let’s discuss the weirdest hills to die on you’ve seen at work

by Alison Green on March 20, 2025

Over the years, we’ve heard about people who chose some pretty odd hills to die on — people who became so strongly committed to a minor fight that they lost all sight of logic and decorum. To wit:

“Our break room has a giant whiteboard calendar in it. Last year the company sent us a new one and asked us to start using it at the first of this year. Not really sure why … the other was perfectly usable and there was no differing info on it, but hey, whatever! The new calendar is slightly smaller than the previous one – as in the previous calendar was 36×48 inches and the new one is 32×44 inches. The woman who updates this calendar was FURIOUS about this change. Oh the campaign this woman has waged to get the old calendar back – she sends emails, complains to every single employee at least once a day, has started tours of our branch in the break room (she points to the board and announces ‘this is the piece of crap calendar they expect us to use’), and holds that fury in her heart. Recently a few big wigs in the company were visiting and she started her tour as usual and then she paused as if expecting them to agree with her. They didn’t, she sighed heavily and moved on with her tour. Before they left she made sure to send them back to the home office with a list outlining why the new calendar sucks. You know they just crumpled that crap up into a ball the second they got into the car.”

•     •     •     •     •

“When I started an office IT job, one of my first assignments was to clean up and update everyone’s computers. The first time I worked with this one coworker’s computer, it was a complete mess. He had some kind of add on for IE that added a little animated Olaf (from the movie Frozen) that would dance around and occasionally have animated snowflakes fall down the screen. Needless to say, it slowed his computer to a crawl, and he was always complaining about how slow his computer was. So, among general scans and cleanup, I removed the add on. He was LIVID. Went to my boss, to HR, to the head boss, because his animated dancing snowman that messed up his computer was gone. Phrases like ‘she has no right’ and ‘how dare she’ were thrown around. He made a big show of downloading some other hideous animated nav bar add on instead, and kept trying to flaunt it whenever I was nearby.”

•     •     •     •     •

“Upon being told that it was now mandatory to wear your badge on a lanyard (no, not a clip, not on your belt, it had to be a lanyard), one woman completely lost it. She stood up (this was a meeting) and ranted about how lanyards were UGLY and they RUINED her outfits and WHY OH WHY was this a rule because EVERYONE hated it (no, the rest of us were fine) and so on. She compared it to ‘papers, please’ and how this was the slippery slope that would lead to robot workers and oh there was so much more but I can’t remember it all. Over the next few weeks she tried wearing her lanyard inside her blouse (no, the point is that the badge is visible) and claiming she just forgot until she got written up… and SHE QUIT. Well, took early retirement, but still.”

•     •     •     •     •

“When I worked at a Scout camp, we would usually get two shirts each summer specific to the year: a polo shirt in that summer’s color, and a t-shirt listing what area of the camp you worked in. For years we wore the polo shirts on Mondays and the area shirts on Wednesdays, when families came to visit. Then one year management decided we should switch that, so campers could see who worked where at the start of the week and we’d all look nice and fancy when Mom and Dad showed up.

There was a minor uprising. Yelling arguments. Flat refusal to cooperate. We had staff for YEARS after the change who would wear the wrong shirt and say “oh — you didn’t tell me we were doing it different this week from how we’ve always done it.” We had staff members going so far as to carry two shirts with them all day Monday and Wednesday so they could put on the correct shirt when management was around, then change back to the other shirt when nobody was looking. Some of the worst offenders were our old retired guys (who are like gold, it’s hard to find adults to work at summer camp, so they weren’t disciplined over minor shirt disobedience) and carried the torch for their preferred shirt rotation for a literal decade after the change.”

•     •     •     •     •

In the comment section, let’s discuss the weirdest hills to die on you’ve ever seen at work.

You may also like:
{ 567 comments }

{ 567 comments… read them below or add one }

  1. If you know you know*

    I work in an elementary school. We had a new principal who was convinced that we weren’t providing adequate supervision on the playground. She had paving stones INSTALLED into the ground for us to stand on to prove that we were spread out and watching our students. When I say that not a single person stood on those paving stones… The kids used them as safe spots in tag until someone tripped over one and skinned their knee. Were the stones removed? No, students were no longer allowed to run down the hill.
    These were gleefully removed when she left at the end of the year.

    Reply ↓
    1. Bast*

      Look, I am all for having adequate supervision and making sure the adults are not just standing around in a group talking (which I distinctly remember from my childhood) but this is just such an odd way to do it.

      Reply ↓
      1. Teacher Lady*

        Also, the closeness of supervision necessary is really, really variable depending on the ages of the children in question! When the Pre-K kids are on the swings and the other playground equipment, yeah, they need close supervision, because they’re 4. My 4th and 5th graders do not need adults spaced at regular intervals to monitor them at recess, because 4th and 5th graders have better awareness of safety and better problem-solving skills.

        Reply ↓
        1. Captain Carrot*

          Also Theyre so good at coming to get ya when Theyre in their tattling phase there is not always a need l

          Reply ↓
        2. Bast*

          Well, it depends on what’s going on. For the littles, it’s more likely that there will be an accidental injury, but 4th and 5th I’d say there’s some bullying issues (that can escalate into physical situations) that happen, and kids know *exactly* where to go so the teachers can’t quite see them. If for whatever reason you decide you’d rather stay outside and explore rather than going back to class, you can also do that too without proper supervision. I was in perhaps 3rd grade and decided I didn’t feel like going back in one day, and wandered down to the pond behind the school completely undetected because the teachers were clustered in the front of the playground. It was spring, and I wanted to catch tadpoles. It was fun for me as a kid, but I can easily see now where someone wandering off/hiding could end in tragedy.

          Reply ↓
      2. Six for the truth over solace in lies*

        Ooh, the teachers chatting in a knot who “didn’t see, can’t do anything, are you sure you’re not carrying tales?” whenever the bully shoved someone into a puddle, pushed them into a fence, stole their things, or knocked them off a ladder. I remember that well.

        Reply ↓
        1. Cedrus Libani*

          Yes, but the moment the bullied kid retaliates, they see THAT like they’ve got a stadium quality instant replay system over there. I remember that part too.

          Reply ↓
    2. weird*

      So every single child had to stop running in a certain place because *one* child tripped and *skinned their knee*? That seems like an overreaction itself…

      Reply ↓
      1. If you know you know*

        Yep. It was completely bananas. She was hyper concerned about kids getting hurt (which is valid, but normal childhood injuries are… normal)

        Reply ↓
        1. Twinklefae*

          Beyond being normal, all research now shows that children who are prevented from exploring their physical environment to the point where they are never injured, are at a higher likelihood of getting into a life-threatening situation as a teen or young adult, because they have never learned their natural limits.

          I work in Early Childhood Education, and the pushback gets called “Risky Play” and there is a lot of talk about the benefits thereof.

          Reply ↓
            1. gemmama*

              (American parent here) Ten or 15 years ago, all the playgrounds I would see looked overly safe, to the point that they’d be boring to older kids. These days, luckily, any new playgrounds I see in neighborhoods or at schools have a lot of really tricky-looking climbing walls, climbing webs, etc., and unbelievably tall slides (way higher than anything I ever saw as a kid other than at a carnival or county fair). I’m really glad that risky play is coming back into style, so to speak, and as a result, I often see a lot of older kids playing too.

              Reply ↓
              1. Saturday*

                That’s nice to hear! I remember walking past some “playgrounds” and seeing the kids couldn’t even get down the slide without scooting themselves along… looked so un-fun. And there was nothing to climb – climbing was one of my favorite things as a kid.

                Reply ↓
              2. Wayward Sun*

                I’ve seen climbing walls in newly-renovated playgrounds, including little four foot tall ones for the youngest kids. It’s so cool.

                Reply ↓
          2. Bruce*

            When I was a Cub Scout leader we taught the boys to whittle with pocket knives, we had band-aids on hand, and we always needed one or two. By they time they were Scouts we had some confidence they could be taught to use an axe without cutting off a limb…

            Reply ↓
              2. Older Than Dirt*

                When my cousin (m) and I (f) were sent out at dusk to cut saplings for the evening fire pit with a small 2-person saw, we managed just fine, cutting the appropriate limbs, unsupervised, at age six!

                Reply ↓
            3. Mallory Janis Ian*

              Oh I remember that in Cub Scouts. The boys had to earn their whittling chip before they could take part in any pocket knife activity, but after that they could carry a pocketknife at Cub Scout events. There were parents who were arguing that their child had BEEN carrying a pocketknife and should be able to continue to do so, but it is a rule of scouting that they can’t carry one at official scouting events unless they have earned the whittling chip.

              Reply ↓
            4. Oolie*

              I was a Girl Scout for a very short time in the 1970s, but I very distinctly remember playing “Mumbletypeg,” where you THREW an open jackknife into the ground at your feet … I’m still not sure how we all ended up with 10 toes …

              Reply ↓
              2. Bruce*

                I was a Boy Scout when sheath knives were proscribed, I am also lucky to have all my digits and both eyes (I was also a pyromaniac). When my younger kid was about to move up to Scouts we did a last Cub Scout summer camp weekend… the safety rules had gotten to be excessive, to the point that any rowdiness was forbidden. At one point some of the boys found some sticks, and started having a stick battle with the boys in the next camp over. They were just whacking them back and forth while whooping and hollering, and the adults in both camps subversively stood by and watched, silently agreeing that if no one was getting hurt then we would not intervene. This went on until some busybody walking by intervened and chewed us out for letting the shenanigans go on… I regret nothing…

                Reply ↓
          3. RagingADHD*

            My pediatrician used to say that he was happy to see kids come in for their checkup sporting skinned knees, bruised shins or elbows, because it meant they were playing outside.

            Reply ↓
            2. used to be a tester*

              We took our kid in to the pediatrician once because he had bruising in weird places and he didn’t have any idea how he got them. Turns out it was from the straps of the assorted pads he wore when skateboarding. So the doctor was happy he was physically active, and we were happy it wasn’t leukemia.

              Reply ↓
      2. Moose*

        I remember that in middle school, someone spilled their water where the teacher could have- but didn’t – slip in it. And she decided to ban water bottles entirely from her classroom for at least the two years I was there. It wasn’t even in her room! It was in the hallway!

        Reply ↓
      3. londonedit*

        I mean, we had various games banned from the playground when I was in primary school, but it usually took an actual broken bone before that happened.

        Reply ↓
        1. Teach*

          We accidentally knocked a kid out playing Red Rover at summer camp – 5th graders running into college kids, in retrospect, did not stand a chance.

          Reply ↓
          1. Bruce*

            When I was a Scout we did a sort of freeze-tag game in the meeting hall… with the lights turning on and off… I ran into another Scout, we knocked heads, and I can vouch that a hard blow to the head makes you see a flash of light!!!

            Reply ↓
            1. Teapot Connoisseuse*

              Just tallying up my injuries at primary school: lost a front tooth when I collided with another kid’s head while running, cut my finger on a milk bottle of water I was carrying back to the classroom when I slipped on some water in the bathroom just after filling it, got my hand trodden on by another kid in circumstances I forget and couldn’t bend it for a couple of days, chipped my front tooth (adult tooth that had just replaced one I’d been missing since falling off a swing when I was 3!) while using my cardigan as a skipping rope. And then there were all the assorted cuts and bruises. Somehow managed to avoid any serious injuries, though.

              Reply ↓
          5. Grimalkin*

            I was on the other end of that as a kid. Actually, that’s my first clear memory–being at a preschool camp when one of the counselors bumped into me when walking backwards for a game, getting taken to the hospital because I fell over and passed out, and then just sitting at the hospital reading and not seeing what all the fuss was about.

            Reply ↓
        2. Elsewise*

          You’ve reminded me of my elementary school rage. I got detention because I’d had two warnings in the same week. One was for running on the playground (dangerous, could trip or run into a smaller child). The other was for walking on the playground (dangerous, not getting enough exercise, could grow up to be sedentary.) As punishment I was banned from the playground for a period of time.

          Sometimes I wish I was still a kid, without adult responsibilities or pressures. Other times I remember what being a kid is actually like and decide I like taxes better.

          Reply ↓
          1. Overthinking It*

            Yes! Being an adult – with all it’s drawbacks – is waaaay better!(except for the loss of parents and grandparents, and others we loved, of course)

            Reply ↓
            1. Dasein9 (he/him)*

              I once got detention for writing my name on the wrong side of the paper.

              I didn’t attend, so it got escalated to the Vice Principal, who asked me why I didn’t attend my English teacher’s detention and said not a word when I replied, “I thought it was a joke.”

              Reply ↓
        3. Typity*

          I grew up in the mad ’70s, and I think a kid would have had to set himself/herself on fire to get something banned. One or two boys every year would fall off something high and break an arm, and the girls all tore up our hands on the solid metal gym rings and compared friction blisters. We were supervised by volunteer “yard ladies,” who’d occasionally blow a whistle at something particularly egregious.

          Things were certainly too lax at that time, but excessive caution and terror of lawsuits isn’t very helpful to kids either.

          Reply ↓
          1. ReallyBadPerson*

            We called them the “yard duties,” or just the “duties,” and their chief job at my junior high was to prevent students from escaping into the woods to smoke weed. Yes, this was in California in the 1970s.

            Reply ↓
            1. LG*

              At my elementary they were called “noon-time supervisors” and they were moms who didn’t work outside the home who were paid, like, $5 a day to come stand around for a couple of hours on the playground and in the cafeteria. That didn’t stop this kid named Scott from falling off the TOP of the swing set and breaking his arm when I was in third grade.

              Reply ↓
        4. Librarian of Things*

          Right. When I was in 5th grade, two girls broke their arms on the very same day (one broke both arms, the other just one arm), doing penny drops from the monkey bars. Reasonably enough, we were no longer allowed to do penny drops. We still played on the monkey bars. Of course, we also had a merry-go-round on the playground and bare dirt under the jungle gym, and an amazing tire house (six massive truck tires, fixed into a cube you could play on/in/through, and also roll, with other kids inside), so it’s not like safety was the number 1 priority at my school. Sure, we had casts, but we also had fun! Gen X for the win here.

          Reply ↓
          1. Susie Occasionally(formerly No)-Fun*

            I managed to give myself a concussion trying to do a penny drop. We also had the merry go round, tire play spaces, and a choice of dirt or splintery mulch under everything. Gen X was quite the time.

            Reply ↓
            1. GenX*

              TIRES!! Why were there so many tires on playgrounds in the 70s and 80s?? Also: cement culvert pipes. Every school in my district had cement culvert pipes of various diameters deposited around the playgrounds for us to crawl through. I mean… we did, and it was fun, but still: Tires? Culvert pipes? Really?

              Reply ↓
              1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

                Ha, we had the tires but not the culverts (we had cement pipes that kids would stare into looking to see if anything disgusting would come out, but they were way too narrow for a person to get into, which is a plus).

                To be fair, though, the most Gen-X play/sport surface we had was the local gymnastics studio, where the mats were maybe half an inch thick and the equipment looked like it had semi-survived an explosion. If you did fall or get injured, everything was treated with an ice-pack and, if the person who got hurt was a girl, the suggestion that maybe she’d be better at the particular move if she ate less. (Ask me and my dislocated knee how we know!) Oh, the 80s….

                Reply ↓
              2. The Editor-in-Chief*

                We had tires as well. They always smelled of piss because kids would duck in there to pee. (Or maybe older kids used the playground at night. Or both.)

                Reply ↓
              3. Tiny Soprano*

                And still in the 90s too. In Australian playgrounds where they were always full of red-back spiders. Madness.

                Reply ↓
    3. Teach*

      Definitely had a secondary principal who put red Xs on a school map to specify hall duty locations. To be fair, some colleagues were claiming to supervise the hallway from their desk or locker room…

      Reply ↓
    4. Jay (no, the other one)*

      My daughter went to a HS that was arts-focused and had been founded about ten years before she started in 9th grade. The original building was too small so there were always kids in the hallways playing string quartets or doing arabesques, and there was no cafeteria. They had open campus so they could go to the sandwich shop next door and buy lunch and they had a commons area where they could hang out and eat if they had a free period. There was also a tradition of a senior class prank. Far as I know, the pranks had always been completely harmless – taking over the PA system and playing music, or unrolling a yellow brick road in the hallway. Not nasty and not dangerous.

      The year my kid started there was a new principal who declared that there WILL BE NO SENIOR PRANK. She reminded the kids that there were now security cameras everywhere in the school. She announced this at the beginning of the year and reminders became more frequent as June approached. The seniors, of course, had watched pranks for three years and were looking forward to their own turn. One morning everyone arrived to find the commons completely covered in Silly String.

      Now it seems to me that the logical response to this is to hand every member of the senior class a broom and say “clean it up.” Not this principal. She called the police to report vandalism (the police basically said “oh, come on.”) She reviewed the security footage obsessively to figure out who it was (these are arts students. They had costumes and masks). She made dire threats about cancelling prom AND graduation (at which point the parents got involved and forced her to back off). My ninth grader reported all of this with serious eye rolls. “Why does she CARE, Mom? It was SILLY STRING.” Indeed.

      Reply ↓
      1. Mallory Janis Ian*

        Talk about weirdly obsessed! I wonder what her deal was? I think the funniest senior prank I saw was that a bunch of the kids drove their family’s tractors or riding lawn mowers to school, so the whole parking lot was filled with primarily John Deere green.

        Reply ↓
        1. curly sue*

          My favourite senior prank was the class two years ahead of me – they somehow liberated a park bench from the parkette behind the school, dragged it into the main lobby, and built a new park around it. There was a kiddie pool filled with water and fake aquarium plants (and a rubber duck), sod built up around it (I don’t even know how), a couple of lounge chairs alongside the bench, and a patio umbrella installed into the sod next to the pool.

          The yearbook has photos of some of the teachers lounging “poolside” with their lunches. And yes, somehow it was all cleaned up by the next day.

          I remain incredibly impressed by the coordination that one took to pull off, especially considering our school was downtown in a large Canadian city, not exactly the kind of neighbourhood where it’s easy to lug in a roll of sod in the wee hours of the morning.

          Reply ↓
  2. Dust Bunny*

    Background: My department is in a separate building a couple of miles from our employer’s main building. It’s not as inconvenient as it sounds, I promise. We have a “courier”, who is a guy who brings stuff to our building when it’s needed, and also does a lot of other odd jobs. We don’t actually need him to come out to our location that often, though, so this system works just fine.

    When I started here, many years ago, the woman who was my supervisor was adamant that the courier come out every morning no matter what, even if we didn’t have anything for him. If he called to ask if we had any mail to pick up, she would get angry that he had called rather than assuming we did and just coming, anyway (we very often did not. Even when we did a lot less by email it was still maybe twice a week that we did, at most).

    One day I discovered that if the courier called, she would tell him “yes” and then send a packet of blank paper to someone in the main building, just to force him to come to our office.

    I told him to call me instead from then on. If she asked if he had come I’d just tell her yes but she must have been in the bathroom.

    She was ridiculous, opinionated, and rigid about a lot of things but wasting the courier’s time was just a step too far for me.

    Reply ↓
      1. Bird names*

        Thanks for shielding the courier from her nonsense. Some people apparently truly only feel powerful when they can push someone around.

        Reply ↓
        1. Dust Bunny*

          This woman was just petty and intractable beyond reason. She and I worked together OK because I have some relatives who are like this and I know how they operate, but I was not sad to see her go.

          Reply ↓
    2. Dust Bunny*

      Also: I was new at the job and young. If my current supervisor were doing this I would say something, but I didn’t know to do that then and wouldn’t have thought I had the leverage, anyway.

      Reply ↓
    4. Dontbeadork*

      WTH was her problem? I mean, he could be doing something productive elsewhere instead of heading out to your satellite just in case you had something to go to the main building.

      Sheesh! They do say the less power you have, the more you flex it.

      Reply ↓
      1. Dust Bunny*

        In context: No. Fortunately for him.

        She was a control freak. I always thought there was a good reason her kids all lived at least six hours away.

        Reply ↓
        1. Le Sigh*

          Was she also confused about why they all lived so far away? I find people like this are often not very self-aware.

          Reply ↓
  3. Amber Rose*

    Our company’s logo color was a royal blue. One day business cards came in and they had printed more like a navy blue.

    Sales lost their minds. They went off about how nobody would respect us as a professional business and consistency was vital and this color was AWFUL, and then the poor admin who ordered the things (me, it was me) got caught up in not just a fight with the printer, but a parade of people going room to room trying to see if maybe it just looked that way in different lighting. Under some lights, they even looked (GASP) purple! It was unacceptable.

    They went through so few business cards that we only ordered them once every three or four years. -_-

    Reply ↓
    1. GreenApplePie*

      And this is exactly why my organization’s comms/marketing department has separate brand standards for print and digital. We have much more leeway in color variations for printed items.

      Reply ↓
      1. Amber Rose*

        If only we’d had a marketing department, but that was also me, if you consider my MS Paint flyers that looked like they were made by children to be “marketing.” I have no graphic design sense. At all.

        I ordered all our print stuff on one of those print on demand services. Vistaprint, IIRC.

        Reply ↓
    2. karin*

      When I started at a position I was tasked with making brochures, and I went with the color scheme of the previous brochures. I was then told I needed to meet the branding requirements that dictated a different color that no one told me about and chastised for the waste of having to throw them all away.

      Reply ↓
      1. JustaTech*

        I once messaged our marketing team to ask them the Pantone numbers/ HTML code numbers or whatever for our official company colors. I knew what the colors were, but not the exact shade, and I wanted to get it right.
        Someone got back to me very promptly and I went on my merry way making my poster.
        Then I got called up to my 3x boss’s office to be told that I could not ask Marketing to do my work for me.
        What?
        Yes, somehow the head of marketing decided that my polite request to a shared mailbox was the exact same as “write my poster for me” and yelled at my 3X boss who then yelled at me, and then my direct boss was mad that 3x boss hadn’t attempted to clarify anything with him first.

        It was not a great day.

        Reply ↓
        1. MBK*

          Why is 3X boss even concerned with fleeting communications between departments? Is actual Stuff To Do so thin on the ground at that level?

          Reply ↓
    3. A Significant Tree*

      One company I worked for decided to outsource their web branding to a consulting firm. They went all-in on the new design, which had all the hallmarks of awful webpage features like text in various shades of gray on a bright white background and fixed font sizes ranging from small to miniscule. The new logo looked like a ketchup smear and that was the less gruesome impression.

      My job at the time was website usability. Our in-house team included highly trained UI and UX and graphic designers. We don’t know why they outsourced the job that we could easily have done (and way better!), but we all collectively cringed when we saw the results. The best part was, the consulting firm was only contractually obligated to update the top three layers of the site, meaning if you dug down several pages you suddenly were immersed in the previous, much more colorful and readable, design. And they did a crap job of the top layers, since months later you could still find the original-design welcome message from our disgraced former and by-then-in-jail CEO.

      There was no time to die on that hill because the rebrand occurred about six months before massive, massive layoffs. The whole company has been gone for over a decade now, but the new-logo swag lives on.

