the Rolodex hoarder, the used tea bags, and other stories of territorial behavior at work

by Alison Green on November 18, 2024

Last week we discussed territorial behavior at work and here are 12 of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The Rolodex

I worked with a manager that kept customer information in a Rolodex to prevent any one else from making calls to them. And I mean a classic Rolodex, the big spinning thing that had index cards with hand written notes. It was kept in a locked drawer, so if the manager was sick or on vacation, then no calls were made and no money was made.

She completely refused to enter the information into the CRM, or to allow anyone to else to enter the information. She even tried to walk out with the Rolodex on her last day.

2. The teabags

I worked at a company that provided free filtered water and coffee. Teabags, however, were kept by the office manager in his desk, and you were required to show your used teabag to get a new one.

I am not a tea drinker, so I never found out how, say, a new employee could get their first teabag.

3. The copiers

When I first started out in my industry 20-something years ago, it was a small tech department of three. I, as an mid-20s female, was grateful to have two kind 50s/60s gentlemen as my mentors. One was our boss, and the other was our network guy. About a year into my tenure, I noticed that a consistent issue we kept having was that no one knew what the name of their nearest copier was when they tried to print. I proposed we changed the names of the copiers from “Copier 289729” to “BldgX-Room123-Copier” in our weekly meeting.

Suddenly the network guy was furious. He hated this idea. It meant that each time we moved the copiers, we would have to update the name. (We moved five or six of them a year.) Boss agreed with me and I implemented the change. It was a resounding success with the employees, and we got a lot of praise for making this change.

But the network guy kept bringing it up … first weekly for a while, then monthly, and settled on 2-3 times a year . He still hated it and thought it was a terrible idea. It didn’t affect him at all, mind you. I managed the copiers. He set up the original system 15 years ago, but my predecessor and then I had been managing them for the last 5+ years when I proposed the change.

Three years after we changed the copier names, our boss retired. I was the interim while they slowly and unsuccessfully looked for a replacement, and then after two years I was hired as the replacement. The department expanded. Any time we hired a new person, he pulled them aside and — without naming names or detailing the history — would “pop quiz” the new hires by saying, “If you had the choice, what would you name the copiers? ‘Copier 289729’ or ‘BldgX-Room23-Copier’?” He was not happy that they all agreed with me.

Come to find out, he didn’t limit his quizzing to our department. He had also shaken down all the department managers, including any new managers hired over the years, and asked them the same question. When I left that org to go to greener pastures, he also sprung it on my replacement. It had been 15 years since we changed the copier names and he never let it go.

What made it more bizarre was that otherwise he was a very friendly and helpful guy.

4. The bathroom

I worked at a family company that took up the whole floor of an office building. For some reason, there were no bathrooms in the office. All 60 employees had to walk to another floor to use a public restroom.

Well, I eventually learned that there were “executive bathrooms” only for The Family. It was the wildest power play. Four guys took the mens and womens bathrooms and converted them into a giant, glamorous bathroom for their own personal use. All us plebians were told that there just wasn’t a bathroom on the whole floor due to some bizarre building design flaw and we had to take the stairs to the public use bathrooms in the lobby.

5. The contacts

I had a boss one time who made me set up a LinkedIn and then insisted that I run by any contact with her before I accepted any connection. Which was absolutely no one. I couldn’t make any connections in industry or she would accuse me of job searching and freak out.

When I finally wised up to her abuse, the first thing I did was add/accepted a bunch of people as “take back my identity” moment.

6. The traffic cone

Years ago, I worked with a traffic cone hoarder. We did not have assigned parking, but we had a parking lot that was appropriate for the amount of people in the building. Yet, we had one woman who kept one of those large cones in her car. When I say cone, it was a filthy, beat up orange cone that she confiscated from a construction site.

She was one of the earliest arrivers so naturally she would get one of the coveted front row spaces. When she would leave for an errand or for lunch, she would put the cone in the space preventing anyone from getting that choice spot.

