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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{ 230 comments }

{ 230 comments… read them below }

      1. cabbagepants*

        There is an old joke in this same vein, though it goes one step further.

        A farmer was tired of people breaking in to his field at night and stealing his watermelons. He tried fences, guard dogs, and even booby-traps to stop the thieves, but they always outsmarted him. Finally, he came up with an idea that he thought would stop the thieves for good: He put up a sign that said “One of these watermelons is poisoned.”

        The next morning there were no missing watermelons, but he noticed that the sign had been updated to: “Two of these watermelons are poisoned.”

        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.

          1. Wilbur*

            Definitely a fine from OSHA if the chemical is mislabeled, I’d be unhappy if people were screwing around rather then spending $100 on a locking cabinet.

      3. Notasecurityguard*

        I remember a story that was maybe from wwii where in north Africa near water sources there were signs saying in German “this water has been poisoned by the british”

        when the germans accused them of war crimes because poisoning water sources is illegal the British pointed out that simply *claiming* you poisoned the water is not a war crime.

        its probably fake but still

        1. Bob*

          I have questions about the first story.. it sounds like the manager wasn’t the owner, how were they OK with just making no money everytime the manager wasn’t there?

    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,

    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.

        1. Nina*

          I used to work in (not radioactives but highly dangerous in other ways) – the general rule of thumb was that people could and would just keep things contaminated for various testing purposes, and if something had a contaminated sticker on it that you did not personally apply, you believed the sticker.

      1. SparklePlenty*

        Re #1 I completely too-long-didn’t-read the title and was seriously wondering how an employee would bogart a Rolex.

    12. Fanny Price*

      In the lab I worked in in grad school, we had a massive cleanup and mandatory training triggered by my advisor finding a plastic squeeze bottle labeled HF. It turned out to be acetone, labeled by someone who was sick of having his reagents stolen.

      1. amoeba*

        That bottle would have scared the living shit out of me (and would not have landed well if it was in any way believable!)

        For the non-chemists here: that stuff is deadly upon so much as a single drop on your skin. It basically eats your bones from the inside, so you’ll take some days to die painfully. There is no antidote.

    13. Mongrel*

      I remember a photo on In The Pipeline, the blog of a research chemist, a plastic squeezy bottle filled with a clear liquid just labelled “Not Water”. He also has a series of posts that are worth an afternoon of anyone’s time called “Things I Won’t Work With” – https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-work-with

      I also have a travel mug from an Atomic Robo Kickstarter reward labelled “Possibly Poisonous?”

    14. Black Horse*

      I literally read #12 and said, out loud, “Oh wow. That is fricking genius.”. So you know my opinion.

    15. Quill*

      All I know is that EHS is going to be so far down your throat about it that you’ll need a proctologist.

    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.

      1. amoeba*

        Even if not – it could be something as harmless as putting water/solvent/table salt in a bottle that’s supposed to contain some actual reagent. No need for it to be dangerous to mess up your experiments, haha!

        (But yes, I also assume bluff.)

        1. amoeba*

          Or even just having one empty bottle in there! If it’s a lot and they’re not see-through, no way you can tell upon a glance and the sign would technically be correct…

    5. JustaTech*

      As a reasonable adult lab worker who works with reasonable people, yes, this is terrifying.

      When I was a very young lab worker in an academic lab with a persistent reagent thief I absolutely would have done this had 1) thought of it and 2) thought it would have worked.

      Dr Very Odd was a very challenging person to share a lab with. He hoarded everything, to the point that we called him a gas because he would expand to take up all available space with his almost-completely-empty bottles. He was forever helping himself to other people’s media, contaminating it, and then denying that he’d used it. He hid a vial of ethidium bromide because he wanted to keep using it for his PCR gels (it’s toxic) even after we got a safe version (there were pregnant people in the lab). When he left we found an entire beaker of razor blades, and an entire drawer of tube racks.

      The challenging thing was that he was a very friendly and generally nice person (if Very Odd). Maybe if we’d had a present and skilled manager for a PI who empowered our lab manager to actually run the space, and had some kind of tracker for everyone’s experiments so we wouldn’t end up with 4 people needing the same tiny tube of fluorescent antibody on the same day, it would have been workable. As it was, hiding reagents was the only way.

  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.

    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.

    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.

        1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

          Likewise. I think a lot of stuff was still creepy in the past, we’re just more vocal and less tolerant of it now.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        It’s peculiar and controlling behavior that singles her out, whether or not it was also sexually motivated.