      Reply ↓
    4. leeapeea*

      I almost never have a story for these prompts but reading yours reminds me I do! I work at a small firm whose logo and branding had always been handled in-house by folks who are not marketing or design professionals. The logo itself is fine, and has gone through 3 or so iterations since the company founding, including some color adjustments. The logo that was in place when I was hired had some issues with poor resolution on some digital and printed documents, so a handful of folks in a different office decided to keep using the previous logo. Ok, I mean, what’s less professional: a fuzzy logo or one that doesn’t match the rest of the branding? Cut to two years ago we develop and hire an in-house marketing role. This person is assigned to tweak the logo – corrects the resolution issue, makes some alignment changes, updates fonts. The same handful of folks STILL refuse to use the updated logo. Neither one is particularly beautiful or ugly I honestly don’t know why they are resisting the switch lol…

      Reply ↓
    5. Elitist Semicolon*

      It’s amazing how people can take the smallest detail and blow it up until it’s a statement about the entire org’s professionalism or credibility. When I was still teaching, I made a little video for my own class about how to integrate citations into research papers. My director thought it was great and asked me to make it available to everyone in our program and to folks in other departments if they wanted it, and I said yes – I was pretty proud of it and figured it could save other people a lot of time. Cue one of my colleagues, a day later, storming into the director’s office, ranting about how the video was sloppy and inconsistent and she could not possibly use it because our students wouldn’t take us seriously and I would damage our reputation across the school if I let other people use it. My offense? I put a . in a different place relative to a ) than she thought it should be. (The director, to her credit, told this person off.)

      Reply ↓
      1. Esprit de l'escalier*

        I’ll bet the . vs ) issue was just one in a long string of over-reactions by this colleague, so your director was probably not in the mood to indulge her in her petulance, especially since your director really liked your video. Just another entry in the “[colleague] is so weird” file.

        Reply ↓
    6. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

      The first company I worked for required a specific Pantone color for their logo. It’s been too many years and I don’t remember what it was now, but every employee had the Pantone number memorized.

      Reply ↓
      1. DancinProf*

        I have the RGB and hex codes for our branded color on a sticky note at my desk–but it’s because I’m a branding standards nerd myself, not because anyone is forcing me. So if I die on this weird hill it’ll be a self-inflicted wound.

        Reply ↓
        1. I Have RBF*

          One large company I worked for had a CEO who liked to piss in everything to make it “theirs”. Among other things, they changed the very recognizable color of our logo, away from one that had been optimized to look the same on a screen as in print, to a slightly darker/bluer on they said looked “more professional”. Cue thousands of dollars in swag and stationary that had to be sold at a discount, recycled or discarded. Sure, I liked the new color slightly better, but not enough to be onboard with the waste, and the web vs print thing was still an issue on older monitors. But they didn’t even consult marketing about it, just told them to change it. Nuts.

          Reply ↓
      2. allathian*

        Our chief graphic designer sees everything in pantone. You can point at any spot of color and he’ll give you the code. Apparently he can somehow compensate for the fact that colors look different depending on lighting conditions.

        Reply ↓
      3. Annie G*

        Specifying a Pantone number for a logo doesn’t seem weird or excessive at all to marketing and design folks. The fact that *every* employee had the number memorized is strange, though.

        Reply ↓
    7. UpstateDownstate*

      Do you by any chance work…in an art gallery? LOL!!!! This is the kind of stuff that happens and don’t get me started on letter head design and font and photo cropping. By the way none of the people that have strong opinions about any of these things are designers. Siiiigh

      Reply ↓
    8. Mike S*

      I used to work for an engineering company, and one of the owners threw a fit over the spacing of a couple of letters being slightly off. He got bought out soon afterwards.

      Reply ↓
    9. Ama*

      I will say my previous employer rebranded about a month before I left and they seem to have picked a color of very dark blue-purple (it is supposed to be purple) that no two printers can reproduce exactly the same (even though I know they have a set RGB/CMYK code that people are supposed to be using). I’m still on their mailing list (nonprofit) and every new fundraising mailer that shows up is anywhere from navy to plum colored.

      Reply ↓
  4. Publishing Freelancer*

    I work in publishing, and years ago when I mainly worked on reference books, I had to rewrite large parts of an encyclopedia because the editor insisted that Mexico was not part of North America.

    (The editor was Canadian. That wasn’t my first assumption either.)

    Reply ↓
    2. The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon*

      WHAT. That’s not editing works, Canadian editor! Or geography. That’s not how any of this works!

      Reply ↓
    3. Lazy Cat's Mom*

      My employer, a London-based media company, also insists Mexico is not in North America and is instead in Latin America. I still include Mexico in North America when I write about it.
      On the plus side, we’re still using Gulf of Mexico.

      Reply ↓
      1. Emily Byrd Starr*

        Latin America means any American country where the primary language spoken is Spanish or Portuguese. So technically Mexico is both in North America and in Latin America. Perhaps your employer is confusing Latin America with Central America, which is distinct from North America.

        Reply ↓
      2. Dust Bunny*

        Latin America isn’t a continent.

        Also, I swear I’m giving everyone “Gulf of Mexico” t-shirts for Christmas this year. What a lot of nonsense.

        Reply ↓
      3. Scholarly Publisher*

        The Thema subject code system for books puts Mexico and Central America under Latin America 1KL. North America, 1KB, includes the US, Canada, and a few places like the Sonoran and Chiahuahuan deserts which cross the US/Mexico border.

        Reply ↓
    5. a perfectly normal-sized space bird*

      Spouse told me they learned in school that Mexico was part of Central America, not North America. A well-funded urban school in the late 20th century. Which I find both sad and hilarious. I mean, my underfunded, rural, poverty-stricken, proud-of-ignorance, reading-is-for-losers grade school still taught Lamarckian evolution in the 1990s and yet they still knew Mexico was in North America.

      Reply ↓
      1. a perfectly normal-sized space bird*

        I mean South, not Central. Well, they were also taught Central America was part of South America, so…

        Reply ↓
      2. sb51*

        I will put my hand up and say that this is kind of how I was taught. Our teachers were kind of big into “many divisions are just political”, so the “real” continents are America (the whole thing), Africa, Eurasia, Antarctica. Australia got demoted, like Pluto, to a weird in-between state. And then once the divisions between “north” and “south” America were just about politics, north/central/south was also a valid set of dividers, and all of them were dependent on what one wanted to say about politics.

        So we all ended up a little unclear on where the “usual” dividing lines were. It was a good school; we were taught to think critically, but sometimes they went a little TOO hard with “think creativally about this” rather than “memorize this”

        Reply ↓
        1. a perfectly normal-sized space bird*

          From what spouse said, unfortunately it was less about thinking critically in regards to political divisions and more about straight-up racism. Because apparently North America is for European-descended people only. Spouse said they remembered being very confused by this because of reality but by then had learned not to question anything their teacher said.

          Reply ↓
          1. Ace in the Hole*

            “Because apparently North America is for European-descended people only.”

            Apparently his school didn’t realize that Spain and Portugal are European countries…

            Reply ↓
        2. Jay (no, the other one)*

          We (from the US) just got back from six weeks in New Zealand and Australia. My husband is a geologist. There are geologists who are campaigning for recognition of Zealandia as a continent defined by mostly underwater continental crust. I realized that it wasn’t just my elementary-school understanding of how many planets that needed adjusting…

          (see also kingdoms in the biological classification schema and a few other things)

          Reply ↓
        3. Ace in the Hole*

          Not cool demoting South America and North America like that… they’re definitely separate continents. They have separate tectonic plates! And they’re only connected by a tiny string of land as narrow as 30 miles wide! And each of them individually has more land area than antarctica! If North and South America are a single continent, Africa and Eurasia should be lumped together too.

          I absolutely agree with Eurasia as a single continent, though. Splitting it into Europe and Asia is geologically nonsensical.

          Reply ↓
          1. Enai*

            Yeah. And dividing the thing by tectonic plates would lead to even more confusion – for starters, Italy is geologically speaking an African country iirc.

            Reply ↓
          1. Ace in the Hole*

            Presumably because antarctica is about twice as large as Australia?

            No matter how you define it, there will always be an arbitrary line somewhere dividing large islands from small continents.

            Reply ↓
      3. L*

        I’m Canadian and went to a decently-funded suburban elementary school in the 90s and was also taught that Mexico was in Central America. Obviously, I’ve learned differently since, but I remember being confused as a kid when I first learned NAFTA included Mexico.

        Reply ↓
    6. Chickadee*

      I had a Chilean professor insist the seven continents are America (North and South as a single continent), Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and the Arctic.

      Reply ↓
      2. allhailtheboi*

        My mum is French and says there are five: the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania. I’m British and say there are seven: South America, North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Antarctica. I think cultural differences in how continents are ‘organised’ is very very normal. Even if I think my mum is wrong.

        Reply ↓
    7. Lily C*

      I can still remember an argument from middle school, in the early 90s, that we had with a substitute teacher who was trying to insist that Mexico was part of South America, not North America. The entire class of 12 year olds united in our argument against her, supported by a) the large pull-down maps and our textbooks that clearly showed Mexico as part of North America and b) about half the class being Mexican-American. Central America, I could almost see the logic behind, but not South America.

      Reply ↓
      1. Publishing Freelancer*

        And that’s the thing: there was literally an entry on NAFTA, one of the ones I had to “fix.”

        Reply ↓
    9. I Have RBF*

      Geographically, Mexico is in North America. It comes from the fact that all of North America is north of the equator. South America is called that because the bulk of that part of the continent is south of the equator.

      Reply ↓
    10. Publishing Freelancer*

      I just searched my email to see if I could find the relevant exchange, and while it has long-since been deleted (this was 15 years ago), I did find emails in which I told my wife about it as the conversation was happening.

      So since I’m reliving my frustration about it all, for the record, the encyclopedia entry that set this all off was on drug smuggling, and the editor wanted it refocused on Canada’s impact on the US War on Drugs, with all the coverage of Mexico removed. That snowballed into him searching the ms. for mentions of North America to make sure that it never included Mexico.

      Because I was rewriting other peoples’ work, which was my main job at the time, it’s entirely possible that the authors were never notified of the changes.

      Reply ↓
    11. AnonAnon*

      That’s like the folks at the French company that bought out my Massachusetts company who insisted that Chicago was in New England.
      I was like, my dudes, please try to drive there….

      Reply ↓
    12. SofiaDeo*

      I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve had problems living in the US, getting online orders from certain US companies shipped to us, because we live in New Mexico and “they don’t ship outside the US”.

      Reply ↓
    13. goddessoftransitory*

      I feel like a gif I have of two labradoodles cocking their heads from side to side, over and over…

      Reply ↓
  5. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

    I’m current waging a war on our IT’s security software that won’t let me download to my desktop. Just that one program can’t download to the desktop. I am 45 and have been downloading to the desktop ever since it was a thing you could do. I hate the Documents and Downloads folders. So, I created a new folder named, “IT Program is Stupid,” download the documents from that one program to that folder, then move them immediately to the desktop. I’m willing to roll with a lot of changes- usually adapting until things are 100% unusable- but this is the one thing I’m unwilling to change.

    Reply ↓
    2. Hiring Mgr*

      That’s strange – did they give a reason why it’s ok to download something to Downloads but not the desktop?

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

        According to our IT people, it’s because some items- identical to other documents downloaded from other sources- can cause problems if downloaded directly to the desktop. Which is intriguing because I’ve never heard that and if that was the case, it should be that ALL programs can’t download to the desktop, not just that one particular program. Apparently the program and the IT program have reps that work together….but apparently someone at program didn’t get with the IT program’s reps and now this is happening. *shrugs*

        Reply ↓
        1. I Have RBF*

          I’m one of those people who hates a cluttered desktop. Some thing in Mac and Windows automatically save to the desktop, and I hate it. I have six items on my Windoze desktop, and I can’t remember when I last clicked on any of them. I use the menu, or icons in the taskbar, to activate software, and the file manager to locate files. Icons of stuff junking up the desktop just annoys me.

          Reply ↓
      2. HistoryBoots*

        In my workplace, many of us have one dedicated computer but it’s common to log in on other computers sometimes – e.g., the spare computer in the meeting room so we don’t have to bring a laptop in to work on a document on the big screen where we can all see, or log in to the front desk – and the thing about desktops is that those files don’t travel between computers. It’s like you left a print copy of the file on a physical desk. The downloads folder was on our individual work drives, which was therefore accessible to any of our computers on-network. The desktop also doesn’t get backed up in the same way as all of our other files. Our information management guidelines say only ever put shortcuts or copies of documents stored elsewhere on the desktop. I’d never consider downloading things directly to the desktop – not great practice!

        Reply ↓
        3. commensally*

          Also not universally true – our work computers have desktops on the network. (It doesn’t work very *well*, thanks OneDrive, but you can save stuff to your OneDrive desktop and see it anywhere.)

          Reply ↓
        4. Wayward Sun*

          This is something that can be configured via Group Policy. There are various reasons why they might not want to sync the Desktop folder, but it’s entirely possible to do it.

          Reply ↓
    3. RachelNYC*

      I am amazed at offices that let you download programs. Maybe it is because I work in such a regulated industry (cannot even print when working from home) but our IT simply would not let you do that. We cannot access any social media or messaging programs that cannot be monitored as well.

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

        It wasn’t that the program is the issue- it’s the documents from that program (Excel docs, PDF’s, etc). It’s a program that literally everyone has on their computers if they have to view websites and since we do most of our business on the cloud, I have to have web browsers. In fact, I have to have multiple web browsers because some of my websites don’t work on one or the other browser- this is one of the adaptations I’m willing to make. Hell, when IT program killed the access to the check deposit reader, I figured out how to fix that issue- but this downloading documents that are identical in every other way to documents you could download with other programs? It’s just a bizarre hang up.

        Reply ↓
      2. just tired*

        Luckily our IT isn’t so tight. But I try to not download too many personal programs on my work laptop. Things like spotify I run from the webpage, or facebook or whatever.

        Reply ↓
        1. allathian*

          Same, except for stuff they put in the Software Center.

          I just upgraded my work computer to Windows 11, which I’ve used at home for at least two years, but I’m annoyed that all my folder shortcuts and favorites have disappeared.

          Reply ↓
    4. Kimmy Schmidt*

      “I do not want to save to onedrive. I want to save to the documents folder… on my computer… that I own… in my house.”

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

        I used to be that way about my emails- I’d rather them be saved to my computer, not stored on the cloud. The reason? Last job, a transit bus ran into our internet cable and disconnected it- *regularly*. I had a specific folder of, “Things To Do When the Internet Went Out.” If someone called, it’d have been nice to reference emails that I could access instead of going, “Bus again. I’ll get back with you later.”

        Reply ↓
      3. I Have RBF*

        Yeah, I hate things that automagically save to “the cloud”. Because I want to chose what goes to “the cloud”, open to that provider’s LLM scraping and searching, and what stays in my house and is encrypted if I back it up to “the cloud”. What kind of things? Financial stuff. Anything with PII or PHI. You don’t have to be doing anything shady to want to keep your own secrets.

        Reply ↓
      4. Escape from the Bay Area*

        I showed that to my IT guy last week when we were backing up my old laptop on OneDrive. I’m still laughing about it. It’s my favorite thing on the internet right now.

        Reply ↓
    5. Beth*

      I’m also devoted to downloading to my desktop! And I keep my desktop clean, too — anything I download, I deal with.

      My Hill To Die On was the pre-ribbon Excel workspace. I kept two versions of Excel running for YEARS so I could go on using my Excel tools in the same manner. I STILL hate that ribbon and everything it stands for (that is, the continuous process of rearranging, hiding, and removing key tools and features so that power users are left cripple).

      Reply ↓
      1. lanfy*

        Isn’t this a nice hill?

        (WHY are you taking up a chunk of usble screen with a big ribbon full of icons that I only use a few of? Especially since I still have to change menus to get to other options, so you’ve saved me no time or clicks. In fact you’ve added clicks, because you’ve hidden all the power user options that I use all the time…)

        Reply ↓
        1. Anonwithknees*

          You may know this already, but you can get rid of the ribbon by double clicking on one of the headers – and you can open it back up the same way.

          I often do that when I need more screen space.

          Reply ↓
      2. I Have RBF*

        I STILL hate that ribbon and everything it stands for (that is, the continuous process of rearranging, hiding, and removing key tools and features so that power users are left cripple).

        Oh, ghods, yes. The dumbing down of Excel with that stupid “ribbon” still has me furious, and I haven’t used it regularly in years. I used to be a wizard with Excel, and Lotus123 before that. I wrote macros and did pivot tables, even. I had finger macros that I didn’t even think about, including all of the old Lotus123 “/” commands. I still wish they would bring back a “power user” mode that had all of the shortcuts and menus that they think ordinary users are too dumb to learn.

        Reply ↓
    6. Mr. Shiny and New*

      This reminds me of when IT wouldn’t let me change the percentage of disk space that was used by the recycle bin. I had to delete a lot of files. My computer spent a lot of time managing the recycle bin. I just wanted it to use less space for that, so that the cleanup step would be faster… nope. For IT dept consistency reasons, I was not allowed to change that setting. Eventually I switched teams and (gasp!) on the new team I required admin access to install software, and so then I could change the setting if I wanted to.

      Reply ↓
  6. Jen*

    I worked in a building that had a custodian who certainly should have been fired, but wasn’t. He had figured out how to stay employed while never answering the radio for urgent cleanups. (The next custodian found a hidden “nap spot” on the top of a huge stack of supplies.) He had the ordering system down to a simplified science. (Simply make the same huge order, periodically, and then stack the stuff up, thereby making a high elevation “nap spot” where he could place his blankets and his radio). He didn’t do much regular cleaning, either. The night guy did almost everything.

    But, he had a hill he was willing to die on: maintaining the mothballed heating system that had been replaced, but not removed. The small amount of time he worked, he was often tinkering with the heater he’d been repeatedly forbidden to touch. When he finally got it “working” and turned it on, it smoked so much that we had a building-clearing fire drill. If he’d just let it go, they probably would have kept him on, doing almost nothing, forever.

    Reply ↓
  7. Helvetica*

    This could fit under several things, I suppose but it was also a hill to die on for someone else.
    In a previous government job, we had to chip in to buy coffee for the office machine. The most senior EA made the ordering but we, the assistants for the other departments, had to collect our department’s money, in cash, and give to her. She would absolutely refuse to accept anything that wasn’t paper money (this being euros where 1- and 2-euro coins are perfectly acceptable and normal), so I’d have to make sure I could change that into paper money as she insisted the coffee guy would not accept any coins. This was ridiculous but she would not budge and I was several decades younger and less experienced than her, so I didn’t make it into an argument.
    One time, I did not manage to give her the money ahead of time nor exchange out the coins, so I went with her to pick up the coffee order. I apologised to the coffee guy for the coins, to which he replied “I don’t mind at all, as long as they are not smaller than a 10 cents!”
    After that day, I stopped changing the money and the EA never told me anything, yet still refused to accept coins from anyone else, so she could keep dying on that hill.

    Reply ↓
      2. Mad Harry Crewe*

        And coins don’t stay together – you can fold a stack of bills and keep them separate from your own money in your wallet. You’re not going to keep coins from mingling in the same space so you have to carry them separately.

        Would have been better if she owned the preference for herself, rather than displacing it to another party, but it’s not wholly unreasonable.

        Reply ↓
      3. Helvetica*

        She specifically said that the coffee guy wouldn’t accept them, not that the coins were heavy, etc. And no, it was maybe 30 euros in paper and then perhaps 5 euros in coins, i.e. two coins of 2 euros and one of 1 euro.

        Reply ↓
        1. Skoobles*

          I think you missed the point of their comment; they were saying she didn’t want to carry all 35 euros in coins, so she lied about the reason why because she also didn’t want to own up to not wanting to carry a mild amount of extra weight.

          Reply ↓
    2. Anon for this*

      I don’t think her stance was unreasonable in the slightest. Not wanting to deal with a bunch of coins (no matter how “acceptable and normal”) that are heavy and jangly in your pocket, much less anything small that will require laborious counting out seems reasonable since apparently she had to trek somewhere with the collected cash on the regular. I can totally understand why she insisted on light, foldable paper money for this task. She could have framed it as an inconvenience to herself, but like her, I find that just invites a ton of arguments from people who don’t have to do the annoying thing (“just bring a bag,” “it’s not that heavy,” etc.).

      Reply ↓
      1. Observer*

        Not wanting to deal with a bunch of coins (no matter how “acceptable and normal”) that are heavy and jangly in your pocket, much less anything small that will require laborious counting out seems reasonable

        Yeah. But lying about it is weird.

        Reply ↓
    3. Just passing through*

      Nah if she didn’t want coins, after collecting the money *she* could have gone to the bank to exchange them. Instead she had multiple other people do something that was her preference. If she had framed it as an “ask” it would’ve gone down better.

      Reply ↓
      1. Skoobles*

        “If she didn’t want coins, she could have done an even more annoying process involving coins” is a weird solution to suggest.

        She probably could have just said “I don’t want to deal with coins” but she shifted the blame downstream so she didn’t have to fight over it. Not that weird of a hill all things considered.

        Reply ↓
  8. WeirdChemist*

    I used to have a coworker that took absolutely everything extremely personally. In particular, for a group of us (all women… hmm…), everything we did were apparently efforts to sabotage and bully him. Pointing out mistakes in his work (a very routine part of our job)? Bullying, because he never made mistakes (he made literally so many). Doing work directly assigned to us by our manager? Sabotage, because he wanted the credit for it. Having any conversation near him but not including him? Bullying, because clearly we were talking about him, despite the fact that anyone walking by could hear that we were talking about TV shows/video games/our partners/etc. He was doing something against policy? Sabotage, because one of us didn’t train him on it properly, despite his training records being well documented, and many of his mistakes were extremely obvious “no’s”, such as don’t lie about data. All of these complaints were escalated to management, who admitted that he was the one who was the problem, but they couldn’t do anything about it because “reasons”

    Anyways, his weirdest complaint about us was after 2 years of working there, he learned what a stapler remover was. Apparently he received one when he started, didn’t know what it was, and threw it in a drawer. He had been removing staples with his fingers the whole time. He claimed that we were trying to sabotage him and purposefully cause him injury in order to bully him by never telling him about the existence of stapler removers. (This man was in his 40s btw, with several office jobs before this) His complaint got escalated all the way to the director level, at which point his conversation with the director was apparently so rude and inappropriate that they finally took action to get rid of him. Better late than never I suppose?

    Reply ↓
    1. Kermit's Bookkeepers*

      Man. There’s weaponized incompetence and then there’s whatever the fuck THIS is. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall watching this man make the argument to a director that it was anybody else’s job to explain the purpose of very basic office supplies to him, though.

      Reply ↓
      1. WeirdChemist*

        Oh this wasn’t him trying to get out of work. He genuinely thought he was the smartest, most perfect person in any given room and that the only reason he could have been wrong about something was trickery and sabotage.

        He insisted that all communication involving him be over email with management cc-d, because he wanted a record of all the ways we were “bullying” him. All it did was create a record of all the ways that he was incredibly wrong about some pretty basic things and all the ways that our professionalism was met with his wild rudeness. But he insisted on the emails because he genuinely thought they made him look good!
        I openly heard him tell our boss “No, you’re wrong, you actually have no idea what you’re talking about and that’s a stupid way to think about it” for something that the boss had done for YEARS beforehand (and was completely correct about) (and also was OUR BOSS… you don’t talk that way to your boss!!)

        Guy just had a massively inflated ego

        Reply ↓
        1. Enai*

          I was all set to hate the guy, but now I just feel sorry for him. Just the tiniest bit of humility and a smidgen of curiosity about the perspectives of other people would have improved his and your lives so, so much. What a waste.

          Reply ↓
      1. WeirdChemist*

        I mean if you’ve never seen one in use before, I could see being confused about the weird claw/fang thingy.

        But to then turn that into “people are purposefully trying to make me cut my fingers on staples” was wild lol

        Reply ↓
        1. metadata minion*

          Exactly! I can absolutely see someone not having used a staple remover before — plenty of offices don’t use a lot of paper, or don’t commonly staple things, and even though I work in a pretty paper-heavy office I’m not sure when the last time I had to remove a staple was. But my reaction in this sort of situation is usually to laugh at myself and thank my colleague for informing me of the existence of staple removers.