It drove everyone crazy with the entitlement, yet the CEO wouldn’t put his foot down because this woman was a toxic shrew and he didn’t want to deal with it. I eventually left for a lot of reasons that were a result of weak leadership. The cone situation was just one of the symptoms.

7. The fridges

My old department had a staff room for two distinct teams, one larger general one and a smaller specialist one. There was one fridge, but the smaller team felt there wasn’t enough space for them so they, between themselves, personally saved up money to buy a second fridge just for them.

Using the Grey Fridge and Not The Black One is a key point in induction tours for new staff members in the other team, as putting your milk in the black fridge is a guaranteed way to have your stuff thrown away. If someone is found to be using the wrong fridge, they are lectured and then ignored by the entire specialist team for the rest of their time in the department.

8. The van

Two departments shared a pair of work vans for driving to program sites. Before I was hired, apparently problems with Mr. O (from the other department) always having the van led to the creation of a sign-out calendar.

Mr. O would sign out one van for every day on the calendar, regardless of programming duties. So everyone else would sign out the other one, and if it wasn’t available would go to Mr. O and ask if it was okay to use “his” van (to, ya know, do actually work tasks). He was a retired teacher who had come out of retirement to do this job, very mild and “generous.” His answer was always, “Oh sure, baby, that’s fine.”

Years later, I talked with some people who had worked in his department. He insisted on driving one colleague to her programs and picking her up, so he could keep the van. And apparently every morning he would drive to work in his own vehicle, then get in the work van to drive to get himself coffee, then drive back. WTH?

9. The parking spots

I once worked in a longish building with entrances on either end. People tended to park by the door they used. But only one end of the parking lot had trees, so during the summer people who might usually use the west door would park on the east side of the lot so they could park in the shade. People who were officed on the east end were *furious.* Those were their trees. How dare you park under them and steal the shade that rightfully belonged to them?

10. The pods

My first job out of college had cubicles set up in sets of four where you’d have low walls within your pod and high walls outside of that pod. My boss, who worked a few pods over, decided that whenever someone moved out, he should move in. Whenever anyone else left, he put desktoys on it to claim it, and whoever allocated desks (maybe him?) assumed those were already taken (there was stuff on them after all) and put new people elsewhere.

By the time I got there, he’d claimed an entire four-desk pod for his own megadesk covered in stuff. I don’t know if he used any of them, but they were great for displaying his many tchotchkes.

11. The facility rentals

I worked with someone who used to manage facility rentals – weddings, bridal showers, and conferences – at my museum. These responsibilities were taken away from him because he had no interest in them and had so much work he couldn’t manage them if he wanted to. They were assigned to me.

He kept those responsibilities on his LinkedIn. Not only did board members who followed his account thought that our rental program success was due to his efforts, but he frequently used his account to promote our rental program. Which would have been lovely if he had actually forwarded the inquiries to me or responded to them at all.

I asked if he could edit his LinkedIn because it was legitimately creating hardship, but he refused and said it was illegal for the organization to monitor his social media activity, and our board believed him.

So for the duration of my time there, I just had to accept the fact that we’d get these horribly negative reviews because he would not change his LinkedIn.

12. The reagent

Someone in a lab I once worked in had a sign above their lab bench: “One of these reagents is not what it says on the label.” It stopped the stealing.

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{ 92 comments }

{ 92 comments… read them below or add one }

        1. Pay no attention...*

          lol very “One of Us Always Tells the Truth” and “One of Us Always Lies.”

          But yeah, I would think that the safety/compliance person would be very unhappy unless they were in on exactly which one.

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    5. Trillian*

      Worked in one lab with coworkers who would label his buffers things like “Ventricle” and “Testicle” to stop them walking. I occasionally stuck a sticky saying “Contaminated?” if I had a long day planned and wanted to be sure I started with enough.

