'd had the day off, which he'd agreed to before I took the job, as I had an exam scheduled. He eventually stopped swearing, and told me what had happened the previous day - no-one had been in the office and answering the phone until after 9am. I walked out of the office, established what had gone wrong, walked back in and told him, and said that I would not be spoken to in that way, even if I had been in any way responsible for the situation, and to accept my notice as I'd be leaving at the end of the month. I left that day. Reading it back, an earlier situation is probably more entertaining - revolting little man.

@TheBloatedMiddle

Wonderful thing about menopause for me is that i have lost my desire to people please and take very little shit anymore.

I hear you!! 🌹

When I was a teenager, I gave tuition to kids at their homes. I was asked to help a 9 year old with his homework. I thought I was expected to teach him to do it. No, the mother asked me to do it for him. Actually do it for him. Kid did not want to know anyway. He spent most of his time with his hands down his pants.

It wasn't difficult money. Just weird.

With regards to slipper wearing, the person in a company I was delivering office supplies, turn out to be the CEO. You never know who's who at times.

These are all great, brilliant idea for a thread.

I worked in a school once years ago where the receptionist would count the pencils out for your class. You couldn’t have more than exactly the amount of children you had a woe betide you if they needed replacements ‘too soon.’ I remember buying some pencils myself just so that I didn’t have to face her. I remember once she had left the cupboard open with them in and someone took some extra pencils. So many emails! I do wonder who had the temerity to do it. (Not me!)

Our large department was being restructured and one area the number of staff was being reduced from ten to five. I was retiring anyway so not affected. My manager explained that the process would involve competitive interviews with a points system to select the successful candidates. I pointed out that any manager who was worth his salt and had worked with all of the people would know who the best ones were. Apparently that was not fair to everyone.
You guessed it,; the talkers and arse-lickers got the jobs and the grafters were made redundant.

Ooh yes. Crosswords. How dare an underling such as me have the temerity to upset a manager by supplying him with the answer he asked for! He was talking through the clue purely to look good and impress us with his knowledge of big words. I interrupted his little performance with the answer. It was over 20 years ago and the word was disingenuous 😀

I worked with a really annoying woman management lackey/grass who kept a nasty plastic toy on her desk. I'm ashamed to say that I stole the toy, photographed it and created a ransom note demanding 37p in unmarked coins for the return of the toy, unharmed. Kept the toy for several months and would occasionally send a new ransom note with a reduced demand. I am a highly qualified professional person and was never suspected of the kidnapping.

I also have never heard of it. While I don't live in the UK there are a lot of people originally from overseas living here, and yes, I have worked with several Asian people - still never heard of it.

That's so true. We used to have papers delivered to my workplace from other businesses and one man would come every day in his running gear with the papers. I assumed he had a part-time delivery job there - turned out he was the accountant, who used to run in his lunch hour and bring the papers with him.

Yes it did! 😀

OMG I think this person might be another Mumsnetter!

She sounds exactly like someone who posted on MN the other day saying she was really excited about starting a new job as an accountant this Tuesday or Wednesday. I think. She said she had gone a little overboard with her preparations and had bought a pink outfit to wear, lots of colourful highlighters, a pink, clipboard, had had her nails and hair done. First job as an accountant. Her BF had laughed at her said that other people would also laugh at her, so felt really upset and was asking others on MN for some advice.

She also wanted to bring in a basket of fruit but other on MN said she should wait.

I cannot find the post arghhhhh..... but she sounded absolutely lovely.

We had a team of ten. We were not allowed to have holiday if someone else was off. One person had booked the first two Monday's of the school summer holidays so those weeks were not available leaving four weeks for nine people. I left so I could go on holiday that year!

I've just remembered another . A good few years ago now , but every single morning when staff arrived and signed in and walked through reception , Tina Turners " Your simply the best" would be blasting out from the sound system to motivate us .

Absolutely love this thread. Here are some of mine:

• small firm, late nineties: specific China coffee cups for clients and the two boss ladies and everyone else was NOT allowed to drink from them and if you were ever seen doing so Words were Had
• small firm, early noughties, we could never work out why the CFO sat with his blind down and door pulled too until my friend who also managed the IT discovered he was streaming huge aunts of porn and taking up all the internet bandwidth - blinds were down so that anyone walking into the room could not see anything reflected from his screen onto the window…🤢
• huge firm mid-noughties - we worked in one division of a larger whole and the head of said division ran it has his private fiefdom with separate rules for “us” and “them” (even though we were the smallest group) - on my first day as a lowly member of the marketing dept I was summoned to his office to be told “Don’t talk to The people in X division - don’t tell them anything - don’t help them out” - he also paid for us all to have advanced driving lessons (my job was entirely desk based, non-customer facing) and gave us all a course in public speaking (see desk-based comment…) which involved in part all 30 people lying on the floor of the training room learning how to breathe properly…. And we thought this was normal!!!

Huge amounts of porn!! Not aunts!! (Although it takes all sorts!!)😅

If we're talking batshit generally rather than insane rules, one particular employer springs to mind due to the incredible amount of sex going on:

• people shagging on the boardroom table after hours, ALL the time, including during work dos
• one of the directors left under a bit of a cloud and the poor PA who had to clear his desk out found it full of porn mags
• another director was fired for not only fiddling his expenses, but expensing the lunchtime travelodge where he was regularly shagging a head of department
• the CEO was also shagging a head of department, having previously done the same to her predecessor

At another employer, I once had to explain to the lovely Muslim finance guy what sexy dollars were and why I imagined we had an invoice for a grand from the local lap dancing club. Needless to say, I had invented a headache once I saw the direction the client night out was going in.

🙄 can you really not join the dots on this one….

A relative of mine worked for JLP years ago. In those days men had to wear ‘business dress’ suit, shirt & tie. Red ties and/or blue shirts were not allowed but noi one could tell him why. Red shirts & or blue ties were ok though.

Does anyone know why?