          Reply ↓
      2. Csethiro Ceredin*

        My parents met because my mum saw my dad struggling to use a staple remover properly and snatched it away from him to demonstrate.

        Reply ↓
  9. Irish Teacher.*

    I’ve got a couple.

    Once was a guy who went on a complete rant at a staff meeting because of a golf classic. Our school had had a past pupils golf classic and some teachers had gone to represent the school. It took place during the school day and this one guy took major offence that he had to cover a class for somebody “going playing golf.”

    He pretty much commendeered a staff meeting, declared he was doing “no more” for the school ever again as a result, then proceeded to start another argument about how much time we should get for a future staff meeting and when the principal admitted he was right about that, changed and started arguing that we shouldn’t have that staff meeting anyway.

    It’s like “dude, you had to cover one class” and there is a requirement that we be available to cover a set number of classes anyway. It was the last class of the day so he could have gone home early had nobody needed cover but…I mean, not getting to leave early on one occasion in a year is…hardly that big a deal.

    The other was in a previous school I worked in. This school was really small and as a result had an arrangement with the nearby girls’ school that senior students would go to the other school to take optional subjects that weren’t offered by one school, so some girls might come to us for woodwork and our students might go to them for home economics, that sort of thing…

    Anyway, there was an issue with the Christmas tests. The girls’ school complained that our school was not sending over the tests for the subjects their girls did in our school. And this one guy started a rant about how he shouldn’t have to…walk across the road and hand in a couple of test papers. “You wouldn’t get lawyers carrying their own papers.”

    The principal told him to just send one of the students over if he was so opposed to doing it himself.

    Reply ↓
    1. Indolent Libertine*

      So what’s in those fancy leather briefcases that practically every law school student gets at graduation?

      Reply ↓
      4. zinzarin*

        Lawyers routinely use couriers to send papers to other locations that they have no need to personally visit.

        Dude’s reasoning vis a vis his own situation was wrong, but his example is spot on. A lawyer in a similar situation would often send a courier.

        (Yes, I’m sure there are lawyers here who could tell me wrong–like any industry, there’s going to be variation–but the lawyers we all know from TV are, well, the lawyers we know. Denny Crane definitely would not walk papers across the street.)

        Reply ↓
  10. LadyMTL*

    I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s seen office drama over fish in the microwave, but a few years back it got to a ridiculous level. We had two microwaves in our cafeteria and someone (don’t know who, we were a decent amount of people in the office at the time) would microwave fish regularly. One day HR put up signs on the microwave doors saying ‘please don’t microwave foods with strong smells.’ Well, the fish-cooker must have taken it personnally because they lost it. They first wrote a note in red on the sign to protest, then stuck up printouts from websites explaining the benefits of eating fish, all the while continuing to heat up their fish.

    Eventually the signs came down, and oddly enough the fish smells vanished too. I never knew who it was, but it was funny…every morning I’d go into the cafeteria to see what new communiqués might have popped up overnight. I was fully on the “no fish in the microwave” side, FWIW.

    Reply ↓
    1. Kermit's Bookkeepers*

      I too enjoy the many health benefits of fish and I would never heat it up in a communal microwave. I mean, jeez, it’s perfectly fine cold, my guy.

      Reply ↓
      1. Kyrielle*

        This *and* you know what works a treat? Heat one of those single-serve cups of rice and put your cold fish on it or mix it in. It will warm the fish up enough to enjoy if you prefer it warm, but not to the degree that it stinks up the area.

        Reply ↓
    2. Captain Carrot*

      My coworker has been cooking salmon in the toaster oven and tbh it actually smells nice to me? I think it’s really just the microwave that does something terrible to the smell of fish.

      Reply ↓
      1. Mid*

        I missed the oven part of toaster oven on first read, and had a very funny mental image of a whole fish popping out of the toaster like a dolphin in the sea, but crispy and with lemon slices. Alas, a toaster oven is far more normal and less glorious in my imagination.

        Reply ↓
    3. I don't work in this van*

      We had a guy who not only heated fish in the microwave every day, he also did it at 3 in the afternoon, so there wasn’t even a chance that other lunchtime smells might cover it up. He would also lecture all of us on our eating habits. Unrelatedly (probably?), he was bad at his job and got fired.

      Reply ↓
      1. I don't work in this van*

        Oh and he would then bring the fish to his desk, so the kitchen AND the huge open office smelled for the rest of the day.

        Reply ↓
        1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

          Ha, we have a 3pm smelly snacker but they prefer carbs, so it’s either burnt popcorn or that maple-brown sugar instant oatmeal. Both smell gross to me and both seem to hang in the air for hours, but I don’t know who it is and don’t want to be That Person putting up passive-aggressive notes or haunting the breakroom.

          But, I can be oversensitive to smells. I didn’t actually buy a house JUST to get away from my apartment neighbor, Mr. Garlic, but living near him was what got my butt in gear to save up for something without shared walls.

          Reply ↓
          1. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

            I’ve never understood why anyone needs to put instant oatmeal in the microwave. Just heat the WATER in the microwave and then stir it into the oatmeal. Voilá!

            Reply ↓
    5. Fluff*

      There was an evil person at my previous job who would use the break room toaster to toast…

      Frozen fried fish things. (Yes, Utah – remember that clinic?)/

      This was probably the one time I was so glad I have celiac disease and never used the group toaster.

      Reply ↓
    6. Lizbrarian*

      I had a colleague who had a special genetic disorder where she was missing some sort of enzyme for breaking down certain food, and so she had a very limited list of things she could eat. She microwaved fish all the time, but no one had the heart to ask her to stop. Our new boss called in Environmental Systems in after she did it one time, because she thought something had died in the ductwork.

      Reply ↓
    7. BeeKay*

      It wasn’t fish, but one time at work someone thought they smelled gas, so the whole building was evacuated and the hazmat people came through in their bunny suits and everything. (It was a large National Lab so they took things like that seriously.)

      It turned out someone had had some durian with their lunch and discarded the rind in their trash can.

      Reply ↓
  11. Tradd*

    We use file folders with a form printed on the front with info to fill out, boxes to check, etc. for our customs clearances. We let the appropriate person know we needed them well before we were out (lead time is about 3 weeks), but order showed up several weeks late. My direct report about lost his mind when we were out of folders with the form on the front. He made the office manager give him a copy of the form so he could copy it and then staple it to the front of all the files. I just took blank files and made notes of appropriate info on the front. Direct report was constantly bellyaching about having to do all the work of stapling copies of the form to the front of files while we were waiting for the printed folders. His histronics were very funny. I just laughed. I actually liked not having the printed folders as the fields are very small. He still goes on about what he went through.

    Reply ↓
    1. Peachtree*

      This sounds pretty sensible IMO – it means that you know all the fields are completed and in the right place. I wouldn’t complain about how much work it takes, but I think it’s a good idea to staple on the forms to the files instead of just handwriting …

      Reply ↓
      1. Tradd*

        That’s fine if he wanted to do it that way, but oh, the drama is my issue. He bellyached constantly to the whole office about it for days. He nearly went into hysterics when he discovered we were out of the files with the form on the front. We’ve had the folders with the form back in stock for weeks and he’s still griping about having to go without them for weeks.

        Reply ↓
    2. Label Queen*

      We used to have special labels that were designed to stick to clothing samples for photoshoots without falling off or damaging the garment. These were cut and pre-printed with a small template form that then had to be filled out by hand with the style reference, description, price etc.
      Several hundred labels into packing one particularly large photoshoot I couldn’t take the hand ache and mind numbing boredom any longer. I re-created the template in electronic format so you could feed in a list of all your samples and it would create a printable version. Then I talked the label supplier into supplying blank uncut A4 sheets for us to print on instead, which were 1/4 of the price.
      I saved the company several thousand pounds in the first couple of months alone and turned hours of handwriting labels into a 5 minute printing job. Were the other 50 or so people using the labels happy? Absolutely NOT! All I heard for the next year were complaints about the new labels, how they didn’t like having to peel off labels from a whole sheet instead of having them cut into pairs, they didn’t like the font (apparently changing a font is just too hard), putting the sheets in the printer was too fiddly etc.
      When I moved to a new job several years one team was STILL insisting on handwriting their labels because copy pasting a list into the template was too hard and, of course, simultaneously complaining about hand ache.

      Reply ↓
  12. liberryannie*

    In our department, it was customary to send around a birthday card for everyone to sign and it was left on the birthday person’s desk on their special day. Similar with sympathy cards, etc. One woman, Laura, was the one who bought the cards and made sure everyone got a card on their birthdays for years. One year, another coworker decided that Laura deserved a little something more on her birthday for that reason, so arranged a small in-office party to celebrate her birthday. It consisted of a grocery story cake and everyone provided their own drinks. We had extra paper plates left over from other events. One coworker was so incensed that Laura’s birthday celebration was more than the customary card that she boycotted the party and kept working at her desk during our short social *in the same room*. It’s fine, no one liked the boycotter anyway.

    Reply ↓
  13. whatever you want*

    I have worked as a graphic designer for various nonprofits (often the only designer on staff). One department head at a library where I worked was adamant about maintaining her own preferred formatting/layout in design pieces that included work from a lot of other departments too (think annual report). So while everyone else was satisfied for me to take their images and text and use everything to make a nice cohesive design, this woman HAD to have “her pages” just the way she wanted—meaning multiple exclamation points (in a row, like “!!!!!”) and tiny pictures often arranged in an arc with WordArt titles.

    I did push back, my boss pushed back, but because she was a department head it didn’t go anywhere. Eventually I just ended up exporting her original submitted Word docs as a PDF and plonking the whole thing into the annual report rather than trying to recreate her bananas layout ideas in InDesign. So if you were perusing our annual report, you’d get through about 20 pages of nicely-designed content, then suddenly a couple pages that looked like a 12-year old made a flyer in Microsoft Word.

    She was happy. I was not, but I was tired.

    Reply ↓
    1. JustaTech*

      I had a principal investigator (PI, big deal scientist with his name on the grants) who insisted that all presentations be written in Comic Sans. We would be presenting our very serious data about things like an AIDS vaccine to a major conference of immunologists and public health professionals and everything is quite serious and here we get up to give a talk in Comic Sans.

      It was embarrassing.
      (I’ve since learned that Comic Sans can be a good font for people with dyslexia, but even if that was the case, why couldn’t we change the font before presenting it?)

      Reply ↓
  14. The Red Folders*

    The Red Folders.
    Pre COVID, I worked in a satellite office of an insurance brokerage and the man who ran the office never moved past 1997. The main office saved everything to the CRM however John(not his real name) insisted we print every email, letter, proposal, spreadsheet etc and save it in the Red Folder for each customer. He insisted this was faster and saved a lot of time when you needed to know where you were with a client. The sales and account management teams HATED this because if they were at a client on site, it was easier to look in the CRM app and John would throw a fit because he thought it was more professional to show up with a file folder.

    John was fired in 2024 and the Red Folders were thrown in huge shred it bins to celebrate.

    Reply ↓
  15. Juicebox Hero*

    Our janitor quit over an ashtray.

    We had a very nice and hardworking janitor, “John.” Our building, the town hall, has a stoop with a trash can and one of those big outside ashtrays on it. When the building closed John would empty it and put it inside where it wouldn’t get stolen, then when we opened he’d put it back out front.

    We also rented the second floor to another government office, headed up by “Fred,” a loudmouth and former smoker who’d gone to the other extreme and who believed that government buildings should be smoke free, and took it upon himself to remove, and hide, the ashtray. This didn’t stop people smoking; they just tossed their butts in the parking lot or on the stoop and made it look horrible.

    Our boss blew a gasket over the butts all over our parking lot, and demanded to know why John hadn’t put the ashtray out. John told him that Fred had taken it away and he couldn’t find it. Boss had a nice loud argument with Fred, who then came storming after John for telling Boss he’d bogarted the ashtray.

    John, who was in his 70s and basically just working to keep busy, quit.

    So we had butts all over the parking lot, overflowing wastebaskets, and no soap or paper towels in the restrooms for at least a month until they found someone else to do it.

    Ironically, the ashtray made a quiet reappearance a few months later, probably because a couple of Fred’s office staff smoked like chimneys and were the biggest users of the ashtray to begin with.

    Reply ↓
    1. Lenora Rose*

      Sounds like your janitor quit over abusive behaviour towards him, and Fred was the one dying on his ashtray hill.

      Reply ↓
      3. Enai*

        Fred didn’t die on his weird ashtray hill, more’s the pity. I hope John found something else to keep busy like petting all the half-feral cats in the local animal rescue to socialize them and thoroughly enjoyed his retirement.

        Reply ↓
  16. Hello Dolly*

    I’m not lanyard woman, but I get it. Lanyards are horrible! My first job was a heavy badge type place (constantly swiping in places, and needed it visible). A lot of people wore lanyards, but they rubbed my neck and I thought they were so ugly. I wore beautiful pearls most days, I’m not having them rub up against a lanyard. I clipped my badge to my suit pocket, it was even more visible than a lanyard placement. Sometimes would put it on my waist, and that was fine too. The waist was very ideal actually, the badge readers were about at waist level, so I could do this hip thrust move to get into places, and didn’t even have to use my hands on my badge to get in.

    Reply ↓
    1. Hello Dolly*

      They do actually make pretty lanyards though. That lanyard woman could have bought or made a pretty beaded on for example. Or found a very minimalistic one.

      Reply ↓
        1. Charlotte Lucas*

          I wouldn’t make such a big deal, but I can’t wear anything on my neck for a full workday. The skin on the back of my neck gets chafed and irritated.

          And as someone who’s worked jobs where hanging things around your neck could be a safety hazard, I just prefer clipping my badge to my clothes.

          Reply ↓
      1. mskyle*

        Honestly I might – I haaaaate the feeling of the lanyard against the back of my neck. I mean first, I’d try wearing the lanyard and also clip the badge to my shirt so there was no actual weight on my neck. But any kind of weight hanging from the back of my neck is super uncomfortable to me (also can’t wear heavy necklaces or halter necks).

        Reply ↓
      2. FricketyFrack*

        I might. I have sensory issues that make lanyards (and anything else around my neck/collarbones) a nightmare. I can tolerate it for a few minutes if I absolutely have to, but I can’t do it for a long period of time, and if that was the hill my company was willing to die on, then I would have to find another job.

        Reply ↓
    3. Judge Judy and Executioner*

      The hip is my favorite place to put the badge; I definitely used the hip thrust to get in the door all the time.

      Reply ↓
    4. Not on board*

      Also, wearing a lanyard means my badge is pretty much at breast level – which means that wearing the lanyard would cause people to have to look at my breast area. That’s the argument I would use to try to circumvent the lanyard rule…. but mostly, I’d just wear the lanyard.

      Reply ↓
        2. Jessica Ganschen*

          Yup, at my last job, every time I went to the bathroom, it would first get in the way when I was trying to pull my pants back up and fasten them, and then it would clank and clack against the sink while I was trying to wash my hands. I was only in the office once a week, and only at that job for a few months, but if it had lasted any longer, I probably would have been hunting for a replacement lanyard that was more adjustable, or gone at it with some safety pins!

          Reply ↓
      2. Morgan*

        If you have a lanyard hung around your neck, or a clip at your belt, or a nametag on your shirt, people who need to look at them will necessarily either be staring at either your chest or waist/hips/crotch (not directly, but if you’re worried about where people are looking…). I’m not sure there’s really a good way around that – it seems an inevitability?

        Reply ↓
        1. Overthinking It*

          Post it on your forehead? (Maybe “Bind it as a frontlet between your eyes,” as the Bibke says. . .)

          Reply ↓
          1. Grenelda Thurber*

            My first “out loud” laugh of the day, thank you! And it reminds me of the time I was buying a new car and threatened to grab a post-it off the salesman’s desk, write “I don’t want the extended warranty” on it, and stick it on my forehead.

            Reply ↓
      3. Zona the Great*

        I had a man reach out and grab my badge rested neatly between my breasts in order to learn my name. I snatched it away from him, told him never to come that close to touching me again, and told him to ask my name next time. What the ever loving feck?

        Reply ↓
        1. Lanyard Mandragoran*

          I once had a nurse grab my badge off my hip (on a retractable tether) to learn my name. I was a non-patient visitor coming from work. I wrote it off as her being too accustomed to working with incapacitated patients, but your case is *wild*.

          Reply ↓
    5. Peregrine*

      I don’t mind them, but they definitely do limit outfit and jewelry choice. And with office-type jobs, I feel like it’s nice to treat people like adults and give them a few choices.

      Reply ↓
    6. DNDL*

      The lanyard thing is so sensory for me. I cannot stand the feel of it around my neck. I’ve had to wear one my entire working life and I’ve always hated it. I switched to the belt clip this year and am never going back.

      Reply ↓
      1. Bunch Harmon*

        I also have the same sensory issue. Due to the specific work I do, it makes sense for me to wear an apron – but I also can’t stand that around my neck. I solved the problem by sewing a cross back apron (that sits on the shoulders) and adding a loop to clip my badge to. It’s solved one of them many sensory issues I have on a daily basis.

        Reply ↓
      2. till Tuesday*

        Same about lanyards irritating my neck. If I don’t have beltloops, I’ll loop it around buttons on my shirt. (Buttons that are done up, the space above or below the done up button) or around a strap on a singlet.

        Reply ↓
    7. Alexander Graham Yell*

      Yeah, I hate lanyards and most necklaces because I get a weird neck/headache when I wear them for too long during the day. But as long as I could take it off at my desk, I’d be fine. I prefer a clip that works on a pocket or belt, but my current company doesn’t have them at all and it’s been lovely.

      Reply ↓
    8. Pastor Petty Labelle*

      I am not lanyard woman but I am kinda on her side. I hate wearing lanyards too. I am always afraid I will snag it on something and strangle myself. When one is accident prone, these are legitmate concerns. I’ve snagged the opening on the back of my good winter coat on things. So ya, know, no that far out of the realm of possibility for me.

      Wonder if I could get an accomodation if I had to wear a lanyard?

      Reply ↓
      1. Bunch Harmon*

        There are break away lanyards that snap apart when they’re pulled. That would at least help with the safety aspect.

        Reply ↓
      2. Heck in a Handbasket*

        I used to wear my badge on a chain until I got it caught one in a paper shredder that took me down so fast my head was resting on the shredder before I knew it and still going. It was all I could do to feel for and hit the reverse button before I passed out.
        Breakaway lanyards are definitely the way to go.

        Reply ↓
    10. A Teacher*

      Same. I have eczema and don’t wear jewelry for this reason. Skin rubbed raw from anything around my neck is really uncomfortable. We had a principal that was determined we were going to wear one. I just… didn’t. I would wear the badge and I would hold it up but I wasn’t willing to have raw skin from wearing something on my neck.

      Reply ↓
    11. Dinwar*

      I spent nearly 20 years working around drill rigs. I’ve been thoroughly trained that “stuff on neck” is wrong, and just about the stupidest thing you can do outside of jumping on the augers while they’re in motion. It’s asking for major problems, up to and including death. Even break-away lanyards aren’t entirely safe, and when the area being injured is your neck, there’s no amount of “not safe” that’s acceptable to me. People talk about degloving being a major issue; imagine that happening to your neck. No. Just…no.

      I ABSOLUTELY would quit if someone demanded my team wear lanyards, especially if they didn’t make an exception for jobsites. Major safety issues are more than justifiable reason to walk away from a job.

      Plus, lanyards can get uncomfortable. They can rub against your skin, or get weighed down (I know a lot of people who put keys on them), or just flop around all day.

      I agree about putting my badge at my waste. It’s convenient, I can easily show it to whoever needs to see it, and no one’s ever complained about it (then again, I’m fairly recognizable, which helps). And the whole point of pants on jobsites is that they get destroyed rather than the person.

      Reply ↓
      1. Nina*

        The last place I worked that having your ID visible at all times was a thing, there was an even split between office workers and floor/factory/test site workers – the former tended toward lanyards, the latter tended towards wearing it in a belt clip or armband (visible, you can open doors hands free, and it’s not a strangle hazard). I was a test site worker and used a belt clip.

        In that environment I would 100% have quit over lanyards being mandatory, because it would have indicated that head office cared more about how things looked than whether their staff were safe.

        Where I am now? I’d definitely job-search over lanyards being mandatory because I hate lanyards, and again it’s a sign that higher-ups care too much about appearances.

        Reply ↓
      2. Peachtree*

        Lanyards don’t work on drill rigs – got it! Now how does that apply to the rest of the workforce where most people are not working in extremely dangerous locations? Like, say, an office?

        Reply ↓
    12. me*

      I totally get the lanyard one. I had an employer tell me that wearing my ID badge on a lanyard was mandatory, and I explained that wearing things around my neck cause migraines and I would need to figure out how to get a medical accommodation for that. They let me wear it on a clip. I would have totally been willing to go through the accommodation process though.

      Reply ↓
      1. Not on board*

        If you’re a woman, depending on proportions, it also means the badge will end up between your breasts. Which means if someone is looking at your badge, they’re also looking at your breasts.

        Reply ↓
        1. Mutually Supportive*

          I hate this. The pass crashes around on the desk when I’m sat working, and then bounces around on my front as I walk around.

          I end up walking around and holding it steady. It’s so annoying, and not something that men or many women will experience and understand.

          I’m happy to wear a pass but could we please make it less annoying!?

          Reply ↓
          1. Seeking Second Childhood*

            For what it’s worth I put a clip on the end of my lanyard and I use both. No floppy drag– but the corporate initiative du jour was satisfied.

            Reply ↓
    13. WyHalo*

      Lanyard woman is my queen. There are so many annoying things about work that this last one just tipped her over the edge. I’ve never had to wear a lanyard except at conferences, and I hate them with the fire of ten thousand sons. They get tangled in my long hair and necklaces and sit right on my prodigious bosom.

      Reply ↓
      1. Teach*

        Yep. A lanyard combines with my height and also-prodigious bosom to sit the ID as if precariously perched on a ledge. Super annoying AND snags my thrifted cashmere sweater collection.

        Reply ↓
    14. HannahS*

      I have to wear an ID at all times at work, and I also hate lanyards. My ID usually also has keys and sometimes a safety alarm on it, so it’s heavy and scratchy on my neck. I try to put them on retractable clips, but if I don’t have one I have my ID tucked in my breast pocket, which kind of defeats the purpose of wearing an ID.

      Reply ↓
    15. Angstrom*

      I wouldn’t quit over it, but “Must be clearly visible above the waist” seems like a far better badge rule than “Must be on a lanyard”.

      Reply ↓
    16. Lurker*

      I had a magnetic pin that was meant to hold glasses, I could put this on my shirt and hang the lanyard there. It was a great solution.

      Reply ↓
      1. Just Here For This*

        The lanyard I used to wear was pilling my knits with the clasp on it, I switched to a clip on my belt to protect my clothing.

        Reply ↓
    17. MarfisaTheLibrarian*

      I also would hate wearing a lanyard. But I wonder if it’s supposed to be a security measure, in that something around your neck is harder to quietly steal than something clipped at hip level. In the vast majority of jobs that would be way overkill, though.

      Reply ↓
    18. Tea Monk*

      warning: violence Lanyards always remind me of an internship I had in which we had to be reminded to have break away lanyards so we weren’t strangled with our own lanyards. anyway I always feel weird wearing one

      Reply ↓
      1. Kay Tee*

        It’s kind that you gave a warning at the beginning of your comment but I read the following as “violence lanyards”

        Reply ↓
    19. there are chickens in the trees*

      I started wearing a lanyard due to having dresses without belts or pockets or anything to clip the badge to. It doesn’t feel heavy, doesn’t “interfere” with my necklaces, and best of all, I haven’t lost the badge by brushing up against something that dislodged the clip.