      And before anyone but buts, bad management occurs in labs to, and grad students have even less time and power to do the managing upward dances. We do what we have to,

      Reply ↓
    9. Catgirl*

      Genius, though I’m impressed it worked. I worked at a nuclear lab and people would put the yellow RADIOACTIVE labels on their tools to stop people from stealing them and taking them home. People did so anyway. Walked out with potentially radioactive tools.

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    2. Cedrus Libani*

      In an industry lab, you would probably get fired for that, BUT you would also have a technician who supplies everyone with buffers and such – there’s no need to steal, just ask for more. In an academic / start-up lab where everyone has to do their own donkey work, there’s always a free loader. I’ve seen the “one of these bottles is mislabeled” sign, I’ve seen several instances where it’s all labeled but not in English, and even “I sneezed in one of these” (for RNAse-free work). Myself, I’m tall, so I’ve never needed to resort to such tactics; the top shelf that most people can’t reach without a step-stool is a great place to put the stuff that tends to disappear.

      Reply ↓
  3. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

    Mr. O sounds like he had some sort of tracker on his personal car. I used to work with someone whose parents would check the mileage on her car daily to make sure she only drove to work and home. She was 27.

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    1. Ginger Cat Lady*

      Or he simply wanted to be able to say that he did, in fact, drive that van every single day he reserved it.

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    2. Slow Gin Lizz*

      On that one, I get that of course he wanted to use company-paid for gas and not his own gas to get his coffee (and possibly work time instead of unpaid commuting time) but I don’t understand one bit who would want to lengthen their driving time by going to pick up a different vehicle just to drive to get coffee. Then again, I usually drink homemade coffee because I don’t understand driving to get coffee at all – the only time I buy coffee is when I’m already on the road anyway.

      Also I’m getting disturbing vibes in my head about why he always insisted on driving a female coworker to her events, but I guess I tend to read creepiness vibes into everything these days, unfortunately.

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    3. missmarymack*

      i wonder if he was told at the start that he’d have access to a work vehicle, misunderstood it as his personal vehicle, and then just doubled down.

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    1. Antilles*

      I was wondering that too. Or the cone managing to ‘disappear’ once it was deployed and she was out to lunch, just to see what happened.

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      1. Goldenrod*

        Me too. I would totally have parked in the spot AND stolen the cone.

        Good thing I didn’t work there, it would have been too much drama!

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          1. Phony Genius*

            I’d be tempted to wait for a day a repair crew shows up to do some work and add that cone to their line of cones, thereby returning it to its natural habitat.

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          2. Slow Gin Lizz*

            This CW strikes me as the kind of person who absolutely would go through all the trash receptacles on the property to find it again. And send out threatening company-wide emails to the effect of “Return My Cone Or Else.”

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            2. Cedrus Libani*

              I would be sorely tempted to dangle some cash in front of my ne’er-do-well relatives in exchange for services…she goes to lunch, there’s a rusted-out truck in her spot and the cone is AWOL…wasn’t me I was here working the whole time. Bonus points if Cone Lady throws such a tantrum that she finally wears out the patience of the higher-ups.

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    1. Rusty Shackelford*

      I don’t know. I’ve worked in more than one building that only had one restroom per floor (old enough that it was built when only men worked there? who knows), so they made odd floors the mens’ restrooms and even floors the womens’ restrooms. I’ve also worked in a building where the only restroom I could access without unlocking a door (that I didn’t have a key for) was in the basement.

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      1. Velawciraptor*

        According to the OSHA site, employers must:
        -Allow workers to leave their work locations to use a restroom when needed.
        -Provide an adequate number of restrooms for the size of the workforce to prevent long lines.
        -Avoid imposing unreasonable restrictions on restroom use.
        -Ensure restrictions, such as locking doors or requiring workers to sign out a key, do not cause extended delays

        Your old employers may have been violating OSHA requirements as well.

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        1. Antilles*

          Rusty’s seems to violate OSHA requirements, but #4 seems like it doesn’t violate any part of that requirement. The public restrooms likely are big enough to prevent long lines, waiting for an elevator (or a 2-minute jog down the stairs) likely isn’t causing an extended delay, and they aren’t actively restriction employees from using the restrooms just specifying which ones are available.
          That said, this very much feels like the kind of thing that annoys the OSHA inspector enough that they ensure they find *something* even if it’s not technically the restroom issue.