        I am curious whether he did that for his male coworkers or called them “baby”. If not, he and I would have had issues, regardless of his “generosity” in letting us females use “his” van.

    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.

      1. JustaTech*

        That’s my thought. Or he felt there was some kind of status in having a “company car”.
        I asked my spouse about this recently, do people even have “company cars” anymore? He reminded me that his parents had “company cars” for their small business, not just for themselves (tax doge!) but also their operations manager.
        But it’s still odd. A van is not a fancy sedan.

    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.

      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!

          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.

          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.”

            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.

        3. Princess Sparklepony*

          If you park there she will bring the drama to you. Steal the cone and watch someone else park there. That way you can enjoy the show.

      1. Jamoche*

        They get stuck to the underside of your car, as a fellow student in my driver’s ed class discovered one day. Or more accurately, was completely oblivious to the teacher telling him over the radio that he was driving with a cone stuck under his car. The cars we learned in had a co-pilot brake pedal to stop you if things went wrong and you weren’t handling them, and this was his first – and ultimately only – day driving without a co-pilot.

    3. Education Mike*

      This baffled me too. I would move it even if I wasn’t going to move my car, because I’m petty in a very rules-oriented way.

      1. Pinta*

        Exactly so. I’d move it and then if confronted I would say that I was concerned that there was an object blocking access in the parking lot.

    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.

      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.

        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.

        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.

          1. Freya*

            It’s definitely an OH&S violation here in Australia – in most cases, employers are expected to provide toilet facilities for employees, rather than relying on access to public toilets external to the business. For the 60 employees in #4, there needs to be at least 5 toilets (1 toilet in a male bathroom per 20 male employees, 1 toilet in a female bathroom per 15 female employees, plus 1 all-gender toilet per 50 employees, plus Accessible toilets – assuming all-male employees that’s 3 male toilets + 1 all-gender + 1 Accessible = 5 minimum)

            1. Rusty Shackelford*

              I’m sorry, I don’t know where you got the impression that this office didn’t have restrooms for the employees. We weren’t accessing public toilets.

                1. sparkle emoji*

                  That’s not how I read it. I understood that as an office building with multiple companies working in it, and LW4 going to another floor to use the restrooms there vs going to a public restroom. I work in an office building like that, and the bathrooms are open to anyone who works in the building, but they are not “public restrooms” in the “open to the public” sense.

                2. Nicole Maria*

                  I think she meant they were open to the public who would be otherwise accessing the building lobby, but they’re not truly public restrooms. I generally use the same bathroom our clients use — it’s not really an issue.

      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

        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.

          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.

            1. Alpacas Are Not Dairy Animals*

              Or people will just get over it. The rule for urinals is don’t look and there’s nothing to see.

          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.

          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!

          4. MigraineMonth*

            If I’d been a Physician or Faculty and female, I’d have started using that restroom out of pure malicious compliance.

          5. Martin Blackwood.*

            Did you know the number of female med students/doctors in the us slightly declined between the 1920s and the 1970s? the 70s was when that trend turned around if i remember right.

        3. AFac*

          I did part of my schooling at a Very Old and Prestigious University.

          There were some of us women who joked that we should get our degrees just based on the fact we could find a women’s restroom.

          1. Anonymous Cornellian*

            And then there were the fainting couchescatvoutvwomdns restrooms, from the early days of my early co-ed university. when I was there in the late 80s some women were pushing to remove them , while others argued they were good for breastfeeding.

            1. Anonymous Cornellian*

              >>Fainting couches in the.womens restrooms …
              so much for my proofreading skills with a migraine.

    2. A CAD Monkey*

      It might not be a OSHA violation per se, but it is definitely a Building/Pluming code violation. I also doubt the work was permitted by the governing municipality. Which means, if the OP were so amind, they could report the violation to the building inspector. Who, in turn, could shut down the office until the violation is corrected.

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

    #3…

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

        1. MsM*

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

          1. wendelenn*

            Using Burr’s copier, you have to be willing to wait for it. (And no one else is in the room where it happens.)

          2. Esmerelda Margaret Note Spelling*

            This reminds me of my time working backstage at a student theatre–all the computers were named after characters from Shakespeare’s plays. Of course theatre folk are superstitious enough to avoid any Macbeths, but it always felt bold that they’d named the main server Romeo, a character who famously died young…

      1. Reluctant Mezzo*

        The fun part is when the global language for copiers gets changed to French on April Fool’s Day.