      Reply ↓
    20. toolegittoresign*

      I’m with you in that I can’t stand the feeling of the lanyard on me. It’s totally a sensory thing and it just drives me up a wall. If I were eligible for early retirement, I might also opt for that over wearing the lanyard.

      Reply ↓
    21. Annalee*

      If my office had a lanyard rule I probably wouldn’t quit, but I would raise it as an equity issue and, if necessary, engage in malicious compliance.

      Roughly half the population has body topology that means that a badge on a lanyard does not sit flat against our torsos but rather swings in front of us with a gap between the badge and our waist.

      I’m large-chested. It’s a big gap, it uncomfortable to have a lanyard swinging around and hitting me as I walk, and in my very male-dominated industry I have no interest in drawing attention to my chest and take pains to avoid it.

      So yes I’d continue clipping my badge to my waist pocket, and if given even the slightest amount of guff about it, I’d say “it’s a big liability risk to institute grooming standards that disproportionately disadvantage women, so I expect the company to be reasonable about this.”

      Reply ↓
    22. iglwif*

      I would also hate wearing a lanyard all day if it was actually touching the back of my neck. But I obviously wouldn’t be wearing neck-baring clothing to work in an office, so I can’t see it being a big enough problem for me to quit over.

      I don’t like lanyards (the metal bits can damage your clothes, they position the nametag at groin level unless you tie knots in them, they can cause your badge to swing against things and make noise) but I’m not sure if I dislike them more than the various other ways that one might have to wear a badge or nametag. (Mainly this seems like another reason to be glad I WFH haha)

      Reply ↓
    23. NotmyUsualName*

      Despise Lanyards. I also get the migraines from them. I ended up putting a magnet on mine so I had it supported above my chest where a name tag would sit. But I still had to have the company issued “safety” lanyard attached to the badge holder.

      Breakaway lanyards still require a fair bit of force before they breakaway. Someone got snagged on the equipment with his required lanyard. And yes, it did break away before it broke his neck but not before it slammed his face into the equipment, breaking his nose and cheekbone and damaging one of his eyes. Finally we were done with lanyards

      Reply ↓
    24. Arglebarglor*

      Having worked in healthcare for >20 years, ID badges are supposed to be worn at chest height or higher (for example, some scrubs have a little place to clip your badge on right near your collarbone near your shoulder). Wearing at waist-height is a no no, “because patients and coworkers can’t see it.” You can use a clip or a lanyard (only a breakaway lanyard, though, for safety reasons) and WOE BETIDE the person who doesn’t have their ID on correctly when The Joint Commission comes in to inspect!

      Reply ↓
    25. Coverage Associate*

      I’m impressed by people who wear badges on lanyards when it’s not mandatory.

      It would hurt me to have my badge on my neck all day, and our scanners are at an odd height, so I would have to take it off to use it.

      I once worked in an office of like 15 people where one of the employment attorneys always had his badge and lanyard when the rest of us just used them to enter the building and kept them in a drawer or backpack otherwise. I get the always visible rule in larger offices where you don’t know everyone, and our larger offices had had tailgaters steal purses.

      I would either get the medical accommodation or figure out a clip to keep the weight off my neck if I worked somewhere that cared about badge placement.

      It’s interesting to me that no one worked somewhere that the business cared which lanyard was used. Our badges are blank on the back, so someone trying to look like an employee whose badge had just flipped over could do so easily unless the business also required display of our brightly colored lanyards.

      Reply ↓
    26. Lenora Rose*

      I’m not overly bothered by landyards (especially if you get ones with suited-to-you fashion of quasi-necklace versions), but once she’s old enough to work, I can see my now 13 year old quitting over a lanyard. As well as her own sensory issues, she doesn’t like ME or her grandma earing necklaces/lanyards in front of her. (We had to teach her that other peoples’ bodies are indeed their own business and she can’t make anyone else stop.)

      I have skirts with pockets, so while I have a clip for my ID instead of a lanyard, most of the time it’s not visible at all, but definitely on my person; we’re less interested here in seeing the ID at every moment and more in actually being able to pass through the doors. (Clipping it at my waist tends to stab me a bit, and not all necklines have a professional looking spot to carry a clip.

      Reply ↓
    27. Audrey Puffins*

      I’ve had neck irritation from lanyards before, no one likes a scaly lizard neck. It didn’t make me anti-lanyard to the point of disobedience though, I just bought myself a different lanyard that didn’t irritate. (I would consider kicking off if I was ever ordered to wear the lanyard that irritated my skin and *only* the lanyard that irritated my skin though.)

      Reply ↓
    28. RagingADHD*

      I do not like the feeling of regular poly fabric / tape lanyards, either. Fortunately, we aren’t dictated a particular way to wear our access card. My “welcome to the team” present was a pretty gold chain lanyard with a couple of pendant / charms, then a round gold medallion, then the badge clip. Even better, the medallion is actually hiding an extension reel.

      We have badge readers at all different heights for the entrance stiles, the elevators, the doors, the printer, etc, so it’s very handy. I definitely could not get my hip up to bleep the top of the stiles!

      Reply ↓
    29. Ms. Whatsit*

      I wear a lanyard frequently and don’t mind them at all; I assume they’re more secure as well since clips could slide off. Mine has a retractable reel so I can tap it more easily without bowing to a checkpoint scanner. But mine is also light; if I had a lot of things hanging around my neck that would be hard. And of course anyone with a medical sensitivity should be able to have another option.

      Reply ↓
    30. Mad Harry Crewe*

      Adding to the pile – I hate lanyards. The sensation of something hanging off my neck, the way they flap around and snag on things when I lean over – absolutely awful. I also hate stiff headphone cords and really anything that hangs from my head and neck.

      Speaking to the safety aspect – I’ve crashed a bike because the crossbody bag I was wearing swung forward and snagged the handlebar, that wasn’t a lot of fun. Stuff around your neck that can snag just sucks.

      No objection to wearing a badge… every objection to specifically wearing it on a lanyard.

      Reply ↓
  17. Alex*

    My boss at a former workplace refused to sign any kind of card for anyone. It was typical for people who were leaving, had a baby, were in the hospital, etc., for someone to start passing around a card to sign. It worked like Hot Potato–after you signed it, you had to find someone else who hadn’t signed it yet.

    If someone asked my boss to sign a card, she would harshly say, “NO! I don’t sign cards! If I start signing for one person, then I’d have to do it for EVERYONE!!!!” I’m not sure how signing “Congrats! – from Penelope” on a card was such a burden for her, even if she had to do it every time, but she felt VERY strongly and let everyone know.

    Reply ↓
    1. Emily Byrd Starr*

      That’s weird. I once had a coworker who refused to sign birthday cards, but that was because she was a Jehovah’s Witness and it’s against her religion to celebrate anyone’s birthday. But your boss just seems bananacrackers because she wouldn’t sign a card for any occasion.

      Reply ↓
    2. Mentally Spicy*

      Cards in general are one of my hills to die on. In my opinion they are a waste of money, resources and time.

      My first thought upon receiving a card is not “oh, how thoughtful!” My first thought is “what’s a socially acceptable amount of time to display this thing before it goes in the recycling bin?”

      Reply ↓
    3. Generic Name*

      One of the principals at my last company (I’ll call him “Brian”) was kindof like this. Except he didn’t tell people he refused to sign cards, he just delegated signing his name to one of his subordinates. The subordinate would sign the cards on his behalf thusly: Love, Brian xoxo regardless of the occasion the card was for. Brian thought it was hilarious when he found out, and I’m sure the subordinate thought they were so clever. But combined with Brian’s love of bathroom humor, the “love, Brian” signed cards came off as kindof creepy.

      Reply ↓
  19. CzechMate*

    Oh, the Kanban board.

    Kanban, for those who aren’t aware, is a type of project visualization. It was created in Japan in the 80s as a way to identify, say, stopgaps in a manufacturing process: you have little cards representing your project and move them to different quadrants (in progress, done, etc.) to represent where you are in development. Makes sense.

    However, I was working at a nonprofit in the 2000’s, and my COO decided that we must, must, must use the Kanban board for ALL of our organization’s work. All. Of. It. Once a week, we would have these awful, boring meetings where we stood (sitting wasn’t allowed) around the Kanban board to pin up ALL of our little cards for ALL of our projects, and then we had to talk through every. single. one. This was especially grueling, because unlike manufacturing, where you might say, “Oh the batteries for the Tamagachi order are waiting because we lost a shipment of argyrodite,” ours were more like, “Well, the state planning meeting isn’t until 2026, so….do we keep this item In Progress until 2026? Or do we say that it’s Complete because we’ve done everything we can until now?” or “My audit of the local youth providers is ongoing so…won’t it be In Progress forever?” This would take hours.

    The only thing I can imagine is that COO had heard somewhere that this was the FUTURE of workplace planning and no self-respecting modern workplace could function without it.

    Reply ↓
    2. Arglebarglor*

      We had a Kanban system for stocking rooms etc at the last Emergency Room I worked in. As you got lower on something in your cart or in the stockroom, you would encounter a Kanban card and you had to put it in a special area and once a day a tech would collect all the cards and then refill everything from a central location. I loved it because things were pretty well stocked but the techs hated it because someone was always on “Kanban duty” which basically meant they were hiding from doing work in the storeroom. Pretty soon it devolved back into the old way which was each tech would just refill the carts etc in their own areas.

      Reply ↓
    3. Jay (no, the other one)*

      There’s a story in one of the threads – was it “using work tools in your real life?” – about someone who used made the whole kitchen a Kanban board for Thanksgiving dinner. So brilliant.

      Reply ↓
      2. Annie Edison*

        I saw this the first time it was posted and have done it for thanksgiving dinners ever since, and I love it so much!!!

        Reply ↓
  20. Snubble*

    The Spiral Binder Machine:

    We had, several jobs ago when I was the lowest-level admin in the department, a spiral binder machine. It had one function for punching a row of holes in a stack of paper, another for hooking a plastic spine open, and then you’d fit the punched stack over the comb on the spine and pull it all off: hey presto, a fake-bound book. It was about two feet wide by eighteen inches deep and there was a whole drawer full of the plastic spines, but it was okay, we had the space.

    The spiral binder was used once a year, to produce a dozen handouts for one internal training course. The handouts were 95% printouts of the powerpoint slides used in the course, with a very small space to take notes next to each slide, and the rest was instructions for activities to be done during the training. The handouts were too thick to be punched all in one go, and there was always some last minute change that meant sections of all the handouts had to be changed, so I’d have to un-bind them, punch the new section, shuffle it in, and re-bind it. The slides were sent around electronically after the course, because this was the 2010s. Nobody ever took notes in the thing and half of them ended up back on my desk afterwards.

    The whole company moved locations, and in the process we had to rationalise a lot of our office equipment. Total number of printers went down because we would be less spread out, stationery cupboards would be one per floor, that kind of thing.

    The department head went to the mat for the spiral binder to come with us. It was vital. It was indispensable. That training course was significant and prestigious (it was a one-day internal course with content you could get anywhere) and it needed to look professional so people would take it seriously and that meant spiral-bound handouts. For a while her plan was that this hulking great thing with its once-a-year use was going to live permanently on my new desk, which would have about halved the size of the desk. She called meetings about it. She polled the department. She petitioned Estates for an extra desk to house the spiral binder in all due splendour.

    She did not trouble herself to come around and help put all the tags on the furniture for the moving company to know what to take. It was her non-working day in the entirely unauthorised compressed work schedule that she and her deputy had agreed between themselves, so of course she didn’t come in.

    The spiral binder never made it to the new site.

    The world did not end.

    Reply ↓
    2. Strive to Excel*

      I love watching spiral binder machines! They’re surprisingly useful in churches, especially if you have frequent changes in music. But it sounds very unnecessary for your office.

      Reply ↓
    3. iglwif*

      … that sounds like a Cerlox binding machine, not a spiral binding machine.

      Department head’s behaviour is still bananapants, though!

      Reply ↓
    4. Lexi Vipond*

      I miss our comb binder, it made such a lovely horrible noise, and was surprisingly cathartic to operate.

      Reply ↓
      1. a perfectly normal-sized space bird*

        It’s the lever that does it for me. A nice crunch down, pressing my frustrations into a single act.

        I bought one so I could print all the training documents and have easy-to-grab reference materials. But now our firewall software has all printing functions disabled so no one can print. The comb binder is now an expensive doorstop, but once in a while I like to unnecessarily bind something if I get frustrated.

        Reply ↓
        1. Strive to Excel*

          I still have occasion to use our Very Large Stapler, because we’re trying to wean ourselves off of paper but not quite there yet. If there’s been a particularly active project I still have to pull out the Very Large Stapler for a month’s activity. It KA-CHUNKS most pleasingly.

          Reply ↓
    5. Syfy Geek*

      The dreaded Ibico Combo binding machine!! Ours had it’s own table in the mail room and was used twice a year for Board Books for the Big Board. There was hell to pay when another division used 3 ring binders for their Board Books, and there were overlapping members. The overlapping members loved having a 3 ring binder, then the rest wanted 3 ring binders too. The Admin for the Big Board was livid! There were meetings, there were tears, then everyone agreed to use the 3 ring binders. When they found out the binders could have a cover page inserted in the cover warfare erupted because some used just a big font while others used a design….

      Reply ↓
    6. DMLOKC*

      Literally, today, I put our ancient comb binder in the metal recycling bin. The cases of combs went into the trash. Relocation after relocation, we’ve moved that dang thing just in case we have a huge proposal to get out and the 24 hour print shop isn’t available.

      Reply ↓
      1. JustaTech*

        And I’ve been told to order one because the stapled PowerPoint slide handouts weren’t “professional enough” (you didn’t tell us what they were for or what format you wanted them in).
        So now a VP imagines we’re going to be doing all of these tours and need to give out all of these bound sets of slides, and 3 ring binders aren’t professional enough, we have to use either spiral or comb binders.

        As though they’re not all going straight in the recycling. *sigh*

        Reply ↓
    7. Funbud*

      My first big Corporate job as an admin included bonding reports on the comb machine. I loved that thing! I especially loved being left the hell alone while I used it! Looking back over my admin career, I wasn’t very stellar. But I was killer at punching & binding reports.

      Reply ↓
    8. MikeM_inMD*

      The holes punched were rectangles and left behind a beautiful pile of chads that proved to be a great confetti to throw as they handed me my college diploma! I was very proud that our commencement speaker, the state governor, laughed when I did it.

      Reply ↓
    9. Thomas*

      We’ve got a comb binder, but ours gets used a bit more often. Mostly just people who want one hard copy of some policy or other.

      Reply ↓
    10. Bike Walk Bake Books*

      This takes me back to working as an admin, having to recycle a bunch of comb-bound things, and getting snapped on the hand repeatedly when I’d try to do a quick yank to get the comb out in one smooth move. I also did lots of comb binding of proposals for a history consulting firm I worked for. Very satisfying and kind of magical, the way it all came together. The taking it apart later, not so much.

      Reply ↓
  21. Unauthorized Plants*

    I’ve worked in higher education for my entire career, so I have some doozies but one in particular stands out. A couple months into my very first gig out of grad school the university entered a new lease for photocopiers and all machines were replaced with different ones campus-wide. The one assigned to our office could print/copy in color. The director was absolutely certain that everyone in her division was going to print and copy in color recklessly, and required everyone fill out a permission form before using the color print/copy functionality, outlining their need for a color copy, and signed by their supervisor. She could and did withhold permission for color copies/printing.

    The funniest thing about this is that the toner cartridges for this particular model were an all-in-one style meant to accommodate for typical color/black-and-white print usage for an office. If you were out of black toner but not the color toner, you had to toss the entire cartridge anyway.

    Reply ↓
    1. Not on board*

      Our office actually sells and services these machines. The amount of paranoia some offices have about people printing in colour recklessly is hilarious.
      One customer bought a colour machine for the very occasional colour prints and mostly did black/white. Every time I billed her for colour pages (which was 1000 clr pages for $80, she spent at least 5x that amound on b/w pages because their volume was so high), she would call and insist they didn’t print those colour pages. The machine counter does not lie. So she would request user codes to be installed – we’d go out, spend a couple of hours setting it up, she would discover that you had to enter your code to copy and scan, and then cancel the user codes. This happened no less than 3 times. Same person.

      Reply ↓
      1. Unauthorized Plants*

        I believe it! In some way codes would have been helpful. There were no technological ways to stop any color printing (the general IT for the University saw no reason to limit it), and the PANIC when someone didn’t change a setting and accidentally printed in color without permission (!!) was ridiculous.

        Reply ↓
    2. Elk*

      I teach in a public school, and for a couple of years we had to get approval from admin every time we wanted to print in color. When a new (and incredible) principal came in, she was somewhat startled to keep getting people asking her for permission to print a few pages in color!

      Reply ↓
  22. Had Enough of this Hill*

    We came into work today to a sign on the bathroom doors prohibiting washing of dishes in the bathrooms. And all the dish soap removed.

    Our kitchen was torn out 7 weeks ago for a 3 week remodel. It’ll be another 3 weeks till it is done.

    I want to write on the signs – please provide microwavable plates, cups and disposable forks, spoons and knives. Maybe a hill to die on as this place focuses on the most archaic and asinine things and not on the actual work. We have people who can not use their email and this is what we are worried about?

    Instead I will be bringing in my own dish soap to wash my knife, fork and coffee cup.

    Reply ↓
    1. WellRed*

      It’s far easier to clog a bathroom sink drain because they are not made for washing dishes. They absolutely should provide disposable items.

      Reply ↓
    2. George McGeorge*

      It’s likely the bathrooms are not designed to have food traps, and there may be some impact to the pipes from folks washing solids down those sinks. If possible, I would encourage you to advocate for paper plates/cups during this remodel period instead.

      Reply ↓
    3. Annie Blue*

      Might be an unpopular opinion, but I just put my dirty dishes back in my lunch bag and take them home to wash. If the meal is exceptionally messy, I’ll wipe it out with a paper towel. And yes, I do wash my lunch bag.

      Reply ↓
      1. Goldfeesh*

        Maybe the business should have thought of a solution before ripping out the kitchen for god knows how long?

        Reply ↓
  23. cele*

    At my last job, we had a receptionist, Jane, who was absolutely obsessive with the TV monitor in the lobby. It had not been used for years, but when a new Communications Manager decided to start using it, Jane suddenly had *major* feelings about it. The monitor was actually completely out of her view, so I’m not sure why she cared at all. Nonetheless, there was Drama. First, one of the rotating screens was a live weather radar, and Jane decided that she HATED the weather radar. Why? It was “ugly.” She actually refused to turn on the monitor for a few weeks, and even turned it off twice after her boss turned it on. Her boss finally wrote her up after she’d been told multiple times, every single day, that she absolutely needed to turn on the monitor. I guess Jane blamed the Communications Manager for the write-up, and she took out her anger by becoming as difficult as humanly possible. If there was an ad for an event that began at 5:00pm, at 5:01pm Jane would submit an “urgent” IT ticket that the Communications Manager had “failed to take down the ad in a timely manner.” She would submit urgent IT tickets for things like “The color on the current graphic looks off, please change the shade” and “The picture on the ad for Event A is confusing me.” IT explained that only the Comms Manager could actually make changes, but Jane continued to submit tickets “to document the many, many serious issues with our communications.” Once there was a minor typo, and Jane turned the monitor off immediately, composed a lengthy email to management about how “unprofessional” our image was becoming, and refused to turn the monitor back on until the Comms Manager could “prove” the typo was corrected.
    Again, Jane could not even see the monitor from her viewpoint, so I’m not sure why this was such a big deal. She was still there when I left, continuing to wage war over her precious TV monitor.

    Reply ↓
  24. Lowly gov't worker*

    Many years ago my office announced that Word would be the preferred word processing program and we had better start using it. My co-worker announced in a meeting that he would QUIT if WordPerfect was removed from his computer. In his defense, he created a lot of foormat-heavy documents and, arguably, formatting in WordPerfect is easier than in Word. He was allowed to keep it because no one wanted him to quit and we were convinced he would quit if not allowed to keep it.

    Reply ↓
    1. Jackie Daytona, Regular Human Bartender*

      WordPerfect evokes feelings. Some of my colleagues still speak of it with a wistful longing.

      Reply ↓
          1. Charlotte Lucas*

            I had Eudora as an email system in the 90s. Everything was a step (or a whole flight) down from that for years after.

            Reply ↓
        2. Bike Walk Bake Books*

          Oh my gosh, I took a whole course in writing macros for Lotus 1-2-3. Once upon a time I was a Kelly temp with all kinds of technical skills and I was a whiz at data entry.

          Reply ↓
      2. Librarian of Things*

        Y2K was the only way I got my office off of WordPerfect 5.1. Mind you, I think Corel was on WP 8 or 9 by 2000, but we were still using 5.1. (I had even bought the newest version, but no one wanted to use it because of the GUI. Text interface for life, I guess.) The head of IT joined forces with me to say that WP 5.1 was not Y2K compliant and that the default date functions were likely to break the precious documents on January 1.

        Reply ↓
      2. FSU*

        So am I. Thankfully, my office still uses it, and I use it personally (am a writer). It’s still going strong!

        Reply ↓
      3. Forrest Rhodes*

        Me too. I’ve now been working exclusively with Word for decades (it’s the nature of the business) but still, sometimes I stop, gaze out my window, and sigh longingly for WordPerfect.

        Reply ↓
    4. Ally McBeal*

      I have very strong feelings about Microsoft Office vs Google Suite. My company is currently switching from one to the other and I feel on the verge of quitting every time it’s brought up. Don’t get me started on file storage systems.

      Reply ↓
    5. KateM*

      Back last century when I was a student and Word’s formulas did not yet have TeX-like syntax, I once had to create a math paper on a computer that didn’t have LaTeX. I absolutely was on verge of quitting several times over a three-page homework.

      Reply ↓
    6. Bike Walk Bake Books*

      I’ll date myself and say that I had similar feelings when I had to move from WordStar to WordPerfect.

      Reply ↓
  25. Juicebox Hero*

    One from my retail daze. Our department got a sales associate named “Jenny” who was polite and friendly and efficient, but she was filthy. Her hair was stringy and greasy. Her clothes were dirty. She had dirt under and around her nails, and she smelled. Bad.

    Our wimpy department manager, who tried to manipulate everyone else into telling Jenny that she smelled but failed, tried and Jenny said that her husband was allergic to fragrances. Wimpy manager retreated until Jenny burned her wrist on the oven and came to work with her wrist wrapped up in gauze. After a couple of days, naturally, the bandage was also dirty and peeling off and was stained with burn yuck and customers were complaining about it, so Wimpy Manager had to talk to her again.

    She took Jenny aside and said that there are soaps and laundry detergents without fragrances that wouldn’t bother her husband’s allergies, so she had to clean herself up.

    Jenny was apparently hugely offended and quit on the spot. Wimpy Manager then dumped all Jenny’s crappy shifts onto me on top of my own because Wimpy Manager didn’t like me and was hella passive-aggressive.

    Reply ↓
  26. Jennifer Strange*

    This is minor, I’m sure, compared to others, but I previously worked at a cultural organization that was open to the public (similar to a museum). Because we had some delicate items sometimes on display (within a glass case, of course) a suggestion was made to put up a sign that said something like “Please do not lean on the glass”. Pretty typical, right? Apparently the person in charge of our external relations decided putting up such a sign would make visitors feel completely unwelcome when they walked through our space, so no sign was put up (at least, not when I was there, admittedly multiple years ago).