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        3. Rusty Shackelford*

          -Allow workers to leave their work locations to use a restroom when needed.

          This wasn’t an issue.

          -Provide an adequate number of restrooms for the size of the workforce to prevent long lines.

          This wasn’t an issue. They were sufficiently large restrooms, just not on the same floor as my office.

          -Avoid imposing unreasonable restrictions on restroom use.

          This is too subjective for me to say. Is going up or down a flight of stairs an unreasonable restriction? The building with alternating floors had an elevator, so I wouldn’t have to be able to use the stairs in order to pee. The building with the basement restroom didn’t, and there would have been no way to work in the basement, so if I had any kind of issue with stairs I would have needed to be moved to a different department, I suppose. But is that an OSHA violation, or an ADA issue?

          -Ensure restrictions, such as locking doors or requiring workers to sign out a key, do not cause extended delays

          It didn’t. Going to the restroom beyond the locked door actually would have taken longer than going to the basement restroom (although, again, that’s assuming one can use the stairs).

          I mean, I’m all in favor of OSHA requirements being met, but I don’t know that either of these situations would have been considered violations. Inconvenient sometimes, yes.

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      2. JanetM*

        Sort of vaguely related. They’ve since been updated, but when I first started working here, one of the older academic buildings had four restrooms:

        * Male faculty
        * Male students
        * Female staff
        * Female students

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        2. Babbalou*

          Back in the 1970s, the University hospital where I worked had a door labeled “Physicians” – it was a men’s restroom.

          And the architecture building where I was a student had a door labeled “Faculty” which was a men’s restroom. The design studios were on the second floor and my first year the only women’s bathroom was a single bathroom in the dark basement (of a building that was open 24/7 so anyone could walk in). We often worked all night on projects and had to walk down to the basement to use the toilet. By my second year they’d converted bathrooms from male to female so we had closer facilities – but they left the urinals and it was not uncommon to be in a stall and hear someone enter and use the urinal. So we’d generally wait until they left.

          Different era.

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          1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

            I probably would have walked out of my stall while the urinal were in use. Do it a few times and people will get the hint.

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          2. Nightengale*

            It was the early 1990s when my father, an administrator at the local hospital, hired the first female OB-GYN. There were no female surgeons. That was when they changed from Doctor/nurse changing rooms to male/female ones.

            The medical school I attended starting in 2003 had been one of the last ones in the US to go co-ed. I was once told that was because all of the bathrooms were men’s rooms and that was considered an insurmountable barrier. Sadly, I believed that.

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          3. Quinalla*

            Yes, by the time I was at my university, they had every other floor converted to women’s restrooms (used to be all men’s restrooms with probably a token women’s on the 1st floor) and yes they all still had urinals. I think they have started going through and updating the restrooms to take out urinals when they are generally updating them and probably adding unisex RR here and there too, but it took a bit to be sure I was in the correct restroom since I wasn’t expecting urinals!

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  6. VP of Monitoring Employees’ LinkedIn and Indeed Profiles*

    #3…

    Should the copiers be named “Jane” and “Fergus” and “Wakeen”?

    Reply ↓
        1. MsM*

          Our copiers are named after various figures from American history. I do find it amusing that Burr never works properly.

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      1. iglwif*

        Most office teabags are so awful that I always just end up bringing my own tea anyway. The bizarre teabag policy OP2 describes would certainly accelerate that decision!!

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        1. Selina Luna*

          I can drink almost any kind of tea, and office tea doesn’t bother me, but I would bring my own anyway. Also, a quick skimming of available teas nearby shows a cost-per-bag rate of between 7 cents and 37 cents. So, this guy is nutso anyway.

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  8. oaktree*

    I am imagining an HR onboarding process that is like “here are your keys, your health insurance paperwork, and your one tea bag.”

