[Closed] Weird things at your work place

Sole westerner in a Chinese company so lots, but my favorite is that managers have to buy the bosses photography book every year (its for charity), his PA goes around with a list noting who has bought one.

You have to screw your timesheet in order to take flexi days you haven't actually earned.

You must put in the least effort possible to just about ge the job done, while trying to garner as much praise as possible.

You must put up with the boss and senior's xenophobic and mysogonistic views and jokes which they frequently share.

Someone 'popping out' to get milk for tea for half an hour, seemingly every day, when there is already milk in the fridge is ok.

The first hour of the day is spent drinking hot beverages and discussing upcoming leave, how busy you are etc.

I work remotely, thank ****...........

They pay people a decent salary to browse the Daily Mail website all day.
Some blokes actually sit there saying "I've got no work on". (If asked, of course!)

Our SW Test group seem to spend all day watching Films on their PCs, whilst their automated tests run. Not surprisingly, our SW reliability is terrible.....

The bizarre space between my managers ears, God knows what goes on in there.

they pay you to sit talking bollocks on a [s]cycling[/s] social website allday.

I work from home. Regularly have a peacock outside my study window.

Adds a rather noisy tone to conference calls sometimes!

too many cliques and too much favouritism for some people where i work.
one office sits there doing very little other than having constant tea parties ...that same group refuse to add information to the database as instructed and do it wrongly and when training is put on for them they dont bother attending
they make mistakes or are woefully behind on thier work yet none of the senior team say anything about it but if anyone else makes a mistake that impacts on that bunch...then you can hear that tonne of bricks from a mile off
the policy is that the new jobs/roles have to be advertised and the application and interview stage has to take place...but for some select few this doesnt happen...we just get told that they have suddenly been promoted to a more senior role

o lot of people here are actually on higher salaries than what their job descriptions should allow...not just my sentiment but this is from some middle managers

but like my Murphy's...i'm not bitter

People are allowed to work from home despite having no vpn access.

We don't have a tea club but people still offer to make each other tea which equates to, "I'll go and get you some hot water so you can make a coffee at your desk."

[i]they pay you to sit talking bollocks on a cycling social website allday.[/i]

Ah, but there you're wrong, mr judgmental! I have 2 screens, I'm paid to monitor stuff on that there other screen, which I do. And therefore my "STW screen" is available for the occasional posting of the bollocks. 😛
(And I'm not paid anywhere near as much as the Daily Mail boys!)

There's a heavy, padlocked door with a "PANDEMIC SUPPLIES" sign on it. I assume it contains shotguns and a selection of medieval anti-zombie maces, lances, axes etc.

Timesheets are always a work of fiction 😀

At a previous place, we had a circular come round telling us (amongst other things) not to wipe s**t on the walls of the toilet cubicles. But I think we've done a "workplace toilet habits" thread before.

CaptainFlashheart - Member
I work from home. Regularly have a peacock outside my study window.

That's a mirror, not a window.

Worked in a large psychiatric hospital all us staff had our own mug and seat in rest room,staff and patients had different coloured cups for meetings, and when a staff member was chatting to a family member who was also a a patient, she would alaways give the patient a patients cup , even when he was her husband,

worked in industry and was told never switch any machine or light on or off unless you know its safe to do so, this after a sparky was electrocuted after somebody switched on the circuit he was working on,his fauklt he hadnt locked it out with a padlock.

All the doors are locked. It's like a jail.

That's a mirror, not a window

Very good

they pay you to sit talking bollocks on a cycling social website allday.

Ah, but there you're wrong, mr judgmental! I have 2 screens, I'm paid to monitor stuff on that there other screen, which I do. And therefore my "STW screen" is available for the occasional posting of the bollocks.
(And I'm not paid anywhere near as much as the Daily Mail boys!)

i have 2 screens...my work is based on open source intelligence so i spend a great amount of time on t'internet...so i can keep the stw page open in the background
but even if i spent all day on stw...my work output would still be far greater than those idiots in the other office

Not here, but in my old place we had 'the board'.