    Reply ↓
  27. Hospital PT*

    My hill at an old job was the arbitrary dress code mandates for clinical staff. In a hospital environment where the PT/OT/SLP staff was regularly between the general clinic and taking care of patients in the hospital, we had to wear: Navy dress pants, white collared shirts, a fleece logo vest (awesome in the summer), black shoes, no sneakers and solid color neutrals for socks. Not only was this completely impractical for the work we did, but it was also burdensome to stick to! Navy dress pants with adequate stretch for job performance were had to find, but doing hands up patient care in white shirts?!?! Ridiculous. Meanwhile the dieticians in the office next door could wear whatever cute combo they wanted. The reasoning was what made it my hill though. Administration reasoned the the dieticians were more like medical providers closer to physicians than “just therapists.” Meanwhile 90% of the therapy staff held doctorates.
    I said at the time that the dress code was what made me leave, but obviously it was just the straw that broke me. Fun Fact though, that hospital organization has since permanently closed, so maybe they should have been less worried about their clinical staff’s shoes….

    Reply ↓
    1. bananners*

      When I worked at a hospital, we scheduled a one hour meeting to make updates to the dress code.

      Six months and many hours of meetings later, we were still debating on how much of a heel an open-toed shoe needed to have to make it a dress shoe (permissible for admin and admin only) instead of a sandal (permissible for no-one). And the difference between a “dressy” denim jacket (permissible, again, admin only) and a “casual” denim jacket (non-permissible).

      Truly the biggest waste of time in my professional career, and it was my first job out of school.

      Reply ↓
      1. Cynthia Simpson*

        In 1997 the military hospital where I worked was told by the JCAHO (accreditation) people to come up with a list of approved abbreviations that everyone in the hospital had to use. My boss, who was head of Inpatient Records, was given the job of putting the list together, and she asked me if I could help her out. So, I typed the first list, and it was distributed – and I immediately started getting calls from providers who were upset that “their” departmental abbreviations hadn’t been chosen for the approved abbreviation list. Some of the providers were downright rude about the situation, even when I explained that I was just the typist and had no say in what was or was not chosen for the list. Then, with my boss’ blessing I began telling the complainers to call Colonel Bigwig, the project’s officer. Next thing I know I got a call from Colonel Bigwig asking me not to refer people to him regarding the approved abbreviation list, as he “didn’t have time to deal with it.” My boss called him back and told him he’d better find the time, as she wasn’t going to put up with people abusing her subordinates over that list. Things went on and on and on…and at the time I resigned from that job in 2004 that list was still being kicked around. I don’t know if it was ever finalized.

        Reply ↓
    2. NoBananapants*

      I’ve worked in healthcare since the late 1990’s, and it’s apparent that those who make decisions on things like dress code have never done hands-on patient or client care. Or have been so far removed from it (going from clinical care to administration) they’ve “forgotten” what it’s like.

      Reply ↓
  28. Snow Day*

    I worked for a utility company in an office with Accounting and Marketing; no one was customer-facing, and my group developed eLearning. We were hybrid, two days home/three in the office, but very flexible.  Most of us worked at home on Wednesday, and then we woke up to 17″ of snow on Thursday. It’s not uncommon where I live, but it takes a few hours to get the streets/highways plowed. The County declared a snow emergency, so only necessary vehicles were on the road (emergency, medical professionals, public transit, etc.). The malls and stores were closed to keep people off the road so they could be plowed.  I emailed my boss that I would be there when the city cleared my street.  Shortly after, he sent our whole team a scathing email about how we were a utility company. We work in any weather, keeping the city running, and must get into the office TODAY OR ELSE. It was so strange because we already worked at home a couple of days a week, so we could certainly work at home that day.  Once we got to the office, he did not speak to any of us for the rest of the week; he was just in his office with the door shut. When we had our next team meeting, he railed about it again and set expectations that if it was our scheduled day in the office, we needed to be there even if it was a snow emergency. So, if we had a snow emergency on Monday and you usually worked in the office on Monday, you had to come in. However, if Monday was one of your work-from-home days, then you could work from home. Normally he let us change our work from home days week to week or work at home three days without batting an eye. I don’t know why this was the hill he wanted to die on, but it was.

    Reply ↓
  29. Bruce*

    Oh wow, flashing back to Scout Camp staff drama from the mid 70s. Nothing as insane as in the 2-shirts story, but lots of memories of eccentricities and personal grudges =8-0

    Reply ↓
    1. Bruce*

      Not to say that all Scout camps have toxic work environments, but the one I worked at did, and one that my kids attended had issues too. Most camps that I visited as an adult leading a group were very well run and if my sons had been interested in working there I’d have been happy.

      Reply ↓
    2. Cedrus Libani*

      Summer camps…yeah. I’ve worked at two of them. One was fine. The other is, to this day, EASILY two-thirds of the “Top Ten Horror Stories” of unprofessional behavior from my entire career. I’ve been working 20+ years, including a whole PhD and academia-adjacent startups. I was at that camp for four weeks.

      It remains the only time I’ve ever threatened a superior with a call to the local news station – twice, and it was different superiors on each count. Also the only time I’ve ever threatened to drag a co-worker to the parking lot for a…polite discussion. (Adult Me would have simply called the local news for a third time, but applauds Teenage Me for a pragmatic and effective solution.)

      Reply ↓
  30. AnonymousFormerTeacher*

    I had been teaching high school chemistry at the same school for 5+ years. I had a reputation as tough but fair – it was a small-ish school, I taught a lot of siblings groups, my entire family went to school there except for me and my sister. I was a known entity.

    I found out at the end of school year 5 that I needed a surgery to stabilize my jaw. They put a temporary fix in place while we waited for a spot to open on the highly in demand specialized craniofacial trauma surgeon’s calendar. We went through the whole song and dance of health insurance denials and approvals, and it finally got approved in early July. And then my surgeon got sick, and I got rescheduled for the third week of school during year 6. Well, it’s compromising my breathing so, yeah. Got to have it.

    I filmed myself teaching the first three units to an empty classroom during the last week of July. I had binders for the sub. I had tons of supports in place.

    The parents made a petition to get me fired for taking 3.5 weeks of FMLA and not having the surgery over a school break. The school had my back.
    One of the parent’s got my personal phone number and called it 8 times while I was in surgery until my partner answered and told her to stop.
    I retaught everything when I returned less than a month later because the students “didn’t like watching the 6 minute videos”.
    Every parent-teacher conference for the next 8 months always came back to me “taking leave and leaving their child to struggle in a difficult class”.

    A student got a B on the final exam the next May and that parent got my phone number from the parent who called while I was in surgery to ream me out for taking leave. In June – a week into summer break. For a 3.5 week leave I had taken 9 months prior.

    I resigned.

    Reply ↓
    2. KrisMaryland*

      That is horrible and absolute insanity!!! You were so conscientious! I felt this because I once had a 4-5 week FMLA leave for a major surgery. Like you, I organized everything as best as humanly possible before my leave. I had been working in my position for many years and rarely took any time off. The coworkers that had to do my work while I was away would not stop complaining and tried to make me feel bad for a year following my leave. When I first returned, they even questioned if I really needed the amount of recovery time I took!! About THREE years later, a coworker who had been particularly grumpy about my leave told me that the added work when I was away for 6 weeks was so detrimental to her that she feels she never recovered and she never got caught up from it!! 3 years!!! It was such a toxic environment. As difficult as it may have been, I always happily took on more work when coworkers went on vacations or had 3 month maternity leaves, etc, and I never complained, but my surgery was apparently a huge inconvenience! You were smart to quit, I should have too.

      Reply ↓
  31. JMR*

    Many years ago, the CEO of the biotech I work at had to review a document I’d written. I emailed it to him; he printed it out and made edits on it, with a red pen, and left the marked-up document on my desk. When I took a closer look, I realized he’d crossed out every single Oxford comma in the entire document. He made no other changes.

    Reply ↓
    1. BlueSwimmer*

      Two members of my dissertation committee had opposing views on Oxford commas. Each time I submitted my dissertation draft, one of them would go through the entire dissertation (about 280 pages) and cross out every single Oxford comma with a red pen. I would make the changes, resubmit, and then the OTHER professor would instruct me to include Oxford commas. She would write in every single one in a green pen. They hated one another and wouldn’t come to common ground on what I should do. My adviser finally scheduled my defense for a time he knew the committee member who was less involved in my work would be at a conference (the anti-Oxford comma prof), and asked an Oxford-comma loving assistant professor to take her place on the committee. Reader, I passed my defense, but the anti-Oxford comma professor wrote me a bitterly nasty email about having her removed from my committee, even though it wasn’t my decision.

      Reply ↓
      2. Walk on the Left Side*

        I have a button on my laptop bag that says “Team Oxford Comma” on it.

        Right next to “Protect Trans Kids”, “Don’t Worry, I Have A Spreadsheet For That”, and “Just One More Tarantula, I Promise.”

        Seriously, the Oxford comma made my top four.

        Reply ↓
    3. Ally McBeal*

      The Oxford comma is my favorite hill for people (including myself) to die on. I work in communications and every 8 months or so, one of my colleagues will bring it up and accidentally(?) spark a massive debate on our internal Slack channel.

      Reply ↓
          1. Bike Walk Bake Books*

            Chef’s kiss. Although whether it’s resisting probably depends on time of death, rigor mortis, and secondary rigor mortis, surely?

            Reply ↓
      3. Mentally Spicy*

        I’ve never understood the passion that people expend on the Oxford comma. There are some sentences that are improved by its use and there are some sentences that are improved by its non-use. And, in my opinion, if the only way to make a sentence make sense is by using an Oxford comma then that sentence needs a rewrite.

        I don’t understand why it has to be more complicated than that.

        Reply ↓
        1. Charlotte Lucas*

          The same could be said about any internal punctuation in a sentence. If we got rid of everything but periods, question marks, and apostrophes, that would force us to write very simple but understandable sentences. (Not that people would.)

          Let’s all give silent thanks to the Medieval printers who thought up punctuation.

          Reply ↓
          1. Book Historian*

            Just a quick FYI: medieval printers did not exist, at least not in places that used Latin. By definition, the advent of printing in the West marks the end of the medieval period. Medieval scribes, yes; early-modern printers, yes; medieval printers, no.

            Fun fact: the first book printed using moveable type is the Diamond Sutra, printed on 11 May 868. I’d include some links, but won’t for obvious reasons. If you search for ‘diamond sutra 868,’ you’ll get lots of interesting results.

            Reply ↓
    7. FashionablyEvil*

      I love this. I had a colleague who went through and removed every double space after the end of a sentence and declared that he had significantly improved the document.

      Reply ↓
      1. JustaTech*

        I vividly remember a commentor here saying that anyone who used the double space at the beginning of a sentence was a monster who was creating a huge amount of work for [someone].

        I’m still kind of shocked by the vehemence towards people that commentor will never interact with.

        Reply ↓
    8. leeapeea*

      I will die on the hill that grammatical rules created by dead white guys should not be hills for anyone to die on. It’s a much freer place to be. (Ok, I won’t really die on this hill, but I will express the sentiment then head down to the valley for a nap.)

      Reply ↓
    10. RagingADHD*

      At least you know he read it closely for meaning instead of just taking out all the commas, or something superficial like that.

      Reply ↓
    12. JustaTech*

      There is a senior person at my biotech who used to be notorious for letting a document get to the very last round of sign offs before kicking it all the way back to editing over a few (non-Oxford) commas.
      (Kicking it all the way back means you have to hunt down everyone to sign it again, a task that can take weeks.)

      What’s amazing is that someone must have spoken to this person because over the years they’ve gotten much better about either doing the editing earlier or letting the commas go.

      Reply ↓
    13. Garlic Knot*

      Oh, we had some external consultants (who had nothing to do with linguistics) throw literal fits that THE OXFORD COMMA DOESN’T EXIST!!!111oneone
      Our boss is a wimp, so then there were consistency issues for some time.

      Reply ↓
  32. Justin*

    This wasn’t a colleague but it was at work.

    I used to run education programs at a senior center. Not residential, just a social place with programs.

    It was a really popular place that had an actual chef and it was free!

    So all of us rotated leading the announcements. At one point I referred to entire crowd as ‘guys,’ which I shouldn’t have. And one woman started yelling. I apologized and tried to move on.

    A few minutes later she came up to me and said, I’m not a guy, I’m a woman. I said, you’re right, I should have said Folks or People.

    And she said, how would you like it if I called you (well, I’m Black, you can figure it out).

    She stormed out. My colleagues supported me etc and the woman was permanently banned.

    It was such a great place! But she really needed to make her point I guess.

    Reply ↓
    2. Kermit's Bookkeepers*

      THOSE ARE NOT REMOTELY COMPARABLE POINTS.

      Ugh. Sorry. Some things really move you to all caps.

      Reply ↓
      1. Justin*

        Not that it would have been okay, but it would have made slightly more sense if I’d been indignant about the sloppy use of a lightly gendered term.

        But I apologized! It was a majority female crowd and I knew better.

        So strange.

        Reply ↓
        1. Kermit's Bookkeepers*

          FWIW, I’m a cis woman from California where “dude” is basically a gender neutral term — this wouldn’t have fazed me at all. Different strokes though, I guess.

          Reply ↓
          1. Justin*

            I mean to be clear I did not actually think it was a big deal but given I was at work and representing the org it made sense to apologize. The funny thing is I usually say “folks” but I had just said folks and as an author I actually just hate repeating myself unless it’s for emphasis. So it’s funny that that’s what happened.

            Reply ↓
            1. Charlotte Lucas*

              Weirdly, I am a CIS woman and prefer “guys” to “ladies” when spoken to as a group of women.

              But I try to use “All” or “everyone.”

              Reply ↓
    3. Ally McBeal*

      “Then I would call you a massive c–t and we can all move on with our days!” (said with the smirkiest smirk that ever smirked)

      Reply ↓
    4. Bossy*

      Sounds like she’d been waiting for her opportunity to display her racism. And I’m sure it’s all your fault that she was banned. Some people are so sad.

      Reply ↓
      1. Justin*

        I hope she told her friends and they looked at her like Jerry looked at George in that early episode of Seinfeld where he quit his job without a plan.

        Reply ↓
  33. Strive to Excel*

    I don’t have a story, but I want to express my horror at the Frozen one because that movie came out in 2013. That means that unless Alison has swapped out the reference material for anonymity, someone was still downloading animated nav bars for IE onto their WORK COMPUTER in *2013*.

    Reply ↓
  34. Jonathan MacKay*

    Back when I worked retail, as a courtesy clerk (read: front end gofer – main duties were carts in the parking lot, returns, customer assistance, carryouts, etc..) I had a manage issue an edict that every cartload back into the store must be full, (for appearance sake) with a minimum of 8 carts per load. That is the point where it begins to be challenging to control, and nothing was provided to manage this – (even a rope and hook would’ve been enough) This policy remained in place for most of the summer, until I challenged it with math. It takes more time to bring in full loads than it does to just make multiple trips grabbing smaller amounts.

    The Store manager scoffed and reiterated his policy. The assistant manager was not so stiff – they figured it was worth hearing me out, and had me prove it – we waited for a corrals to be filled on both sides, and then I was timed on both methods. The method I suggested was easily a full minute faster. Policy was rescinded (for ME at least) by the next shift.

    Reply ↓
    1. VN*

      Honestly, props to them for doing a little experimentation. There’s too many managers that would never bother.

      Reply ↓
  35. Blue Spoon*

    I’ve got one I still occasionally camp out on. I work at a library, and back in 2020, county finance changed cash handling procedures in a way that increased accountability but made a lot more work for frontline staff, especially because they kept putting off training on the new procedures so we effectively had to create our own process based on a game of telephone (finance would tell the library director about a change who would tell the branch manager who would tell us who would have to figure something out). At one point, our process involved several versions of one specific report in a day, including a cumulative one. We printed the cumulative one on orange paper to make sure finance knew which was the most important report. Eventually they told us that they only needed the cumulative report, so we stopped printing the other ones but still kept using the orange paper for the cumulative.

    I was incensed. Now that there was nothing to color-code, there was no reason to keep using the orange paper. It was garish, making photocopies of it wasted ink, and it was completely unnecessary. We have monthly check-in meetings with our supervisors, and I complained about that paper to my supervisor every meeting for months. I got into a raised voices argument about it with a coworker. It was bad. I did eventually calm down about it because in the grand scheme of things it’s not that big a deal (and because I was told that we would switch back to regular paper once we ran out of the orange), but a few days ago a relatively new coworker made a joke about the orange paper and I felt the rage flare up for a moment.

    Reply ↓
        2. Blue Spoon*

          Like I said, it’s only until we run out of the orange paper, and I’ve mellowed on that a lot. I’m ready to pick the campaign back up if I discover we’re ordering more orange paper, though, haha.

          Reply ↓
          2. Casino Royale*

            They work in a library, right??? Just…give the orange paper to the children’s librarian or something??? Use it to make signs that need to be extra attention-getting (like caution signs) or for signs about Halloween-related activities and events?

            Like, seriously, what the heck. This is one of those things that I think I wouldn’t actually tell people about because it is that embarrassing.

            Reply ↓
        2. Enai*

          Cut it into squares, offer an introductory origami course. Win-win! Orange paper is gone or at least unusable for printing, patrons get to do origami!

          Reply ↓
    2. Aspiring Chicken Lady*

      I worked in a customer database department once and there was a form for some purpose or other that had a form name on it, but was universally called the Pink Sheet. Apparently at some point in far off history it had, in fact, been printed on pink paper. For longer ago than many of the current staff. Who walked around now, discussing Pink Sheets that were universally colored white.

      Reply ↓
      2. Lily C*

        Sounds like my office’s Blue Sheets. Which used to be quarter sheet of blue paper. Then it evolved to be a full sheet of blue paper. And now it’s entirely digital, and old-timers like me are slowly coming around to referring to it by the much more logical name of File Closing Sheet.

        Reply ↓
    3. Peachtree*

      Did the paper come in orange, or were you printing the orange onto the page?

      If the former … yeh that’s not a hill to die on. And I would be concerned if you were someone I managed and you raised “orange paper” in every staff meeting for months.

      Reply ↓
      1. Lenora Rose*

        It can be if you want to make photocopies of something printed on Orange paper. (I mean, the solution is print it once on white then make photocopies onto orange…)

        Reply ↓
      2. Blue Spoon*

        The paper itself is orange, but we had to make multiple photocopies of it a day, which meant printing orange onto those pages. We did get a new printer since we started using the orange paper, and the new one only copies the contents of the page, not the color. On the one hand, it means that we’re not printing orange onto normal paper and wasting ink anymore, but on the other hand it makes the orange paper seem even more pointless.

        Reply ↓
      3. Blue Spoon*

        Also I should clarify that it was not meetings involving all staff. It was one-on-one meetings between me and my supervisor as part of conversations about the financial procedure changes (I was in charge of making training/reference materials for the procedures, so that came up pretty often). I wouldn’t harp on that in front of everybody.

        Reply ↓
    4. Hiring Mgr*

      I don’t get why you were so incensed by the orange paper, but i guess that’s why it’s a weird hill to die on

      Reply ↓
      1. Blue Spoon*

        Yeah, I wouldn’t be sharing it here if I didn’t recognize that it’s a silly thing to get worked up over. Looking back, I think it got mixed up with general annoyance about the way the changes were implemented (finance wouldn’t tell us what they wanted because they promised they were going to go over all of it in a training that didn’t happen until 2 years later), covid stress, and some possessiveness over the procedure trainings and reference sheets I had developed throughout the whole thing. So much emotion got bundled in there that it has the potential to pop back up, although I can tamp it down.

        Reply ↓
  36. YesPhoebeWould*

    Many years ago, I worked for a very conservative smaller bank. The CEO was very old school, with a rigorous dress code. For decades (literally) the bank bought all staff four nicely tailored suits every two years. For the men, two were navy pinstripe, two were navy solid, and there were five company-supplied approved ties. For women, they were the same navy, and women could choose skirts or pants. This was described in the employee handbook. The solid suits were to be worn on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, the pinstripe suits on Tuesday and Thursday. I’m not kidding.

    Toward the end of my tenure there, they decided to stop buying pinstripe suits. All four suits were the same dark navy. One older gentleman in our mortgage department was LIVID that they got rid of the pinstripe suits, and threatened to quit unless the decision was changed. He literally sent a resignation letter to the CEO (who he had known for decades).

    Eventually a compromise was reached. It was added to the company handbook specifically that while we were not buying new pinstripe suits, if an employee had a pinstripe suit brought by the company, that as long as it was in good shape and looked professional, the employee was allowed to wear it on Tuesday or Thursday.

    Reply ↓
    3. iglwif*

      The dress code is bonkers, but big kudos to the company for making sure their employees didn’t have to pay for the bonkers dress code themselves!

      Reply ↓
      3. Artemesia*

        Dressing in suits in a bank is pretty traditional — not bonkers? What is strange is that they paid for the suits. It is rare to require expensive c lothing and then to actually pay for it. Usually that junior staffer has to fork over for this stuff himself. I am with the old guy though — pin stripes are more attractive.

        Reply ↓
        1. iglwif*

          Suits, in general: Not bonkers at all.

          Suits of specific colours, all the same, with a specific selection of ties, with different suit colours to be worn on specific weekdays: BONKERS.

          Reply ↓
    4. Polyhymnia O’Keefe*

      My question is, did the women have to choose just pants or dress, or could they mix it up? Pinstripes are skirts, solids are pants; or one pinstripe skirt and one pinstripe pants, and vice versa? So many options!

      Reply ↓
  37. lee*

    lol the employee badge thing!
    Ours is a prox card needed for getting onto floors and into some rooms. So a mandate came down that we needed to wear it around our necks so folks could be identified as legit employees. Since I kept mine in a wallet, which made it easy to get the doors open, I made myself a fake badge to look like the real one and wore IT around my neck. Luckily this policy didn’t last long since there was no enforcement.

    Reply ↓
    1. Zona the Great*

      I raised a huge stink angering the facilities manager because our doors were not only badge in but were also badge out. So if there were a fire or shooting, we had to remember our badge or die.

      Reply ↓
      1. Archi-detect*

        you are supposed to have panic openers that release the doors within 15 seconds per building code. They also make a racket and set off an alarm for good measure

        Reply ↓
  38. dePizan*

    We had an employee who had been at our agency for over 30 years. He was set to retire in 2021, but with Covid, decided to take an early retirement and since the building was closed, left without going through his cubicle (beyond any personal items). When we reopened two years later and had finally hired someone to replace him, our boss started going to through his cubicle and cleaning it out before the new person started.

    He had a best friend in the department, and she had a meltdown. She went in and grabbed stuff from the trash, put a lot of his files and binders in her cubicles, was sobbing and angry the whole time about how they were trying to replace and erase him, etc. After it was all over, she was very proud of what she had saved. Things that she didn’t remotely need for her own job and which the new person didn’t need either.

    We were in a remodel at the time and this was a temporary location. When we moved back to our permanent one, even though she had used none of his things, they came back in with us. We had no space for his 40+ binders, but she insisted. We had lost shelves at our desk in the remodel that circled the cubicle, so most of his stuff either stayed in boxes or she took over space that was supposed to be for our library’s archival documents.

    When she left a few years after that, we went through it all. They had both hoarded things like receipts going back to the 1980s, manuals on software we hadn’t had in decades, timesheets for temp workers from over 15 years ago, and not a single thing from his 40+ binders was useful to anyone but himself (and while we’re a state agency and subject to record retention requirements on some things, most of those rules max out at 10 years at most)…..I think we saved maybe half of a small filing drawer’s worth of stuff out of something like 9 large drawers and several boxes.

