things your company did that you thought were normal … but were actually very weird

by Alison Green on April 3, 2025

Especially early in your career, it’s common to think that they way your workplace does things is normal — and then you move somewhere near and discover that having a goat shrine isn’t normal at all. This can also happen if you stay at one job for a long time, or if you move to a new field. We don’t always know that what we’re surrounded by isn’t normal — until something makes us realize that it’s not.

Today’s “ask the readers” is a suggestion from a reader, who requests stories of “expressions, traditions, methods that you thought were universal but which you learned were actually just a weird thing your old workplace did. Bonus points if you learned this in a manner you are still embarrassed about to this day.”

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  1. ChurchOfDietCoke*

    My old company had a fiercely complex three-layered signoff and cross-charging process for people to attend (internal) training courses.

    My current job has a centralised budget for Learning and Development. Phew!

    1. Aggretsuko*

      One department here makes a whopping seven people work on the same process. It seems to be along the lines of “we don’t trust each other, so someone else needs to proofread/key” and they keep passing it along. Seven different times. Upper management thinks this is ridiculous, but this is an area where the office culture is very weird.

      2. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

        if upper management thinks this is “ridiculous,” why don’t they manage a change?

        Am I the only one here who was puzzled by this? I’m not used to upper management backing down to the whims of a particular department, and that’s what this sounds like to me.

        1. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

          That was supposed to say ” mandated,” not “managed.” *glares at autocorrect*

  2. Rogue Slime Mold*

    When I was in the Peace Corps, part of the exit counseling was, explicitly “Don’t describe the exact details of your last bowel movement to people you encounter. This becomes an ice breaker with your fellow volunteers, but it’s really not going to fly when you are outside of this narrow context.”

    1. Kaiko*

      This reminds me of early post-COVID lockdown small talk, in which people would say the WILDEST things because we were all so undersocialized. Literally had 3+ conversations about poop with strangers in 2021.

      1. Wolf*

        Early Covid time was wild. Smalltalk could be either banana bread recipes or a traumatic story of losing loved ones, and you never knew which one you’d get today.

    2. Eatyourveggies24_7*

      . Also an RPCV, I don’t know if Peace Corps can be considered either a “job” or “normal,” but other advice I got from staff and trainers included, don’t develop an eating disorder, don’t start smoking, and don’t get in a car alone with a man (if you’re a woman.). Still some of the best years of my life though.

      2. linger*

        Ok, as a literal icebreaker, in a recent episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage (“Adventures on Ice”) Felicity Aston described the toilet protocol at the British Antarctic Survey’s Sky Blue base.

        “The toilet was a big bright orange pyramid tent […covering…] a big deep hole dug into the ice. And the guys were talking about, ‘Is the broom in the toilet tent?’, and there was a lot of fuss about the broom, and I thought, ‘That’s nice, they’re keeping it tidy. Hygiene, that’s important.’ But it didn’t take me long before I realized […] it’s a wooden broom, but all the bristles have been chopped off it, so now I’m really confused. […] But of course, anything that’s going into the long drop freezes, so eventually you get a sort of stalagmite of … pooh … that surprisingly quickly emerges from the surface […] so that’s where the broomstick comes in; […] it’s to do battle with the poohsicle.”

        1. TinyLeptonAvoider*

          I remember that one. No one wants to be impaled on a poosicle, thousands of miles from medical help. And hello fellow Infinite Monkey Cage fan!

    4. Richard Hershberger*

      What? I shouldn’t be doing that? Can I at least post the spreadsheet of daily ratings?

      3. Free Meerkats*

        There was a (now defunct) blog where someone took photos of every bowel movement and posted them.

        2. Elsajeni*

          I’ve seen at least one person who adapted the popular crochet project of a weather blanket (assign colors to temperature ranges, crochet one row per day in the color of the day’s high or low temp) to a, um, more personal design that involved assigning colors to values on the Bristol stool chart. At least you’d never know if you just saw the blanket lying on the back of their couch.

        3. MBK*

          The Internet has always been a remarkable tool for people to share information, but it’s always important to remember who “people” are.

    5. TGIF*

      I would never describe that to anyone, that is private jeesh. What a weird thing for them to say.

      1. Rogue Slime Mold*

        It was in the exit training because it only took a few months for people to shift from the social norm “Never would I ever” to the social norm “You won’t believe ….” (Only with fellow volunteers, not with local people we worked with.)

      2. Ally McBeal*

        It’s not weird when you’re trading “war stories” with fellow volunteers. Like, they’re not opening every all-hands meeting by running through everyone’s GI issues, they’re commiserating, possibly over drinks.

      3. That Snake Wrangler*

        Ive never been in Peace Corps, but I work in environmental science where we spend a lot of time in the field. It can be hard to come back to society because discussions of worst field poop and inviting people to see a cool parasite/snake/wasp aren’t exactly…normal ways to make new friends. Certain working environments absolutely change people.

        1. Quill*

          Environmental science sure prepared me for vetmed though.

          “Who wants to see a tapeworm?”

          *We all stampede to the microscope.*

          1. AnotherOne*

            From the sound of it, this has prepared all of you to be around the under 5 set, cuz let me tell you when my nieces were little (and admittedly probably still now) they’d run for that microscope.

            But there is now less talk of poop. Unless it’s dino poop.

            One of my nieces got to hold (i assume) fossilized dino poop once and it was a highlight of her life.

              1. Distracted Librarian*

                To be fair, this exchange happens fairly regularly at my house, and my husband and I are both in our 50s.

      4. K*

        So you say until you’ve had the strange comfort of sharing giardia experiences with similarly traumatized folks.
        The weirder and grosser ailments become a badge of pride — I had a botfly in my finger so I was pretty cool.

        1. JustaTech*

          My 4th grade teacher’s daughter was in the Peace Corps in Ghana, specifically working on the guinea worm eradication program (which worked!).
          Guinea worm is a horrible parasite that causes immense suffering, and there is no mediation to prevent or eliminate it.
          My teacher would read us the letters her daughter sent home about her work in the Peace Corps and wow, 8-9 year old girls are super duper into gross worms!
          Right up until the daughter came home and showed us a worm in a jar that she had brought home – oh the screaming. (It was a big jar and completely filled with one worm, they’re like 30 inches long.)
          So yeah, I can see how you would need a re-calibration after seeing things like that regularly.

    6. cleo*

      Yep, one of my best friends from high school was a Peace Corps volunteer and she definitely had to relearn that once she got out.

    7. DEEngineer*

      Can confirm this was needed! I visited a Peace Corp volunteer friend in West Africa, and he warned me ahead of time that BMs were frequently discussed. I’m a practical person so I didn’t mind so much.

      1. QueenoftheTamazons*

        I work in a methadone clinic. Poop is also frequently a topic of converation. people get real mean (pangry?) when they cant poop so most of us have a constipation plan and share it freely.

    8. Spacewoman Spiff*

      Hahaha, also an RPCV, and enjoying the clear division in the replies here between people who have and have not served in the PC. Now I’ve got to think of what other strange things I picked up while serving. (I remain very willing to talk all bodily functions. But I know to target these convos to other RPCVs!)

    9. I don't even watch football*

      Not mine, but I was in a bank where tv was tuned to The Football Channel. It was the off-season so they were obviously scrambling for programming, which might explain why they were showing an entire documentary on the history, culture, and future of the “good job” butt pat.

      Apparently this was a problem for players who left the league for corporate contexts and had to very quickly retrain themselves before they got a note from HR

    10. Great Frogs of Literature*

      A friend from my (not Peace Corps, but a similar program) days has a story on this topic that, to this day, I think is split-your-sides-laughing funny. Although it’s possible that you needed the local context.

        1. Great Frogs of Literature*

          I can’t do it justice, unfortunately. She was out running and REALLY needed to go. There was a large clump of grass involved.

    11. Teacher Lady*

      Okay, this is true in nearly 100% of contexts, but about 5 years after I completed my service, I did a summer language immersion program abroad. (Different country and language than my Peace Corps service.) Three weeks in, over coffee before class one day, a fellow American takes a deep breath and goes, “OKAY SORRY if we’re not here yet, but has anyone else been having super weird poops? I’m starting to get worried…”

      I said, “I was in the Peace Corps, I’ve been waiting ‘here’ [i.e. the place where we talk about our weird BMs] since Week 1.” And then we all talked, and people felt better, at least emotionally!

    13. Galaxiid*

      Wow, this just made me remember that when my ex in the Peace Corps broke up with me, he tried to make me feel sorry for him by saying he’d sh*t his pants earlier that day. I did not have much sympathy at that exact moment…

    14. DramaQ*

      I work in a lab so I totally get this. Telling people “I got Chlamydia again today!” is definitely not appropriate dinner table or corporate conversation. You almost have to develop a second personality for the outside world.

      1. goddessoftransitory*

        “You wouldn’t BELIEVE the strain of herpes I got! …where are you going?”

      2. Scrimp*

        Did you get chlamydia from the lab work? Are you… assigned to work on something involving chlamydia?

        Is chlamydia a normal hazard of your particular work?

        1. hawk*

          I think it’s more along the lines of “I got chlamydia again… (as the lab sample I am required to analyze)”

    15. Anita Brake*

      My ex-husband was/is a travel writer and a lover of travel and hiking. One time he showed me a book (or article) of travel tips…and one of them was literally “We really can’t stress this enough…no one…ABSOLUTELY NO ONE…wants to hear about your last bowel movement!”

    16. lina*

      LOL we got exactly the same thing!! (Senegal, ’01-’04). Since I’m in public health now with a lot of people who work internationally, it sometimes still comes up – also “what parasites have you had and how did they make your poo look?” – but less frequently.

      1. Carol the happy*

        Dang- one roommate had been in Peace Corp until recently; we were food shopping and she took a bunch of unwrapped carrots, green tops still on. And she started bargaining loudly with a produce department guy about how she had never seen such awful carrots and wouldn’t pay more than (foreign currency amount) for twice that many!

        I tried to hide, as she realized that the A&P doesn’t work that way!

        After that, she’d give us her share of the grocery money, but she did once get a really good price on a new rug….

        1. Reluctant Mezzo*

          I once got several hundred dollars for paying in cash for pickup repairs…hey, it’s worth asking even in the US because of the merchant account percentage the vendor has to pay for you using a card.

    17. Not suitable for home*

      This is such good advice.

      I travelled with a group through developing countries and this was breakfast conversation topic.

    18. Cats Ate My Croissant*

      There’s a story behind that and I’ll cheerfully go to my grave never hearing it!

    19. Rebecca*

      I worked in healthcare. It was not only normal to discuss these things, but for some people, riveting. Not only poo but phlegm. I’m very interested in phlegm myself.

      1. K*

        I just had pneumonia and was startled by the level of detail my care team wanted to know about my phlegm

    20. K*

      ALSO you wind up speaking an incomprehensible dialect that is a mix of English, host country language, and Peace Corps specific acronyms.

      But actually my most painful adjustment upon returning was the morning when I woke up to rain and my first thought was “yay! I don’t have to go to work today!” Before I remembered that that is not a thing in the US.

    21. K*

      In the country I served (Honduras) peace corps wouldn’t pay for courier service so if you needed lab work done you had to carry your own specimen to the lab (I got to travel across Tegucigalpa with a mole in a jar once). Consequently there was a tale about a volunteer in the previous cohort who was taking a taking a stool sample to the lab in Colonia Palmyra inside of a bag from a nice

      1. K*

        Department store, but a thief snatched the bag and ran away. Y’all, I totally believed this happened!
        Until I returned to the US and went to an RPCV meetup and told the story, only for every single person there to tell me they’d heard it in their country of service too. A global urban legend is an interesting phenomenon, IMO.

    22. huh*

      Aww, there was a fun comment thread going where someone couldn’t understand why this was necessary. I’m assuming it got moderated. Oh well.

    23. Allright, before the flying monkeys attack*

      Dunno? I was a combat medic in the army, and ’observing your stool’ was one of the best ways to first ’get someone sorted’ beforethey die off. So maybe it is in their training? And maybe in there for a reason?

  3. maybe a tangent, but still weird*

    I’m not sure this is totally on topic, but throwing it out there. My first job was in a call center. I was relief for the main receptionist during her breaks and lunch. She called the district manager “daddy bear” and he called her “baby bear”. One time he brought her in a stuffed bear. Everyone saw this and no one commented. It wasn’t that I thought it was normal, but today I would have reported it to HR :)

    1. Aggretsuko*

      My mom’s old boss wrote down that he wanted a hot blonde on something or other. She bought him a Barbie doll.

      They didn’t have THAT kind of relationship, but the boss did once write me an email from “Mom” saying “Remember, sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, love, Mom.”

      2. Charming Kitten*

        Once worked at a startup where the CEO was the ex of the COO, who was married to the third member of the C suite. THAT wasn’t fraught at all…

        1. Zephy*

          I would watch the *hell* out of that TV show but absolutely hate working in that real-life office.

        2. lost in translation*

          I believe I may have worked with you! LOL. Place I worked at had the same setup.

      2. maybe a tangent, but still weird*

        Picture like the whole office watching and no one saying anything acting like this is the most normal thing in the world. She also kept trying to get me fired. It was amazing.

    3. Trotwood*

      I worked on a team where two people were very publicly a couple at work but were married to other people. I believe the man was in the process of separating/divorcing but the work relationship predated his separation. I can only imagine how nightmarish it was to be the third wheel on a 12-hour night shift with those two. The stories of the quantity of at-work extramarital affairs that were happening at my workplace in the ’90s and early ’00s are beyond belief.

        1. maybe a tangent, but still weird*

          This was also the early 00s. Its strange, I work in a male dominated field now, and you’d think the sexism would be rampant–but is super chill. Never encountered anything else like this.

      2. maybe a tangent, but still weird*

        Maybe the weirder part is that I don’t think they were a couple. She was really funny to work with tho. One time she told me all about reading 50 Shades of Gray. It was my second day on the job. I still have work nightmares about this place.

      3. Bruce*

        My first job in the early 80s was a swamp of work-place affairs, there were also a lot of single parents who liked to party after work at the local late night bar and disco (early 80s so yes discos were still a thing)… I had a non-work girlfriend so I stayed out of all of that (other than a few nights dancing to Madonna). After hearing some of my stories my GF went out and made a poster sized photo print of herself and suggested I hang it up in my office, this seemed to have the desired effect of making me off limits (we later married and had kids, together until she passed away)

        2. goddessoftransitory*

          I’m so sorry for your loss. That was inspired and she sounds wonderful.

      4. Soft clothes for life*

        This happened to me, too, in the early 2000s! Except the man was not divorcing his wife, and she would sometimes pop in to the office. Very awkward!

        In the late 2000s, I worked abroad in a hardship post where you couldn’t bring your family. Everyone lived and worked together on a compound and it was very common to have a “work-city” spouse. I never did, and could not get over the cognitive dissonance of the work-city spousal goodbyes when one of them went on home leave.

    4. Charlotte Lucas*

      Somehow I imagined her saying this in Cassandra Cillian’s voice. (Specifically when she and Jenkins are undercover in “The Librarians and the Infernal Contract.”)

        1. maybe a tangent, but still weird*

          Yeah she would talk like a little girl with him too. Very strange. The strange part is no one thought it was weird?

