Why? (Stupid Work Tales)

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I'm starting this thread in the hopes that others will share some work scenarios that baffle or amuse them. I've been working a long, long time and I still run across stuff that puzzles me. Currently I work as a cook in a mega-market, and here are a few things that baffle me right now:

1) We store a lot of stuff in a giant, walk in freezer. It's pretty essential that everyone keep their supplies in the designated areas, and to this end there is a diagram of the freezer, divided by area, on the door. You would think it would be called Freezer Map, or Storage Guide, but no; it is called Frozen Item Efficiency Incentive. Why??? I feel no incentive at all when I look at the diagram, I just want to laugh and put things in the wrong place in protest over such a silly title for a map.

2) The lights (about 400 watts of them BTW) are always on in the bathrooms; but there is a motion detector that ups that wattage by about 200% whenever you go in. Why do I need this much light to do what I need to do in there?

3) Every day my department needs to make and price a production run of ten different items. The pricing is done by entering a four-digit product code which never varies; neither does the required production vary. You would think one day would be enough for workers to realize that they need to print labels for items 5384, 5385, 5386, etc.; the product codes are in a simple sequence. Yet every day I watch people who do the work on a daily basis look them up, as if they'd never done the task before. Why? How hard is it to remember ten sequential numbers?

Well those are mine and my mini-rant for the day. Share some stupid work tales, ok?

I work at a zoo. This is the best Stupid Guest Story I have.

I was at the entrance keeping people in line for tickets entertained by taking out the African Grey parrot. This guy comes up to me and asks me where the 11:00 birthday party is. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then he asks, "Is that an African Grey?" and I say yes. He starts petting it. I freak out and say, "Sir, please don't pet the parrot! He will bite people he doesn't know.". He says, without missing a beat, "I'm from Africa. We're cool." The weird thing is, the parrot didn't bite him!

This is an excellent idea for a thread! There's so much that if you can get above the frustration, is really, really funny. Aerial, your examples are funny, what gets me is that they say it's the Aspies who are obsessive at following rules. Item 1) is jargonizing, a variety of name dropping, which is definitely a Narcissistic Personality Disorder trait. Uh oh, I'm beginning to categorize....

I'm a software developer, and the management driven idiocy there is well covered by the Dilbert cartoon strip. Here's a couple of examples of idiocy by allegedly sane people who have no problem whatsoever with eye contact and showing correct subservient body language to the boss:

1) To boost our flailing morale, our company issues an annual company calendar from the QA (Quality Assurance)department. Every month has platitudes like "Quality starts by going the Extra Mile" and other such twaddle. Last years is a prized souvenir of mine because the QA department got the month of June wrong...they put 2 June 12ths one after the other (perhaps it's easier to go an extra mile when you have the same day twice????)

2) My company does some Defence work. Sorry, I'd love to work somewhere more positive for humanity, maybe when the job market picks up. Anyway, in around 2002 we interviewed an Iraqi national for a job. Interviews are counducted by 2 people: a manager type who rambles about our corporate vision of "leveraging our customer synergies" and a technical one who doesn't say much, but tests the candidate on his technical abilities. I really don't know how an Iraqi national, who'd done national service in the Iraqi military, even got an interview in a company that does sensitive military work. We thought he'd be shown the door sharpish, but it gets worse. The non-tech guy really took a liking to this interviewee, even though the techy guy has found that his skills are really, really poor. His behaviour was very suspicious, surely he can't be employed here? Final decisions are always made by the manager, who had said that "he had a feeling that despite his lack of skill and inappropriate past, this developer had lots of potential and would prove to be an asset". They employed him!

However, it soon became clear he didn't know the first thing about software development (which had been pointed out, but ignored in the interview) and his security clearance was refused with the authorities starting an investigation into his background as he was a possible spy. He was released after his 6 week trial period, the only person ever that has failed the trial period. And what happened to the manager who made the barmy decision? Nothing - a couple of promotions, then left to become some director somewhere where I assume his gut insticts are as crazy as ever!
BTW I have no problem with Iraqi nationals - it would be as crazy as a US citizen being employed in an Iraqi defence establishment.