'The Board' was just an old whiteboard, a fairly benign thing, it's creation came from a time before shared outlook diaries and mobile phones but in 2009 (and probably still today) it had a sole purpose - if you left the office, next to your name you wrote where you were going and what time you'd be back so if someone called for you, we knew when you'd be back.

But really, it was a war-zone in felt tip pen.

It was a war on 2 fronts, firstly, truthfully due to the vary 1970s way the company ran - most people who were senior enough to get out of the office did, but you had to justify it - so you would write down a list of existing clients and businesses on your patch and after arriving at 10am, leave for the day at 2pm. It was a mixed bag, some of the cocky ones I know literally went days working 4 hours a day at most and spent the rest of the time playing golf or sat in their garden. Some had a mix of actual meetings and 'home in time for neighbours' days, some real believers actually stressed themselves half to death and browbeat their poor clients into endless monthly meetings about nothing.

The second front was more fun to watch - the game of one-upmanship, you could write - blah blah blah, back 'tomorrow' or 'Tuesday' or whatever, but what's the point in that when you can write 08:30.. half an hour before kick-off, or if that's stating to look a bit pedestrian 08:00 or 05:30 seemed to be the point when the boss had to step in.

We, by this point, had left our quiet little edge of the empire office and moved in with the rest of the group at a regional centre, with access cards, cctv and an IT network - the boss took the worse offenders into his office, showed them photos of 'the board' saying they'd been in a 5am, visited 20 clients, blah blah blah - but the access system showed they'd come in at 10am, the it system showed they'd not touched an e-mail or the CRM system before this time, or after 2pm, on any day.

At first they got a gentle telling off about 'duty of care' towards them and 'the board' should reflect their actual movements, and if plans changed they were to call in and have someone amend it, also asked if they thought they needed some training, because despite working very hard, their output had remained static for years, and how despite several meetings with a potential client over many months, even years, they'd never managed to secure any business with them. Said with a smile, but with a stern warning about not wanted to have to dig much deeper.

Some of the utter morons I work with.

For the first time in my life I work in an office with cubicles and there is a white noise generator across the whole office.

Strange and breeds strange, solitary people.

😀 @daffy!

Just saw a workmate eating a pizza with curry, peanuts and banana on it

At one of my old work places we used to have a top 40 chart of stupid/funny shit that happened. A bit like a music chart where items would go up and down depending on new entries etc. Was highly entertaining but you had to be there.

I can't understand some people in the office moaning how bloody tiring their job is - to make some phone calls, send few emails, scan some documents... All that in air conditioning environment, with nice comfy chairs, unlimited tea/coffee breaks, etc...

In the bogs on the back of the door is a "how hydrated are you wee chart" I always find that kind of odd, most folk know how hydrated they are.

Putting up notices saying floor is wet when its a carpet?

I used to work with some Civil Servants - their TU rep used to come around and tell people off for not putting in enough 'sick days' as they hadn't taken their annual 'quota' - needed to keep the average up which was something like 9 sick days a year.

In the bogs on the back of the door is a "how hydrated are you wee chart" I always find that kind of odd, most folk know how hydrated they are.

here

- you buy everyone else cakes on your bday
- we shoot nerf darts at each other a lot
- we don't sign in/out
- holiday usually needs little notice
- no body takes sickies really..

only guy we had that was ex-council couldn't adapt and was a waste of space

Weird things? Can I start with that function laughably called management?

In the bogs on the back of the door is a "how hydrated are you wee chart" I always find that kind of odd, most folk know how hydrated they are.

Ours had a little rhyme too.

1 to 3 is health pee,
4 to 8 you must hydrate.

Still in my head 6 years after leaving.

Sat here watching my automated tests run (and fail regularly), and checking that STW is still working (but that's a personal project 😀 )

we still have to wear shirts and ties, even for just regular days in the office with no meetings (int/ext) or customer interface.

I also was asked by the MD to ask a worker to shave his beard off because the Chairman was visiting and he didn't like beards, as he believed people with beards told lies. I refused on that one.

pah. no dress code.. boss once said he didn't care if we came in dressed in suspenders as long as we got the job done..