        2. Vimes*

          I have Librarians weaponry in my trunk. Also have the Bank of Thieves sign. When the show ended they had a big warehouse sale only my son is an Attack Child so no edged weapons in the house. The Hello Kitty machete is also in storage (Harbor Freight was selling machetes for $4.99 and I had poor impulse control and also Hello Kitty stickers).

          1. froodle*

            I have absolutely nowhere to put sweet sweet Librarians props and yet, I am both super jealous and filled with the urge to steal…

              1. froodle*

                Alas, no, not even in the States. Probably for the best for budget and space reasons, because otherwise…

  4. Diomedea Exulans*

    It was one of the biggest and best known multinational companies. A tech team with 50-50% male-female distribution that prided itself on being feminist and an advocate for human rights. And the team’s favourite happy hour or work-hour team building activity was to play Cards Against Humanity. Not a single person protested or thought it was work-inappropriate. They even created a team-specific version of it and we had to play it at every_single_work_event. Everyone seemed really enthusiastic and thought it was hilarious.

    1. JHunz*

      The thing about Cards Against Humanity is that it can be great fun until someone gets genuinely offended by something. If you have a group where people get along and are able to separate the offensive humor of the game from reality, it’s a good time.

      Of course, the flip side is that it’s a ticking time bomb because it only takes one bad interaction or unintentional poking of something too sensitive for the whole thing to come down. I certainly wouldn’t recommend playing it at work for that reason.

      1. Zombeyonce*

        I would feel so bad for any new people coming into this environment. It’s hard to speak up when something makes you uncomfortable if everyone else is acting like it’s fine (which is the big issue with a lot of these stories today). It builds resentment and increases turnover of new staff.

        1. MBK*

          Exactly this. Everyone thinks everyone is cool with it because they act cool with it because they’re expected to be cool with it. So as the new person, you don’t want to be The One Who Ruined It, so you act cool with it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

          I go to a number of related professional conferences where one of the social activities is always Tabletop Game Night. Which is awesome. But for a while, there was always at least one of the “deliberately offensive social card matching” games involved, and it was easy to see the “we’re all friends here” / “don’t make waves” dynamic creep in. Game night continues, but everyone’s a lot more content-aware now.

          1. not your traditional office*

            I have experienced this exact scenario at work. We have been playing CAH as a “team building exercise” for the last couple years. Just hired a new person who refuses to use any profanity. I’m sure you can imagine how that went.

      2. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

        I have a house rule that if a card crosses your personal lines, you can pass on it and get another one. Some people pass on “The Holy Bible,” others on sex references.

        1. HQetc*

          We had this same house rule when I was in grad school, plus you could also fully take cards out of rotation. It made the game way more fun for us, a bunch of socially anxious nerds, because you didn’t have to worry about whether cards would cross other people’s lines and could really go all in. It only works if you don’t have any edge lord-y, don’t-be-a-prude types who get all shirty about placing “limits” on their “creativity, but honestly those are exactly the types I don’t want to play with, so it was a good screener. Fortunately, we didn’t have many and they were not invited to return.

        2. Not on board*

          Our only rule for Cards Against Humanity is “D**k Fingers” always wins. Until a Zoomer spoiled it, and DID NOT PICK it.

      3. Ha2*

        It takes one person being legitimately offended… but that also may happen without that person being able to voice that offense because “everyone else is having fun”. You never really know who is having fun and who is stuck between a rock and a hard place, not having fun but also scared about social repercussions if they’re the spoilsport. (And third option – which is having fun because they think the game is haha joking-but-not-joking and they actually think rape and racism are funny. Don’t want to create a culture where those people feel at home even if nobody realizes who they are.)

        1. Worldwalker*

          I think a lot of it is who you are playing with. If you’ve got a group whose attitude is “OMG, they went there?” and laughs, that’s one thing; if the group takes cards seriously, and takes offense, not so much. You really have to know the kind of people at the table.

      4. Ally McBeal*

        No, it’s just not an appropriate game for people to play with coworkers. Apples to Apples exists as an alternative for kids and coworkers.

        1. Amy Goldschlager*

          The other option for similar gameplay is Dixit, which I only discovered 5 months ago and love. The task is to pick which of the beautiful, surrealistic images in your hand fits a phrase. It’s very creative and very lovely.

          1. Dasein9 (he/him)*

            If I ever own my own home, I want to wallpaper the bathroom with Dixit cards. They’d be lovely to gaze at while in the tub.

          2. Bruce*

            Cool, will have to look that up. I do like Apples to Apples and my wife won’t play Cards Against Humanity!

            1. JustaTech*

              There are many wonderful things about Dixit (the expansion packs!) but one that isn’t really mentioned is that unlike Apples to Apples, you don’t have to be able to read to play Dixit so it’s great for folks who don’t all read the same language well (or kids who really want to play but aren’t good readers).

          3. Lydia*

            Code Names has a version with pictures that is mind bendingly difficult, but a lot of fun.

          4. Worldwalker*

            I’ve never seen that; I’ll have to look.

            I’d like to pitch “Tabloids.” (full disclosure: I work for the publisher) The basic idea is to assemble the most ridiculous tabloid headlines ever. “Elvis and Bigfoot Prevent Nuclear War” kind of things. It’s child-safe, and uproariously funny.

            1. Ally McBeal*

              Ooh, I work in media and bet my coworkers would like this game. And it’s from the makers of Munchkin, which is one of my favorite games to play with friends. Thanks for the rec!

            2. Casual Fribsday*

              This exists! It’s called Man Bites Dog. (Obviously not the movie of the same name.)

          5. Ally McBeal*

            I love Dixit! Codenames (and Codenames Pictures) are also great to play with coworkers.

          6. gamer*

            Just One is a great, SFW cooperative word game. I also love Phantom Ink – can’t wait to try the new Arcana version.

            1. Insulindian Phasmid*

              aaaa I love Phantom Ink but I can’t get any of my friends to play with me.

          7. Wendy Darling*

            I first heard about Dixit when someone recommended it verbally as a non-offensive alternative to Cards Against Humanity and, possibly because Cards Against Humanity primed me, I didn’t spell it “dix” in my head so I was like “sorry in what way is something with ‘dicks’ in the name less offensive?”

            1. Jellybean_thief*

              I don’t remember dixit, but the description here makes me want to recommend the game Ouisi (“we see,” but also “yes yes” in French and Spanish).
              It’s a stack of (beautiful, closely cropped) photos, and each player needs to place their next photo card on the field of play next to a card it relates to (“relates” can be as vague or specific as you want— “the dominant color is blue” “similar textures,” “both close-ups of cats” are all acceptable relationships).
              Creative, collaborative, playful, interesting insight into how people see things differently—it’s a great work-appropriate icebreaker game.

          9. Checkerboard Cat Mom*

            Thank you, this is the most useful explanation of Dixit I’ve ever seen. It always sounded vaguely like something I might like, but I was never sure, and no one I know owns it. I’m EXTREMELY picky about board games, because about 80% of the time, they become bored games for me.

          1. JustaTech*

            But not Codenames After Dark!
            My husband’s company was having a game day and I guess someone just bought a bunch of games without looking too closely and they managed to get the NSFW version of Codenames. My husband noticed and they managed to stash it away before it became an issue.

        4. HailRobonia*

          Even with Apples to Apples we’ve had to take cards out of rotation. Hiroshima?

        5. SimonTheGreyWarden*

          There’s also Kids Against Maturity (just as many poop jokes as you’d expect, none of the profanity and stuff). Also, I had great fun playing Ransom Words against my MIL.

      5. MusicWithRocksIn*

        Honestly I think it’s way less fun and creative than apples to apples. In cards against humanity you usually win based on getting the most shocking card, it’s pretty standard when to apply it. In Apples to Apples you actually have to be creative, and it is so much funnier when someone manages to make a really great pair because they were working with basic tools instead of pre-constructed ideas. I hated when it got really popular. And so many people thought it was hilarious to play it at work or with family and kept trying to bring it places it shouldn’t be. I never turn down games, but I refused to play it so many times that year.

        1. recoveringCAHaddict*

          My best friend and I met in high school, and together we went through an Apples to Apples phase (high school) and a Cards Against Humanity phase (college). Just recently we were discussing whether nowadays we’d be more offended/shocked by it but we were trying to decide if that’s because we’re now in our 30s and more mature/have fully formed frontal lobes, or if it’s because of PC culture. We both landed on not having fully formed frontal lobes as the reason why it was SO funny in college.

          That said I did used to play it with family but my family is very strange and not normal. Humor like that is ordinary by our standards lol. My 12-year-old cousin used to be allowed to play with us BUT she wasn’t allowed to ask what anything meant…

        2. Ainsley*

          The problem is Apples to Apples can have questionable cards too – once I was playing with my uncle and he got Timothy McVeigh. The only problem is he worked in the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City but then moved to Colorado right before the bombing happened, and a lot of his former coworkers died. Needless to say, that card went in the trash that day.

      6. a bright young reporter with a point of view*

        If it’s people you’re close with and trust to not have horrible politics, it can be fine, I guess. If it’s coworkers, it’s hard to know like, are they laughing because that’s dark and messed up and we all agree? Or are they laughing because they are actually misogynistic and this is a fun excuse to show that, because “it’s just a joke!” I know I wouldn’t enjoy playing it with anyone I didn’t know and like in that way.

      7. Tea Monk*

        Yes people think I’m wild for refusing to play but like I want to have a good time and trying to offend people isn’t fun for me

      8. Elizabeth West*

        I was in a group like this, outside work. We played CaH all the time, for hours, and every time we ran into something offensive, everyone would go, “Nooooooo no no.” We all pretty much agreed on which ones were not funny.

        I would never ever ever play this game with coworkers. Ugh. That way lies madness.

    2. Shades*

      I literally had to yell at coworkers at happy hour last night about this.
      “Oh, they have Cards Against Humanity! I haven’t played since lockdown, let’s play!”
      “Oh, fun, yeah!”
      Me: “Are you insane? I work with you all and I’m the only woman here!”
      “But we’re not working on any projects together right now, we’re basically just friends!”
      Me: “But I might have to work with you in the future, and I’d prefer to be able to actually look you in the eye!”

    3. Momma Bear*

      At one company we played Cards Against Humanity at the holiday party. It is very very audience specific and not something I would expect to get away with with a larger team.

    4. Trotwood*

      CAH can be fun in the right setting, but with coworkers it is 100% bad news. When I was only a year or two out of college, it got brought out at a happy hour, and one very skeevy manager was clearly delighting in making a very conservative young woman on his team read all the most inappropriate cards out loud. It was bad bad bad. That guy did get fired a couple of years later after one dirty joke too many in the office, but it should have happened way sooner.

    5. AnonnyNoob*

      We (a mixed development group) recently played CAH after dinner at a company retreat as a sort of comic relief.
      As my company is very big on inclusive, well mannered, nonviolent speech, we went to town with the game, performing dramatic readings of the results, reenacting Jerry Springer, and calling each other every name in the book.
      Our nicest, most chill developer played the game all evening, sitting there with a beatific smile while the insults flew thick and fast.

    6. Blue Spoon*

      For me, Cards Against Humanity is a strictly friends-only game. I won’t play it with coworkers due to the inappropriate nature, and I won’t play with family because there are things on those cards I would prefer not to have to explain to relatives (my poor husband had to explain one particularly dirty term to his aunt once).

      1. BurnOutCandidate*

        I judged a round of CAH with a particulary dirty term I didn’t know. I had to look it up on my phone to even make sense of it…

        If you’re a Firefly fan, there’s a GIF of Nathan Fillion as Mal that’s commonly used on the ‘net of him looking confused, flicking his fingers in front of his face, as he’s trying to make sense of it, before he finally facepalms.

        That was what I did for about a minute as my mind wormed its way around the whole situation.

        1. My Dear Wormwood*

          lol I know exactly which card you mean and I did much the same thing. It was played in the context of “The National Museum now has an interactive _____ exhibit”

          1. BurnOutCandidate*

            A fellow Screwtape fan!

            I don’t remember precisely how the card it was playing on was worded, but it had to do with superhero names.

            And I know that my friend played the card thinking that it was a sure win on the round, except my ex knew me better and what kind of superhero name would appeal to me. It was tough to judge. I wanted to reward… that for the boldness, but my ex just made more sense.

            (My ex and I had been broken up for a couple of years at that point. It was a case where it didn’t work romantically, but it wasn’t a reason to jettison friends and friends groups.)

      2. CAH Fan*

        We have a house rule that if you don’t know what it is and/or don’t want to have to explain it to the more innocent at the table, you can quietly put the card aside.

        2. SimonTheGreyWarden*

          We did this the handful of times we played with our DnD group. One of the gals was very sweet and very clueless. If you wouldn’t explain it to her, you just wouldn’t use the card.

      3. Great Frogs of Literature*

        The one and only time I have played CAH was with my uncle and his friends. (He’s only a year or two younger than my dad, lest you imagine that this is one of those large extended families where we might be close to age-peers.) I knew what it was, and I thought, “Well, this is certainly an interesting choice to play with your mid-twenties niece, but you’re all really excited about it, so… I guess we’re doing this.”

        Reader, they did not know.

      4. Lady Danbury*

        I’ve played CAH with family, but only at events with siblings/cousins where we’re all around the same age. I’m already cringing at the thought of playing with anyone from my parent’s generation or above!

        1. wendelenn*

          And. . . now I’m imagining the actual Lady Danbury of Bridgerton playing CAH with Violet and the adults in the family. And hilarity ensued.

        2. Anita Brake*

          My husband and I played it with my kids (late teenagers at the time) and his mom.

        3. SimonTheGreyWarden*

          I would play it with my MIL before I would EVER play it with either of my parents.

    7. Liane*

      Tangential comment. There’s a family friendly version. I cannot imagine how to make CAH family friendly.

        1. Higgs Bison*

          There’s also Kids Against Maturity which has more edge than A2A, but is still relatively tame.

      2. Sunshine*

        I saw that at the library. I wondered how a family-friendly CAH would be different from Apples to Apples. Then I saw one of the cards was something about “a cow’s butt.” That does sound like something a lot of families with little kids would have a lot of fun with!

        1. Worldwalker*

          Totally un-card-related (but cow butt related) story:

          I used to be the manager of a Tandy Leather store, 30+ years ago (back when it was the real Tandy Leather… Leather Factory bought up their trademarks at the bankruptcy auction). One of the manager’s jobs was teaching Cub Scout workshops, etc. As you might imagine, a bunch of 7-year-olds or thereabouts could be a bit of a fractious group. So, my first bit, after I introduced myself, was to roll out the biggest chap side I had in the store (half a cow, moderate-thickness leather, chrome-tanned, and usually black) and have one of the kids hold an end of it while I stretched it out and asked them to identify the various parts. My end was the neck, the legs were obvious, the back was obviously the part that didn’t have legs, etc. “And what part do you think it is that Bobby is holding?” Yeah … after that I owned them. Because to a bunch of pre-teen boys, there is apparently nothing funnier than one of their buddies holding a cow’s butt.

            1. SimonTheGreyWarden*

              Have a 7 year old. Can concur. Mine’s a boy so the next funniest word is p*nis.