Right now, I make sandwiches for my $8.25/hr. The part that frustrates me is how people ofter expect you to know that they don't want something on their sandwhiches. F=or example, lot's of people don't want bacon (for various reasons) on their sandwiches. Most are intelligent enough to say that right away. However, I occasionally have someone that only remembers to mention it right at the counter, after they've paid. In some cases, they even insist that I make a new one, for any number of reasons, like religious reasons. Or even more frustrating, if they're allergic to whatever. If it's so important, wouldn't people want to mention it right away, instead of taking a chance and HOPING I don't put it on??? I tell you, one of these days, I will be tempted to lie and say, 'No, there is no cheese on your sandwich'. I know that would be a very bad move, but I will still be tempted. *inhales* Well anyways, that's my little rant/tantrum/complaining spree. move along

I work retail at the moment, which is like a gold mine for stupid people stories. Among my favorites are the lady who bought a product in 1988 and tried to return it a couple of years ago...and argued that she should be able to because she kept the original receipt; the endless stream of customers who come up to the front counter and ask, "Do you have a box that's four inches by eighteen by twenty three and a quarter?" (or something similar) and then get really annoyed when the person can't tell them off the top of his or her head in less than ten seconds whether we have something that size and where it is; and the people who come up to the doors after we close, visibly read the hours we're open, check their watches, and then start banging on the glass and screaming obscenities at us for being closed.

And then, of course, there are the imbeciles who let their small children run around the large store completely alone. This is frustrating enough when it's just kids being heinous little brats (like the pair that got into a plunger duel a couple of weeks ago), but it's just plain scary when the kids are toddlers and anyone could really walk off with them. :/

When I worked in a pie/pasty shop, the customers were very stupid. The amount of times we had people pointing at pasties and saying 'are they pasties?' was unbelievable. In the end I sarcastically said to one guy that they were stuffed gerbils that were skinned alive. He never came back. But then I didnt care because I do not suffer fools gladly. My other responses to 'are they pies/pasties' were 'well no s**t sherlock' or 'what the hell do you think?' unless they were foreign or genuinely didn't know what they were. My then boss thought my attitude was absolutely hilarious hence I got away with the speaking to idiots how I did.

Here are some funnies from my job at a medical equipment company:

Some MBA savant tried to name a new product the DOA monitor.

Our safety department caused injuries!!
By requiring clip on toe protectors with metal bars underneath on an antistatic floor. Think ice skates. One tech bruised her rear so bad that she had to get xrays. The stupid toe clips disappeared shortly after she was halled off by the ambulance

The company ordered two big signs for the plant and research buliding -- both were put up with typos. Administration was spelled "Administraon" and plant becam "Plan".

If you work at the same zoo as me, I was there! And I think I was holding the parrot, but whatever.

The time a VERY, obviously pregant girl wandered into the building, asked for an application, filled it out, and left. The boss, thrilled, came out and told me "finally, we've got a new employee!" Me, being as slow as I am, said something like "well, I guess that pregnant girl will be sad to hear that she won't be hired in here just to go on medical leave and quit!" The boss gave me a funny look, and said "Pregant girl? What pregnant girl?" You know, the one that just left your office? No, he DIDN'T know, apparently. She started the next day and spent a week in training, went on paid maternity leave on the first day she was supposed to do any real work, and quit the morning she was supposed to actually come back from maternity leave. In short, we paid her for a couple months just to be pregnant, and then we never saw her again.




That's the same institutional kitchen where we hired a girl in to cook who admitted she'd never cooked a thing in her life ("That's what McDonald's is for!") She was employed for several years just to do busy work, because she refused to learn how to cook anything, and nobody thought it was fair to make her learn.

And the same institutional kitchen where we hired in a cook who, I kid you not, asked how to tell when water is boiling. And who couldn't figure out how to slice a watermelon. The boss insisted on keeping her on the job anyway, doing nothing but watching everyone else work, past the probation period (when, theoretically, they could have gotten rid of her without providing a reason.) Two days after her probation period ended, she called in and claimed to be injured on the job, and was never seen by any of us again, although presumably we paid for her disability.