    Reply ↓
    1. Bruce*

      I started at a smallish company in 2000, and we were acquired by a much bigger company 10 years later. Part of my job was dealing with any issues on older products. When my employer moved us to a new building they were going to throw out binders that went back to the founding of the old company, including what I thought were the only records of the early design choices for our first products. Most of the people who authored these had moved on or retired. I claimed these fusty old binders, then had to get a special book case that could hold them all. By 2020 some of these had not been opened in so long that the toner on the transparencies had fused to the adjacent pages and it was getting hard to separate the pages. Finally they moved us again during the Covid shutdowns… I was getting ready to go permanently remote so I went in and emptied the binders into the shredder bins. It was a little emotional.

      Reply ↓
      1. Bruce*

        To be clear I did ask if there was any reason to hang onto these binders, was told “What? No!” I guess when the patents that were issued based on the old designs have already expired it is a reasonable choice to make.

        Reply ↓
    3. CowWhisperer*

      When I worked at a big box home improvement store in the paint department, we had a roughly seniority based system for working in less desirable departments during the slow months.

      Essentially, if you were newer and wanted hours in the winter, you learned to cashier, work the service desk or in a tricky department like electrical.

      FT and PT had separate seniority lists because the store couldn’t keep PT people for the winter if the FT people used every available hour to stay in paint – so most people worked a couple shifts a month out while newbies worked most shifts out.

      Two young male workers became FT after COVID because they had worked 14 weeks consecutively of full time hours. Sweet! But that made them FT department floaters.

      As fall rolled around, the two of them would loudly protest that they wouldn’t accept any hours outside of Paint – and they deserved FT paint shifts even though people with more seniority worked outside of thr department in the winter. And our rather sexist department supervisor wasn’t telling the only two male members of the department to knock it off.

      As the most senior PT person, I was pissed. As a middle aged woman, I knew what to do.

      So, I went to a salaried manager and explained (in detail) how every FT and PT female member of the Paint department worked shifts in less desirable departments. The manager nodded. I explained that the two male members who were the FT newest members worked zero (0) shifts outside the department – and the manager visibly blanched. I was told the situation would be corrected immediately.

      I nodded and left for my normal days off.

      When I came back, the older young guy – who swore he would quit if not given only paint shifts – had opted to return to PT and was given shifts in lumber. The very young other guy was shocked that the other guy didn’t quit and returned to part-time work as well. He was told to train to be a cashier because he was going to need that to get hours – and he found a different job.

      Play stupid games; win stupid prizes.

      Reply ↓
      1. Observer*

        I explained that the two male members who were the FT newest members worked zero (0) shifts outside the department – and the manager visibly blanched.

        Well, it’s good to hear that someone in authority had some sense.

        Reply ↓
    4. And...uh...Abraham Lincoln*

      Oh boy, when my company started coming back into the office in 2021, they instituted hot-desking, so we had to clean out all the desks. A couple that I cleaned out had what I think was every single piece of paper these people had ever been handed during their entire employment. One had stuff like handwritten timesheets from a previous role (and he had been in his current position for at least five years); the other had file upon file of every procedure she had ever used. Even though a) the procedures were in a computer database she could access at any time and b) were frequently updated, making her paper copies obsolete. I would not have been surprised to come across first drafts of the Magna Carta in either desk. So. Much. Paper.

      Reply ↓
  39. Plath*

    This isn’t from an employee there but fits the bill–at the vet’s office, there will be a small group of owners who refuse vaccines for their animals for multiple reasons, but many believe they are over-vaccinated. There is one woman who comes yearly to her dog’s annual visit and demands that titers be drawn to prove that the dog’s immunity has not waned from last year’s rabies vaccine and thus he does not need a new one. Ultimately she does comply with getting a new rabies vaccine for her animal every year. Drawing titers makes the visit more expensive but she repeatedly says that it’s “the principle of the thing” and she’s trying to prove a point to the veterinarian’s office so they will “stop trying to push vaccines on animals who don’t need them.” It’s literally our state law that animals be vaccinated annually for rabies so she really needs to take the issue up with the state Dept of Health.

    Reply ↓
    1. Bruce*

      You are doing the right thing for her dog, as I’m sure you know… imagine if it bit someone and did not have a current vaccination! One of my relatives got bitten by an un-vaxxed dog, and the owner would not allow it to be put down so my 8-year old relative had to take a round of rabies shots.

      Reply ↓
    2. Ana Gram*

      I was surprised to learn my state (or county maybe?) has a very narrow exception for indoor, elderly pets. My vet told me my crotchety, 17 year old indoor cat didn’t really need a rabies vaccine. He wasn’t gonna get rabies unless I gave it to him, I guess, so she wrote a waiver and that was that. But I was still happy to get him vaccinated unlike these people!

      Reply ↓
      1. Delta Delta*

        My very crochety, one-toothed 18 year old indoor cat also didn’t really need a rabies vaccine until I had to board her recently. The vet said she didn’t think it was necessary but the cat spa wouldn’t take her without it, so vaccine it was. (This cat did catch and kill and eat a mouse with her one tooth so maybe it’s not the worst idea)

        Reply ↓
      2. Academic Physics*

        Agreed! I am a bit glad for that exception since my cat was very sick last January when he needed his rabies vaccine, and the vet was willing to delay for a few months.

        Reply ↓
    3. But Of Course*

      I mean, I refuse to get one of my cats vaccinated (because he reaction to vaccines is to try to die; he is also allergic to fleas, most flea treatments, and walnuts) but wow, the sheer efffontery of demanding titers to avoid vaccinating your pet is … who the hell has time for that????

      Reply ↓
      1. Enai*

        Also, blood draws are much more stressful for the animal than vaccinations, aren’t they? But I suppose she has the money…

        Reply ↓
  40. Working under my down comforter*

    I used to work at a newspaper and handled uploading local movie theater listings. The editor of that section didn’t like me and one time sent out a mass email saying that one movie’s titled had to be cutdown. There has no surrounding scandal around it and the title didn’t have anything offensive in its wording. I questioned it and asked why, out of concern for repercussion. She ignored my request. I ended up not changing and she completely blew it about it saying I was rude to ignore her and shook up everyone. Even our paper’s movie critic with a lot of street cred felt uneasy about it; she grew up around Hollywood in the 40s, 50s and 60s. No other newspaper in our area make this editor change and published the title as it were.

    Reply ↓
  41. CowWhisperer*

    When I worked at a big box home improvement store in the paint department, we had a roughly seniority based system for working in less desirable departments during the slow months.

    Essentially, if you were newer and wanted hours in the winter, you learned to cashier, work the service desk or in a tricky department like electrical.

    FT and PT had separate seniority lists because the store couldn’t keep PT people for the winter if the FT people used every available hour to stay in paint – so most people worked a couple shifts a month out while newbies worked most shifts out.

    Two young male workers became FT after COVID because they had worked 14 weeks consecutively of full time hours. Sweet! But that made them FT department floaters.

    As fall rolled around, the two of them would loudly protest that they wouldn’t accept any hours outside of Paint – and they deserved FT paint shifts even though people with more seniority worked outside of thr department in the winter. And our rather sexist department supervisor wasn’t telling the only two male members of the department to knock it off.

    As the most senior PT person, I was pissed. As a middle aged woman, I knew what to do.

    So, I went to a salaried manager and explained (in detail) how every FT and PT female member of the Paint department worked shifts in less desirable departments. The manager nodded. I explained that the two male members who were the FT newest members worked zero (0) shifts outside the department – and the manager visibly blanched. I was told the situation would be corrected immediately.

    I nodded and left for my normal days off.

    When I came back, the older young guy – who swore he would quit if not given only paint shifts – had opted to return to PT and was given shifts in lumber. The very young other guy was shocked that the other guy didn’t quit and returned to part-time work as well. He was told to train to be a cashier because he was going to need that to get hours – and he found a different job.

    Play stupid games; win stupid prizes.

    Reply ↓
  42. LegallyBrunette*

    Between college and law school, I took an unpaid internship with a local District Attorney’s office. I was hired on full time at the conclusion of the internship as a research and writing assistant for the attorneys, which made the Office Manager that supervised me *lose all her marbles* in spectacular fashion. She pulled me out of meetings with the attorneys to do things like move boxes, rearrange files, and sweep floors. When one of the supervising attorneys told her off for it, she retaliated by ordering me office-branded notepads with my name and the title “Temporary Assistant District Attorney Intern.” You better believe I still have a few of those notepads hanging around and still laugh at them some 20 years later!

    Reply ↓
    2. BigBird*

      Law offices are weird about titles. Years ago when a piece of new legislation made it necessary to create identical documents for hundreds of clients, we hired a temporary non-partnership track lawyer to assist. Instead of being signed as “Attorney at Law”, all her correspondence was signed “Jane Doe, Part-Time Attorney.”

      Reply ↓
      1. LegallyBrunette*

        If I had been a client, I would have paid extra for her to complete that signature with whatever else she did:

        Jane Doe
        Part-Time Attorney, Part-Time Llama Whisperer

        Reply ↓
    3. Jaydee*

      My favorite part is that those notepads are misleading. They make it sound like you were a lawyer (Assistant District Attorney) there on an internship that was temporary. Not that you were a temporary non-lawyer employee hired to assist the actual lawyers. In her attempt to “demote” you, I think she inadvertently gave you a “promotion.” (Perhaps this explains why you were hired as a writing assistant and she was not given those tasks?)

      Reply ↓
    4. Bike Walk Bake Books*

      You got custom notepads with your name? That’s fun. And it was a full-time permanent position, not an internship, so she was wrong times two. Way to represent the firm professionally, Office Manager.

      Reply ↓
  43. Zona the Great*

    Mine was one I’d still die on if this happened to me today. I worked as a prep cook in a resort and we made fresh Pico de Gallo everyday. I found a huge slammer (like a chopper you’d have at home but massive for commercial use) in the back of the storage room and began using it to produce the gallon of Pico we’d go through in one day. Before I came around, we made it by hand which meant people were spending two hours chopping tomatoes, onions, and jalapenos and scooping into a gallon container, mixing with lime, chopping fresh garlic, and adding the cilantro. I found the slammer and began getting it done in 20 minutes. Boss was pissed and ordered me to stop using the slammer and to go back to hand-cutting a gallon of Pico. She had no good reason for this other than “it’s better to say it was hand-made”. I took one look at her, told her to do it herself, and walked out. She must have gotten about 2 tomatoes chopped when she called me back to work. We had two slammers the next week.

    Reply ↓
    1. Amber Rose*

      Legit. I once chopped potatoes into fries for a place, and if I hadn’t had the giant Potato Destroyer I wouldn’t have lasted a day. I’m remembering the massive tubs of potatoes and cringing at the idea of hand cutting them. D:

      Besides, it’s still hand made. Just using a different kind of blade than a chopping knife, arguably.

      Reply ↓
    2. Strive to Excel*

      I’m struggling with getting hits for ‘slammer’ – everything I google comes up as some variant of a mandolin or a cocktail. I’m assuming it’s some sort of big chopping machine? Like a food processor?

      When someone tells me they’ve made something ‘by hand’, I don’t assume it’s because they hand-chopped and mixed every single ingredient. I assume that they’ve made something themselves rather than buy it from the store, meaning that they’ve personally assessed the balance of different ingredients and that there’s less preservatives involved.

      Reply ↓
      2. Zona the Great*

        If you look up a veggie chopper, it should look like a box with a lid that allows you to put a chunk of onion in, or whatever, and you slam the lid down and it chops the food into pieces and neatly catches it in the box for easy dumping. In this case, a slammer would allow me to chop three huge tomatoes in one motion depositing the chopped pieces into its container. It was loud but it maintained the integrity of the veggie without mushing it or obliterating it.

        Reply ↓
        2. epicdemiologist*

          Oh, the thing Shiadanni uses to work out her aggression on the food ingredients! (Search YouTube for “Glam Kitchen”.)

          Reply ↓
        3. Strive to Excel*

          I was wondering if that was what it was!

          And, like, how is that different from using a regular knife? You even get nice even sized pieces. I’m assuming you can get multiple different sized grates on the professional ones if you need to chop things in different sizes, if you absolutely have to.

          Bonkers complaint.

          Reply ↓
    3. darsynia*

      Oh man, giving me flashbacks to my first real job. I got to work at 5:45 in the morning and spent the next 4 hours prepping… the salad bar at Wendy’s! It was fun but without some of those automatic tools I would have been SO frustrated/would have quit! The best part was getting to take my break pre-open (10:30) and grill my own chicken or whatever I wanted for my ‘lunch!’

      Reply ↓
  44. Middle School Madness*

    Middle school teacher here. We had a principal who was, to say the least, a micromanager. There was no detail too small to escape his notice, or his desire to have control over it. My favorite hill that he died on was the issue of how items should be attached to bulletin boards. We were not permitted to use push pins. Only flat, silver thumbtacks would do. If we used anything else, we were expected to swap them out. It was a small delight of mine to use the most colorful tacks I could find, and to deliberately attach the papers so they weren’t totally straight. Drove him absolutely insane every time he came to my room.

    Reply ↓
  45. azvlr*

    At my first duty station with the US Navy as and Electronics Technician (ET), we had to stand overnight watch, basically being on call to fix any equipment that went wonky overnight. To qualify as a full-fledged Duty Tech, we had to learn how to maintain an entire building worth of complicated systems, and 18-year-old me was terrified of having to be responsible for fixing (or not being able to fix) something while people were breathing down your neck to get it done. This duty sometimes involved sleepless nights, but when that happened, people usually got the next day off. And if you were lucky, you didn’t get woken up at all.

    I was an ET, but the equipment maintained by a different group of technicians. Somehow, the ETs finagled it so we weren’t required to qualify, but would have to stand an 8-hour roving patrol watch. I went from duty every eight days as Assistant Duty Tech to six-section duty in which I was guaranteed to have to make rounds every hour in the dead of night for eight hours straight, and have to report for my regular duty the next day.

    Once the folks who made up the Duty Tech watch bill knew they would be losing me, they made sure that I had duty on a Friday, then next week Saturday, then the following Sunday, and once I transferred to rover duty, the Master at Arms made sure to schedule me for Sunday, then the following Saturday, then Friday. I had weekend duty for six straight weeks, but never let on that I didn’t have confidence in myself to learn those systems.

    Reply ↓
  46. Mouse named Anon*

    I worked at a very odd company that had many hills the CEO and management were willing to die on.
    1. Once a client emailed someone at the company after 5pm. They didn’t get an answer until the next morning and thus lost their shit. So, after that everyone had to put an out of office every SINGLE DAY. With the day it was and what time they would be returning the next day. Same with their voicemail. It was such a huge deal that people were fired or disciplined heavily for. If you didn’t do it was very taboo, pearl clutching reaction from others.

    2. This company also decided that their needed to be several “employee events” every month. They established a committee that would plan the events and I joined it. Despite the other crap at the company I enjoyed planning events. We planned a summery- tropical party. We had fun mocktails, even had frozen mocktails. Tropical snacks etc. I was in charge of this particular event bc it was my idea. I was working my ass off, it was very hot and I was sweaty and exhausted. The CEO came up to thank me.We were talking and he glanced down at my feet. I had sandals on (summery attire was encouraged) and saw my small tattoo. He goes “Wait you have a TATTOOOOOOO”. I just blinked back. He stormed off muttering under his breath. We got an email an hour later that no visible tattoos were permitted. He went on several rants about it too. I quit like 2 months later.

    Reply ↓
  47. SicktomyStomach*

    This isn’t mine, but my father’s. I am still proud of him for it, actually.

    He was a high school history teacher from the 60s into the 90s. Very well-respected, wrote many textbooks, loved by his students. What he hated – and I mean HATED – was having to wear formal clothes while he was teaching. The students could wear jeans, why couldn’t he? He actually organized a rebellion among his fellow teachers who were also sick of having to get dressed up every day – suits, dress shirts, ties, pantyhose, dresses, heels for the female teachers, dress shoes for the men, etc. – so they were quite willing to follow my dad’s lead. He fought with the assistant principal. He fought with his department head. He fought LOUDLY with the principal. He went up against the school board. He declared he would quit over this if they would not relent. Finally, he organized a day of resistance. He got as many teachers as possible to come to work dressed in jeans. I think about 60 teachers did. The principal couldn’t send them all home, so he acquiesced. From that day forward, teachers could wear jeans. There was much rejoicing. And I think, cake.

    Reply ↓
    1. Zona the Great*

      Ha! This reminds me of the professor in undergrad (public state school) who demanded his students wore business casual clothes to his class because he was required to dress up so we had to too. Well, I guess we all are dead on that hill (or is it he who is rotting away up there?) because homeboy was replaced mid-semester. None of us dressed up for him. What a creep.

      Reply ↓
      1. Not The Earliest Bird*

        I was in college in the late 90’s. I had a professor who insisted that we wear business wear when we needed to give presentations, because the class was “practice for the real world.” Well, this was the tech boom. One of my classmates got a six figure job offer, in tech. At his last presentation, he came to class in jeans and a t-shirt, and included his job offer in his talk- which was something along the lines of “Tech turning business normals upside down.” Professor was incensed. It was delightful.

        Reply ↓
        1. JustaTech*

          Ha, when I went to undergrad in the early 00’s if you saw someone “dressed up” (not in jeans, shorts or pajamas) it meant either that they had a big presentation or they had completely run out of clean laundry.

          Reply ↓
        2. Elitist Semicolon*

          I used to require this in my first teaching job because I had colleagues who insisted it was “practice for the real world.” Then I saw one of my students lugging a garment bag with him on a particularly shitty early spring day and realized how ridiculous it was. After that, my rule was that they had to dress on presentation day at least as well as I dressed on any regular day. Given that I mostly wore jeans and sweaters to teach in, that still gave them a lot of room.

          Reply ↓
    2. Also Laura Actually!*

      This happened at an agency where I worked. Old school HR only allowed jeans on Friday. We noticed all the male VPs wore jeans whenever, with button-down shirts and ties but still. So we all started wearing jeans but with nice tops. HR director pitched a fit and called someone into her office but the VPs went to bat for us bc it was a dumb dress code. None of us worked face to face with clients. Thankfully the HR director retired a year or so later and many of her 1980s policies retired with her.

      Reply ↓
  48. Claudia Jean*

    I had a professor in college who was devoted to Word Perfect. On our first day of class she told us all that Microsoft had unfairly shut them out of the market even though it was, in her opinion, the superior software.
    This was 2016, none of us had even heard of Word Perfect, but we had to submit papers in a comparable file type because she didn’t have Microsoft Word or Google Docs. She had a desktop from the 80s or 90s so that she could still operate Word Perfect on it. She had to have an alumn from that era come help her whenever she had issues because IT wasn’t able to work on it because it was so old.
    I adored her. She was a great teacher and a very impressive woman.

    Reply ↓
  49. mpe1*

    Many many years ago I worked in a quiet back office at a small firm. No clients ever came near it. I put up a poster I liked on the blank wall above my desk. It stayed there for months, until it was suddenly ripped down and shoved in my desk drawer overnight. I put it back up. A week later, it was ripped down and shoved back into my desk drawer. And so the happy game went on. Turns out, one of the partners in the firm was making occasional patrols and decided he didn’t like my poster. Never said a word to me, of course. (I found out through the grapevine.) Eventually I was moved to a large front office with huge windows, where illustrious clients were sometimes shown around and where I was introduced to them as ‘one of our star employees’. No blank walls, so I didn’t put the poster up again. Who died on that hill? I’m still not sure…

    Reply ↓
    1. JustaTech*

      Years ago (back when we got a physical newspaper in our office lunch room) one of my coworkers took a page from the paper that had a full-page ad for some cologne that, with a post-it now said “sausage”. (The ad was a picture of Johnny Deep, before … everything.)
      This was some weird in-joke, but ok, “sausage” as a name of a cologne is funny, and it got stuck up on the wall.
      The building was renovated, but the “sausage” ad was carried along and put back up in our new digs. Then one day the COO, who was in charge of the renovation (which was great for her team and not very functional for our team) came through and was very upset at the “sausage” ad, mostly because she didn’t want anything on the walls. The plain white walls. She wanted them completely bare. (Her area had company-relevant decals and some accent walls.)

      The coworker with the “sausage” ad is a quiet, chill guy, but can be incredibly persistent/stubborn. And damn if he wasn’t going to die on the hill of keeping that piece of newspaper on the wall.

      Joke was on all of us – before it could come to a head COVID happened and then the COO quit, and even though that coworker has also left, the “sausage” ad is still up on the wall.

      Reply ↓
  50. Anon4This*

    Our Fortune 500 company hosted a weekend company-wide softball tourney, which was won by a team led by a guy known around the office as Hothead.

    Monday morning arrives and the company-wide daily email goes out with important company announcements. One of the items included was the results of the previous weekend’s softball tourney. Hothead was livid about the fact that it included only team name (not individual team members) that it also included the team name of the runners up.

    He sent a scathing email to the comms person responsible for the newsletter about their “failure to recognize exceptional individual achievements” in the newsletter and demanded they send out a second email identifying each team member of the winning team. The comms person said no, so he made a nasty post on the company’s internal bulletin board; the posting was so snarky that it got removed within a couple of hours of posting it.

    That made Hothead even more incensed so he skipped several levels of management and brought “the glaring omission” to the attention of the VP of Comms, head of HR, and a couple of C-level execs via email. He got a call from HR and ripped them a new one. He was brought in immediately for an in-person meeting with HR–with security present–and ordered to undergo anger management therapy. He refused, escalated his behavior, and was escorted from the building. Security cleaned out his desk for him.

    Reply ↓
    1. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

      Why do I suspect Hothead was one of *those* parents at their kids Little League games.

      Reply ↓
      1. Anon4This*

        Your suspicions are absolutely correct. My manager had kids the same age as Hothead’s but they lived in neighboring school districts. Manager’s kid’s team was playing Hothead’s kid’s team. Hothead started arguing with the ump and wound up getting himself kicked out of his own kid’s game.

        Reply ↓
        1. JustaTech*

          Those people.

          We used to have a fun softball game at our company summer picnic, but it had to be canceled after the head of sales (who later came back as our CEO) would not stop cursing out both teams (all employees) for not being sufficiently athletic.
          In front of their kids.

          No, he was not a brilliant CEO, and yes, he did end up getting perp walked.

          Reply ↓
  51. TeaDrinker*

    I am a manager, and a fellow manager’s manager who we’ll call “X” was over a direct report for a bit as his front line manager was out for a number of weeks, and the direct was trending to a PIP for unrelated reasons. The direct report took some time off (properly put on the calendar and everything), and forgot to cancel their weekly 1:1 with X. When X was alone in a zoom for a few minutes, he was livid. He went to HR, saying that it was rude and inconsiderate of X’s time that the direct didn’t cancel that week’s 1:1, and this alone was worth a firing. HR basically had to talk him down and say, … no. Yes they’re on a PIP but it’s not a fireable offense. It’s been 3 years and I believe the direct still works there!

    Reply ↓
  52. iglwif*

    Many years ago I worked in an office that had a coffee machine, a hot-water dispenser (for making tea), and a mini fridge for storing those little individual containers of cream and milk. This mini-fridge was emptied every Friday by a guy in Accounts Receivable. (I don’t know why him specifically.)

    A new employee started in my department and, because she was vegan, put a little 500ml carton of soy milk or oat milk or something in the mini-fridge by the coffee machine. The AR guy threw it out on Friday. She complained to me; I talked to him about it.

    The following Friday, he threw away another carton of her non-dairy milk. She complained again. I talked to him again. He asked why she couldn’t keep her milk carton in the main fridge. I said, well, maybe because it’s in the cafeteria, on the far side of the building from the coffee machine??

    Well, he said, couldn’t she remove the carton to the main fridge every Friday, then, and put it back every Monday?

    If he cared that much about it, I said, couldn’t he do that, instead of throwing it away?