      3. Walk on the Left Side*

        There is indeed a family version of CAH that is not Apples to Apples, which is a totally separate game.

        The family friendly version of CAH replaces most of the sexual and otherwise definitively “adult” content with poop jokes, with cards like “Filling my butt with spaghetti” featuring prominently in the examples on the box. If you don’t mind a lot of bathroom humor, it’s pretty darn funny.

        In the height of pandemic times, I found a website that could host a game the same format as CAH, but let you build your own deck. I built up a relatively SFW base, then had add-on decks of NSFW cards, the bathroom humor (yes, that set was named “the poop deck” because I have the same sense of humor as my children), and then also a pile of general “Cards Against Technology” ones, and some specific to the company I had just left. And then played that game, online, with coworkers who were still at the company I had just left. And it was *fantastic* because we could leave out the NSFW stuff and include the technology cards.

        For any other software/tech folks in the audience, it was prompts like:
        “This sprint, EVERY team is going to stop what they’re doing and focus on _.”
        “Can I get access to the prod db? I need to fix _.”
        “How’d the build get broken THIS time?”
        “Let’s circle back tomorrow so we can touch base on _. We need to identify some action items.”
        “Yesterday, I worked on _. Today, I’ll be doing _.”
        “_ never worked to begin with.”

        and responses like:
        “A blameless retrospective”
        “A poorly-executed SQL injection attack”
        “Caching problems”
        “Our custom Jira workflow”
        “The shame of failing a phishing test”
        “Wearing many hats”

        and I would like you all to know that I also included this response in the deck:
        “Resigning from a job by spelling out ‘I QUIT’ on a desk in cod, haddock, and tilapia”

        This was a version I could very happily play with coworkers — but not one where you’d really want your management involved in the game!

        1. Junior Dev*

          Is there a way to share the decks you made or the tools you made them with? That sounds amazing.

          1. Walk on the Left Side*

            It’s a site called Bad Cards. It used to be called “All Bad Cards” but appears to have upgraded since the last time I played on there. I believe you should be able to find my “Working in Tech” deck using this pack code: FHWnwvA2bzLXZagobJLR

            If you’re interested in “the poop deck” which is just a couple extra poop-themed white cards, that one is here: yxTOxE3IGhFus1jz15FH

            For more general nerd stuff, try: 6mC2jyFIgJvoXiKto5R6

            The kid-friendly one seems to be split in two decks:
            FiCsT9D6FlIO6wTOj4jv
            1ISyT7YcbHcffe6VkIBV
            There are some vocab words in there some younger kids may not know (like “encroaching” for example) and references to books they may not have read (like “A B-Ark Golgafrinchan”) — but I think you could also duplicated the decks and then remove whatever you don’t want, and add more that cover your own favorite nerd culture, in-jokes etc. :)

          2. Walk on the Left Side*

            Not sure if my longer reply is in moderation or the website ate it…but if that fails, try:
            bad.cards/?pack_code=FHWnwvA2bzLXZagobJLR

        2. Blue Spoon*

          I love that website! I once ran a game there for a gaming group that I’m in, and between decks about the game in general and a custom one I made including a lot of the group’s in-jokes, we didn’t even have to use the base Cards Against Humanity deck.

      1. RC*

        Okay, Exploding Kittens is legit a good choice though. Easy to learn, plays quick, the only offensive bit could be a cute kitten with a bomb (who you can defuse with a laser pointer so it’s obviously a cartoon), just don’t get the NSFW version with illustrated genitalia.

        1. MusicWithRocksIn*

          The people who made Exploding Kittens have a new game called Mantis that’s really good. It’s easy to play and easy to learn and works well with a larger group. A nice low spoons game. I’ve also played Anomia with coworkers and that was really fun- you have to think super fast sometimes but it’s good for a keep you on your toes game.

          1. Nomic*

            Mantis is just a great game. Kid-friendly, group friendly, only cut-throat if you decide to be . Heartily recommend.

          2. Blue Spoon*

            Anomia is a great game. It’s easy to learn, you can play it with a group, and it’s just thinking fast and word association, so it’s not super difficult to keep up with.

    9. Skeptic53*

      Over 40 years ago I was in a situation where a game with co-workers went bad. It was Trivial Pursuit of all things. I was doing my internship on the East Coast, I’m from Seattle. The ICU nurses challenged the residents to a TP game, losers to cook dinner for the winners. The residents got their plastic pie thing filled and made it to the middle first. The nurses got to pick the category, they chose Geography. They pulled the card and started celebrating. All my teammates were from the East. They started passing the card along and saying “Indonesia! No, Portugal! No, Singapore!” I got the card and the question was “What two countries are on the opposite sides of the Straits of Juan de Fuca?” I had a hard time convincing my team I knew the answer cold. The Straits in question separate the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, USA, from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. The nurses were so mad, they claimed it wasn’t fair, and reneged on cooking dinner. The bad feelings lasted a surprisingly long time.

    10. Worldwalker*

      The thing is, CAH is offensive to everyone. No matter who you are, there’s a card to offend you. That’s kind of the point.

      I know a lot of people dislike CAH for that reason; I’m married to one of them. Yes, it’s crude, lewd, and rude. In my defense, I can only say that the calendar can make me grow old, but it can’t make me grow up.

    11. a fever you can't sweat 0ut*

      This, plus people getting iced and then drugs in the bathrooms. tech bros in the early 2010’s were a wild ride man.

      1. Wendy Darling*

        People still get iced at my work.

        The only thing I can say in its defense is I have been pulled into the recon re: whether a prospective victim would be okay with being iced and no one ices anyone unless they’re sure the person is down. If you ice someone and they politely decline that does not reflect badly on them at all, but it does low key look bad for the person who iced them because they should have known better.

        1. Overthinking It*

          What does “iced” mean in this context? Not. . .getting a bucket of ice dumped on you. . .? Because once it was dumped, it would be too late to withhold consent.

          1. Long time reader*

            I believe it involves having to chug a Smirnoff Ice while down on one knee.

          2. Em*

            You surprise someone with a bottle of Smirnoff Ice (wine cooler type drink) and when they notice the bottle they have to chug it.

    12. A*

      At one of my jobs along the way they planned to play CAH at an after-hours event and thank goodness I had worked several places before that because I was horrified. I’ve played that game with close friends without incident, but. Coworkers??? I did not attend. But it was lots of people’s first job out of college and among other bonkers things at that job, I shudder to think what they thought was normal after working there.

    13. Delta Delta*

      I like the guy who makes Facebook videos of playing Cards Against Humanity with his cat. But that’s about where that should stop and it probably isn’t a great work idea.

    14. CAH Chaos*

      I love CAH but I would be very skeptical about playing with anyone I was involved with professionally. When I was working at my college’s LGBT center I made the very unpopular decision to ban it in the center. My logic was people came for a safe space and some people lacked awareness of what other’s boundaries were. The person who was hired after me when I graduated unbanned it and literally a week later a fight broke out because of a card combination that someone, who wasn’t playing and just trying to study, found repulsive.

      I don’t miss working there…

    15. JustaTech*

      I once had a slightly edgy coworker suggest CAH for a work social event. Everyone who knew what it was said “Nooooo!” but our director was like “oh, that sounds good”.

      It took some quick thinking on my part to come up with a card I was willing to say out loud at work that was also sufficiently terrible to get the point across.
      (“Lance Armstrong’s missing testicle”, in case you are curious.)

  5. Miri12*

    At my first job, I had to log my time in fifteen minute increments. There were codes for every possible task under the sun. I was not working on a project being billed hourly or anything like that. There was no good reason for this level of micromanagement.

    Oh, and everyone at the company was required to log time in fifteen minute increments, too.

        2. Charlotte Lucas*

          Yep. It’s nice if they let you group the time, though. So, 2.25 hour of doing X instead of 15 minutes logged 9 times.

          I’ve been inflicted with a lot of different time-keeping systems, and the quality varies wildly. People should have to use the systems they develop for at least 3 weeks.

      2. Fed-Ex*

        I always wondered what to put reading my emails under. I was glad to leave the gvt 18 years ago.

        1. Sneaky Squirrel*

          The general advice I’ve given to staff when I’ve held jobs like this is to not overthink it – things like reading work emails is a method of getting organized and chatting with your colleagues for 15 minutes is a method of teambuilding (and many people tend to waiver in and out of talking about work and personal life). If there’s a code you spent most of your time in that space doing, use that, otherwise split up that time equally across codes.

        2. K*

          If it’s client related and non medical, 106. Client related and medical, 340. Otherwise, 990. (At least for my position).

      3. Jen with one n*

        I’d say it depends on your department. I’ve been a federal employee for over 20 years and have never had to do that.

        I’m outside the U.S., though.

        1. Failed Astronut*

          I don’t know that it’s normal for civil servants, but it’s normal for contractors so that our time can be billed to the government. Even indirect time, which ultimately gets billed as overhead costs.

        2. wendelenn*

          but did you have to email 5 things you did this week t\o a completely unrelated outsider?

          (sorry. . . )

      4. Annon*

        I work on government contracts, we are required to log time in 6 minute increments. It’s not weird in Government contract work, but when I explain filling out my time card to people, they tend to look at me in horror.

        1. I Have RBF*

          Yup. Been there, done that, I still have my old log books somewhere. Environmental consulting that bid government contracts. In the 90s. Some weeks my timecards were two pages.

        2. allathian*

          I did that when I started my current job 18 years ago, 10 years ago we switched to 15-minute increments.

          That said, I’ve always been allowed to group the time, and nobody’s pretending that it’s anything other than a rough approximation.

      5. recovering litigation paralegal*

        OMG, billing as a litigation paralegal in 1/10s of an hour (i.e. 6 minutes), with two different codes for each activity. When you’re doing overtime all the time. The. Worst.

    2. Just a Pile of Oranges*

      I had a job like that too. I think because our services were being billed out to another company? Personally I thought it would have been fine to have one or two hour increments since nothing I did took less than an hour and most things were at least half a day.

    3. Emily Byrd Starr*

      At least you only had to log in your INcrements and not your EXcrements, like the Peace Corps comment above.

      3. le bureau des conneries françaises de Chicago*

        You jest, but it’s not uncommon in my firm to round up to the next quarter to give yourself enough time to go sit on the can. After all, in there, you’re probably thinking about the client’s problem, aren’t you?

    4. NotAnotherManager!*

      Everyone in our organization, billing or not, does this. It’s a bit of a pain until you get into the groove of it, but it’s actually been really helpful at looking at metrics, particularly around training and staffing. (It’s easier to argue you need a llama groomer when the llama tamers are billing more time to grooming than taming.) The system we use also has a lot of tools that make entering the time pretty quick and easy. Probably overkill in a smaller organization, but if you have a lot of people, it’s a good way to be to always know what’s going on at both a high and more detailed level without having to look at status reports ore call a bunch of supervisors.

    5. Liane*

      I worked for an otherwise sensible & good company that started time tracking, I think for just our department. (No billable hours.) We even had a code, TT, for time tracking!

    6. Packaged Frozen Lemon Zest*

      This is pretty standard for consulting. The second consultant I worked for (and the one I stayed at the longest had a time entry system that required us to log our time in FIVE MINUTE increments. Fortunately you could select/fill multiple rows at a time but we were all told that this was what our busy and important clients needed.

      This company also had a very long name (think “Phillips Associates Grooming Inc”) and our email addresses and website were Lemon-Zest@Phillips-Associates and phillips-associates.com (even in 2009 when nobody was using dashes anymore). Folks had asked to abbreviate to @pagi for years but the owner could not bear to not use his full name. I did think all of this was a little annoying but mostly completely reasonable from an IT perspective.

    7. MigraineMonth*

      My company did this too, even thought 1) my role was exempt and 2) my role was non-billable.

      They claimed it was so they could track time spent on projects, but conveniently it also let them have a disciplinary talk with anyone who logged less than 40 hours (excluding lunch) in any week, so it was impossible to take comp time even if you’d worked 60 hours the week before.

      I was once spoken to about not being allowed to log an entire hour each day to “Admin tasks” (which included email, bathroom breaks, getting coffee, and basically anything else that wasn’t a meeting or project work). I fixed this by logging a half hour to “Admin tasks” and half an hour to “Logging time”.

    8. Timothy*

      I had to do exactly this for the last two months of my last job. When I was laid off, my first thought was, “Hallelujah! Don’t have to log my time any more!” As someone with 40+ years of experience, it was beyond ridiculous.

      So I was 65 and unemployed, and decided, “Yeah, OK, enough. I’m retired now.” And I gotta say, retirement is pretty awesome.

    9. I was a patent examiner*

      I was in a job for 14 years where this was the norm, and we had to produce one report for every 7 hours of work we did. You can imagine that every minute we weren’t working on a report, whether it was training or IT systems being down, etc. was logged down to the second even if it was only a three minute system outage. After I left that job I was blown away that I didn’t have to track my hours in the new job. I kept asking people where the tracking system was, and they looked at me like I had two heads. It was such a relief not to have to continue to do that!

    10. Tiger Snake*

      Gov’t Tiger, and IT-contractor Snake: The only thing weird here is that you didn’t have to log it into two systems at once.

    11. Bike Walk Bake Books*

      Long, long ago I had to do this as the sole admin/bookkeeper/everything person in a tiny tiny history consulting firm. No real point to me doing it–just a very anal boss who had read some management things to supplement his PhD in medieval Spanish history.

      Almost none of my time got billed to client work and I hated figuring out how to deal with a 10-minute project.

    12. Zircon*

      About 20 years ago I worked in a government job where this was the norm. Managed a team. Team moaned about it. The activity itself was fairly intense and took about 15 – 20 minutes each day. I had managed other departments where I found it really useful. Came to needing to replace a leaving employee who had kept good records. I asked for the records so I could see how much time that position spent doing particular activities. Conversation went a bit like this:
      Me: Could I please have all the time spent by X team on A code per week in the first quarter?
      Department: “No”.
      Me: Yes, I am allowed access to that information for planning and budgeting and budgeting purposes.
      Department: Oh, it’s not that. It’s that we can extract that information.
      Me: What information can you extract?
      Department: What each person entered each day.
      Me: But that’s just the raw data.
      Department: Yes, that’s all that’s available.
      Me: But don’t you process it in any way?
      Department: No.
      Me: Isn’t it used for planning and budgets by the entire organisation?
      Department: No, I’ve been here 15 years and you are the first person to ask for anything.

      Nothing happened with the data!!! It got entered into a system and never got analysed!!! I told my staff that they didn’t need to do the stats anymore. No one asked where all our stats were.

    13. lizzay*

      Yeah, this is pretty widespread. I think the last job I didn’t have to do a timesheet in 15 minute increments was babysitting. Or bagging groceries. You obviously aren’t in consulting!

      1. Julia*

        I only had to do this twice in my 30 year career. First time was manager who implemented this for 6 months to see if I was splitting my time evenly between two parts of my job. I faithfully did this (including accounting for time spent on accounting time). After I demonstrated I was splitting my time evenly he wanted me to continue because he found it helpful. I politely declined.

        The other time was a retail job where we punched in and out.

  6. ecnaseener*

    May I just say I love how the “you may also like” section comes across in context. Examples of things you might think are normal if you didn’t know any better: taping people’s mouths shut during meetings, filming a sex tape, and biting!