      2. Princess Sparklepony*

        When I worked in a university library, the book carts were either named or numbered. Mostly named – we had Huey, Dewey and Louie. There were others but those were the ones I remembered and they were all the same type of cart. We had many kinds of carts from wooden ones to metal ones, all different eras.

    5. Princess Sparklepony*

      Exactly. I’ve been reading down the comments to see if anyone mentioned that. They so missed a golden opportunity of naming the printers.

      I’m partial to Petunia, Violet, and Mandrake (for the printer that always jams.)

      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!!

        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.

          1. AnotherOne*

            all i could think was this person would have been horrified by how loose goosey my office is with tea.

            oh, you want tea? those are the 10 options we currently have. oh, you want a tea we don’t have. what kind? hmmm- that seems reasonable. we’ll order in a box.

            1. Selina Luna*

              I work in a school, and no one is that loose with tea (pun partially intended). Heck, teachers can’t get bad coffee in the staff lounges anymore (not in a decade, at least).

            2. iglwif*

              I had a remote job where the office (which I went to about 4x a year) was like that, except the number of options was more like 40 lol. It was excellent. And because there were so many tea drinkers on the team, they had also invested in a water-emitting thingy that produced ACTUALLY HOT water.

          2. JustaTech*

            For a while my office decided to be weirdly cheap/possessive about the coffee and tea. Management claimed people were stealing the K-cups, so all the Keurigs were taken away and replaced with these similar coffee machines that took special pouches rather than pods (so people couldn’t use them at home). But they also decided to stop stocking tea bags and instead use the tea “pouches”.
            The tea from those pouches was, to quote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “something almost, but not completely unlike tea”. Utterly disgusting.
            Thankfully when folks didn’t come back to the office after COVID those machines were too expensive so we went back to K-cups and bagged tea.

        2. Reluctant Mezzo*

          I didn’t like the yellow sweetener that the company finally decided on (there were serious color wars with the sweetener) and so just brought a box of the pink (which I like) from home courtesy of Dollar Tree.

    2. WellRed*

      I hope someone with even a tad of political capital brought in teabags to hand out, openly, freely and cheerfully!

  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.”

    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.”

  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.

    1. Education Mike*

      Interesting, in my office we definitely do not use other people’s mugs. People bring them from home.

      1. Cookies For Breakfast*

        I have a colleague who does that and keeps her personal mug in her desk drawer. Based on my experience in this office, I really don’t think anyone’s personal mugs are kept in the shared kitchen, which is why this episode struck me as odd :) if it was me, I’d assume that if my own mug is in a shared space and I haven’t labelled it in some way or stored it out of view, other people are going to use it.

      2. londonedit*

        I’ve worked in offices where people had their own mugs, and I’ve worked in offices where mugs were a free-for-all, but usually you expect that the plain IKEA ones are company-provided and therefore for use by anyone. If people have their own mugs, they’re usually patterned or they have their name/initial on them, or are in some way distinctive. I’d assume any generic IKEA mug was part of a job lot.

      3. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

        I have a mug that I never dared to bring to work. It had a cartoon person with a devil over one shoulder and an angel over the other; each had a balloon saying: “Quit your job”.

        1. Reluctant Mezzo*

          I still have a lovely Betty Boop coffee cup, but it was stolen. Then I asked if anybody had seen it, since it was a Christmas present from my husband. It finally reappeared in the kitchen (just before I was about to start checking desks). I do wish whoever brought it back had cleaned the used oatmeal out of it first…

  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.

    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.

    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.

      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.

      2. higheredrefugee*

        And even if they didn’t, but he did them as original posts, folks would assume he was the contact. And even if he did reposts, some folks wouldn’t understand they should look up the original post. Regardless, he refused to forward inquiries which is where I want to kick yhe Board in believing his BS about monitoring his personal social media.

  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.

    1. Education Mike*

      I thought it was about him having to do the very minimal extra work until OP said it was her work to do. I can’t think of a better explanation than yours, but given that she got the boss’s job and he was otherwise very pleasant, I don’t think blatant sexism fits very well either.

      The mysterious thing is why he would keep quizzing people about it, esp if he hated being shown up. Someone with the common sense of a kindergartener could tell you no one is going to side with the random string of numbers when you take away the “advantage” of it being what’s currently in place. There is literally no advantage what so ever.