(boss is/was also an MTBer ;))

most folk know how hydrated they are

I doubt that.

Here:

- One of the admin staff makes tea/coffee for everyone in the office (approx. 25) at 10:30am and 3pm every day. I've always thought it to be a bit archaic, especially as people still make tea and coffee as and when they like.

- We only get 20 days holiday a year AND we have to set aside 2-3 days of those for when the office shuts over Christmas.

- We have CPD seminars that are held over your lunch break, and are supposed to replace your lunchtime. I refuse to attend most of them, unless they are important ones.

- We still do domestic work: more hassle than it's worth.

That'll do for now.

Not weird, just annoying in that one place the office manager seemed to have no role other than to pester you with charity collections literally every single day.

Likewise the daily birthday/marriage/sprog/leaving card but then I've had them in numerous places now. I avoid them by working from home.

One place long ago and the teams were arranged into separate pokey little offices that were like class rooms and even re-arranged the desks so they all face the manager.

One chap at an old workplace q senior did nothing as he found a new wife for the md

another person was having an affair with the md s secretary, no one dared question where he was or what he was doing. I worked alongside him it went on for years

"[i]- you buy everyone else cakes on your bday[/i]"

That's been standard practice every place I've worked. At one place we even had a wall planner up with everybody's birthday marked so that you couldn't get out of it by keeping quiet !

That's been standard practice every place I've worked.

Part of our standard introduction to new grads is 'you're an adult now, which is a lot like being a kid, only you buy us cake on your birthday'

I sometimes have to spend more time chasing up project code access to book time to than I actually spend on the project.

Our datacenter team are responsible for racking and cabling servers but are not allowed to assign an IP address to the ILO so I have to send a Wintel engineer to a DC just to type an IP in (yet the Wintel engineer isn't allowed to rack or cable anything). So much for private sector efficiency.

It takes months to get water coolers or water boilers fixed, yet they're all covered by (no doubt expensive) maintenance contracts

Let me see:

When I was a lawyer in private practice a law firm of 4000 employees (2000 of whom were layers) was pretty much run on an individual fiefdom basis.

This drove some very odd and selfish behaviour, but weirdest of all was the standard corridor/lift greeting:

"How are you? Busy?"
"Good thanks. Yes, very busy right now. How about you?"
"Stacked out with work."

You'd then disappear to your desk and continue working the rest of your 16 hour day secretly worrying that you might be less busy than your colleagues and were now somehow not going to get a payrise/miss a bonus/being stabbed in the back/overlooked for promotion/being managed out.

Ridiculous state of affairs.

I now work in a FTSE250 company (household name). As a senior manager, it seems my job is not to manage those working for me (whether directly or indirectly), but to manage those I work for. And they, in turn, have to manage the board.

But it beats being a private practice lawyer every day of the week. .

We only get 20 days holiday a year AND we have to set aside 2-3 days of those for when the office shuts over Christmas.

same here but 1 extra for each year, up to 5.. and i'm pretty much a lifer.. 🙁 so start with 25.. and can carry some but have to be used in first part of the following year. once upon a time we could cash them in.. build up a huge excess then get a tidy sum 😈

My last place, the same woman used to go round putting up the decs at Christmas. Every year. Lots of them.
She was the only Jehovah Witness in the office.

Since I got reorganised a few years ago into another dept with a different manager, I now do 1/3rd the work I used to do in a week BUT he thinks I'm the best thing since sliced bread as the majority of his original staff are useless, lazy, incompetent idiots.

Our SW Test group seem to spend all day watching Films on their PCs, whilst their automated tests run. Not surprisingly, our SW reliability is terrible.....

I believe it's the LAW to post one of these in any 2 page thread:

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My last place, the same woman used to go round putting up the decs at Christmas. Every year. Lots of them

Blokes are not allowed to sign women’s birthday cards. People who have tried have been told off..........

Am I the only one who doesn't understand the point of this then???? 😕

Nope

I have not had a sensible answer to B.day cards.

One place i worked a Christmas collection went round for all the secretaries who worked so hard throughout the year. I refused to give not cause i am a tight arse but I too oddly enough worked.