And also the same kitchen, in a mental hospital, where we were forbidden from bringing pocket knives ("deadly weapons") onto the grounds, while also being forbidden from preventing violent mental patients from entering the kitchen (a seperate building from the hospital) and gaining easy access to our butcher knives and all the other deadly, dangerous, and sharp objects available in a kitchen. Why? "Because this is their home!" Similarly, we were not supposed to report the where-abouts of stray mental patients wandering into the kitchen to security, "because it is demeaning and de-humanizing." We were later held responsible for the injury of a patient who got hurt in the kitchen, because we didn't tell anyone he was there.



It's also the same place where they installed an attendence incentive to discourage absenteeism; they gave the same rewards to everyone whether they showed up to work or not, because "it wouldn't be fair to the people who call in sick to just give rewards to the people who show up!" The boss also told me it was unfair that I kept getting so much overtime and the people who call in sick two days a week never got any, and that the fact that I had perfect attendence and always agreed to do extra work to make up for the people who called in gave me an unfair advantage over everyone else. Nobody could ever explain what those advantages were, since I consistantly got paid 10 cents an hour lower than the starting wages of any new employees. I was informed that they couldn't afford to pay me so much overtime, until I refused to work over for a no-call-no-show because I had other plans for the night, when I was informed I was not a "team player" and my evaluation would reflect that, because I wouldn't work extra that day.


Overtime pay is the bane of my existence: "we can't afford all the overtime we keep paying you!" One day I told the complaining manager, "overtime pay is time-and-a-half, so you're paying me $12.00/hour to do work in about 9 hours that normally you would be paying two people a total of $16.00/hour to do in a total of about 15 hours, so you're actually saving money. And you're actually not even paying me $12.00/hour for most of that 9 hours, because you are paying me only $8.00/hour for the first 8 hours of it. So you are actually saving a LOT of money by paying me over-time. And besides that, while I'm working overtime you're only paying the insurance for one person instead of two, so you're saving even more money. But you ARE paying the guy who called in 7 and a half hours of sick pay for doing absolutely nothing... there is your waste of money." She got very mad at me and told me that just because I don't call in sick, doesn't mean I have a right to criticise anyone who does, and it's unfair of me to "get everyone else's overtime all the time."






I'll never be able to untangle the surreal web of management priorities!


I compare every day of work at every job I've ever been, to living in some sort of a real-life scene from Monty Python's Flying Circus!

The company I work for likes to use statistics to track everything. We have two bulliten boards filled with print-outs of "tracking statistics" that show how the store is preforming, if were meeting quotas, etc. I'm suprised that they don't make us wear pedometers and put a limit on how many steps we have to take each night.

The other lovely thing about all of this is that department managers all have to fill out forms to submit this information to corporate. Do you think they're being honest? From what I've seen, no.

A few years back our company started this thing called "C.O.R.E", which is short for "Customer Oriented Regiment of Effiecency" - nothing more than an attempt by corporate to streamline and standardize the operations in all corporate stores. That would be fine, except that this company owns three different supermarket chains, each of which is different and unique in it's own way. So that what works for one store dosen't for another.

The company uses what's known as a "discipline schedule" to deal with people who violate company policy. At the bottom of this schedule is the following disclaimer...

"This schedule is not all inclusive and is to serve only as a guideline for discipline. Managers and supervisors retain all rights in determining the course of action to take when disciplining an employee"

So if I read this correct, this "schedule" is nothing more than a "suggestion"?

At least it's not Frozen Item Efficiency SOLUTIONS. Solutions are driving me nuts...

"Integrated Care Solutions (Shropshire):working in partnership to deliver Residential, Day-care and Extra-care solutions "
NURSING HOMES

"The Blue Team: Outsourced Vehicle Movement Solutions "
CAR DELIVERIES

"Clegg: Accommodation Solutions "
FLATS

"Uniq's Vision is to be the most exciting provider of chilled food solutions to our customers across Europe "
READY MEALS

"Fabric Display Solutions"
FLAGS

When I worked on cruise ships I was often asked things like:

'What time is the midnight buffet?'
'How can I tell which of these photos is mine?'
'Does this staircase go up or down?'
'Has this ship ever sunk before?'
'Which elevator do I take to get to the front of the ship?'
'Is this island completely surrounded by water?'