    3. Zombeyonce*

      FYI: Duck Club is NOT a normal business practice. I know, I know, it all seems so innocuous, but apparently it makes some people uncomfortable.

      1. lurkyloo*

        I heard someone quack at work the other day and nearly spit my coffee out. After eavesdropping a little longer, I realized they were describing their child’s version of a duck noise. Phew.

  7. LessThanZero*

    I used to work at a startup where the owner’s last name was Miller. So much of our internal design-related things (not official logos) was a clear rip-off of the Miller High Life logo, and for major celebrations the featured drink was always 40s of Miller High Life. I was straight out of college, so this frat-like stuff didn’t seem that weird at the time!

    1. Zombeyonce*

      I’d love to see the expression on the boss’ accountant’s face when the boss tried to explain why a case of 40s should be considered a business expense.

      1. LessThanZero*

        Oh the CEO would toss someone some cash to go get them, not sure they were being expensed. Also we were getting them from a gas station, so no convenient cases/boxes to carry them around in!

        I’m glad this thread came along to make me remember all the weird details of this job lmao

      2. Heirloom 'Peep*

        At one place I worked, when my division’s president left, the company threw a huge party. Her favorite drink was Fireball and they bought a TON of it. Maybe not quite enough for one bottle per employee, but on that order of magnitude.

    2. LessThanZero*

      I should also mention that the only place in town to buy 40s of High Life was a sketchy gas station…. So for major office events someone would have to go to the gas station and buy a bunch of 40s, totally normal work activity!

  8. Just a Pile of Oranges*

    We had a Bratz doll. I don’t clearly remember why or what her origin story was, but this weird little doll in it’s tiny miniskirt became everyone’s favorite “elf on a shelf” game. Anyone could move her, but the (unspoken yet understood) rules were nobody could see you do it, she had to be somewhere visible and not in a person’s office or in a drawer or anything, and she had to be doing something.

    I saw her pole dancing, watering plants, filing paperwork, crab walking, blowing kisses… She’d show up randomly absolutely anywhere.

    1. Just a Pile of Oranges*

      I should say it wasn’t that I thought the doll game itself was normal. I just assumed that it was normal that any group of people would develop these weird rituals, the way online meme culture works.

      Many (most?) workplaces do not, in fact, operate like meme culture.

      1. Rachers*

        The Bratz dolls creep me out but this reminds me of my DH’s office. They have a Spider man action figure that periodically gets moved around the office which has been comical.

          1. Zombeyonce*

            I wonder how long it would take people to notice the doll was missing if you put it somewhere hidden. And would anyone complain?

        2. Ally McBeal*

          My office has a creepy plastic skeleton hand AND a ceramic animal statue that get moved around the office.

      2. LessThanZero*

        I just posted above you about some real frat-like behavior at a previous job and your comment reminded me that said job also had a meme wall, where we would make, print out, and tape up memes we made about each other/work things lol. I thought it was super normal at the time!

        1. Just a Pile of Oranges*

          Oh, we had one of those too! There was an empty bulletin board, an enormous one, that nobody had any use for and eventually people just started pinning random memes to it. I’d totally forgot about that, since it vanished at some point after we painted the walls.

        2. Moose*

          I had a boss who was a birdwatcher so every so often I would send him bird memes. He did in fact like them

      3. GreenApplePie*

        My current job has a lot of Gen Z/younger millennial staff so we do have a meme whiteboard. Sometimes people draw on it, sometimes people will do the old-fashioned thing of printing out a meme and hanging it up.

        Of course, this is only possible because of the office culture and a general understanding that there will be consequences if you add something inappropriate.

      4. Nina*

        I just assumed that it was normal that any group of people would develop these weird rituals
        I… also assumed that. I’m now questioning that assumption.

        Like, I’ve worked in the lab where the first sterile (nitrocellulose) filter paper always fell off the roll when you changed the roll, so you sacrificed it to the bunsen burner gods and then you wouldn’t get any more torn papers on the roll. I’ve worked in the lab where the first person in set the radio station and then put the radio as high up as they could reach (from the floor) and you could only change the station if you could reach the radio. I’ve worked in a place with a ‘dead to us’ wall of past team members, and in a place where a specific drawer in the showroom was the ‘mailbox’ where you put anything you wanted to say to a coworker. The office I’m in now, the meme is hiding stickers from software companies in places that are technically visible from the desks of people who hate that specific software package (e.g. there’s a Matlab sticker on the inside of a lighting panel).

        Is it STEM or have I just basically never had a normal job?

        1. amoeba*

          Oh, it’s STEM for sure! (Although my current coworkers are pretty professional by comparison… sadly, I miss that stuff!)

          I was also working in academia for years so, yeah. We used to make those elaborate hats for people’s PhD defenses, which is actually “normal” in Germany, and some of us then also exported the tradition when we went abroad for postdoc etc. Like, literally, it would take multiple sessions to make those from cardboard, hot glue, all kinds of materials… once, we made a miniature version of the whole two corridors our group occupied including every single lab. Another guy who played the bagpipes got a giant Scotsman. Stuff like that.

          And on the inside of the hat, there was always very, very NSFW pictures. Basically pornography. Which everybody knew, and of course at least some of the professors also found that hilarious and would check it out every time. So, in the beginning, we were using actual magazines to cut out the stuff from, so somebody was chosen to go out and buy them. Later on, that became less common (and we actually tried to make it at least a little bit more, err, tailored to the person, for instance also putting some pics of, like, nice-looking people at the beach that they’d actually enjoy – together with the mandatory body parts, of course.) So we’d search for those images on the lab computer, paste them all into a large Word document and then go to the PI of the other group sharing our space and ask him to print it, because he was the only one with a colour printer.
          We’d then all sit in the coffee room, drink coffee or beer, depending on the time of day, and cut those pics out and glue them into the hat.

          Aaaah, good times. I did know enough to not expect similar things to happen in my first actual industry job, though!

        2. K*

          Our lab also has a meme wall, with many department personalities past and present photoshopped into place as appropriate.

      5. Phony Genius*

        Our IT group used to have a screaming flying sock monkey toy that occasionally would fly across the office without warning. I want to say that I think this kind of thing is probably not uncommon in IT offices. But in IT, “not uncommon” does not necessarily mean normal.

        1. Wendy Darling*

          I worked on a team doing user research that involved a lot of hardware and sat next to the team that did the device prep. The devices came packed in foam and they would stack it up until the recycler picked it up.

          There were foam fights periodically. Like think snowball fights but indoors and with pieces of packing material. Also once one of the devices people accidentally knocked an entire wall of packaging into my cube while I was working, and I was super busy so I was NOT pleased.

      1. MusicWithRocksIn*

        It sounds fun! Except for pole dancing. Whoever made her pole dancing is why we can’t have nice things.

    4. Eskarina*

      I work in what is basically a gym/dance studio, and we have a lifesize cardboard cutout of Buddy the Elf that gets moved around in a similar fashion. My favorite was when I had my class lie down on the floor to stretch, looked up, and saw Buddy grinning down at me from his new spot, taped to the ceiling. One moment of absolute terror before I burst out laughing.

      1. Silvercat*

        Oh my god. We also have a lifesize Buddy the Elf (with a visitor badge) at my office (we’re the packaging design department at a medical manufacturer). Happily he doesn’t move around

      2. Elizabeth West*

        I’ve posted this before but at LabJob, we had a life-sized Frankenstein’s monster cutout someone who didn’t work there anymore left behind. We would move it around the office to scare each other. My boss got me in the bathroom and then I got the metallurgy guy by hiding it in his darkroom.

        We also had a Halloween squeaky rubber rat (also life-sized) that would find its way onto people’s lunch containers in the fridge. That job and the company is long gone, but I still have the rat. It’s on my windowsill right now keeping my plant babies company. :)

    5. AnneCordelia*

      So this is reminding me of my all-time favorite AAM Christmas letter. One office had an Elf on the Shelf tradition, where the Elf would get passed around to different teams to be posed. Until one team (legal, I think?) posed him snorting cocoa mix through a rolled-up dollar bill, next to a naked Barbie doll. Then the tradition was banned.

      1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        That’s hilarious — I may have to try something similar this Christmastime. I honestly don’t care if folks want an elf on the shelf in the office, but I’m not interested in 10-20 daily all-staff emails with pictures of the elf, requests to guess where the elf is, and increasingly strident requests for everyone ignoring the elf to jump in and take a turn. I try not to be the Mayor of No Fun Town at my office, but I need to work hard in December to have a shot at any kind of vacation — no trees, dolls or Hanukkah balls!

    6. Coverage Associate*

      There is a legal precedent regarding Bratz dolls that is the rare precedent with some pop culture cache in my niche of the legal industry. When I present on the precedent, I wish I had a doll I could share a photo of.

      I don’t have the cite handy, but “Bratz doll” in any legal research software will give you the case.

    7. goddessoftransitory*

      We have a wee little tiny ghost taped up on one of the pipes in our workspace–he’s so small that unless you know where to look you’ll miss him. We don’t move him around, but a manager changes out his hat for various seasons and holidays. Right now he’s got an Easter bonnet.

  9. Snarkus Aurelius*

    My very first internship was the most bizarre work experience I’ve ever had, but I didn’t know it then.

    My boss was personally wealthy, as in 1% wealthy. But she was super cheap at work. When we organized the nonprofit’s annual conference, we got X many rooms free for staff for however many attendees booked rooms. My boss told us that we were going to be bunking together because there weren’t enough rooms. She had her own penthouse suite though! Only unpaid interns roomed together. (The paid staff had their own. Unpaid interns made up about 70% of the organization’s entire staff.) I learned later that we got a discount for every hotel room we didn’t fill for staff.

    I stayed in a large suite with **11 women**. Three of us shared a bed. Three were on the pullout. I vaguely recall some people on cots and the floor. All of us broke fire code. But think of a medium size hotel suite with 11 people staying in it. It was normal to me because I thought it was like dorm living on a Friday night.

    At my next job, we were planning that annual conference, and I asked the VP of Events, a very scary, fierce woman, if we could pick who we’d be rooming with or would she do it? She blinked twice and said, “No one ever shares hotel rooms. I’ve never heard of that! Hotel rooms for staff are the cheapest expense so cutting it makes no difference in the event budget.”

    I was mortified for the remainder of my time there.

    1. soontoberetired*

      One part of my company forced people to share hotel rooms until HR got wind of it and put an end to it in the late 90s. Some places still do it.

        1. Bruce*

          At my first job I had to share a hotel room at a conference with my boss. He was a nice guy and I valued his mentorship for decades, but he snored.

    2. Llama Wrangler*

      Sharing hotel rooms was also something I thought was normal from my first job, and is otherwise not normal in my field – just my first place of employment trying to save money!

      1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        I was supposed to share a room with my boss on a work trip as an attorney, for a super cheap client. Thankfully, my boss paid for another room for himself, giving me the first room for myself. Honestly, if he hadn’t offered, I would’ve — the rooms were tiny and we are not the same gender. Awkward!

        Funniest part? Client was a huge multinational corporation. No one would be surprised about the cheapness if they heard who it was. They would’ve maaaaaybe saved $500 if we’d shared the room. They also made us take red-eye flights (boss upgraded; I didn’t, because I wanted to sleep and not listen to him blather about work).

      1. Sloanicota*

        Yep I still see it. You can … usually pick who you want to share with. It’s hard on new people.

      3. Wolf*

        Same in academia. Sharing rooms is the norm; we were happy when there were separate beds. Worst I’ve had was a shared bed with a shared blanket.

    4. Joyce to the World*

      I think I shared here before that I had a former Director who made me share a bed with her. (all female). She had a twin size air mattress that she placed on the bed next to me. Would straight up flop around during the night and the air mattress made so much noise. Next work trip she tried to pull that again and I insisted on one of those roll-away beds. Eventually I got my own bed, but we still shared a room.

      1. Grizzled*

        I had a similar experience working at a non-profit. I had to travel alone to a different city for a meeting. My boss had a friend who lived there and asked me to sleep at her friend’s house to save money. I had never met this friend of hers, she had a few kids, and I was to sleep on an air mattress in her living room. I said no and thankfully my boss got me a hotel room instead. Another time my boss and I were traveling together and she booked us bunk beds in a cabin at a summer camp. I got the double-sized bottom bunk and she had climb the ladder near my head to access her tiny top bunk.

      2. Calamity Janine*

        to say now what i thought when you previously shared this story: you should be commended for your restraint in not simply buying some wasabi peas from a purveyor of snacks and seeing how many you could sneak under her mattress during the night

        1. o_gal*

          But, but, maybe she’s really just “Shy” about sleeping Upon A (shared) Mattress.

    5. The Wizard Rincewind*

      I was surprised to discover that sharing a hotel room is not common. I work for a nonprofit and have always shared hotel rooms on the infrequent occasions that we travel.

    6. Lady Danbury*

      I once went on a work trip (to a very high COL city) where I shared an airbnb with 2 other female coworkers because it was cheaper than 3 hotel rooms, while the lone male had his own room. At the time I didn’t mind (it may have even been our idea), but nowadays absolutely not. Give me my own private hotel room, please and thank you!

    7. Strive to Excel*

      I have had a hotel room experience similar but it was for my brother’s out of town Little League trip. All 6 of us in one Red Lion room on the ground floor by the pool. *Not* my most pleasant hotel experience.

      1. Worldwalker*

        In my early 20’s, I shared a room at a science fiction convention with 12 other people. They sold it to us as a quad, but they only had 2 room keys. (this was back before key cards) We had people in the beds, people on the floors, and even a person in the bathtub. We had elaborate procedures for ganking enough towels from the housekeeping cart, hiding all of our sleeping bags, etc.

        I’m not one of the ultra-private people who can’t share a room, but even for me, that was a bit much. (on the plus side, I was smart enough to claim a place under a table, so at least the roommates who were both late and drunk didn’t step on me, though I was sometimes wakened by the screams from the people they did step on)

        1. I Have RBF*

          My wife tells the story of one SF&F con where she slept in the closet of Gopher Crash. That was better than ensconcing one’s self in the lobby “reading a book”.

        1. Miss Woodhouse*

          High school debate for me. It was a lot and the social politics of who got to share with who was exhausting. (Especially since I was the “had to” person to share with and not one of the “got to” girls. )

          1. Elizabeth West*

            Most of our forensics trips were close enough where we could drive back, albeit sometimes a bit late. I think the furthest we went was to Mizzou. I remember that trip very well because there was a tornado warning and we had to shelter in a campus building’s basement until it passed. There was a very good-looking dude (not sure if he was college or from another high school) who kept checking me out. I was a complete nerd at that age — to this day I can’t fathom why he was doing that. I never got to talk to him and find out. The tornado emergency ended and we all left!

    8. Jules*

      I’ve worked in nonprofits most of my career and had to share rooms in all of them except my current job. I got my reservation info for our annual meeting when I first started here and asked who I would be sharing with. The EA was so sweet when she told me everyone gets their own room.

    9. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

      My first year attending GenCon, there were … sixteen? people across multiple genders and a wide age range (16-40s, as I recall) sharing a standard two-queen hotel room. People slept on the floor, in the chairs, in the bathtub. It was a whole weekend.