We have an office dog. We're a FinTech company based in Central London!

I have not had a sensible answer to B.day cards.

I wonder if there was an incident about 20 years ago with someone being a bit stalkery, now you've had 100% staff turnover so no-one remembers yet the rule still applies because "we've always done it this way"?

We have an office dog. We're a FinTech company based in Central London!

My dog is in the office today. I don't think that is weird, just great!

My company paid for dog beds and dog gates and a vax.....(!) and added them to the insurance, so you could say its a dog friendly office

We just have one though. He has a bed outside the boardroom, he's in the company newsletter, has a Facebook page, even appeared in our TV advert. Never seen another one here.

I know a retired partner at a reasonably large provincial law firm. He banned employees bringing their dogs to work when it got to the point that there were regularly more dogs than employees.

Yesterday I stole an industrial sized lamp shade for my dining room from work.
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I also get copious amounts of wine as part of my salary.

Not any more if your boss knows you have light fingers!

He'd have to look up first.

langley - Member

I have not had a sensible answer to B.day cards.

One place i worked a Christmas collection went round for all the secretaries who worked so hard throughout the year. I refused to give not cause i am a tight arse but I too oddly enough worked.

We had a similar policy at my old, old place - we had to take out Admins out for lunch at Xmas and bought them a little gift. It was a bit odd in the 21st century, but we'd all been Admins before we were 'Managers' and there was a big gap in pay between the 2 roles, about double.

It did feel odd though, you spend all day, pretty much every day sat next to someone, working hand-in-hand and then you had to act a bit like their Dad, it wasn't really a Boss / Sub relationship.

We are an engineering company who specialise in automatic personnel registration and muster systems. We and any visitors have to sign in and out of the building using a pen and paper.

Stupid rules? or just stupidity?

I work for a certain supermarket.

I have to clock in / out yet I'm salaried paid, and all overtime gets crossed off.

A staff canteen that closes at 4pm every day yet staff work till 10pm and then through the night.

I have to enter my car reg into the system every day yet its supposed save the reg as I enter my employee number as well.

You can't progress unless you blonde, female and have a massive pair of jugs.

I need a proper job!!!

We have an office dog. We're a FinTech company based in Central London!

I've worked on a movie where a dog got a credit on the title roller - '4th Assistant Director'

Our work toilets are all cubicles, no urinals.

Several blokes refuse to shut the door when they're doing a piss. Nothing fundamentally wrong with that except given the distance between the door and the toilet, it takes a ridiculous amount of body manipulation to hold the door open with their feet/ legs and do a piss at the same point.

Absolutely no idea what the point of it is other than proving to their colleagues that they're not getting up to any funny business in the cubicle. 😕

You can't progress unless you blonde, female and have a massive pair of jugs.

I need a proper job!!!

We are an engineering company who specialise in automatic personnel registration and muster systems. We and any visitors have to sign in and out of the building using a pen and paper.

Lol
We are a signage company and we only just got round to putting one up on our own unit 2 years after moving in......

A guy who works for our company just got a job which is a huge step up despite the fact the job description states you [b]need[/b] to hold a driving licence as the job is basically going round in a pickup as a first man on the scene when problems arise and visiting various work locations. This is a problem as when given the job he hadn't even passed his test and now that he has he still needs to be driving 3 years before being allowed to drive company vehicles...

The usual, cliques who get everything that's going for no real output and them that work that get told that their jobs are not going anywhere.

One guy get's bored every 18 months having completed nothing in that time then starts shouting that he's going to leave, so they create a new position for him. That has now happened twice.

"- you buy everyone else cakes on your bday"

I managed to change policy so that we give everyone their birthday off as an extra days holiday 🙂

I don't get dogs in the office. I'm in the armed forces and when they were recently nearly banned at our place of work it caused a proper ruckus. If you haven't organised yourself to properly care for it full time then don't get one.

