Strange / silly rules at work

[melpomene]

What strange or silly rules do you have in your workplace?

Here are some examples from the office where I work:

• My colleagues asked if we could have a small bookcase, because we have heaps of reference books on the desks and a bookcase would make it much easier to store and find them. We were told that it is against the policy to have bookcases or shelves, and that "if we got a book case then people would put things on it".

• They provide pencils but not pencil sharpeners, so when your pencil gets blunt you have to throw it away and get a new one.

• In the canteen, they sometimes serve vegetable curry. They also serve rice.

However, you are not allowed to have vegetable curry with rice. You are allowed to have vegetable curry with a baked potato, or chicken curry with rice, but not vegetable curry with rice .

Has anyone else got any silly rules?

It does depend on who you have to kiss though!

I worked for a well-known Bank's contact centre.

They decided (just before I left) to bring in a staff uniform (bear in mind, we worked solely on the telephones, no face to face whatsoever).
The had Jeff Banks design the uniforms, therefore a skirt was £32, a blouse £22, etc.

We had to pay for the uniform, then if you left, you had to return it to the company with no refund!

Fortunately, I was sacked from this god forsaken place for transferring £50 of my own money from my savings account to my current account on my lunch break. They had recently brought in the rule that we could manage our own accounts in the same way that branch staff could, but conveniently forgot to tell us that we couldn't transfer money.

(I fought it at tribunal, and won).

I work in a school with a dictator for a head.
Staff are not allowed to drink redbull. It's illegal apparently.
We can't wear our coats to walk to our classrooms
We have to open swinging doors in a certain direction
We are not allowed to come into the school using the front door
We have to reverse into the parking spaces in the carpark

I am bewildered that some of these rules can be legal
I'd imagine that a lot of them aren't, but the companies get away with them because they're not challenged.

Happy to work somewhere we have very little in the way of stupid rules, let alone any sort of dress code, but loving this thread!

I got told off for sending an email to the people on my floor saying there was a key (ie a lost one) in the kitchen. Apparently I should have emailed the person in charge of lost keys.

then they would have sent an email round.

Also, when I did some work recently for a newspaper the commissioning bod sent me an email entitled payment in which she asked me for my name and address. a bit confused (surely they're not going to send me a cheque?) I asked her if she wanted my bank details. no. she wouldn't email my details to the accounts dept. she would email accounts telling them to email me. Accounts would then email me asking for my bank account details.

In my brothers workplace they can only take their cars to work on certain days,they are given a coloured tag to display in their car and told which days you can bring your car and one of my brothers jobs is to go out in all weather and check all the cars in the car park to see if the correct people have brought their cars to work that day. If you have a blue tag and bring your car on a red tag day you get a letter about it etc.

They also have to reverse into their parking space, I could never work there as I can't reverse park.

And they have to hold the hand rail when walking up and down the stairs at all times. If you don't you get into trouble.

I don't have any weird rules in my work.

At my last work place the MD kept saying 'no paperwork on desks' We were a sales order INPUT office therefore HAD to ahve paperwork on our desks.

He then said that he wanted to remove all drawers from under desks because it causes un tidyness [condused]

So no drawers and no paperwork or anything on our desk apart from our PCs, where was our stationary meant to go or where was our UK 'area' paperwork meant to go.

I left before that rule came in so dont know if he carried out with it. He actually did order a new desk for a new colleague (who left after a week) but didnt order any new drawers for the desk.

Twat!

We were allowed to bring our dogs to work (every day if we wished, so long as they sat in our office- people in open plan were denied the dog perk) but were not allowed a toaster in the kitchen for health and safety reasons. We were also not allowed to bring our own mugs into work- well we could, but they weren't allowed in the dishwasher.

You were allowed to wear jeans but not a t-shirt with writing on it other than the manufacturer's logo (apparently this rule was introduced after someone wore a FONDLE, FOREPLAY, FCUK t-shirt to work.)

You were allowed to use work mobile for personal calls (great rule!) BUT stationary had to be signed out as apparently people were going wild and taking 50 pads of post-its.

This thread makes me so glad that I work for myself at home. I do have a stringent don't come to my house between 9am and 1pm unless you have cake, coffee or chocolate (combinations allowed). Thinking of banning FB in the workplace though...

LOL oftenpurple, over banning FB !

There's a neat little add-on for Firefox called 'LeechBlock' if your will-power is not too strong some days. You can specify websites where it will either block completely during certain hours, or have a limited number of minutes allowed, so automated 'ban' but not an outright ban!

oooh, can I add a stupid lack of rule?

Our office building was overhaulled abit ago and new fire alarms were put in. We have formal dining rooms and a full kitchen, so we requested not having the fire alarm sensors in there as cooking would set them off. All fine, every floor in the building was told about this etc.

For a period of 7 months before I went off on mat leave, at least once a week, there was a fire alarm going off as the people who rent the 4th floor have toasters in their kitchen but didn't ask for the super sensitive sensors to be removed from their kitchen. Every time someone has toast on their floor without putting the toaster basically out of the window, the whole building gets evacuated (huge building in Cen. London, at least 10 major companies in there) and 2 fire engines arrive to inspect the source of fire alarm - which will be the toasters on the 4th floor.