      1. Petty_Boop*

        THAT was my thought too! I’d watch and as soon as she left for lunch, I’d go out, throw the cone in the nearest dumpster (or the furthest I could walk, maybe just to make it more annoying) and then park my car there. And when she lost her sh*t and started yelling about her “cone” I’d look blank and innocent and say, “I just took the first empty parking space I saw, and it didn’t appear to be a reserved or handicapped spot.”

  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

    1. Freya*

      At a couple of workplaces where bosses would wander off with pens, I had a decoy container of pens sitting on the top of my desk, filled with pens I didn’t like or with low ink. The ones I actually liked would live tucked behind/under the keyboard, out of sight.

      1. Kyrielle*

        But would you have waited until she returned and parked (without the benefit of the cone) and went in the building, and then put the cone atop her car?

        (Okay, that’s the chaotic-evil choice…but it would be funny.)

  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.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      Seems like it could backfire. I know a number of women who would travel quite a distance or pay significant money to steal a pen with that special quality.

      1. Mad Harry Crewe*

        If you return a pen, do you get your pick of the, hm, losses? He could be making money coming and going, if he’s smart.

  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

    1. Petty_Boop*

      But SHE stole the cone first from a construction site! The doctrine of clean hands would apply here, I think ;)

    2. Princess Sparklepony*

      You have to work with security to make sure there is glitch in the system (or it’s down for maintenance) when you do the pilfering of the cone!

  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.

    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.

      1. Esmerelda Margaret Note Spelling*

        As a Brit, I disagree. Our summers are not Texas summers, and most of the time it’s perfectly comfortable to walk around outside. While a car that’s been sat in the sunlight all day will have a *much* higher, much less tolerable temperature, because it’s behaving as a tiny metal greenhouse.

    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.

      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.

        1. Insulindian Phasmid*

          Farther in this context! I learned “farther” for literal distance and “further” for metaphorical use

          1. C*

            That’s not a real rule. It’s a made up zombie rule. You can confirm this by checking the usage note at Merriam-Webster.

            As a rule of thumb, if you’re a native speaker but had to be explicitly told “do this” in school, you can safely ignore it because it’s made up nonsense.

    3. Rusty Shackelford*

      There was a door on each end of the building. People who lost “their” spots on the shady end could easily park close to the door on the non-shady end. And yes, I can easily understand people being irritated that the spots they preferred weren’t always available. But they didn’t own the shady spots just because they were closer to their offices, and their attitude was more “how dare you park in OUR spots” and less “oh, bummer, I hate having to fight for a good spot just like every other employee.”

    4. Freya*

      I’m Australian, and there’s a reason why car window shades are ubiquitous here. Park close, stick the shades up, you’re golden!

    5. Cohort1*

      Ah, how times change! Many/most large parking lots in my area are now covered with solar panels including our hospital and the adjacent large medical office buildings. A two-fer! The cars are in the shade and the hospital gets the electricity. And it’s nice to be able to get in and out of the car under cover when it rains.

    6. Petty_Boop*

      But it’s okay for THEM to have to walk extra or be subjected to an automotive sauna? If parking spaces are first come first taken, then really nobody gets to be butt hurt about it IMHO. Either adjust scheduling to get there early enough for a prime spot, or take what’s left.

  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.

    2. Tradd*

      Years ago I worked in an office that supplied everything – coffee, tea, hot chocolate. I didn’t like the plain Lipton teabags so I brought in my own Twinings Earl Grey. Every other tea drinker just used the Lipton teabags. However, one day someone saw the Twinings tag at the end of the string hanging out of my cup and was shocked I was drinking “other” tea. It was hysterical. She was beside herself.

    3. Dog momma*

      I can make a teabag last thru 4 cups of tea if I have to. and in this situation I’d do it just to annoy Mr Teabag Giver- Outer

        1. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

          I also save my used teabags for a second (third, forth use) and use a spoon cozy in the kitchen. I lived/worked in Germany for a summer in college and discovered that their tea bags only had enough tea for one cup (small pot?). That’s when I became a coffee drinker. While working in a restaurant, it was soooo much easier to pour from the machine like everyone else than to waste a tea bag for each of my multiple cups of morning caffeine.

  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.

    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).

    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

    3. Education Mike*

      lol I had this question too.

      The confusing thing is this doesn’t actually stop anyone from using an “excessive” number of tea bags. It just stops them from making large/strong cups of tea.

      1. Stipes*

        I think the idea is it prevents them from taking extra tea to bring home — you can only take as many as you use.

        Why this was such an urgent concern to develop this whole process, is beyond me.

  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.