On the dogs front, a mate used to work at a place where the directors budget for grounds keeping/landscaping the new site included a couple of hundred square meters of dog run. Ended up with about 8 or 10 other dogs in there. All with permission of course.
All came crashing down spectacularly when the directors extremely expensive pedigree dog got knocked up by some scruffy mutt instead of the prime breeding dog they'd been introducing it to on a daily basis. Didn't find out until said lady dog produced some of the ugliest purebreds ever seen. Needless to say. Mate has since gone to another job where you can't take dogs to work........

GM- great story 😆 !!

I work for a company which has almost 3000 employees, on one site and our parent company also own a mobile phone network provider. The finance director has to authorise any mobile telephones, our line rental is £4 per month! Probably costs more in his salary than an annual line rental cost...

I manage over 70 staff and have no operating expenditure authorisation, I can't even buy my staff a pen!

Many people spend more time trying to get out of work than it takes to actually do the job in the first place.

I could easily go on but they pay me pretty well and I have a good pension...

My (ex)boss made me redundant, and at some point uttered words to the effect of "I'm doing everything I can to find an alternative roles in the company, but it's not looking great".

My former boss sit's about 10ft from him, and on my last day told me that he'd just had to take on contract staff at my level as he's so busy, but he only found out I was leaving the day before!

"Everything" apparently equals the square root of sod all.

We are not allowed to use company time when giving people the bumps on their birthday.
something to do with the insurance, place has gone downhill 🙄

It's weird here but in a good way.

There are no hours of work and no set days to be in office if you go in at all. WFH is up to you, turn up when you like go home when you like.
Holidays are not monitored by anyone (we get 30) and we take them at a moments notice - I've taken a half day at 12.30 as someone called with a good thing to do.
I left work at 2.30 on Wednesday to go and see Predator at the Imax and then went and worked at home until 8pm - Everyone knew -nobody cared.
If you come in sick you and your germs get sent home, this freaks newbies out...
If you get caught lying about pretty much anything work related you get sacked, we're big on honesty..

Oddly despite this lax attitude to almost everything we have the best results and highest customer ratings in the global group.

I don't get dogs in the office. I'm in the armed forces and when they were recently nearly banned at our place of work it caused a proper ruckus. If you haven't organised yourself to properly care for it full time then don't get one.

It all started with us years ago when i had a dog with a tumour on her leg that needed dressings changed. Work said why not bring her in, and people liked having her around, when she died everyone missed her and i brought the next one in

It does help with everyones stress management, and we get to walk them in the field next door which is much healthier than eating lunch at your desk, or standing about smoking.

All pretty good reasons i'd say! 😛

In the US office of the company I work for you can have dogs in the office and whilst its pretty cool you need to bear in mind around 2000 people work in the US site over 8 buildings and we are consolidating to a single building so that going to be a *lot* of dogs...

The canteens are interesting too as there are dogs under tables everywhere.

See I don't think we can have dogs in the office. We have an office dog. Obviously he has an owner, but I've literally never seen another one, while this one is in our TV adverts and is adopted by various people around the office!

Managers are not allowed to spend a large lump of thier bughet on obtaining some hand-reared burrowing owls to keep in the office as entertainment/minions. Bloody stupid rule if you ask me 🙁

To clock in to the factory I (used) work in, you have to first scan your hand in a hand scanner, then flash your I'd card to let you through the turnstile, then enter your 8 digit work ID into the fire regs log, then sign a log in time at the security hatch, who will then give you 4 digit pin that changes every day that lets you access the factory floor!

If you forget the pin, security make you start right from the beginning again!

At shift changes it can take up to an hour to get in!

They are now talking about fitting body scanners!

People at our place actually try to commit suicide. They also risk their lives by using unknown substances which very often results in a trip to hospital or a visit from the local paramedic.
The outside of the establishment looks lovely as the 'boss' has invested £££'s on fancy trees & blue shale stone chips. The wings are shitholes because there's no mopheads, paint, (we have prisoners who've done a half decent course in painting & decorating but we can't get any paint cos that department is run by Amey plc & they won't give us any), disinfectant or many other cleaning materials. We sometimes even run out of binliners. We have a rat problem too.
'Weird' The prison service takes it to a new level!