Apparently, the staff complained that they shouldn't have their toasters removed, and their management caved and let them keep them. The fact that they were causing major distruption to the rest of the building, not getting to eat said toast as they had to evacuate and pissing off the fire brigade was considered to be of less importance to their right to toast.

I'm only on week 2 back from mat leave, not had a fire alarm so far, so am hoping the toast issue has been fixed.

I work in cosmetics. They love rules!
Full face of make up at all times (must be reapplied everytime you leave the shop floor)
Nails must be french manicured
Nude tights all year round. No ladders
Plasters covering all tattoos
Hair must not sit On the collar of your jacket or it must be tied up (we all have bob's or bun's)
Must not be caught smoking in uniform.
Cannot go for a drink/meal straight from work in uniform.
Hair bands/clips/bobbles must be black or tortoiseshell
Holiday must not be taken in promotional time or peak trade (which honestly leaves about 3 weeks a year and you are only aloud 2 on holiday at the same time and even that's at a push !)
I do love my job but there are sooo many silly little rules. I can't think of them all! I suppose the 3 pages of "how do identify and manage stress" in my contract should have given the game away!

As a primary school teacher we weren't allowed hot drinks in mugs- which makes sense when kids are around, but when you can't have a cup of tea at 8am an hour before the kids arrive (by which point it would have gone cold anyway) it ridiculous.

When they brought it in I kept running (well fast walking) off with a hot drink in a mug and the 'health and safety' person would jog after me shouting- ha ha. Eventually they dropped the rule.

Start rebelling against these stupid rules people!!!

Ahem...I leechblock Mumsnet on my work computer and laptop, so can only access it on DH's

Portofino I like the sound of the day!

This thread is hilarious. My office is positively sane, who knew?

I might change my talk name to VulvalDebris or PerinealFallout- PMSL.

Clarkiee - we have that rule too, which is imposed at 8am! We have to have travel mugs with lids. Maybe I should have a travel mug with a lid when drinking a cuppa at home with my two kids?

Fakeplastictrees - taost addicts need help. Maybe they could be counseled towards salads...

Acekicker, yep I think I will wear the red dress. And to he'll with what anyone, especially that image consultant, thinks as this thread has reminded me why I don't plan to work in an office for much longer.

On the subject of dress codes, q friend of mine doing her first application before a judge in his Chambers, about 10 years ago, was told, "Sorry Miss X, I can't hear you". Thinking he was a little deaf, my friend raised her voice. The judge repeated his statement. My friend raised her voice again. Eventually the judge deigned to explain that it was more a case of wouldn't hear her....because she was wearing that newfangled form of female attire known as trousers.

oh, the joys of what IT allow us to do or not do... our Digital Media team who maintain our organisation's flickr-commons, twitter and facebook team have, like the rest of us (you've guessed it) been blocked by IT from using those sites

and we've had any kind of digital 'dropbox' facility banned so we can't share files with our designers and contractors because apparently these sites make it 'too easy to share information'

I worked in an office in a building rented from royal mail. We were not allowed to walk in the carpark without a yellow jacket (or park in it at all). The Royal mail employees could park their cars and walk accross the carpark ok but if I wanted to take stuff out to the bin in broad daylight I had to wear a hi-vis jacket.

Still the way they drove it was possibly a good idea.

I worked for an oil company a few years ago. we were all confused when signs went up outside the office saying "CAUTION - DO NOT LOOK UP" The first thing you would do would be look up!

Apparently an employee in the Norway office had been in the carpark, looked up and a bird poop landed in his eye. As he had to take time off to have his eye checked this was classed as a lost time workplace accident and we lost our safety bonus for that year! Twas an American company, needless to say!

This is so funny.........I remember years back working for the DTI - as a temp (18 years old) - I arrived early (always worry about being late especially on 1st day) and went into little kitchen and grabbed a cup of coffee (had been working B4 at v rich well known bank where everything was laid on for staff)

OMG!! I was completely bollocked by two older ladies as I had used the senior managers filtered coffee and everyone brought in their own cup and I had used one of them.

Even worse I didn't get ready to leave at 5pm as I had some stuff to type - everyone began getting their stuff together at 4.50pm so they would be ready to leave on the dot at 5pm! The work ethic at that place was the worst I have every encoutered

"Caution do not look up" is brilliant! How fantastically self-defeating

It's a bit like telling someone "don't think about elephants" or similar mind-benders.

Just got through this whole thread its really cracked me up!

Most of my work places have been ok but there's been a few that have been a bit ridiculous strange.

In an office I worked in we could only use pink highlighters and blue pens never black. The cleaners weren't allowed to touch anything on our desks which for some reason extended to the area around and under our desks even though there wouldn't be any work about. Once I left some screwed up paper by my chair to see if the cleaners would pick it up. 2 weeks later I got fed up and threw it away myself!

I was a manager in a shop where staff weren't allowed to take time off in December (busiest time) fair enough but we weren't given a very big staffing budget so there were never quite enough people in. May as well have allowed some people holiday! We were also expected to work 50+ hours a week when our contracts said 40, the extra 10 were unpaid but we should do it for the love of the company! This was also a company that cared more about their 'ethics' than their staff. Hmph.