    1. Artemesia*

      This is a classic sign of incompetent management. I used to do some consulting and found this sort of thing fairly often. ‘We are doing this incredibly inefficient thing because Fergus developed the procedure and won’t cooperate in letting us change it.’ A decent manager would have walked up, taken the Rolodex and had the data entered into the system that day.

  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!

    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.

      1. Aeryn*

        I assumed there was a hostage exchange going on – he takes your soggy teabag, and a fresh one is released into your custody.

    3. Mostly Managing*

      The rotating tea bag is brilliant!

      I make my cuppa, then give you the used bag to trade in. You make your tea, and pass your used teabag to Fiona, who trades in, makes tea, and passes it to Shrek…. the entire population of Fairy Tale Creatures can have tea and only one teabag needs to be kept track of for morning!

  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.

    3. Hroethvitnir*

      Yes! “I’m not letting this fridge we had to buy with our own money get full of everyone else’s stuff” is pretty out of place with the rest. You really do have to be onto it from the outset or people just ignore you.

      Though if they’d actually hold it against someone who didn’t know, that is jerky.

    4. I Would Rather Be Eating Dumplings*

      Yeah, it seems unlikely to me that a whole team would be willing to use their own money to buy a fridge unless it was genuinely impacting them. And the pain of having to keep their lunch by their desks or painstakingly re-arrange a crowded fridge would be the sort that would go unnoticed by the larger team.

      It wouldn’t surprise me if this was one of a number of small things that the smaller team felt sidelined on.

  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.

    1. Bike Walk Barb*

      I don’t think that would solve theft. Take pods home, use in home machine, save pods, return.

      1. Stipes*

        It wouldn’t stop someone from bringing ONE serving home. But it should stop someone from fully stocking up their home cupboard by grabbing two or three extra every time they get a drink at work.

  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.

  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.

    1. Filthy Vulgar Mercenary*

      Ok I need to hold on a minute and just … think about for a second just what it would look like with that message actually CARVED into the pencil.

      I’m stuck on how freaking creepy and scary and … disgusting that would feel to see those words carved in. Like, carving it means he felt so damn strongly about an effing pencil that he sat there for at least several minutes and perhaps longer, carving the words with a knife. It seems like a scene out of a movie where you start to realize a character might be more than just quirky, and might be ‘off’ in a kidnapper/serial killer kind of way, and quirky slides into scary really quick.

      (Or are you saying he ordered them premade/engraved that way?)
      Ugh.

      1. Purple Jello*

        I think he was just annoyed that his pencils kept disappearing. Other pens and pencils cycled through but that one was always there. I found it amusing.

      4. CeeDoo*

        I don’t know if Oriental Trading Co still exists, but I used to buy pencils from them that said, “I belong to Ms CeeDoo.” When people saw my pencils on the ground or in their classrooms, they always came back to me. We use computers far more now, so I don’t need to buy personalized pencils.

  27. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

    I missed the original thread due to family drama, but mine are mild by comparison:

    1. (From a friend) “The boss of our department is much taller than everyone else. He always makes a show of setting the department van driver’s seat and steering wheel to accommodate his height and then leaves it that way. If someone else uses the van and the seat and steering wheel aren’t returned to the boss’s height, he throws a fit. But he only uses the van 2-3 times a year while everyone else uses it daily. Since his use of the van is random, everyone is torn between the inconvenience of resetting the seat and steering wheel every time to avoid confrontation or just hoping not to be the one that gets yelled at next time boss has to drive somewhere.”

    2. Archive I used to work for was originally run by someone with no training, who was appointed for Reasons. No archival standards were in play and everything was horrifyingly lax, which led to a lot of missing items and misplaced collections. The other archivists were fully certified and knew better but fell into all the bad habits the director encouraged. A couple decades later, the director retired and a new director was hired, one who is a certified archivist and has headed other archives. She resolved to turn this place around. There was teeth gnashing and rending of clothes but they slowly started to get in line. Until the day she removed the kitchenette from the work area and imposed a rule that lunches had to be eaten in the break room. Makes sense, no reason someone should be microwaving leftover casserole or cooking ramen on a hot plate in the same room that archival documents are being processed and repaired.