      1. Worldwalker*

        That sounds like my story from … was it BaltiCon? … but with slightly more people. Check elsewhere in the thread for details.

        At one GenCon, I was sharing a room with the two people who were working at my booth. They got the beds. I took the floor. Because those beds were so soft, if I’d tried to sleep in one, they’d have had to pick me up by the ends and carry my totally stiff, seized-up body in to the vendor hall and prop it up at my booth. Ever after that, I stayed solo. When you have to drive 1200 miles, set up, run a booth for 4 days, then reverse the process, you need it.

        I have a weird thing about never staying in the convention hotel, even if I’m there as a guest, etc. In Chattanooga, for example, I always stay at a Red Roof Inn in Lookout Mountain — about 15 minutes from downtown. DragonCon, it’s out at the Country Inn & Suites. Etc. When I get done for the day, I want to be done. I need the time to decompress. I’m not an introvert by any means, but when I’ve been on all day, I need to be somewhere that it’s not so people-y.

        1. Mentally Spicy*

          I can definitely relate. Separate rooms is very much the norm in my industry. But there was one occasion where a huge workforce of staff and volunteers had to travel to a major city for a big event. My colleague and I travelled for 5 hours to get there, and when we checked in we were astounded to learn we would be sharing a room. How long was the event, you ask? Ten days! No-one had told us or even asked if we would mind. I liked my colleague a lot but we were working 12+ hour days on the event. And they expected us to then sleep in the same room too. For ten days!

          Hell to the no. That first night I quickly found myself a very, very cheap room in a very, very cheap hotel. The next day I vented my displeasure to my boss, his boss, the events manager, the person who booked the rooms and anyone else I could find until they magically managed to find a hotel room for me to move into.

          I’m a very, very calm and chill person. But don’t fuck with my private time!

        2. Fluff*

          Yup – and the funny rules when you have a big slumber party in the room:
          1. No hair dryers. Anytime.
          2. No smelly food in the fridge. No fishsticks, Sauerkraut, etc.
          3. No sex in any shared sleeping area. Find another hiding spot.
          4. Sign up lists for showering (morning, evening, afternoon) and cosplay prep in the room.

          See you ate DragonCon. I love the Country Inn.

          1. Overthinking It*

            I do remember a college ski trip, eight in a one bedroom (one bed as I recall) condo. The rule we had for showers was: close the curtain, and leave the door unlocked, so that the others could have access to the toilet.

      2. demo hall gm*

        LOL, my first jobs as a teen were demoing games at GenCon and Origins. I never shared with quite that many, but we sure did stack up a lot of people in one room. It was a little better when we became proper contractors at least.

    10. Vveat*

      Not in the US and 25+ years ago but it was common to book you a bed in a hotel, not a full room (unless you bought the “single room supplement”) – which meant sharing with complete strangers. I definitely had awkward encounters.
      My second job was for an European company that opened an office in the country, First thing we got a 2-week onboarding training in Paris and even though the company was on the cheap side, everybody got their own room – I couldn’t believe it.

    11. The Prettiest Curse*

      Wow, your first boss was awful! You were literally getting the staff rooms for free, what on earth was achieved by making so many people share one room?

      Scary Events VP was correct that, unless you’re sending 100 people to the Ritz, paying for a few hotel rooms for staff really won’t make a big difference to your event budget.

  10. Bugs*

    3+ hour, meandering meetings. I am now with a group that meets for 15 or 30 minutes and ends exactly on the dot and the difference is amazing!

    1. Roy G. Biv*

      Yes! Long “brainstorming” meetings at an ad agency where it really was a mandatory invitation to watch a narcissist think out loud with an audience, because she was bored.

      2. Middle Aged Lady*

        Mine was a narcissist with health and family issues, so we got to hear about those as well as her work ramblings. I was old enough by then to know it wasn’t normal, though.

    2. Sloanicota*

      Lord, my last job had basically an all-morning staff meeting (at least 2 hours, sometimes more) on Monday AM. When I started it seemed so weird, we weren’t that big a staff and inevitably it turned into things that should have been one-on-ones between my boss, who was hard to reach, and one person. But over time I just got numb to it … even as our staff shrank and shrank due to mismanagement (weird!). By the time I left, there were just two of us, and the “staff meeting” was still routinely running three hours.

      1. LTR FTW*

        Oh man we had this, it was at 8:30 on Monday morning and everyone had to attend. It was strictly for the benefit of the Big Boss… you could give your update (which took like 5-10 minutes) and then zone out for the remainder of the two hours. And only the PMs gave updates, the developers and designers just had to sit there. It was such a colossal waste of everyone’s time. But it made Big Boss feel like he was engaged with all the projects, so…

        1. Overthinking It*

          I remember Monday morning meetings that we never could get started. We met in the bosses office. Start time rolled around, person one sticks their head in, no one there (not even the guy whose office it is.) Well time to run to the restroom before we start, Person 2 sticks their head in, so one – time to check voice-mail really quick! Person 3, no one there, time to grab a coffee, the break room is just down the hall. Person 4, a quick phone call, Person 5, check email (really fast, this was the 90s, no deluge) By now, Person 1 has come back, found no one and wondered off to find a pen, Person 3 comes back, still no one, leaves to ask receptionist a quick question, Person 4 comes back, no one, back to write himself a reminder to stick on his monitor for after the meeting. . . and on, and on, and on!

    3. Trotwood*

      My workplace is structured where each manufacturing production team has a daily check-in at 8 am. Then all of the production managers would have a check-in at 9 am. My first manager hated going to the 9 am check-ins so much that he’d routinely run our 8 am meeting for 75-90 minutes to give himself an excuse not to go. I was so shocked to learn when I moved to another team to learn that the 8 am could be over in 20 minutes.

    4. WeirdChemist*

      Back in grad school the prof I worked for held a weekly meeting that was at least 2.5 hours. And if we didn’t have 2.5 hours worth of things to say, oh he’d MAKE it last 2.5 hours, mostly by finding the most nitpicky things to talk in circles about. These meetings were every Friday afternoon… Before that they were wednesdays *starting* at 6pm….

      Don’t miss academia!

      1. I Have RBF*

        At one company, the new CEO was annoyed that the parking lot was half empty on a Friday afternoon. People wanted to get out of town before the rush, and had usually already worked more than 40 hours. But that wasn’t acceptable to her. So we had weekly all-hands meetings, and they were not remote accessible. You got a talking to if you missed one without being on an emergency project. So everyone, including the people with 100 mile commutes that did the “stay in town during the week” thing, had to attend this meeting and stay until 5 pm. At least there was food and drink. But it was petty and ridiculous, like the CEO in question.

      2. Wolf*

        Same issue in academia. our group meeting was every Friday, starting 2pm… and it might go until 8pm if the biss had no other plans that evening.

        2. JustaTech*

          I am so, so glad that when my PI suggested that we do journal club at 5:30 on Fridays everyone just looked at him and said “no”.
          This was only possible because we didn’t have any grad students, only staff and post-docs.
          (Said PI had never noticed that everyone was an early bird and I was often the last non-post-doc to leave at 4:30.)

    5. KateM*

      I had this experience when my kids went to school and we had teacher-and-parents meetings. Eldest child, teacher would bring the headmaster to the meeting who would tell us some general boring stuff for half an hour, then we’d start with actual class things, that would maybe take another hour. Second child, teacher had most important things typed up as notes, every parent got a copy, she covered the questions in 15 minutes and let us go, if you were half an hour late you probably didn’t see the teacher at all unless there were many parents who wanted to speak 1-1 after the main part was over.

    6. I'm freeeeee!*

      Two hour weekly executive team meetings, complete with a 30 minute icebreaker and a rotating special guest EVERY week. This was at a relatively small company where most people had worked there for at least ten years, so it wasn’t as though we didn’t know each other.

    7. CareerChanger*

      Oh lord yes! We’d have meetings rarely, but then the boss would just be like “we need to meet at 2” and it would go until…whenever. Having meetings that start AND END is such a relief.

    8. Susie Occasionally(formerly No)-Fun*

      We didn’t have official 3+ hour meetings. Instead we had the hour long pre-meeting, followed immediately by the hour long meeting, followed by (you guessed it), the hour long post-meeting review.

      I don’t think this was an improvement.

  11. Ann Onymous*

    My sister is a teacher and some of the things that are normalized because of the budget constraints in US public schools are wild. At one point the only light in the staff bathroom had a burned out bulb, so the bathroom was pitch dark. Everyone just accepted that it would take multiple days to get the bulb replaced and used the bathroom with phone flashlights until someone brought in a string of battery powered Christmas lights and hung it on the coat hook inside the door.

    1. Random Thoughts*

      At my current job, I often have to work with stuff that’s in a very out-of-the-way, windowless storage area. One of the cavernous rooms has had the lights out for months. There are a few emergency overhead lights that are still on, so I’m working trying to read small labels in a murky glow. Yes, it’s been reported to maintenance!

        1. NoIWontFixYourComputer*

          Hopefully you’re in a state that has it’s own OSHA (such as CAL-OSHA for CA). Because OSHA isn’t going to do ANYTHING for at least the next four years.

        2. Random Thoughts*

          I’m actually looking into this! Thanks! It’s true, one does start to normalize things after a while.

    3. Rhetcon*

      YUP. A friend of mine is a teacher at a rural elementary, and they frequently get to take half-days because the electricity is out. They have an entire procedure where the kids wait in the dark for 10-30 minutes to see if it comes back on before everyone gets sent home.

    4. Ann O'Nemity*

      It is a TRAVESTY. The biggest local school district in our city has been begging for funding increases to fix crumbling infrastructure – leaky roofs, broken windows, actual holes in exterior walls, black mold, raw sewage backing up, no AC or proper ventilation, inadequate heating and frozen pipes, fire code violations, etc. Stuff that would get a restaurant shut down immediately, but somehow it’s okay in schools?

      1. Artemesia*

        so is the demographic of those schools minority and/or poor? Usually there are marching mothers who get things changed for better, or alas these days sometimes worse, when precious white kids are involved.

        1. Macropodidae*

          I’m an election inspector and most school special funding stuff goes up for a vote. Like new busses, building a new school because the current one was built in the ’60s and has asbestos, etc. I can 100% say that the people voting against these are the “My kids are adults; I don’t want my taxes to go up for these snowflakes,” people.

          What they don’t often recognize is that the taxes only go up for businesses and secondary residences. Fortunately, we’re a rapidly growing community that used to be mostly farmland (they complain about that too) so there are a lot of very involved parents that make sure to get out to vote.

          We recently got a new Community Center/YMCA and OMG they would not stop complaining. Funnily enough, the place is full of The Ancients doing Senior Fit and Aqua Cardio. All the yoga ladies are cool though.

      2. Wolf*

        Same issue, different country. I remember at the first day of 5th grade, we made a bet whether, in the 8 years we were going to be at that school, there would be a day when the bathrooms have toilet paper, soap and hand towels. If anyone found all three, they would tell the school newspaper and get mentioned in the next edition.

        Readers, we did not see that day. There were plenty days with no TP, plenty days with no soap, and no hand towels was almost a constant.

        This was way before covid. Last I’ve heard, it still isn’t possible to get a daily soap supply.

    5. Elizabeth West*

      I hate to say it but even the nice public schools are going to look like this before too long.

  12. Up to my elbows*

    We don’t often leave the building for lunch where I work, and when I started everyone had a different day of the week to wash everyone’s dishes. My day was Friday, and I often forgot, and found myself washing dishes on Monday morning. One day I finished my lunch then proceeded to the sink and washed my own dish and put it back in the cupboard, right in front of everyone else. Shortly thereafter at a staff meeting, it was announced that everyone was responsible for their own dishes.

    It seemed that there had been an employee a few years before me who would not wash her dishes, or anyone else’s, and everyone let this happen. I guess she wasn’t even listed on the dishwashing schedule.

    1. Emily Byrd Starr*

      That’s just weird. It’s always been my understanding that unless you’re specifically hired to wash dishes, everyone is responsible for washing their own dishes and no one else’s.

      1. Momma Bear*

        At a couple of jobs we had dishwashers so you just needed to put your stuff in the dishwasher for the night and the last person out set it to run. That seemed pretty reasonable to me, except for the fact that some people never put their dishes in the dishwasher in the first place. Ew.

        1. Heirloom 'Peep*

          We had a system sort of like that at our last place, except the problem wasn’t loading or running the d/w, it was emptying it. We had a rotation for teams to be responsible for emptying, but when (not if) they didn’t stay 100% on top of it, people would pile dirty dishes into the sink. There were probably not enough dishwashers for the number of people working there? If certain people caught you adding your dirty dish to the pile, they would literally yell at you. I picked up the bad habit of piling dirty dishes at my desk, which I still haven’t shaken 10 years later.

          1. Elizabeth West*

            Exjob had two dishwashers,and a cabinet full of dishes, cups, and cutlery. People would just load them up and then the admin would run them. Most of the time, she would empty it, or someone would help her — I often did it if I had a slack moment in my day. It was mostly women but we had a couple of men who pitched in.

        2. Another Admin*

          At my current job there is a dishwasher in one of our conference rooms! I think they used to do more DIY catering like making pots of coffee and using real mugs during meetings. I’ve only been here a year and I’m assuming COVID made some major changes. I’m the Executive Assistant and it probably was my predecessor who dealt with it, but I have staunchly ignored the dishwasher. I’ve never asked anyone about it, brought it up or even touched the thing! We have Keurigs now and I keep paper cups fully stocked.

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

        I interviewed at a place that had a schedule for who’s responsibility it was to clean the breakroom* for a week. It was a rotating scheduled and everyone- from the receptionist to the owner- took a turn. That was nice…but seemed excessive. It definitely felt like the type of place that had A Culture (TM).

        *I took a test in the breakroom and admittedly, it was a very nice breakroom.

        1. Bast*

          I read this quickly and thought it said bathroom, and was both baffled and amused at the idea of taking a test in a bathroom.

          I think in this case, at the very least, it seems nice that they rotated. I can respect an owner who does what it takes to keep their place running and doesn’t feel too high and mighty for it. In one office I worked at, certain people felt that they were “above” certain tasks due to their title — for example, leaving their garbage can overflowing because the cleaning lady only came once a week, and they were “above” putting their own trash in the dumpster, despite it attracting bugs and rodents.

        2. Skytext*

          I think that’s nice, and the fact that everyone takes a turn means everyone is cognizant of keeping it up and not trashing it, even when it’s not their turn, because they don’t want it trashed when it IS their turn. And since the big boss is also taking a turn, people know better than to slack off when it’s supposed to be their turn—I bet that boss wouldn’t put up with that!

    2. Debbie Does Dishes*

      This will sound odd, but…I love to wash the breakroom dishes as a kind of mental break. We have a dishwashing machine, but many who bring their lunch need to wash the containers so they can use them again the next day. Often, they’ll leave the dirty containers in the sink to soak for a few hours for easier residue removal. So, when I hit a mental wall, I go to the breakroom, wash the available dishes, and leave them in the drying rack. It’s amazing how it clears my mind. If I worked from home, I think I’d be ironing for a mental break. I know, this is way weird.