    Reply ↓
    1. Reindeer Hut Hostess*

      I would be rethinking my employment decision if I were handed that packed on Day 1 with the accompanying explanation. “Wait…what? Naaahhh…I’ll bring my own tea bags and not play this game.”

      Reply ↓
  9. Cookies For Breakfast*

    I always think of suitable stories after the roundup post is up!

    The first time a colleague (from another division) spoke to me was while I walked to my desk with a coffee, over a year since I’d been hired, to let me know I was using “her” mug. This was the plainest IKEA mug with no distinctive marks on it, and I often saw two identical ones on the same shelf.

    I apologised and said I’d wash it as soon as I was done. She kept saying “oh no, no, just remember for next time” as if she was granting me . I then mentioned I saw a second identical one, and she said “ah, yes, the other one belongs to [other employee I never ever saw in the office]”. She was in the office every time I was and I never saw her use the mug. So who knows what that was about. Maybe we take coffee the same way, and she also realised that mug was the best for a double espresso? (I caved only once and used it again, walking around like a thief to ensure she wouldn’t see me)

    Epilogue: the office got a huge stock of parent-company supplied indistinguishable white mugs some months ago, so now they are all we use. The IKEA mug enjoyer has since retired, wonder what she’d have made of that.

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  10. it's raining it's sleeping*

    Re #11: I’m confused as to why people were even bothering with linkedin. Why does it matter that his linkedin says he does it? They should be contacting the museum directly, not trying to hire a space by PMing someone on linkedin? Or maybe I’m applying too much logic to these folks giving you bad reviews by not actually doing what they should be expected to do when you’re trying to book a space.

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    1. Elsewise*

      I’m planning a wedding right now and contacted a lot of venues, including museums, and it never occurred to me to check LinkedIn! How bizarre.

      Reply ↓
    2. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      Sounds like he was actively promoting the program in LinkedIn, not just listing it in his resume. If those promotions ended with “DM me for details and to make a reservation” then I could see how some people would just do that.

      Reply ↓
      1. Antilles*

        Yeah, that was my read too, he was using his account to actively promote/advertise so when people see it, they assume it’s the official way to contact them.

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  11. Chill Kat*

    For #3, the real issue is that young woman showed him up, and came up with a better structure than his. THAT was the real thing he never got over.

    Reply ↓
  13. RandomNameAllocated*

    I meant to send this in : I used to sit near OldBoss (notorious acquirer of stationery) and on the outside of a group of tables by an open plan corridor, and so yes I labelled my stapler, ruler, scalpel etc, but what really annoyed me was people stopping by to borrow a pen and then walk off with it, so I labelled them as “RNA’s Pen” and “RNA’s other Pen”. Mind you, these were bog standard Bic biros, nothing fancy, but I was able to hold on to them until they ran out! and I REGRET NOTHING

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  15. Forrest Rhodes*

    I love #12. It reminds me of a long-ago chemistry prof at my university who got tired of students and others (at the time, it was an all-male department) walking off with his pens and pencils. The prof put a sign on the office door:

    “Writing implements in this room have all been treated with a special solution.
    Two paces after you remove one from this room, your d*** will fall off.
    You have been warned. There will be no complaints or reattachments.”

    Okay, it was a different age—but the prof stopped losing his writing implements.

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  16. I wish I could snooze life*

    Plot twist- the cone person is also the cheap ahh rolls person
    Although in all seriousness, I don’t know if I woulda moved/stolen the cone. They seem like the kind of person who’d complain until someone checks the security cam

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  17. beautiful, talented, brilliant, powerful musk-ox*

    #9: Okay, depending on how many parking spaces there were and if it affected where I had to park all of a sudden, I might be irritated, too. Not because of the trees, but if I’m used to being to park close to the building, and now I have to park farther out because people who work on the other side want shade, I’d be annoyed. Like, I live in Texas and I do not care particularly about parking in shade, but I DO care about the amount of time I have to spend walking outside in business attire in the summer. Some mornings, I get sweaty just walking out to my car (before the sun is even fully up!), and I prefer to limit that as much as I can, especially if I then have to spend 8 hours at work.