    Nope, this was too far. The archivists retrieved all the equipment from the break room and returned it to the work area, then had an eat-in where they all took lunch at the same time and blocked access to the vault while they leisurely ate. The director had everything moved back to the break room only for the same thing to happen the next day. After a week of equipment going back and forth, the director had facilities move everything into locked storage. The next day, brand new equipment appeared, with laminated receipts taped to each piece of equipment, each one purchased by a different archivist, with notes saying these purchases are for personal use. The director said fine, but they have to go to the break room and gave them one day to get their stuff out of there or it would be removed to storage and they would not be reimbursed. There was howling, threats of calling the union, reports to HR of a hostile workplace. After two weeks of the others refusing to work until they got their kitchenette back, we shut down for the pandemic. I never found out if anything was resolved, as I got a different job.

    What’s really bananapants is there was no fridge in the work room. They had to walk to the break room to get their food from the fridge and bring it back to the work room. And the break room was much nicer than the work room! Plenty of tables and chairs so no one had to hunker at their desks and risk getting food all over valuable documents.

    2. Lazuli*

      It’s wild that there are jobs where you’ll get fired for being 3 minutes late, but then there are also jobs where you can do… this??? (The archive drama)

  28. Roy G. Biv*

    I’ve been copying pithy wisdom from the AAM commentariat into a document for a few years now. Today’s topic about strangely territorial behavior makes me think of this gem. I only wish I could reference who wrote it:
    Looking for a molehill on which to die, in a sea of molehills you don’t care about, is a broadly applicable human trait.

    2. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Haha, I have a similar document! I missed that one when it first came out but I’m copying to my doc now!

    3. Hopefully Helpful Bob*

      Found it!

      Falling Diphthong* on “should I warn a store their new hire will steal from them, manager mocks me for my chair choice, and more”

      “Looking for a molehill on which to die, in a sea of related molehills you don’t care about, is a broadly applicable human trait.”

  29. PDB*

    #4: At my family company with a small office-no more than 4 or 5 in the office-my grandfather and great aunt, the owners along with my grandmother, had their own bathroom that could not be used by anybody else, who had to use the bathroom in the shop. Now my great grandfather had set it up this way many years before but, really…

    1. Filosofickle*

      Gotta say, this is the one I’d consider doing in this list! To get my own very own cube area with high walls and no one else? Yes, please.

  32. Generic Name*

    #2 You know, I can understand when someone (like administrative staff) low in the org chart with little to no institutional power does small and petty things like requiring a 1 to 1 exchange of tea bags, but a manager? Get a life.

    1. Bike Walk Barb*

      I’m imagining how they highlight this major accomplishment in a performance review. “Inventory management and teabag control: 100% success rate”?

          1. Wolf*

            Yeah, makes me want toi ask “As a manager, is this really the most valuable thing you can do with your time for the company?”

  33. Literally a Cat*

    Number 12 reminded me back in the days, when CSI was big, we used to claim that we swab handles for DNA whenever our lab’s things were stolen. People believed it.

    1. Hroethvitnir*

      Haha! I’m kind of judging that person unless there are huge problems with theft (it is possible to have a culture where everyone asks and shares when needed), but I like your one.

      Not sure why they thought you had reference genomes for everyone!

      1. Literally a Cat*

        I’m more sympathetic to 12 because I think it’s a small lab. I used to make all the histology stains from scratch, so I’d be annoyed when they grew legs.

  34. Jasmine*

    #8 If Mr O gets in a fender bender at the coffee shop the insurance company may not pay for it. He is not working. Happened to my FILs company.

    1. CeeDoo*

      We have neon green ones that belong to the band. After the buses leave, they use the bus parking lot as a practice field. I’d switch her for one of those.

  37. Turtlewings*

    Not a tea-drinker so maybe that’s why I don’t get it, but what on earth is the “turn in your used teabag” thing supposed to accomplish?

    1. Petty_Boop*

      Presumably to keep people from getting extras and either using 2 or 3 bags to make a strong cup of tea (I do that) or get extras and take them home, perhaps? But the main accomplishment I assume was to feel in control of something/anything.

  38. Alicent*

    At my last vet job we did housecalls. We had enough pieces of a certain type of equipment for each person to have one for unexpected needs, but only one of them wasn’t made in 1975 and worked well. By “well” I mean didn’t shoot out sparks like the others and was a quality piece of equipment. Some places we went we couldn’t even use the old stuff so we NEEDED the new equipment. Our boss would randomly get mad at us and steal the good equipment when one of us actually needed it to the point of STEALING IT OUT OF OUR CARS “just in case” he needed it that day. Which was never. It was just a petty control thing when threats of making us work unpaid weekends or cutting our pay weren’t enough.

  39. Sc@rlettNZ*

    The teabags – I’m dying :-)

    As a dedicated tea drinker, that would be enough to make me start looking for a new job pronto!

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