    This disagreement went on for several weeks, with my new staff member getting increasingly pissed off, until I finally threatened to just let her complain to HR about him discriminating against her for being vegan.

    Reply ↓
    1. PotatoRock*

      Honestly I’m kind of on Team Accounts Receivable here, assuming “mini fridge gets emptied every Friday” was a well communicated, standing policy. It’s annoying to have to take your creamer home every weekend but it’s SO hard to keep a communal fridge from turning into a science experiment that sometimes an “overly rigid, no exceptions” clean out day is the only option.

      Reply ↓
      1. KateM*

        Yeah. Let one employee keep her milk and other employees will ask why are their milks thrown out, and then the guy has to “throw out everything but these two hundred exceptions”.

        Reply ↓
      2. AcademiaNut*

        If the company bought the milk and cream, and the employee bought her own vegan option, then a logical solution is for the company to provide a vegan option.

        If everyone is bringing their own cream and milk, then yeah, the rules also apply to her, and she can either take it home on Friday, bring just a week’s supply, or let it be thrown out.

        Reply ↓
    2. New Jack Karyn*

      I guess I’m unclear on the issue. The little fridge gets cleared out every Friday. Everything gets tossed. Why would there be an exception for her non-dairy milk?

      Reply ↓
      1. leeapeea*

        Non-dairy milk, even open, keeps for much longer than traditional dairy. It’s also historically more expensive. Also, the OP calls it “her” (the employee’s) milk, leading me to believe she purchased it from her own pocket money, though I’m not clear if the company was paying for the other dairy products or not. So, essentially, AR guy was throwing away someone’s perfectly good food that they paid for themselves.

        Reply ↓
        1. KateM*

          Yes, but I have understood that “everything in fridge on Friday evening gets tossed out” policies aren’t that uncommon and those include also employees’ forgotten lunches and what not.

          Reply ↓
    3. Mid*

      Why did all the milk and cream have to be thrown away weekly? And if everything else was being thrown out weekly, why did the oat milk get to stay?

      Reply ↓
    4. Admin of Sys*

      Wait, was the dairy cream dumped every Friday as well, or was that allowed to stay? If the mini cream / cremora gets to stay, so does the oat milk. If the dairy products get dumped, so does the oat milk. The fridge is for ‘things that go into coffee’ is a clear enough rule. But the oat milk shouldn’t be exempt from an all inclusive rule just because it doesn’t go bad as quickly – that sort of exception leads to fights over what can and can’t stay.

      Reply ↓
    5. Samwise*

      You and your employee are wrong here.

      Your employee could have brought the creamer in a thermos and taken it home on Fridays.

      The fridge is cleaned out every Friday, everyone has to comply, why should vegan creamer be the only exception? especially since you just know that once there’s one exception for no good reason, someone else will soon be whining about wanting an exception , and then the little fridge will be full of exceptions and rotting crap.

      Reply ↓
  53. House Haunter*

    I worked as a park ranger for a few summers at a national historic site and we had (as all national parks in my country do), a Junior Ranger program. Ours was designed for kids who were at least in kindergarten, so five and older. If a parent came up to us and their kid was under five, it was a “no, no, fine” deal. (Say no, explain why, say no again, explain why, and then give it.) This might seem silly to parents, but those books were EXPENSIVE, so were the badges, and in my country our national parks are not well funded (and REALLY aren’t well funded now) so we wanted children who could actually connect with the experience to have that opportunity.

    We all got annoyed with parents blatantly lying to our faces about how their toddler was actually five years old. But, whatever. Our goal is for people to care about history, not police our youth program. (Side note for parents: If you really want your kid to have a badge but they’re a baby, JUST DO THE BOOK/PROGRAM YOURSELF. You’ll learn some new things, the rangers will love you, and it’ll be fun!)

    HOWEVER. I had a coworker who chose this as his hill to die on. If a parent came up and their child was clearly underage, he would refuse to give them the book. If another ranger had given an underage child a book, he would refuse to give them the badge. This led to parents screaming at him, parents screaming at anyone working with him, law enforcement even got called one time because one parent was so mad that his two year old wouldn’t be given a Junior Ranger badge that he proceeded to harass us even after someone gave him the badge. Even after our boss told Coworker to stop and just give the children the book/badge, he couldn’t stop. SO many more fights with parents went down over that summer.

    Honestly, I think that there were so many rough things happening at that job that this felt like the one, tiny thing that he COULD control and he just couldn’t give that up. And, my coworker was a DEEPLY principled person, which sounds great but if you’re ever worked with people you really have to decide which principles you actually care about because if every principle matters the same, you’re going to burn out. Which he did. Spectacularly.

    Reply ↓
    1. You can call me flower*

      I know this isn’t the point of your post at all, but it made me fondly think of our trip Channel Islands National Park in October. It’s not a heavily trafficked park since you have to take a ferry to get there. We took our 9 month old to spend the day hiking and he received a junior park ranger pin from the park ranger who greeted us as we got off the boat. I put it is his baby book along with a photo of us and the pin.

      Sorry to derail. I’m just thinking about our federal workers and park rangers especially right now. That moment was really special to my family.

      Reply ↓
  54. a perfectly normal-sized space bird*

    Someone in my company’s IT has decided the hill they are dying on is that Adobe Creative Cloud must automatically load every time we log into our workstation. On our already slow work computers that’s connected to an even slower virtual desktop using firewall software known to lag, it means a 15 minute start up sequence on a good day. There have been many complaints and we’ve begged them to just change the startup settings so CC isn’t a startup app but they refuse to budge. No one knows why.

    Every time someone requests this be changed, IT sends an email reply with the subject line “Why Adobe Creative Cloud Will Remain A Startup App” that is a long manifesto over the importance of Adobe CC in computing history without actually explaining why it needs to be in startup. There is not one single CC app we need for our jobs and we’re not even allowed to use Acrobat for PDFs.

    Reply ↓
    2. Enai*

      Well, someone is earning a commission for all those fuckoff expensive renewing software licenses, I wager.

      Reply ↓
  55. Caz*

    Two organisations merged into one. The org I had worked for previously brought a stronger management presence to the new org, so policies I was used to tended to prevail. One of those policies was that, over the Christmas period, everyone was allowed max two days of leave (my department ran the reception desks, we had 10 offices to keep open and only closed on Christmas eve/Christmas day/new year’s day, it was *tight* even when this heavily restricted). One of the “dark side” staff said “but I always get two weeks off!” and followed up with “if I can’t get my two weeks off, I shall have to retire!”
    .
    .
    .
    Reader, she retired. Before Christmas. I got promoted into her job, and enjoyed my two days! (I later found out she’d tried to pull this before – to the point of putting in her notice to retire – and managed to get her way that time. I guess she thought she’d try her luck again!)

    Reply ↓
  56. Beezus*

    Early in my career, I was an administrative assistant for five people, so I filled out a lot of expense reports and purchase orders for my department. The Accounts Payable person was decades older than me, and had been at the organization for years. Her hill to die on? Paperclips. Never mind that we work in a field where metal paperclips are widely regarded as the devil. (Don’t get us started on staples.) But she insisted that everything that came to her was stuck together using one-inch long metal paperclips. If you brought purchase orders and receipts to her with smaller paperclips or plastic paperclips, she would pointedly remove them, discard them, and apply her preferred size and style of paperclips. I kept a special box at my desk just for paperwork that went to her, even though I otherwise never used metal paperclips. (I don’t know what she did with the discarded paperclips. I hope there was an elaborate disposal ritual.)

    Reply ↓
    1. DefinitiveAnn*

      This is funny. My husband is a teacher at Uni, and when students bring him essays paper clipped together (or worse, just a stack of loose paper), he makes them staple them so that the pages don’t get separated. It is in the syllabus “multi-page essays should be stapled together before turning them in.”

      Reply ↓
  57. That Senior Center Director*

    I run a senior center. Our building is laid out in such a way that our internal hallways can be used as an indoor walking track, which many people do utilize. Since we opened the facility, everyone seemed to all walk in our direction: counterclockwise. This went on for about a year, when we had some requests from patrons to switch directions. Not only to shake things up, but also so walkers could better enjoy some large murals we had had installed.

    We announced the change at the start of the new year and you wouldn’t believe the backlash. I had people telling me and my team that they were “never going to come back again!” I had folks telling us “you can’t make me walk that way! I won’t do it!” and I had one person crying about how this change was too big and too dramatic and he would find somewhere else to walk.

    After a week of this, we decided to hang up mirrors at the corners and tell people to walk whichever way they want and just not bump into each other. My colleagues and I still laugh about how we ruined everyone’s lives by changing the direction of the walking track; it still comes up years later in department head meetings.

    Reply ↓
    1. Seal*

      What makes this even more ridiculous is that walking/running tracks in gyms have schedules and prominent signs telling users which direction they can walk on any given day. Obviously safety issues aside, it’s better for conditioning because you use different muscles on corners.

      Reply ↓
      1. Archi-detect*

        yup I walk up stairs frequently for excercise (30ish stories a day nothing crazy) and my right/inside leg going up always hurts more

        Reply ↓
  58. Abogado Avocado*

    OMG, we are in the middle of a microwave war. Our office’s former microwave decided to stop heating food as quickly as it had — like, it used to take 3.5 minutes to heat a can of soup, but then it took 7 minutes. So, the office administrator bought a new microwave and, this being local government, completed official inventory paperwork allowing slow microwave to go live in a communal kitchen next to a very large conference room used for large meetings. (The communal kitchen is a full kitchen and exists for the rare times that groups using the conference room have lunch and need to refrigerate or heat food.)

    Recently, our office administrator learned that the very necessary onsite repair office (we are in an extremely old government building) didn’t have a microwave, so they completed more official inventory paperwork that allowed slow microwave to go to the repair office because they needed one and one of the repair folks thought they could fix slow microwave’s heating issue. But then we learned that one of our office’s employee has been eating in the communal kitchen and heating her food in the slow microwave, and she pitched a fit. She went to HR – and, not, I should add, our office’s HR, but the main HR office for local government, which then called in the office admin to question his authority to give slow microwave to the office repair folks. He explained his official duties, showed Main HR the inventory paperwork and Main HR conceded that he had followed the rules — but perhaps even a bit too well since, ordinarily, slow microwave would have been sent to the public auction site where our local government overlords send excess property.

    Meanwhile, the staff member who lunches in the communal kitchen can’t get over that Main HR failed to back her up. So, she makes not-so-veiled asides about “people who give away government property” and complains about absence of slow microwave — even though the communal kitchen is all of 33 steps from the office kitchen with the newer, well-functioning microwave.

    Reply ↓
  59. Gloria SwanSong*

    I’m having flashbacks to the LW whose office phones were reworked with fewer speed dial buttons, causing a Myspace Top 8-style mass panic.

    Reply ↓
  60. UpstateDownstate*

    It would be so great to have a group of actors re-enact these, community theater style.
    Especially the lanyard one, I’d dieeee! ;alkdsjf;alsdkfj

    Reply ↓
      1. ICodeForFood*

        Oh, there would have to be an intermission where cheap-ass rolls, extra guacamole, and other Ask A Manager foods were served!

        Reply ↓
  61. Rage*

    Some years back, the payroll set up at my employer was HR only…no accounting/finance staff had any sort of access to the payroll system.

    Our CFO – who had fiduciary responsibility for payroll – didn’t like that at all (understandably), but got nowhere until it was brought up by the external auditor, who also didn’t much like it, and suggested that the CFO have *at minimum* read-only access.

    Then the board of directors got on board and said, basically, “This change has to happen, like, yesterday.” HR Director flat out refused. So HR Director was fired.

    And the 2 HR staff quit over the injustice of it all.

    Reply ↓
  62. Coverage Associate*

    Mid pandemic, when we were allowed in the office but only at half capacity and with other restrictions, one of the restrictions was no communal coffee machines. The executive team got all sorts of pushback on this, but from other offices that allowed individual coffee machines.

    Our office building did not allow individual machines, contrary to the advice of the executives, which I found out when I shared in an office wide email that I had an extra machine I would bring in for the first taker and the regional office manager shared that our particular landlord didn’t allow individual coffee makers. I would have liked this clarification weeks before when the executives provided their guidance. Also, as the building’s issue was fire risk and power use, their prohibition didn’t make much sense, as we were already limited in how many people could come in at once, and the number of people in and using personal machines wouldn’t take as much power as the big machine in normal times.

    I eventually brought a pour over setup and put a sign “help yourself.”

    This was all at a time when we could only enter the office once per day, no getting lunch and coming back, because we could get sick or contaminated while out.

    Reply ↓
  63. lurkyloo*

    Years ago, I was a team lead for a mailroom. I had started in that very same spot 3 years earlier and there were some lifers in there.
    One particular individual, let’s call them Francis, felt that, due to their seniority, they should be able to do only the jobs that they liked. Which was, in essence, ONE task. Of the 15 or so that had to be done on the daily.
    When I was offered the role, I was told very clearly that I would have to be the leader to change things. And one major change was that everyone had to be cross trained and rotate for everything. We’d been caught flat a few times and that was not to happen again. Francis, however, was having none of that. ESPECIALLY about opening mail. “I feel that it’s beneath me’ was one argument. Then they seemed to always have some injury on days that they were supposed to be on mail opening. Sprained wrist. Broken finger. Sore back, preventing them from sitting at the mail table. Eventually, I told them that they would have to open mail standing up or bring a chair to the table. Readers, they threw a FIT! They lamented. They wailed. There were even tears. They made no friends among the coworkers who were obviously ‘beneath’ them, because, as much as I tried to get them to take it to my office, they insisted on carrying on the lamentation in the middle of the room.
    They were astonished that they got a disciplinary warning and were immediately placed on a one and done PIP.

    Reply ↓
  64. Llama Llama*

    My team regularly had to wire funds (multiple weekly) which couldn’t go through our regular AP system and had to be manually sent. The manual process was cumbersome as it was and we had to get approval from the local banking team (who worked from home) who then sent to the headquarters team to wire the funds.

    Headquarters required a manual signatures and would not budge on it. My team had to print out the request form, get my managers signature. We then scanned the document and sent to the local banking team. The local banking team who then printed the document and sent to HQ.

    I occasionally asked if it could be a digital signature but was always shut down.

    Eventually there was a new HQ lead who found digital signature acceptable.

    Reply ↓
  65. def anon 4 this*

    I used to work at the Walmart garden center back in my college days. The hill I died on was my utter refusal to attend the morning meetings. The meetings were optional but in practice they were “optional.” The reason I refused to go is because the manager who ran it insisted everyone at the meeting had to end it with the Walmart Cheer. And being in my hardcore goth phase, I was absolutely not going to be seen in public doing that.

    Efforts I went to in order to get myself out of the morning meeting include:

    – hiding amongst the potted palm trees that had just been delivered to the GC floor
    – building a fort out of boxes of new seasonal merchandise and hiding inside
    – suddenly being overcome with the desire to assist every customer in sight
    – getting in the scissor lift and raising it as high as it would go to rearrange merchandise on the top shelf so I wouldn’t be able to get down before the meeting ended

    I arrived to work one day to find that the meeting was going to be held in the garden center that morning. My coworkers were absolutely convinced that I wouldn’t be able to get out of it. Thinking quickly, I grabbed a piece of cardboard and a sharpie and made a sign saying the meeting had been moved to the paint department. I then hid between some racks of tomatoes and watched as the entire group of morning meeting attendees ambled up to the GC, read the sign, and then all walked to the paint department.

    After that, my ability to avoid the meetings became legendary. I kept it up for two years before I left and I am still proud of never having to do the ridiculous Walmart Cheer.

    Reply ↓
    2. LuckyPurpleSocks*

      Oh man, I’ve been shopping in Walmart near a morning meeting a few times, and even as just a customer it’s one of the most soul-crushing, lackluster, existential-crisis inducing experiences ever.

      Reply ↓
      1. def anon 4 this*

        Search Walmart cheer in Youtube and there will be many examples of this.

        Explanation for anyone who doesn’t want to watch a video of this (which I understand completely):

        While everyone claps somewhat in time with each other, the manager shouts “Give me a W!” and the employees yell “W!” Then an A, then an L. Then the manager goes “Give me a squiggly!” and the employees shout “Squiggly!” while…doing some kind of hip wiggling twist thing. Then they go on to spell MART.

        Then the manager yells “What does that spell!?” and the employees shout “WALMART!” Then the manager shouts “Whose Walmart is it!?” and the employees shout back “MY WALMART!” and then the manager shouts “Who’s number one!?” and the employees shout back “THE CUSTOMER ALWAYS!” Then they all shout “HUH!” while doing whatever that motion is that kids do to make semi trailer trucks honk their horns.

        There are variations of this, some enthusiastic managers add in lines about safety or make them shout the store name multiple times if they feel the response is too lackluster. I’ve seen people make (or try to) the letters with their arms as they shout back. The worst are the managers or management interns who are too enthusiastic about doing this because they think bleary-eyed employees should be chipper at 6am and have an undying love of Walmart. Those are the ones who will single employees out for not smiling enough and make them do it again.

        Reply ↓
      2. LuckyPurpleSocks*

        I don’t know if it’s the same in every region, but in my town to wrap up the morning meetings here is what I’ve heard:
        Everyone starts clapping somewhat in sync.
        Someone nominated to lead the cheer, who always sounds bone tired: “Give me a W…”
        Maybe about 1/2 of the rest of the group respond in a I’ve-been-taken-hostage tone: “w…”
        Clapping and chant continues until they have gone through all of the letters of “Walmart”
        Chant leader: “What does that spell…?
        Group: “Walmart”
        Chant leader (slightly louder): “What does that spell…?
        Group: “Walmart”
        Everyone: “yaaaaaaaay”

        Reply ↓
  66. Margaret Cavendish*

    I would consider dying on the lanyard hill as well! “Slippery slope” and “papers please” is a bit of an overreaction, but they definitely do ruin my clothes.

    Unless there was a clearly articulated reason as to *why* it had to be a lanyard instead of any other method (assuming visibility, safety, etc), I would likely just keep wearing it on my belt.

    Reply ↓
  67. ReallyBadPerson*

    Not my workplace, but it is someone’s workplace, and the place where I work out: The cardio room at my gym had three TVs. On the left, the channel was permanently tuned to CNN, on the right, Fox news, and in the middle, ESPN to act as a sort of referee. The customers complained about whichever news offended them, especially if they got stuck using a treadmill in front of an offending channel, so the staff switched the TVs to Animal Planet, ESPN, and NatGeo. Were the customers happy? No. They complained about the frequent infomercials. We came in one day to find all of the TVs disabled. Did the customers shut up? No. A week later, someone on staff had had it, and ripped all the TVs down entirely.

    Reply ↓
    1. JustaTech*

      Just the other week I was at one of our manufacturing sites where they have a TV in the breakroom when everyone discovered that someone had hidden the TV remote so you couldn’t change the channel, change the volume, or turn it off.

      It was set to a cable news station, so pretty much guaranteed to annoy at least half of the people based on content, and half of everyone else based on knowing they couldn’t even turn it off.

      Reply ↓
  68. Meg*

    Listen. The lanyard one was an overreaction, but I understand. Lanyards chafe my neck and are a pain in the booty when you are trying to do basic things, like wash your hands. Plus, they can catch on your desk.

    Reply ↓
  69. Owl-a-roo*

    I’m in healthcare IT now but started my healthcare career as a certified medical assistant. I was a full-time float for a large organization, which meant I worked at a different office (and, usually, different specialty) each day. Whenever I started at a new-to-me location, I always shadowed one of their MAs and/or front office staff for an hour or two to learn their workflows. During one such session, I witnessed an MA give a series of vaccines, stick each used needle IN THE EXAM ROOM BED, and gather them up at the end for disposal. The sharps container was in the same room, maybe two steps away from the bed. I was horrified and calmly asked why that was their preferred workflow, citing safety and infectious disease concerns (not to mention that it’s ridiculous to fill an expensive exam table with holes). They responded by referencing their “superior credentials” as a registered medical medical assistant (not true – our credentials were clinically interchangeable) and insinuating that they had access to better quality clinical information. They even offered to send me data on why this was a perfectly acceptable practice! After I left, I reported the incident to my equally horrified manager, who assured me she’d take care of it.

    A couple of months later, I was assigned to that clinic again. The MA was still working there. They and most of the other MAs refused to talk to me. I learned from one of them that their office manager TOLD THE ENTIRE OFFICE about my reporting of the issue. Luckily, I had a supportive manager and a hard-earned good reputation, so I never worked at that clinic again and was free to support all of the other offices that were clamoring for additional short-term assistance.

    Reply ↓
    1. Owl-a-roo*

      Oh, and I was the ONLY float for our entire organization, so this office decided they’d rather ice me out over the used needles thing than have access to my help!

      Reply ↓
  70. naptato*

    Someone in customer support pitched, and got, an end-user-generated live help message board. It would cut down on support tickets and let everyone see the outcome of certain questions. But not all because sometimes those answers contained proprietary information.
    This was unacceptable. The pitcher cited first amendment rights, then left.

    Reply ↓
  71. Deit*

    At my husband’s workplace after I was in a horrible car accident that injured me we were also down a car since mine was totaled. Both of us had the ability to work from home, but had butt in seats bosses. To deal with this, I carpooled MWF and took his car T/Th. He went to the office MWF and had to WFH T/Th.

    His bosses harangued him about it for a couple of weeks despite us explaining that we were struggling financially since the accident and medical bills and doing our best to save up for a down payment which we thought would take 12 weeks. Then on a Monday they demanded he buy a car tonight or be fired. I had to have the car for Physical Therapy so we had no choice but to go out then and there and buy a car. We found the cheapest thing we could with $500 to spare for a down payment. Our loan terms were of course atrocious.

    Well that Friday they told him he would be laid off at the end of the next month. Flabbergasted he asked why on earth they demanded he buy a car if they were planning to lay him off anyway and they answered “That’s just business you can’t hold us accountable for your bad financial decisions.”

    The icing on the cake was one of his two bosses (a married couple) worked from home full time and the other one worked from home most of the time too. They were just a 5 minute walk from the office.

    Reply ↓
    1. DoctorOfTranslation*

      The stream of obscenities I just hurled at these “managers” on your behalf would likely get anyone barred from the comments, so feel free to use your imagination, and receive the many good wishes I – and surely MANY others – are sending you (albeit belatedly) after the accident and ensuing insults to injury! I hope you both are doing MUCH better nowadays :-)

      Reply ↓
    2. Lenora Rose*

      I feel like you told this story before? At least, I know I’ve heard either it or something extremely like.

      Regardless of how many times I hear it, I am absolutely furious at those selfish bosses.

      Reply ↓
  72. Librarian the Ninth*

    I might have told this story in comments before, certainly I think about it whenever the topic of unreasonable behavior at work comes up.

    At my library, there’s a small “back office” that is also sort of a break room. There’s a desk and a computer in there that is used mostly to process incoming holds, new items, and and outgoing holds. There are two people (A and B) who use it most often, who work alternating schedules and are never in there at the same time. Other people use the space and sometimes the desk as well, usually when neither A or B are in there.

    One day, someone used the space, and left behind one of the rolling ottomans that are usually out in the stacks for people to sit on while they look at the shelves. It was left under the desk and the space for your legs would be a bit cramped.

    A came in the next day and complained to me that B left the ottoman in her way. I commiserated, and offered to push it back to the floor on my way out of the office because A has some mobility issues and I like to be helpful. She declined and said B must have done it on purpose and *she* wasn’t so rude as to move things in another person’s workspace without asking them.

    At B’s next shift, she also complained to me about the ottoman, and assumed that A had left it behind to torment her. She also left it place, because she wasn’t about to cave to A’s tricks.