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    1. peakvincent*

      I was going to come say this! If it’s hot enough to care about parking in the shade, then it’s hot enough to care about extra distance to the door.

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    2. Generic Name*

      I used to live in Texas, and some people would park absurdly far from buildings to get a shady spot. I used to work at an airport and found an employee lot (with no shade) steps from a door to the terminal, so I parked there. Even though I had to walk several blocks through the terminal to my office, at least it was air-conditioned.

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      1. Texas Teacher*

        I’m in Texas and I absolutely will walk farther (further? I always mix those up) to have a car that’s not 130F+ when I get in it.

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  18. The Gollux, Not a Mere Device*

    I took my own teabags to work anyhow, when I was working in an office, because I didn’t like what the company bought, and a box of Twinings Irish breakfast teabags isn’t very expensive. I would have been happy to wander around and offer people free teabags, because it would have been more than worth it to wait for the hoarder’s reaction to someone asking for a fresh teabag, and giving her a used teabag that obviously wasn’t one she’d given them.

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  19. Karo*

    Do you think you were supposed to hold on to your used teabag overnight so you could get one the next day, or were you supposed to turn it in immediately upon finishing your tea so you just had a new one on hand?

    I’d imagine the former would cause a lot of consternation if a cleaning crew came through, and I can’t imagine such a hoarder would be content with handing out bags for use the next day.

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    1. Generic Name*

      I’d be very tempted to flop a soggy teabag on the manager’s desk when I asked for a new one (but I probably wouldn’t be brave enough).

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    2. amy*

      And also the weekend
      Or after a sick day (bring a used one from home? eww lol)
      Or extended leave.
      The scenarios are endless

      Reply ↓
  20. duinath*

    How did #1 not get immediately fired? Letting dysfunction slide is one (unfortunately weirdly common, apparently) thing, but she was messing with the money.

    Reply ↓
  21. Jellyfish Catcher*

    #2
    Regarding the tea bags; people, You only need one or few wet bags each morning, depending on You get a tea bag wet each day, then pass it around, so that everyone can take it up to get a dry unused one.
    I’m all for honesty and integrity, but also there clear times that need and deserve “creative resistance”
    AKA: don let the a-holes get you down!

    Reply ↓
    2. Seashell*

      I wonder if the guy who wanted to see the wet teabag required it to be thrown out in front of him or given to him to be thrown out.

      Reply ↓
  22. Gumby*

    I gotta say, I kind of feel for the team that paid for a fridge with their own money. It definitely sounds like the OP was part of Larger Team so I’m not sure how seriously to take the insinuation that there was enough room for Smaller Team’s stuff in the original fridge. And whether or not there was, I figure that if someone else purchased X with their own money, I do not have the right to use it w/o asking or w/o them making clear it is for communal use no matter where it is located. This comes from *years* of living with roommates. Some people cared and some didn’t, but just because a blender existed on the kitchen counter didn’t mean I could use it.

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  23. Milo*

    Ok but… we just had to discontinue free k-pods due to theft and some automatic way to only give out a pod if you turned in your old one (like a shopping cart quarter return) actually sounds like a good idea.

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  24. Hannah Banana*

    She completely refused to enter the information into the CRM, or to allow anyone to else to enter the information. She even tried to walk out with the Rolodex on her last day.

    …And? What happened next? That sounds wild.

    Reply ↓
  25. Purple Jello*

    I had a boss who worked in the admin office on the sixth floor of a department store. I found in his desk pencil cup a pencil CARVED with “Return this damn pencil. Mr. Smith”. It was ALWAYS on his desk.

    I was told that once a cashier from the first floor Jewelry Department had called him in a panic because the pencil had turned up at her terminal and she had no idea how it had gotten there.

    Reply ↓

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