I used to work in our federal public service.

Walking into the building at work was like being anesthestised and everyone else was too. The go slows, the think slows, don't rock the boat. You could feel your brains being slowly curdled.

They managed to call one department,
The department of Foreign affairs and Trade = D-FAT - which is exactly what it was and what everyone calls it.

Another was
Department of Primary Industries and Energy. or Dopie - like the dwarf. And we called it that too. I think this one has been restructured and renamed several times, but it still gets refered to as "dopie".

And then they changed the names of the clerical workers to
Administrative Service Officers Level 1 through 9 or so.
And they became known as assh*les. It seemed to fit snugly somehow.

The union was called the Public Service Union, which we tended to call the
Piss you. Which didn't really mean anything but it did piss your bosses off.

Another company I worked for, delegated to one of my co-workers, the task of comming up with mission statements for every department. The poor girl was tearing her hair out trying to come up with stuff that sounded right. Until I pointed her at the Dilbert.com mission statement generator. Management thought her mission statements were perfect.

LOL, yes, Mission Statements! I NEVER understood that. "Those that can, do, but those that can't need a Mission Statement!" At the mental hospital I worked at for a time, the laundry room had a mission statement... it seemed to me that you really wouldn't need much more of a mission statement than "our job here is to clean the laundry, and avoid being infected with frighteningly awful diseases by it as we work", but instead they had a framed plaque mission statement that went on and on and on and on complete with fine print, and said absolutely nothing. Show the mission statement to any random passerby, and ask him what sort of business the statment represented, and I imagine he'd probably suggest banking or psychology or prostitution as soon as anything.



And the jargon is spot on! "So, Bob, what exactly does your business do?" "We provide marketing solutions to today's fast-paced interactive inter-business relationship." What the HELL does something like that REALLY mean? I can understand "we make cars", "we cook hamburgers", "we machine mining equipment", "we run a chain of department stores", "we sell crack", "we break legs when people fail to pay back The Boss's loans", and that sort of thing. ("We provide solutions" is an answer designed specifically NOT to be understood, so it's probably no coincidence that it sounds like the sort of answer an embarrassed parasite who produces absolutely nothing constructive would give, when he doesn't really know what he's doing beyond leeching off of productive people!)




Have you ever noticed how, after someone has been with some lame, un-productive company for five, ten, fifteen, or 40 years or whatever, the management will give them this dinky little tiny pin consisting of about five dollars with of gold and a diamond you can barely see with the naked eye, and act like that's better than a paycheck? Noticed how these managers, and the rank-and-file chain-of-command types, get all loopy about the whole thing, practically jumping up and down like a kid at Christmas, and wondered: "Good Lord... do they REALLY expect me to get excited over THIS? Or are they such brainless twits, that this really IS the sort of thing that would make them happy???" Well, wonder no more - YES, they really are brainless twits, who would rather have a dinky little $10 pin than a paycheck! I don't understand it, but if you are ever looking for that extra little something "special" to get the boss to notice you, then find a good cheap source of those chintzy little pins, get everyone on the job to put up 50 cents or so, buy one or two, and invent some sort of "special occassion", like an anniversary of some sort, to give one out along with a lame speech and handshake to your boss on, and act like it really means something. You will, of course, have to abandon your pride and sanity at the front door for this plan. Anyway, I say that this is so, because I've actually seen these jerks sitting around nosing through catalogues of these pins and getting sour over it because they would rather have the pins for themselves than pass them out, and they got really nasty with me because I'm so "ungrateful" that I would rather "rewarded for my years of loyal service" with a check for the purchase price instead GODS, how I hate those pins! Sure, back in the "good old days" it was a watch they would give out, but at least a watch was something practical and functional. Instead, now it isn't bad enough they want to stamp you as property with the company logo all over you, in the form of a uniform and badge. But, oh my gosh! You've been with the company for 10 years??? Well, let's slap the company logo on a cheesy, useless little pin and stick that on you, to mark you as 10-year-old company property! And they would seriously take THAT as some sort of honor?!?!