      1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        I’m impressed — I find cleaning/organizing satisfying at home, but I couldn’t do it with other people’s icky stuff. (I do wash my own, though.) BTW your screen name is hilarious

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

        When stuff gets either super boring or super stressful at work, I like to clean- it’s a physical way to make sense of the world and/or cure boredom. When we’d be super busy and stressed out for various reasons in retail, we had the cleanest breakroom and supply closet you ever saw.

      4. Now THAT'S somebody I want to work with*

        I think you could get yourself job interviews simply by pasting a screen-shot of this comment into an email that says, “Dear Hiring Manager: I wrote this.”

      5. Not That Jane*

        Doesn’t sound weird to me! I wish my current workplace had this, I would totally do it.

      6. Melody Powers*

        It’s not odd to me. When I worked at a dog daycare I would start each afternoon shift by doing the dishes (lots of food and water bowls) while I heard what had been going on during the morning shift. Everyone else tended to avoid that task so it was a nice way for me to feel productive while I eased into the day and heard the information I needed.

      7. Elizabeth West*

        I did dishes at home by hand for many years — this apartment I’m in now is the first rental I’ve ever had that has a dishwasher. Even my house didn’t have one. I’m so spoiled now, lol.

        At some old receptionist jobs, I was responsible for keeping the kitchen clean and washing coffee mugs (by hand), but I don’t like to do dishes like that at work. I tend to splash a little and the hem of my shirts always gets wet.

    3. Lady Danbury*

      The cleaning staff at my current job washes any dishes in the sink, but I always wash my own because a. that’s how I was raised; and b. they don’t do a very good job anyway. I draw the line at washing anyone else’s dishes because I didn’t come to work to do chores!

    4. My Useless Two Cents*

      Little late to the party but this reminded me.
      When I started at my workplace the office (100% women) had a rotating schedule for cleaning the breakroom. The shop (98% men) were not on the list. After a few years there was enough turnover (and a couple of men added to the office) and enough complaints made that the shop was added to the rotation. So that meant breakroom duty once every 3 months or so, took maybe 10-15 min. Almost every man in the shop “forgot” their cleaning day, even when reminded 30 min before the end of the workday. The owner’s father who helped out in the shop flat out refused as it was “women’s work” and actively advocated to have the shop taken off the rotation. Two of the managers (both women) got fed up and now switch off days to clean the breakroom.

  13. The Other Katie*

    The company I ended up working at for my first tech job had Friday afternoon keggers. Literally, everyone just stopped working at 2:30 on a Friday and had a beer or six for the rest of the afternoon – company funded. Ah, the early 2000s tech life.

    1. Sloanicota*

      Ha! We did that in our WeWork, and it was encouraged by WeWork. You know you’re having fun when someone later makes a Netflix documentary about you … :P

    2. Turquoisecow*

      Husband works in tech and his previous job was a startup. He told me that often his coworkers would have a beer while working in the afternoons. I was appalled, he didn’t think anything of it – and he doesn’t drink.

      1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        His job must be less boring than mine. If I drank alcohol when I was trying to work: Nap City.

      2. I Have RBF*

        LOL. I once worked for a web company that was a household name, in operations. One team had a liquor cabinet. As time went on, I because the custodian of the liquor cabinet. People who traveled would bring back a bottle from wherever they went.

        Then came an edict that liquor could not be out visible in the cubicles (this was before they squished us into an open plan noise pit.) I had a hard time fitting some of the more unique bottles into a shelf with a door. Yes, I was annoyed.

      3. Funny that*

        This has been the case in almost every professional job I’ve had in Australia – a beer/wine while finishing work on a Friday or just after work, funded by the company. Mining companies never do this though as they are always strictly dry due to OHS rules.

    3. LTR FTW*

      I was at a dot com in the late 90s that had TWO beer fridges that were kept full at all times (there were like 30 employees). Any time after noon it was fair game to just crack a beer and start drinking.

      Since we were responsible workers and all, we never broke out the tequila until 5:00.

      I thought all tech jobs were going to be like this…

    4. NoIWontFixYourComputer*

      Early 2000s. Tech startup. We had a Friday afternoon Counterstrike game. I played once, because I grew up before videogames were a thing, and I got fragged instantly.

    5. Bless his heart*

      I worked at a law firm that had in-office happy hours. One of the attorneys had to be told that while there were kegs, it was not appropriate that he’d done a keg stand.

      This was only a few years ago.

    6. kt*

      We had beers and liquor in the office at a startup I was at too. We’d also frequently stay after work in the office, drinking and smoking weed, with leadership. There were times we went out drinking until 4am. The CEO (who had two kids at home!) was the biggest partier, frequently pushing other people to come and stay out later. I was in my mid-20s so this all seemed fun and great to me. Now I’m extremely troubled and wondering how many people felt pressured to participate — there were definitely career benefits to people who were buddies with the higher-ups.

    7. Mademoiselle Sugar Lump*

      Yes, I worked at a computer company in the late 90s that did that.
      More recently I worked for a large search engine company where there were extensive liquor cabinets at peoples’ desks and in meeting rooms. High quality stuff. One group was doing beer brewing in their area. If someone visited from another office for training or something, that would be a good reason for everybody to gather and have bourbon or whisky. I know it was tough for Mormon and Muslim people there because the culture is SO alcohol friendly. I saw someone nagging an intern to go ahead and have a drink when she didn’t want to and later I let her know I had her back if she needed it. (He was later fired for …reasons he didn’t want to talk about.) I’d started my career in banking so all this was just utterly foreign to me.
      I was sad when I got laid off for lots of reasons, but I don’t miss this.

    8. londonedit*

      Publishing is far less boozy now than it used to be (it used to be completely normal to go out for lunch with an author/agent and have a few glasses of wine, people used to routinely go to the pub at lunchtime, etc) but it’s still not uncommon to have post-work drinks either in the office or at the pub, whenever it’s someone’s birthday or someone’s leaving or whatever. Sometimes just because we feel like we haven’t been for a drink for a while. I always say it’s not a publishing company unless there’s a bottle or three of wine in the office fridge! We actually have a dedicated wine fridge in one of the kitchens for book launches etc. Office culture in the UK, and in London in particular, is fairly booze-tolerant – now we’ve got some nice weather you’ll see people thronging outside the central London pubs at lunchtime and from about 4pm onwards all having a drink or three.

      Anyway, all of that is to say that earlier on in my career I absolutely worked for a company where 4pm drinks on a Friday was a totally normal thing. Someone would go out and get a few bottles of wine and we’d stop work at 4 and have a drink. The idea of it was to chat about work and maybe come up with some new ideas for books we could do, but really it was an excuse to knock off early and have a couple of glasses of wine. A few of us would often then carry on in the pub afterwards.

      1. EllenD*

        Also London based in the civil service, and I was in one team that every few weeks would have a Friday afternoon drinks. We’d pop down to the offie (for those outside UK off-licence ie licenced to sell alcohol for consumption off premises) for a few bottles of wine, and soft drinks and have a break. A senior manager would fund the initial run, but others might pop down if we ran out. It was very relaxed and a good way to get to know colleagues better. None of the adjacent teams seem to mind. My next team didn’t have this culture, but we did got to the pub after work.

    9. Thomas*

      My team, manager included, at my current employer does Friday lunch down the pub. But I’m aware it’s very much a tradition from a bygone era and not normal nowadays.

    10. Gumby*

      I had a summer internship at an established software company where they had a “Beer Bash” at 4 on Fridays. No one got drunk (that I saw) and they provided snacks and non-alcoholic drinks as well. It was mostly hanging out and socializing. But people did, by and large, stop working at 4 on Fridays. This ended up not being standard in the industry. In fact, working until 8 was more common than shutting down at 4.

    11. JustaTech*

      The biotech across the street (which has since moved/ been subsumed) used to have “Christmas Coffee” for the whole month of December.
      What made it “Christmas coffee”?
      The boss came around and poured whiskey in it – starting at 10am.

  14. NotBitter*

    Office of about 30 people, but very male dominated field so only 6 were women. One guy in leadership had something happen in his life that was not work related. The men brought a BBQ pit to the office on a Friday and set up in the back parking lot. Sent an event via email to all the other men in the office to celebrate. They barbecued, smoked cigars, and drank beers in the back parking lot for the entire afternoon. All 24 men. The six women never got the emailed invite and sat in the office working while they did this. I was one of the women.

    1. enchilada*

      I’d have organised a reciprocal event for those who didn’t get invited for the next week. Or just wandered down and helped myself, to be honest.

        1. Marz*

          I mean, maybe this is a good thread not to talk about what you would have done? It’s often not that close to what I see happen in reality, quite likely because people are in environments that discourage that, that they know would be met with resistance, yelling, or even consequences for their jobs, and, at the very least, as is the case in all of these by the nature of the prompt, new/unaware of what norms are/think this is normal.

      2. Turquoisecow*

        It sounds like they didn’t know it was happening at the time, since they were working. But obviously found out about it afterwards so I think a “girls only” type event in retaliation would have been warranted.

  15. Problem!*

    Doing 60+ hours of work for 40 hours of pay and working 7 days a week. My first company absolutely took advantage of most of its workforce being straight out of college with no previous full time corporate work experience to compare to.

    Now that I am older and jaded I’d a company asks me to do that I tell them where to shove it unless I’m getting additional compensation and it is temporary to meet a deadline.

    1. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

      I entered the workforce before there was general understanding of what sexual harassment was. There were definitely some male co-workers who qualified. I feel awful for my 22-year-old self!

      1. Old Lady at Large*

        One of my early jobs was like that. This was from back in the mid 1980s, and I was one of two civilians working in an office staffed by mostly military people. Most of the others were okay, but there was one individual…at least it gave me plenty of opportunity to hone my sarcasm, a necessary skill in my family. He once said to me, “You believe in the Bible, right? We can be just like Adam and Eve!” My response was, “I don’t know, I think I have enough brains not to fall for a line from a snake.” I wasn’t unhappy to see him transferred overseas.

    2. Sloanicota*

      Yeah, my first job was at a small nonprofit and, in addition to the regular 9-5, I was in charge of evening and weekend events. It was not expected that I would take comp time for that, in fact I had never heard of it and it was not offered. So I just … worked seven days a week … for $35K … :P

      1. Sloanicota*

        Oh and at a different small nonprofit job, we all just agreed not to submit reimbursement requests unless they were tied to a grant. The place was basically going under, reimbursements were “annoying to process” and we wanted to keep our jobs more than we needed that mileage or supplies expense back. In retrospect, kinda set me up for a weird relationship with future employers.

        1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

          I’ve been told that any expense accrued by “overhead” people are not allowable (um, I write the grants and have seen our allowances for indirect), which was super annoying.

          Worse, though, was the boss who said “you can submit that expense, but think about whether that box of labels is more important than our clients.” She had a ton of personal wealth and made twice as much as I did, and I really wanted to say “fine, you pay the 30 bucks and stick the guilt trip where the sun don’t shine.” I needed the job, though, so I thought it but didn’t say it.

    3. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      Maybe we worked together. I started as a temp. They gave me a raise. Then they asked if I wanted a job. “You’ll be categorized as management. Yeah, it’s illegal. But it’s a job with benefits and you seem to like it here.”
      So I took a paycut from temping to work the same 70 hour weeks for 40 hour pay.
      I was also learning the trade I was doing. (I knew how to glaze a teapot, but this job was hand painting. And they were happy to teach me enough to finish a project and then build and build my skills.)
      Six months later, company was sold and I was able to get unemployment and find a teapot painting job I’ve been in for 20 years. (and everything I learned there is not obsolete! But yeah, youth.)

    4. Sneppy*

      For me it was being told I had to get mu shifts filled myself for which I had a WORKPLACE ACCOMMODATION. Or being bullied into taking shifts that broke it and being bullied more when I said no.

      I had worked enough retail to think this was normal in a professional job.

      Now I know is isn’t, I am at a new job, and I am like “This breaks my accommodation, please fix it” if it happens. It doesn’t happen anymore after some conversations Occ Health had with management.

    5. Kaz Down Under*

      ​OMG, yes! In 1991, when I was 23, the small retail company I did administrative work for was taken over by a larger, more aggressive company. They didn’t have an office role for me but offered a retail supervisory role, which I accepted because I was living hand-to-mouth and didn’t feel confident I could find another job in a hurry. My contract said I was supposed to work 38 hours per week but my new boss declared I had to work at least 45 hours per week (for no extra compensation) and, in reality, it ended up being 50 to 55 hours due to all the problems in the business. I hated that job but it took me nine months to find another one, partly because I was working most waking hours. After I left, I complained about my underpayment to the relevant government department, and they investigated. I only received about $500 back pay for all the extra work, but was delighted that they investigated as they trawled through the dodgy company’s records to find evidence. I hope that was really confronting and uncomfortable for them :-)

    1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      because 1 time, 1 person used a marker and it got smudged and someone couldn’t read it.
      am I close or by the time you got there, nobody knew why?!

      1. Jay (no, the other one)*

        OMG. I had completely forgotten about the office manager I worked with once who insisted that we completely black out the previous addresses on those multi-use interoffice envelopes. She would take a Sharpie and cover every bit of writing except where the envelope was going next and she insisted that every piece of interoffice mail had to go through her because she didn’t think we would do that (she was undoubtedly right about that). We did not work for an intelligence agency or a company with IP concerns – it was a medical office. Never did figure that one out. It was late enough in my career that I at least knew it wasn’t normal.

    2. Zombeyonce*

      This feels like a reaction from someone in the mail room to a lot of people’s illegible handwriting.

  17. Llama Llama*

    Nothing silly but I only have been doing accounting for one company my entire career. About 8 years into my career, they outsourced the work and I went to new company. I continue to do accounting for this company 10 years later.

    Apparently the company did (and still does) accounting is crazy and overly complicated. It is the only accounting I have ever known (besides college courses). People keep coming in and saying that our accounting is not normal.

    (Everything is ethical/meets accounting standards.)

    1. The Prettiest Curse*

      A conversation that the Ops Director at one of my former nonprofit employers had with a member of senior management:
      Ops Director: So, from now on we’ll be using GAAP accounting.
      Senior Management (who oversaw ths budget!): What’s that?

      (I believe GAAP stands for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, but didn’t look that up before posting this, so if anyone knows another definition feel free to correct me!)

      1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

        You are correct.
        So Sr Manager undoubtedly had savings and investments and he never once looked at the legally required documents sent from his financial companies.
        That’s crazy.

        1. I'm A Little Teapot*

          GAAP has to do with financial accounting. The bank statements have nothing to do with it. Ordinary people who are not accountants or in finance would not be expected to know about GAAP.

          Also, budgetary accounting is often on a different basis than GAAP. So someone who only deals with the budget who knows nothing about GAAP isn’t really that crazy of an idea. I see it all the time.

          Far more crazy is that the nonprofit was not previously following GAAP.

          1. The Prettiest Curse*

            Let’s just say that the accounts were not in great shape before the Ops Director (a great guy who ran a very tight ship) started. After he got to work, we had no-comment audits every year!

      2. Strive to Excel*

        Every time I see a post like this I feel a year of my life leave my body.

        I’m hoping he understood the idea but was just unfamiliar with the acronym. We CPAs love our acronyms.