    For almost a week, each complained daily about how the other one was out to get her. I think the head librarian was the one who finally moved it out of the space.

    Reply ↓
    1. New Jack Karyn*

      No one thought to tell A and B that neither had done so? No one else just snagged it when both A and B were away from the desk?

      Reply ↓
  73. used to be a tester*

    I wouldn’t quit over the lanyard thing, but as a woman with… great tracts of land, I was once told that me wearing a lanyard looked ‘vulgar’. So after that I was allowed to just have it in my pocket as long as I was on my floor.

    Reply ↓
  74. Might Be Spam*

    I would keep the badge on the lanyard and hang the lanyard from my belt. Letting the badge hang down by my knees. I’m whimsical (ok, maybe I’m petty) like that.

    Reply ↓
  75. Anonymouse*

    My boss (the COO) was locked in a titanic power struggle with her rival (the program director). Meanwhile, their respective teams were planning a month-long training in another city for over 100 people, with housing and meals provided, daily guest speakers, dozens of special events, etc. Basically event planning hell.

    They could not agree on a project management platform to use. The COO preferred Platform A, the program director preferred Platform B, and neither one of them would compromise.

    We ended up having to use both platforms. The COO refused to open Platform B and the program director refused to open Platform A, so their underlings had to record every guest speaker, special event, random logistical to-do, etc. in both platforms so both execs could keep track.

    For what it’s worth, the program director ended up getting fired for being drunk on the job and horrible to his staff throughout the month-long training. So despite the mutual pettiness we all ultimately sided with my boss.

    Reply ↓
  76. llama librarian*

    I worked for a company that was fairly flexible about family issues, and was supportive about a parent bringing in a baby to the office for a few hours when their daycare fell through. I worked with a woman who had one of those “almost alive” dolls – that were intended to look like a real life baby. She INSISTED that she should have the same exact rights as any other parent, and as such would bring in her doll in a standard car-seat carrier, spend the day distracted by the “needs” of the doll, and would loudly claim discrimination whenever anyone would ask her to do her job when she was spending time with the baby. Her leader tried to reason with her, but she refused to budge. When we had budget-related staff cuts later in the year, she was the first impacted in our department.

    I was maybe 23 years old, and completely baffled by what was happening.

    Reply ↓
    1. H.Regalis*

      Ooof, grief does weird things to people. I’m assuming she got one of those for the same reason a lot of people do, i.e. she lost a child. If that wasn’t the case, then O_o

      Reply ↓
  77. Not Jane*

    I had not long started a new job that had introduced a new uniform a few months earlier. A couple of months in, we had a new senior manager who held an all-hands away day (across two days, half the team on each), to consult on what could be done to improve performance.

    Apparently the hill that several of my new colleagues were willing to die on was that the jumpers/pullovers were the wrong colour. Replacing these jumpers was the only outcome of the whole exercise. I do think the colour was a mistake, but I’m sure we could have found more productive things to change.

    Reply ↓
  78. Styx-n-String*

    To be honest, I might have also died on the lanyard hill. I have severe claustrophobia and ADHD (which comes with tactile issues), and one of my biggest triggers is anything that touches the front or sides of my neck. I feel like I’m suffocating even wearing a light necklace. Finding clothes that don’t touch my neck all the way around is difficult. Lanyards make me feel like I’m dying because they touch the sides of my neck, and the heavy badge pulls down on them which increases the pressure on my skin. The times I’ve tried wearing a lanyard, it has triggered panic attacks where I feel like I’m suffocating. It’s stupid, but it’s out of my control.

    The lady in the story just sounds cuckoo, though.

    Reply ↓
  79. The Boxer*

    I work in an office that relies heavily on paper archives, because the oldest data is not digitized and it would be a major undertaking to do so. When I started with this company, we had one closet dedicated to storing paperwork for completed jobs. Each job was put into an expanding file folder and the folder put into a box. Each box was labeled to show the range of job numbers (for example jobs 1300-1315) that were filed away. If a job with a number in the middle of that range (say 1310) was not completed, you knew to leave space in the box so that you could archive it in the future. The boxes were then put on shelves in numerical order.

    As years went by, the closet became full to the extent that the boxes were stacked in rows up to the ceiling. If you had to access an old job, all of the boxes had to be pulled out of the closet one by one until you found the one you were looking for. Eventually jobs just got tossed into random boxes with no organization system. If you pulled an archived file, when you were done it just got tossed in a random box too.

    Eventually we moved to a bigger office space. We went from have 50 sqft of storage to 2,000 sqft of storage. I asked 2 employees to start the process of organizing the boxes. To the extent possible, all jobs needed to be put back in numbered order into boxes and the boxes labeled with the job numbers they contained. Instead, they just labeled the boxes based on contents. So you could have jobs 1105, 1212 and 1451 in the same box.

    I pushed back and explained that filing all of the jobs numerically would be much more convenient down the line when we had to pull an old job from the archives. One of them told me that what I was asking for was impossible. The other actually yelled at me to say that the files were old, dusty and disgusting, and that there was no way they were going to touch the old files.

    I knew it needed to be done and was determined to prove them wrong. So for the next 2 weeks, I showed up to work in jeans. I spent half of my days doing my regular work and the other half organizing those boxes, often crawling around on my knees because we had shelves and a floor, but no tabletops to work on. I got about 90% of those jobs files organized by job number. The rest got clubbed together by client, as we had a lot of repeat work from certain clients. I created a spreadsheet to list each box and its contents and then put fresh labels on each box showing the box number and the jobs inside of the box.

    Just when I was finished and feeling a big sense of accomplishment, the employee who had yelled at me miraculously found a box of files that belong to a particular job that was already archived. I had just finished working on 95 boxes. The newly found files they were handing me should have been put in box 20, but there was no space for them.

    Reply ↓
    1. Lenora Rose*

      Ooof.

      Having attempted to help a company organize archived files where there flat was NOT enough room for the files in question, no matter how you sliced it, this takes me back…

      Reply ↓
    2. Indolent Libertine*

      Arrrrrgh! Nooooo! I would have thrown things and turned the air blue. What did you do? Was there a box 20-A? Or 20.1?

      Reply ↓
    3. Percysowner*

      I would have been very tempted to create a box 20A and split box 20 into 2 sections, because after 95 boxes of organization, it works and you don’t have to move everything down a box.

      Reply ↓
  80. MrSquid*

    I used to work in a department handling some B2B sales. For the high-dollar orders, we had a strict policy that we required a customer contact who would be responsible for scheduling delivery and signing for product. It was explained multiple times to our sales team why this policy was in place and how much money the company lost from disputes before this was enacted, but we still would get occasional pushback.
    One coworker decided she was exempt from this policy and started putting down obviously fake contacts (literally Customer@Customer.com and 5555555555 for phone number). Since I was working on data validation, I would kick these back as invalid. She was livid each time and would try to escalate up the chain of command regardless of how many rejections came back. It finally got to the point that I requested a special exemption: she specifically was no longer allowed to make these requests. Management, already tired from near weekly emails of her complaining about the policy, approved.

    Reply ↓
  81. NMitford*

    I feel like I may have told this before, but here goes….

    I worked for a company with an eccentric IT director who refused to put servers in each office location. He also configured everyone’s laptop so that you couldn’t save work to your hard drive. So, every file that you need to work on was on the main server in a different city and that server was accessed using Citrix via phone lines (because this was 25 years ago). I’m a proposal manager and worked on multiple large files. Needless to say, pulling up a file was extremely slow. Printing a proposal was excruciating, because the file had to spool over phone lines from headquarters to my satellite office. I could start a print job, go out to get lunch, and hope that it had started printing by the time I got back. Burning the CD copies of proposals for delivery was worse than excruciating. His system jeopardized ontime deliveries of proposals. In one case, my boss had to leave to deliver a proposal ontime while the last CD was still burning. He left and had me follow him in my car when the last CD was ready. He dropped off the package with seconds to spare then met me in the parking lot where I handed off the last CD, then went back in the building after the deadline and said, “This must have fallen out of the box on the way. Can I please just tuck it back in?”

    Numerous employees begged and pleaded for local servers and/or the ability to work off our hard drived, but he loved the system he created. Well, finally, the CEO who’d hired him and tolerated this disfunction quit. A vice president in the company was promoted to be the new CEO. The first thing she did was order the IT director to put servers in every office, allow everyone to save to their hard drives if needed, and stop making everyone work over phone lines using Citrix.

    Well, that setup was the hill that the IT director chose to die on. He sent a companywide email announcing that he was going to go be a missionary in Africa with his church and called us all godless heathens who didn’t appreciate him before he stomped out the door.

    Months later, when there was a power failure and the new system went down for a few minutes, I heard one of my coworkers call over the cube walls, “It’s what everyone in Africa has been praying for.”

    Reply ↓
  82. Nat20*

    I had a communication professor in college who told this story in class once. This was at a very small school. He was telling us about the change the school had made in the 90s to require all staff to have an email address, which had apparently been decided through some sort of faculty vote. Apparently only one professor was against the change, and loudly, angrily petitioned against it. Said he would never, ever use email even if they tried to force him to, and that this reliance on technology to communicate was going to make everyone in higher ed dumber (or something to that effect, you get the idea). My professor wouldn’t mention the dissenting person’s name out of professional courtesy, but said “you can probably guess”.

    Another student immediately said, “was it [Dr. OldGuy]?” Seeing as how Dr. OldGuy was highly valued by the school for his expertise, but was notorious for being nigh-unreachable, stubborn, old-fashioned, always lecturing the exact same things from the exact same ever-yellowing, visibly disintegrating notes, and he could still often be heard clacking away at the TYPEWRITER in his office (this was now circa 2014), it was a good guess.

    My professor just smiled.

    Reply ↓
  83. Jay (no, the other one)*

    This is my husband’s story, not mine. He was a professor for ten years. Two years into that job, he took an administrative position running a program that worked with community partners. They put his office in a very large room and didn’t have grant money for physical plant. They did have grant money for furniture. Procurement gave him the office furniture catalog and he picked what he wanted including the largest desk available – it was a huge space and he loves a big desk. It had a ledge for visitors to use for laptops or notebooks when they met with him.

    Phone call: you can’t have that desk. Only deans and above can have that desk. It’s too expensive. He explains that the institution isn’t paying for it. – Well, it’s policy. – Where can I find that in the faculty handbook? – It’s an unwritten policy. They would.not.budge from the “unwritten policy.”

    In the end he had to get a letter from his dean saying he was allowed to get that desk.

    Reply ↓
  84. XX*

    I worked at a tiny hardware store for a few months. This place is a neighborhood staple, almost 90 years old in the same building, and independent too. The current owner has been the bookkeeper for 50 years and did all the accounting by hand. She let the manager mostly do whatever he wanted but he couldn’t touch the books. I think it was her way to stay involved in the business without having to go to the store often. They finally switched over to quickbooks last year after years of pestering by the manager, and no more utility bills go unpaid.

    Reply ↓
  85. Lanyard why*

    I’d be mad about the lanyard thing too, big because wearing anything on my neck like that gives me awful headaches not because it’s ugly. I assume there would be some kind of compromise available, like having the lanyard on my neck but then actually clipping the badge to my shirt to take the weight off the lanyard

    Reply ↓
  86. Nicole Maria*

    I don’t have any good stories, I just want to know what happens to people psychologically to make them behave this way. Not trying to be snarky, genuinely curious. Do we have any psychologists or behavioral scientists on AAM?

    Reply ↓
    1. Strive to Excel*

      Not a psychologist, but speaking from my own experience: a lot of it comes from control, and the feeling that we’re losing it. When people feel like something’s out of control, they’ll often reach for something they feel that they *can* control. And this is often because the thing they feel they can control is tangible. Something like: “I can’t control the weather/the sociopolitical climate/the country-wide price of eggs, but I *can* control whether or not I can have a mug of coffee at work.”

      Reply ↓
    2. JustaTech*

      I think it depends on the circumstances, but one thing I’ve noticed is that when people are under a lot of external stress the will attempt to redirect their feelings/energy about it to something that is at least theoretically within their control.
      For example, you’ve never seen so many rules-police and rules-lawyers as at my undergrad during finals. Not the faculty or staff, but among students.
      Half of them would attempt to enforce rules that they paid no attention to for the rest of the semester (and not reasonable things like quiet hours), and the other half would then lash out at the rules enforcers for enforcing the rules *wrong*.

      They were all eager to die on hills that the rest of the year they didn’t even notice.

      Reply ↓
    3. Daria grace*

      The situations where I’ve seen the most and worst of this behavior are ones where management exerted a lot of control (needlessly strict schedules, badly designed but rigorously enforced production targets ect) leaving employees feeling like they lacked autonomy. Getting overly insistent about other people not using their stapler or whatever seemed like employees grasping for the only things they were able to control in a difficult work environment

      Reply ↓
  87. Daria grace*

    This has been shared in a post before but I’ll always fondly remember a coworker who got too into Christmas. She had an hours (yes hours not days) until Christmas countdown for about a month before Christmas on one of the whiteboards. She’d get up and update it a few times a day. Someone needed that whiteboard for a work task and rubbed it off. She got so mad she complained not just to her manager but her manager’s manager

    Reply ↓
      1. Daria grace*

        Her managers manager was already aware that this was how that person was so apparently was not too perturbed by this. The manager didn’t give them back that particular whiteboard but eventually the countdown resumed on another one

        Reply ↓
  88. Whatever*

    I used to work for a private company teaching English in Japan. We contracted out to a bunch of schools and day cares, so the handful of teachers would go to a bunch of different schools and each school would have a rotation of different teachers.

    This company was really big on standardizing everything so that teachers were using the same methods, words, phrases, songs and so on. This included the way we sang songs and nursery rhymes to our youngest students, and bizarrely even extended to the individual actions performed while singing.

    At the start of every new unit we’d have a meeting to figure it all out. These always became way too heated, until we’d reach the point that multiple adults are screaming at each other about the the right way to move your hands while singing “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.”

    I still remember my coworker jumping out of his chair yelling “I have to point at my head like THIS because when I say ‘ears’, I grab my ears like THIS!!” while acting out an accelerated version of the song.

    This place was a real mess, but I think we let a lot slide since most of us didn’t have a ton of other work experience and some of the more bizarre stuff would get waved away as we assumed that was just how Japanese companies operated.

    Reply ↓
  89. spiffi*

    Our elementary school had a cool wooden play structure – two towers and a suspension bridge between them – the bridge was a bunch of wood ‘logs’ strung together with chain and with chains for the sides forming a “railing” on each side.

    To my knowledge nobody was ever hurt – the bridge was maybe 4 feet off the ground – of course kids would jump off?

    but at some point, they hacked the tower legs down and shortened the whole thing -the bridge ended up being 3 inches off the ground – it was soooo lame

    Reply ↓
  90. Maple Cheesecake*

    Tortillas. The (one of many. so many) hills she died on was tortillas. We’d had a potluck, which I had done most, if not all, of the legwork to arrange. This was typical for my role, and I didn’t really mind. I also enjoyed sharing my home cooking with my team.

    Nightmare Coworker, however, could not be bothered to contribute the absolute barest minimum, and brought a single package of store brand tortillas to the potluck. They weren’t even opened. (Very nearly cheap-ass rolls!)

    When a colleague later thanked me for organizing the potluck and bringing something homecooked, Nightmare Coworker LOST IT. Slammed her desk, yelled “I helped too!”, bolted up, and ran away sobbing.

    Unfortunately, that was far from the end with her, I hear she nearly had the cops called on her when they finally fired her!

    Reply ↓
  91. L*

    My office was making plans for renovations, and the director got it into his head that we should have a big lounge area with couches where we could all bring our laptops and work together socially whenever we wanted.* My department head suggested we should get some sort of fancy espresso machine for this space, which the director roundly shut down as an unforgiveable extravagence. Department head was not to be deterred. He brought the espresso machine up at every meeting – department meetings where none of us could do anything about it, all-staff meetings, department head meetings where he reportedly got into arguments with the director each time. Finally he retired (possibly in part because of the espresso machine). We have an annual party where we invite our recent retirees back to make nice speeches about them and hear them make a speech too. He used his speech to bring up the espresso machine.

    *This is it’s own issue but let’s just say not many people were enthused at the prospect of leaving their private offices with dual monitor setups to balance a laptop on their knees on a couch. In the end, the renovation was mych more mundane and mostly involved expanding the boardroom so all the staff could fit in it at once.

    Reply ↓
  92. Dark Macadamia*

    I worked at a school where we had a homeroom period built into the schedule mainly for silent reading time (like 20 min per day, sometimes interrupted by announcements). It was really frustrating because some teachers enforced the reading time and others did not. On the last day of school most homeroom teachers had snacks/parties or let their classes mingle in the hall to sign yearbooks, because it was the END of the LAST DAY of school. One teacher insisted on having her class sit silently and read. I supported having clear expectations about the reading time most days but on the last day????

    Reply ↓
  93. Former Academe*

    Years ago, I worked at a college and the school selected, purchased and implemented software for securely delivering and proctoring exams electronically. Remote exams were unusual then. At the time, the software formatted the tests multiple choice questions first, short answer next, finally essay questions. There was no flexibility. (I bet there is now, there’s a ton more competition and demand since the pandemic increase in remote learning.) Anyway, one (tenured, of course) faculty member refused to agree to format his final in this order, complaining to the Dean, faculty, and much of the staff via email “I refuse to have my academic freedom restricted in this manner for the sake of administrative convenience!” We were still unable to change the software.

    Reply ↓
  94. StarTrek Nutcase*

    I was working at a large research university’s medical complex as an executive secretary (standard hrs 8-5). These are very limited staff positions (30 out of 500+) as only deans & vps have one and pay was excellent. Anyway, I was assisting in hiring a ES for one dean and really stressed how parking was ridiculously hard. Only physicians, professors, deans, & vps had assigned spots. There was very limited parking within a brisk 15 min walk and then several huge garages within 30 min walk or a 15 min shuttle ride. BUT I also emphasized arriving after 7:15 meant even the garages would be likely full, and once you parked, you didn’t leave & expect to return that day (but complex had many food options).

    Anyway after a lengthy search, W was hired. I was anxiously awaiting her start because I had been covering 2 deans (hers & mine) for 3 months. I reached out to her a week ahead to remind her about parking & with some other details. All was set. So first day finally arrives, and at 8:05 I get a call from W. She QUIT 5 min past start time. She was livid because she had been hunting for a parking spot since 7:30. I was half laughing-crying when I reminded her what I said about parking and said nothing will open until probably 3 p during medical staff shift change.

    When her dean strolled in at 9:00 (reserved parking), he was shocked but philosophical – easy cause he knew I’d still cover. I was disappointed until I quickly realized that if she couldn’t deal with parking, she’d not have lasted with him (he was blunt but respectful & both he and the job were demanding).

    Reply ↓
  95. Oh no*

    Some examples re: a mostly pleasant and competent former co-worker paralegal at a tiny law firm. She did not deal with change well. 1. She insisted on using only 11.5 font even though the court requested that we use 12, because “that’s how we’ve always done it.” This went on for months until a clerk at the courthouse decided to die on a similar hill and started returning our pleadings without filing them because they didn’t meet the court’s preferences. 2. We used to have binders full of paper for every case. We went as paperless as possible over a 6 month period, scanning and saving docs on our server, and gradually we starting receiving most documents from other law firms electronically only. No more massive binders – I kept a few hanging folders to hold any original documents that we needed in paper (ie original Affidavits). Boss had very strong feelings about not wasting paper and space unnecessarily. When this co-worker retired, we discovered she had printed all of our electronic records, put them in binders, and hidden them in a storage chest behind her desk. 3. On the paper theme, we used to print and mail huge packets of paper (long complaints) to a local process server. It was time-consuming and annoying given that we could have just emailed a copy, but co-worker insisted that the process server required that system. After co-worker retired, the process server called to see if I would be willing to email papers moving forward because the way we had been doing it was more laborious and expensive (they paid the postage) for them. Found out they had requested multiple times that she use email, and she told them boss would not allow it (untrue). 4. We had a tradition that the boss would take staff to lunch for our birthdays. This didn’t always happen on the actual birthday, because of work appointments and deadlines. She got upset one year that several days had passed since her birthday with no lunch out, complained to the boss, and chose a date the following week that appeared free. Turned out it wasn’t free. Boss had a lunch meeting scheduled with co-counsel on a case valued at $20 million. She argued literally up to the moment that boss left to meet co-counsel that her birthday lunch should take precedence because it was office tradition. (I really disliked those lunches, and after co-worker left, was delighted that they went by the wayside.)

    Reply ↓
  96. NotmyUsualName*

    When everyone was sent home for COVID there was a lot of discussion about reimbursement for things like printer ink and other supplies.

    But one group got all up in arms about 3 specific items. Paper towels, hand soap and of course, toilet paper. On the argument that they got these items for free while working at work, so their at home usage went up for all of these things. They were livid that they were not going to be reimbursed for the toilet paper they had to use while working from home. And since we use the giant industrial rolls, they couldn’t just take some home.

    There are a couple of them who still sneak extra office supplies home to “make up” for the injustice of having to provide their own essentials during that time.

    Reply ↓
  97. fidgeter*

    I do struggle with lanyards. I’m a terrible fidgeter. I prefer having it attached to my belt. But wouldn’t make a fuss like this. I wouldn’t want to draw attention to the fact because I always end up taking them off and losing them.

    Reply ↓
  98. Bob*

    Many many moons ago when Harry Potter was all the rage a range of video games were released across the various consoles, PC, Playstation, Xbox, Dreamcast, Nintendo etc. Each game was completely different from the other but we had a staff member that INSISTED they were all the same because “I don’t think they would make a bunch of different games” he simply would not believe other staff members that had played them, customers who liked specific ones or the different company reps that confirmed the differences. He simply refused to accept he was wrong about something he had never played and seemed to think everyone else didn’t understand his point of view.

    Reply ↓
  99. talos*

    This is tiny potatoes, but I was once at lunch with some coworkers who had a 45 minute argument about…whether nautical miles are the same as regular miles.

    For the record, a trivial search will reveal that they are not.

    Reply ↓
  100. St. Agatha's*

    Circa 2013, my school (think Dead Poets Society) adopted Gmail. Prior to this, the school used a bespoke email system that had been absolutely top of the line… in 1998. It had not been upgraded since.

    Faculty tended to stick around, so the email shift was a Big Deal. The Deans scheduled Gmail training as that year’s required professional development. For some reason, they decided the best way to do this was to gather every single teacher together in the cafeteria for FIVE DAYS of Gmail 101. I’m not sure for whom it was more miserable–the Bespoke Email Loyalists who lamented its loss almost as loudly as they did having to use email at all, or the handful of mostly young but seasoned Google users for whom these meetings could have literally been an email.

    About halfway through Day 1, news that “all this new techology made someone quit!” began to snake through the cafeteria. Catherine was a known Bespoke Loyalist, but had recently announced that she would be stepping down in two years’ time as part of a handsomely paid step-down retirement program. She reported to the training that morning, and seemingly stepped out for some fresh air sometime after Creating an Email Signature but before Forwarding A Message. Apparently, she loathed Gmail enough to march over to the Deans Office and bump up her retirement date to effective *immediately*. She left her laptop right on the cafeteria table, had movers pack up her on-campus apartment (!), and disappeared into the night.

    I had never liked Catherine much, but that week I couldn’t have liked her better. Her exit fueled enough indignation (from Bespoke Loyalists) and surreptitious Gchat gossip (from Google natives and quick learners alike) to propel everyone through to summer break.

    Reply ↓

Leave a Comment

Before you comment: Please be kind, stay on-topic, and follow the site's commenting rules.
You can report an ad, tech, or typo issue here.

Subscribe to all comments on this post by RSS