Speaking of uniforms, my last employer had this thing about making us buy most of our own uniform, and then change the uniform every few months. Oh, I could understand if we had to buy the uniform from them, or from one of their "partners"... I could understand that, since I could follow the money and find a logical, if under-handed and slimey, reason for it. But it would be "you must wear khaki slacks and black shirts with this uniform!", and then suddenly a change, and "you must wear black slacks and white t-shirts with the new unform shirt over the top!" And then later on "they must be white slacks, with green mock-turtleneck shirts!" "Our uniform shoes are now black athletic shoes, manufactured only by company X or brand Y!" "Our uniform shoes are now white athletic shoes with black laces, by company W or brand X!" Since this was all for a cooking job where I'd get filthy and sweaty every single day, this began to add up to a LOT of new uniforms, and a lot of junk collecting in my drawers that I would never wear outside of work, and I got mad about it because I was spending a fortune on the company fashion show for no good reason, and so I refused to buy the new uniforms any longer. ("INSUBORDINATION!")

Things had gotten so bad, in fact, that they even issued written policy (I kid you not!) on what colour underwear was acceptable to wear on the job (remember, we were working in an institutional kitchen, not a brothel, strip club, or Victoria's Secret catalogue photo-shoot!) - the wrong colour was "grounds for immediate termination." And note that this didn't just come from one wacky boss, but it came down from somewhere out of "corporate" where it had to go through a lot of time, effort, manpower, money, and attention to ever get distributed down to us as a supplement for our surreal employee handbook; in short, a BUNCH of nitwits thought this was important enough to worry about. I didn't win any popularity points when I asked them if they were going to do an underwear check every day before we started working. I was, in fact, informed that that question might be in violation of the company's sexual harrassment policy, an offense that could be considered grounds for termination, just like my other questions about how they were going to enforce the underwear colour policy without crossing into sexual harrassment territory themselves, and what difference it makes on an employee's ability to flip burgers and mop floors To basically paraphrase the spirit of the situation: "an important part of our job in managing a kitchen is to control what colour underwear you wear, and you will be considered to be sexually harrassing us if you don't act like such a policy is a natural part of running a business that will never have a sane, normal reason to ever see or otherwise be affected by or concerned with the colour of your underwear!" (And they think I'm weird? No wonder that corporation was having difficulty with "providing profit solutions to shareholders in synergy with the wide range of undergarment options available to today's employees"....)

I thought the reason that a company mission statement was so vague was because you wouldn't want to limit opportunities for the company by being specific about what it does and where it is going.

Except if you ask what the mission statement is for, it usually is something about goal and value setting for the company, ie defining what it does and giving it some direction. And yet they choose direction statements that avoid doing that all together.

Maybe we could have a thread for "guess what this company does from its mission statement"

Fortunately they do seem to have gone out of fashion.

I'm annoyed by most of the people in my office where I work, unfortunately. In my depapartment we have a ritual "tea-round", which requires everyone in the office to take it in turns to make their co-workers a cup of tea - normally 5 cups per round. Sometimes people volunteer - a 5 min break is often welcome, but sometimes we get pushed... some of those people get can really arsey when they haven't had a cup of tea for an hour.

So like, it's my turn to make the tea, but I really can't be bothered because I'm doing real work and don't want to be distracted by this stupid ritual. So I have to endure a torrent of rhetoric and abuse because I haven't made a brew since yesterday. God damn you people. Make the tea your-bloody-selves. I don't even like tea! I only drink tea because making tea for everyone else except myself feels even more pointless than the entire ritual itself.

Your throats are not dry, please don't exaggerate. Stop repeatedly asking me "Where's the tea?!", because it's a really annoying question and I don't want to give you a pedantic answer because that only makes you more irate. Ok you annoyed the pedant in me now.

"THE TEA IS IN THE KITCHEN. WHY BOMBARD ME WITH SUCH IRRELEVANT QUESTIONS WHEN I AM TRYING TO WORK!?"

I'll eventually make the undeserving cretins a drink, but only after they're in a bad mood. I do enjoy watching people get irate over trivial things like this.

I work in a supermarket.

A customer once asked me if the orange juice was made from free range oranges