    2. I'm A Little Teapot*

      It is very possible to massively over complicate things. Usually it’s because the system wouldn’t do something so you had to have a workaround (and then it was never changed even if the system changed), or there’s a person who doesn’t know how to to do it/has a weird preference.

      Changing is hard. It usually takes 1. new accounting software, 2. the person(s) who won’t change either leaving or being forced to change by management, and 3. someone who is high enough in importance who knows/cares to make it happen.

  18. Cafe au Lait*

    My first library job out of grad school had very clear process documentation, standard ways to name documents, shared notes, and everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) was available on the staff intranet. If you had an issue, it was easy to reach out to the probable person in charge of the process and see what needed to happen.

    Cue my shocked Pikachu face when I moved to a Big 10 University Library and discovered that was not the case at all. Documentation was siloed, and if it was available, it was often woefully out of date. Knowing who to escalate issues to depended on who trained you, and often, managers were angry that their staff reached out to peers in other departments rather than following a strict hierarchical line.

    I’ve come to learn that most libraries operate like the Big 10 library, and not my smaller, community college library.

    1. dulcinea47*

      Documentation?! LOL no. (source: many years working at large university research library.)

    3. But Of Course*

      Conversely, I was delighted when I started my new job and was taught to name files “filename DRAFT 040325” and it is now making me nuts to get files from new staff who insist on “very long filename 2025_0403”. It’s all made worse that our crap IT vendor thinks Proofpoint, godaddy’s provided antivirus checker, is the best and proofpoint converts spaces to %20 but then reconverts them to -. I spend a lot of time renaming files for our website.

      Apparently, if we get rid of Proofpoint, we will never be able to have another antivirus ever and we will all die. The solution to this is to get rid of the IT vendor.

      1. Nina*

        I learned in a previous job (US office and non-US office) that ISO dates are like that for a reason! Our filenames were always YYYYMMDD_filename, so nobody was using their ‘native’ calendar and also nobody was getting confused between April 3 and March 4. And you can sort them!

      2. Caffeine Monkey*

        I’m sorry, but your date method brings me out in hives. yyyymmdd means that things get sorted in date order. Your method (I’m guessing mmddyy?) has things scattered all over the place.

        1. amoeba*

          Yeah, I mean, I’m European so we do use DD/MM/YYYY and I vastly prefer it in almost all situations, but for filenames, I use ISO as well, for sorting purposes.

          1. Caffeine Monkey*

            Also European, so yet another cause of confusion! I was just guessing mmddyy because yesterday was 4th April.

        2. Aunt Vixen*

          Maybe it’s because I need some caffeine at this point in the afternoon, but doesn’t mmddyyyy sort in date order as well? I mean I don’t like it because of the possibility of confusing April 3 and March 4 as noted upthread, but. (I personally like ddMMMyyyy – 03apr2025 – which I grant doesn’t actually sort properly at all but does remove all ambiguity, rather than having the Americans assume it’s April 3 and the Europeans assume it’s March 4 and the whole thing ending with the lander crashing on Mars.)

          1. A. Lab Rabbit*

            Yes, but it will result in all your March 2023, March 2024, and March 2025 files being together, because you are sorting by month, rather than by year.

            1. Lexi Vipond*

              But if you’re working in a new area for each year, that’s fine. You want the year in there somewhere in case the file is out of context, but it’s not the (first) thing you need to know from the file name.

        3. I Have RBF*

          ISO date in filenames! YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD for the win! I am primarily a Linux user, and I hate spaces in filenames. Anything with dates to me should be consistent so it’s sortable.

    4. Christmas Carol*

      What can you expect from an outfit named the Big”TEN” that now has 18 members…….

      1. Seal*

        Ha! I was working for a Big Ten university library when they added their 11th member. There were repeated explanations that the Big Ten was now a brand name that wasn’t tied to the number of conference members.

        Working there made me a stickler for documentation and consistent policy and procedures throughout my career, because that Big Ten library – widely considered to be one of the best in the country – was utter chaos behind the scenes. I still wonder how a profession that organizes and provides access to information can be so random and disorganized.

        1. higheredadminalumna*

          As an alumna of the 12th school, who has worked at multiple academic, government/court, and community libraries, I often think of it as “do as I say, not as I do.” Always amusing to me as a non-librarian.

    5. Mad Scientist*

      I came here to share a similar story – going from a small, relatively functional workplace to a larger, less functional one, and realizing how many things I took for granted at the previous job.

      My first job after college (at an engineering consulting firm) had design standards and lots of internal resources that made it easy to follow those standards. I got so used to it that I assumed all consulting firms worked that way. Then I went to a much larger company and realized that the larger the organization, the less consistent things will be. There were essentially no company-wide standards, so everyone tried to claim that their personal preference was the standard. It was… a mess.

    6. Pay no attention...*

      Same at my medium-sized university. I’m in the MarCom office and because I’ve been here for so long, I know more about our university history and have more historically relevant documents than our University Archivist. I’ve tried to give them stuff, but all they do is stack it up in boxes where it will never be seen again, and at least I have it all accessible to people who might need to reference exactly when we announced a new college, or a founding faculty member died, for example.

      1. AFac*

        I mean, where do I start?

        One of my colleagues recently got ‘talked to’ for trying to buy items for a funded project that she specifically included in the budget to buy.

        We also have to get permission any time we travel out of state, even if it’s for personal travel on a weekend or university holiday.

    3. Cabbagepants*

      Entire buildings with every lab filled with broken, ancient, unused equipment belonging to some ancient professor who couldn’t bear to part with it…

      1. amoeba*

        The labs I worked in at uni were actually all pretty well run, not that different from what I encountered in industry later! Even the data was stored on a group server that was regularly backed up, the lab notebooks were electronic and searchable, the budget was pretty big… in all honesty, it was pretty professional in terms of actual science/lab work!

        The people now, on the other hand, are a very different story…..

      2. Rock Prof*

        My entire wet lab was just full of this stuff when I arrived at my current school. Luckily the powers that be waited until literally the day after I’d cleared out all the junk for the room to be flooded by a broken chemistry waste drain above us. Of course, I just cleaned up all the water (hopefully water) ourselves after this happened instead of contacting maintenance and safety about it because that’s what everyone else impacted was doing.

      3. Gloaming*

        Once you learn how much it costs to properly dispose of some of that stuff it starts to make a lot more sense.

      4. Wolf*

        That moment when the budget for disposal of chemicals is used up, so everything gets stored and someone has to sort and make sure the most dangerou stuff goes first.

    4. HigherEdExpat*

      I definitely was tempted to respond “it was student affairs.” I was in a meeting where a potential vendor asked about the level of trust and camaraderie in our org and I literally could not answer reasonably based on previous experience. Like, I haven’t been in a meeting that describes experiences with mucus plugs?

    5. Wolf*

      Yeah, this.

      * Paying for your own business trips, and getting reimbursed (might be complete, might not) 3-6 months later.

      * Overtime was expected, but could not be written down because our insurance didn’t cover that many hours.

      * Buying your own lab coats, safety shoes, goggles etc, and occasionally buying new ones because they disappeared.

      * Having workshops on weekends, unpaid. And being responsible for setup and cleaning of the rooms, because you can’t make the cleaning team come in on a Sunday evening.

      * Offices that were overcrowded, full of broken furniture and decades-old paper, or had broken windows (which we patched with tape). For two years, I worked in an office with no fire escape route, but it was either that or have no office space.

      * Being expected to be waiters for the bosses’ dinner parties.

      We were aware that this is wrong, but everyone did it, and when your boss is also your thesis committee, you don’t put up a fight.

  20. Toot Sweet*

    This was a long time ago, but I’d bet that there are still employers who would try to pull off something like this.

    When I was in high school, I worked the ticket window at a movie theater. The person who owned the theater had a bunch of them, even some out of state. When I was hired, he explained that my hourly page was the “minimum student wage,” lower than the state’s minimum wage. (Hey, I was 17, what did I know?)

    When he sold that theater, the new owner met with the staff to talk about wages. I told him I was being paid the “minimum student wage.” He laughed and kindly informed me that there was no such thing; I would be getting the state minimum wage going forward. He also threw away the ugly seersucker jackets with an inch of dust on the shoulders that the former owner required us to wear (and never sent to a dry cleaner).

    1. Irish Teacher.*

      Ireland actually does have a lower minimum wage for under 18s and then gradations up to the age of 20 when you are entitled to the full adult minimum wage. Full minimum wage is €13.50 per hour whereas for under 18s, it’s €9.45 (and €10.80 for 18 year olds and €12.15 for 19 year olds) so it wasn’t that unlikely a story for you to believe.

      Not that that justifies somebody unilaterally making up a lower minimum in a state that didn’t have such a thing.

      And fair play to the new owner for correcting it.

      1. Dark Knight in White Satin*

        Do some employers hire only lower-wage teenagers and fire them when they turn 18?

        1. Irish Teacher.*

          I haven’t come across it. For the most part, employers are reluctant to employ under 18s because of the restrictions on the hours they can work and so on and because it is assumed they are just working for fun money and won’t take the job seriously.

          Plus, most jobs 16 and 17 year olds get…they wouldn’t likely be staying at long term anyway. They would usually be summer jobs or Saturday jobs and would be quitting to go to college or to look for something full-time when they finish school anyway.

          Plus there are rules around firing people and I don’t think “I wanted to hire somebody who I could pay less” would be legal.

        2. Oldsbone*

          I’ve seen several stories on “Not Always Right” about this topic. Since they’re user generated anecdotes, they kind of fall into the category of “Probably mostly for but you’ll never know.” I’m sure it happens though.

      2. But Of Course*

        I *think* my state may have a lower minimum wage for minors, or did in the 90s (we’re actually one of the few US states without a tipped minimum wage). Given the restrictions on working hours for minors, it was probably an incentive to actually hire minors, but their labor isn’t less valuable than anyone else’s so I hope that’s changed.

        1. Charlotte Lucas*

          The state where I grew up had a lower minimum wage for kids under 16 (who also needed work permits and had more restrictions regarding hours, etc.). There were also laws about when any kid in high school could work during the school year.

        2. ThatGirl*

          When I was hired to my first job (in 1997, as a waitress at Chuck E Cheese) I believe we had a “training wage” for the first 60 days that was below minimum wage? I didn’t work for a tipped wage though; we didn’t get that many tips. So I moved up to $4.75 or whatever it was after the training period.

        3. Deedee*

          Same here, though it was heavily restricted and mostly only involved kids (like me at the time) who were actually too young to work outside agriculture with the special alternate minimum age. I don’t think it applied once you were 16 even

          And yeah that was the exact justification, that if they had to pay as much as an adult why would they bother to pick a kid when that kid came with all sorts of extra restrictions about not being able to work with fryers or garbage compactors or some other things and having to get extra breaks and so forth.

      3. CatMintCat*

        When I started working in Australia in the mid-1970s there were age-based salaries, starting at 15 (minimum working age) and going up to 23 when you (finally!) reached adult status – or at least in law, where I was working at that time. Birthdays were eagerly anticipated.

    2. Sloanicota*

      I actually looked this up once, and there is actually a lower wage for minors in the US, which I don’t agree with and think is crap; however I believe it’s limited to the first three months, not forever.

      1. Fluffy Fish*

        from FLSA “However, a special minimum wage of $4.25 per hour applies to young workers under the age of 20 during their first 90 consecutive days of employment with an employer.”

        there’s additional allowed shenanigans for students

        https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/whd/flsa/docs/wages.asp#:~:text=The%20Fair%20Labor%20Standards%20Act,of%20employment%20with%20an%20employer

        what the actual F. and here i thought there was nothing left to surprise me about US’s appalling worker protections

        1. Georgia peach reader*

          I believe part of this is because of the idea that teens new to the workforce would need a lot of training and have little responsibility, and also to encourage teens to stay in school and prioritize education!

          I thought the minor student wage was also only for weeks when the minor student worker also attended school more than a certain number of hours, so it might not apply to summer jobs, not sure.

        2. Southern Violet*

          You can also pay disabled people under minimum wage unless your state disallows that.

    3. OneBean TwoBean*

      I’m pretty sure this varies by state. My state definitely has a different minimum wage for minors (85% of the regular minimum wage).

  21. ticktick*

    Not so much weird, but an example of how your environment can really shape you – at my first job as a newly minted lawyer, I worked in an in-house legal department where the CLO was often angry and swore a lot. I, being mentored by this person, also picked up the habit of being angry and swearing, and for the years that I worked there, swore often, even when I wasn’t angry, and felt that it was just a part of who I was. Eventually I realized how toxic the environment was, for many other reasons, and left – and completely stopped swearing. Turns out that it’s NOT actually my natural mode of expression, even when angry.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Haha, that’s funny. My mother can’t abide swearing and has somehow managed to train those around her not to swear in her presence. I somehow manage to not swear around her even though in pretty much every other life situation I swear like a sailor, even when I’m not angry. I just like swearing, I guess. Although I do sometimes replace swears with non-curses like dagnabbit, etc., even when I’m not around my mom. It’s fun to try to get creative about it.

      By the bye, not that you asked, I love watching stand-up comedy, but I’ve found that I don’t enjoy comedians who swear a lot. Obviously I’m not against swearing at all, but for some reason I think it’s kind of lazy of these comedians; part of why I like comedians is their very clever use of words, and let’s face it, there are many more clever and amusing ways to express dismay than using your average boring swear word. :-D

      1. Lynda*

        A friend who does stand up mentioned that swearing is also a very useful tool if your routine isn’t working: people laugh out of embarrassment and shock.

      2. ticktick*

        Totally agree about the stand-up comedy! If swearing is used cleverly, appropriately and with good timing, then it’s fine, but it’s often just tiresomely sprinkled in.

      3. Throwaway Account*

        My 90-year-old mom has always sworn like a longshoreman, especially when driving! When my son was little, she would bring him home and say in her best grandma voice, I think he learned some new words today!

    2. Blackness*

      I have a similar experience. In my first job after school, it was completely normal for employees to come out of the boss’s office crying after their annual performance review. When I got my next (actually current) job, it took me a few years to fully realize that that wasn’t the case everywhere. My boss is a wonderful person who would never make any of us cry, but I still had to run to the restroom right before my first couple of performance reviews to calm myself down.

    3. ICodeForFood*

      When I worked in printing and print purchasing, overseeing what our vendors printed, I was a young woman in a skirted suit, telling middle-aged working-class pressmen what to do… In order to be “one of us,” instead of “one of them” (said while making a face and pointing to the management office), I took up swearing like a sailor. Unfortunately, the habit has never left me even though I’ve changed careers and gotten to retirement age.
      (BTW, I worked well with the pressment, mostly because I understood what they did and respected their abilities… though probably the swearing didn’t hurt.)

      1. Paint N Drip*

        ugh god my first jobs were kinda ‘rough and tumble’ for a baby-faced gal like me and now I’m a professional lady who CANNOT stop with the salty language!! Sorry to my long-suffering boss, but it really helps with connection to the blue-collar customers

        1. Chauncy Gardener*

          Ha! Learned to swear like a sailor, well, as a sailor, and the habit has never left me. It sure has helped in a bunch of male dominated environments, though.

    4. ComingBack as a HarpSeal*

      I was an attorney. When I was in law school I was in a clinic for low-income family law clients. I found that 9 out of 10 litigators were absolutely foul-mouthed. It completely shocked me. I already had a potty mouth, so the language didn’t shock me bur the context surely did.

  22. Judge Judy and Executioner*

    My first job after graduation was with a Big 4 accounting firm. That place was awful, and I started looking for other jobs within four months of starting. Most people were single, and you were looked down on if you left before working a 10-hour day. As newbies, we had to answer phones, and we would get yelled at if we didn’t answer after three rings. Once, I was berated when Panera forgot to include a blueberry bagel in the order I had to pick up (I was reimbursed for the cost). In addition to just not liking the job of being an external auditor, the people on the team were awful to each other. It was expected that you lunch with your colleagues every day. I was a newlywed and, as a recent grad, did not have a lot of money. I went into credit card debt trying to afford all the lunches. There was one guy who had a new baby and was trying to save money, so he would pack 4 days a week and go out with the team one day a week. They talked crap about him every day about “not being a team player.” Eventually, the firm decided I was not a good fit and showed me the door. I’ve worked at some toxic places in my nearly 2-decade career. Since then, not one person has ever pressured me to spend money on lunch.

    2. Martel*

      Cannot imagine berating someone for forgetting a blueberry bagel. I mean an everything bagel might be worth some shouting but blueberry????

    3. Chauncy Gardener*

      My Big 6 (at the time) firm required us to go out for lunch as well. It was awful! So $$$.

  23. Jen*

    I worked for this small family owned company for 10 years (started in high school, worked breaks through college, then a few years after college). The owner, a white guy in his 50s at the time, would drink tea every day and leave his dirty mugs on the back of the toilet in the women’s bathroom for the female employees to clean. If we didn’t clean them the tea bags (because he couldn’t even be bothered to toss those) would get moldy. He had dozens of mugs and would just stack them.

      1. Liane*

        I think – I HOPE – Jen means “on the lid of the tank.” Agreed that only makes it a little less gross, but doesn’t lessen the sexism & lack of respect.

        (On many US toilets the tank is in the position of a chair back and the lid is big enough to hold several cups.)

    3. froodle*

      so did he make a cup of tea, then go into the ladies toilet to drink it? or drink it then make the trip to the ladies toilet in order to leave it in designated the mouldy teacup leaving spot?

    4. Georgia peach reader*

      Was this the only sink in the whole office?!

      I wonder what he did with dishes at his own house!! I think a case can be made here for switching disposables, yikes!

  24. H.Regalis*

    When I worked at the public library, no one would ever say hi or smile at each other when we passed in the hallway. A lot of the higher-up staff was straight-up rude to the paraprofessional staff; they’d act like it was beneath them to speak to us. Then I worked at a hospital and we would all say hi to other staff when we passed them in the hallway even if we didn’t know them personally. I much preferred the latter.

    1. dulcinea47*

      Interesting- I worked at an academic library (as a lowly staff person) and experienced the lack of basic interaction/borderline rudeness. It was my first “real” job and I worked there for 17 years. When I moved to a public library people were shockingly friendly! Everyone greeted everyone else, from the Director to the custodial staff! Now I’m back at the academic library but in a different environment- I still say hello to pretty much everyone I encounter.

      1. H.Regalis*

        Where I was the problem was definitely the professional staff working there. All the jerks are retired now and the people who came after them are good and have definitely changed the library for the better, both for patrons and in terms of how staff treat each other.

  25. tired designer*

    I was hired as a design director in a role that was a bit of a stretch for me (I had the skills but not the experience working at that high level, and was the youngest person in my new office), so I played a constant game of “fake it til you make it” so as not to appear underqualified.

    A department I worked closely with all used the term “blueline” frequently, and I had NO IDEA what this meant, but through context clues and a little research I discovered that it’s a somewhat antiquated term for a printer’s proof… this had always just been called a “proof” everywhere else I’d ever worked. Because I had taken such a big step up the ladder, I just assumed that they knew the ins of the industry better than I did—and it was the whole department, not just one person!—so I adopted the terminology.

    Came to find out, at my next job, that they were totally the odd ones out. Everyone else just says “proof” and had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned a “blueline”. Moral of the story: if you fake it til you make it, try to be sure that what you’re faking is actually correct!

    1. skadhu*

      Yeah, no, a blueline is really a very specific kind of proof in which all the content is reproduced in blue. It was used for proofing that all the text was correct (it also dates from when typesetters copied from typewritten hardcopies, so errors could creep in during the process of typesetting) and all the visual elements were in their correct place, and was intended to catch mistakes before anyone paid for the very expensive colour proof. If you caught a mistake in the colour proof you’d have to have another colour proof made after it was fixed, so the goal of using bluelines was to make sure you only had one expensive colour proof. This tech is no longer used because colour proofs are now cheap.

      1. tired designer*

        Yep! I am assuming it started with my boss there, who was an older lady, and then the rest of the team just adopted it much the way I did. But I remember sitting in that first meeting thinking “wtf is a blueline?!?” but not wanting to ask for fear of being thought an idiot/out of my depth. So just agreed to everything and frantically googled later.

        I am also assuming the actual printer we worked with just rolled her eyes and accepted this old-fashioned, incorrect term due to her longstanding relationship with our department/my boss.

        And to state the obvious, we weren’t getting a blueline. Just a regular color proof.

      2. ICodeForFood*

        Intersting… I’ve also heard them called “salts,” and I believe “cyanotypes.”

    2. Sar*

      Comparable: in New York (where I first practiced in criminal court), an incident of crime often gets called a TPO (“time and place of occurrence”). It’s very handy, because you can use it to ask questions (Both “what’s the TPO” and “is this the earlier TPO or the later one?”) and because a single case (e.g., a case with one docket number) can have multiple incidents, which may or may not take place in different places and at different times/dates, and you can generally use it to describe an incident in sort of judgment-free language (i.e., “this TPO” instead of “this specific alleged assault” or “this specific incident of alleged criminal contempt”).

      Because this was such handy lingo, I assumed it was universal. When I moved to a new but nearish state and started asking colleagues about such and so TPO, I got exclusively blank stares.

      I am still trying to make “TPO” happen.

    3. Nosmo King*

      I worked at a university and the production team for print projects used this term too.

    4. Skippy.*

      Yeah, we do that… It’s gotten farther and farther from reality and now we do “digital bluelines” (which is really just “last look”), but we all know what we mean. :)

    5. TANSTAAFL*

      I was a MarCom manager back in the mid-90s and “blues” was the term we used. I actually still have a booklet that is a guide to working with “blues.”

  26. EMW*

    My current job every single expense report has to be approved by every wingle level of management. My employee submits her expenses. It comes to me (director), I approve it. It goes to the VP above me, she approves it. It goes to the EVP above her, he approves it. It goes the the CFO, he approves it. It goes to the president, he approves it. THEN and only then does it go to accounting. They then have to change the status to approved. Then they have to submit for payment. Then they have to change the status to paid. Then you get paid. And you get several emails about the status at every step along the way. So inefficient and if one person is out of the office it delays payments.

    1. exoboist1*

      Wait, I don’t remember seeing you at my university!
      Our hiring does this same show twice: two full treks up the ladder for signatures, first to maybe hire, and then to actually hire (or something like that).

      1. Lily Rowan*

        Oh yeah. I worked in higher ed fundraising at a university where a piece of paper had to be signed by six different people between the school and Central, before any solicitation went out. In the 2000s!!! So bad enough that everything needed that much approving, but it was all in hard copy.

      2. EMW*

        I work in government contracting. Up until Covid all of our paperwork had to be printed out signed and hand delivered to the military base.

      3. purple square*

        My jobs new parent company has this structure for hiring, and we were trying to sort out an internal transfer just as the parent company changeover happened. The employee has been doing the job in our team for about six weeks now, and I think they’ve finally set up a “job role” for him to “apply” to (facepalms all around)

    2. anon teacher*

      A hiring process:
      – Set candidate status to “Recommend for Hire”
      – Complete Hiring Proposal with dates of contract, salary, etc.
      – Set candidate status to “Offer Extended”
      – Review automatically-generated offer letter
      – Click “Send Letter”
      – Set candidate status to “Offer Set”

      It doesn’t seem that bad – except that all of these steps are accomplished by the same person, with absolutely zero checks or balances along the way.

    3. Generic Name*

      Let me guess, the whole process takes months, and the employees waiting to be reimbursed are basically fronting the business interest-free loans every month (and are often out interest if they don’t make enough to just cover the business expense temporarily themselves.

  27. Young Business*

    There’s a certain volatility and toxicity in tech, especially in startups, that I KNEW wasn’t normal, even earlier in my career. I’ve seen my fair share of ghastly things and heard terrible comments. But one thing that stands out is that there’s a culture/trend of oversharing in the vein of “we’re family, you need to unload all your vulnerabilities here.”

    One example was employees (even folks in HR…) using a monthly company-wide town hall with 400 employees as a venue to share extremely tragic things that happened to them. One person shared that her mother was a drunk driver that was killed in a car accident. I’m all for extending compassion but I don’t think this was an appropriate place to share this story.

    Prior to that, I worked for a tyrant who made everyone talk about the most tragic thing that happened to them in their childhood in a team meeting. Brutal.

    1. Wolf*

      WHAT. What was he thinking? Some inspirational “tell us about hardships you overcame” that went very wrong? The childhood story thing is just plain cruel.

      1. Young Business*

        It was! I don’t think the intention was to motivate or inspire. I think she truly delighted in seeing people squirm/get uncomfortable.

  28. Burnzie*

    I work in a hospital. When we needed to send a letter to the patient we would print it, fold it and put it into an envelope. Twice a day someone from the internal post team would collect the letters and their team posted them. I did this from 2018-2024. In August 2024 I moved departments. When I printed a letter everyone looked at me like I was crazy and told me it goes electronically to an off site printing company. I immediately emailed my old manager to tell her, thinking she would love this new information. Turns out she knew this all along but didn’t trust the process. So she made us do it all by hand. I asked the internal post guy about it and he said we were the only admin team that he collected packages from. His teams actual job was to arrange transportation of clinical samples to labs.

    1. Paint N Drip*

      it’s this one for me – spending money twice for a longer process? Ahhh sweet sweet ineptitude

    2. Lana Kane*

      Oh, healthcare managers. Ours made us print labels for the envelopes instead of ordering the envelopes with clear address windows because she claimed they were more expensive. We were already slammed with taking phone calls, calling patients, processing referrals, scouring for patient records, printing and stuffing these damn letters….and she wouldn’t spend a negligible amount on better envelopes so we didn’t then have to print the label, go get it, and address all those damn envelopes. When that manager left I managed to convince the new one to buy the window envelopes. If I’d found out we had a way to outsource that whole deal to an offsite printer I would have had several strokes.

      Same manager would make the department admin carry monitors and desktops around whenever we had to move spaces, which happened 3 times while I was there. She refused to get her a cart because they were “too expensive”. Again, when she left, we ordered a $50 cart from Amazon for the poor admin.

    3. Allright, before the flying monkeys attack*

      Well… back in the day when Mainframes ate little dinosaurs…. I workedin a northern-europe country you ’can do the census by a database run’ … everything is ’in the computer’. And I worked for the ’Population registry’… there was a ’hiccup’ in the system so once in a while the batch job would interpose… every 6000 lines or so… people into a different ”you have moved” letter. The database was correct, the outputfile corrupted, just because it needed to ’take a breath’. That was my most scientific explanation of the issue. Back then we already had mobiles, and I had access to the mainframeruns, so ’error’in a certain file would send ”STOP PRINTING” and wake me up. Future ex-wifedidn’t appreciate those mornings…

      I finally figured it out. I had coredumps in cages delivered to me (and boss actually was amused). Hardware issue in the end. The buffer ran out.

  29. jaques*

    Not work related, but I went to an evangelical Christian K-8 school where I was taught quite a few science “facts” ranging from questionable to blatantly false. One example was that we were taught men have one fewer rib than women because God used Adam’s rib to make Eve. When I was taking Anatomy in my health sciences grad program and we were talking about bone structure, I raised my hand and asked which rib men don’t have. The teacher was very confused as it turns out men and women have equal numbers of ribs, and I wished I could disappear into a black hole.

    1. Seashell*

      I’m a woman, and I have one less rib than most people. Apparently, it’s a fairly common variation (I think it is something like 5% of the population that has one less or one more rib than typical), and I never would have known about it if I didn’t have x-rays due to an unrelated problem in that area.

      1. BellStell*

        I have two more tiny ribs and one more vertebra than normal which i found in a CT scan post cancer. Oddities.

    2. Foureyedlibrarian*

      I work in a libraey and had a reference request asking to prove this… it was a very interesting email to receive

    3. sb51*

      I actually was raised only culturally-Christian (both of my parents had left different branches of it long before I was born) and thought this was anatomically true for quite a long time, just from cultural osmosis. (I did not believe any of the religious reasons, but assumed that the biblical story had come to be because ancient people had looked at skeletons, noticed a difference, and come up with a story to “explain” it.)

    4. RT*

      Aww I’m sorry that happened! I’m glad you learned the right facts later on.

      Religious schools can be like that. I’m glad the private religious school I used to teach at was completely 100% accurate with its science classes. No problems at all with Big Bang, evolution, sexuality/contraception.

      The school always backed up the teachers if parents complained, which was thankfully rare.

    5. Zippity Doodah*

      Definitely a bold strategy on the teacher’s part to make a claim that is so easily checked.

      1. Nil*

        Apparently not so easily though, as OP found out the truth only in grad school. Sometime you don’t even know that you should/could doubt something, just because it is ingrained so deep into your brain.

      2. Sharp-dressed Boston Terrier*

        Bold of you to assume an evangelical K-8, or the parents who sent their children there, would teach the students to question authority.

      3. Irish Teacher.*

        I’m guessing the teacher actually believed it themself.

        But it is a pretty silly thing to make up, not only because it is so easily checked but also because…well, even if you take the Bible literally and believe Eve was literally made from one of Adam’s ribs, the more obvious explanation is that he had one more rib than people have today before all this happened. Or that he had one less rib afterwards but that that was unique to him. It doesn’t even make sense to think that if he had had a rib removed, it would also be true of his male descendants but not his female descendants.

      4. I went to school with only 1 Jennifer*

        Not so easily, not too long ago! I have no idea how old jaques is, but when I was in high school in the 1970’s, I had to go to the library and consult an encyclopedia to check facts. (Fun fact: smart phones are less than 20 years old.)

        1. Seeking Second Childhood*

          Depends on your definition– Nokua had early smartphones in the early 2000s. Blackberry was well before that.

  30. Cee*

    I work for a midsize tech company with tons of money that is weirdly cheap about some things. We all have to share a Zoom account, for example.

    1. E*

      I worked at a company that did this with software licenses. One of our programs was constantly glitching, deleting data, getting frozen, I thought it was just bad software. Imagine my surprise when I moved to a new company that buys everyone a license, and this program now always works perfectly! A couple hundred dollars a year per person would have saved so much lost time at the old place.

  31. Opaline*

    My first retail manager booked all bank holidays off as annual leave for every employee at the start of the year. This was bad for three reasons:
    1 – (UK) bank holidays are state holidays, you’re meant to get then in addition to your annual leave allowance
    2 – This meant you’d lose an extra annual leave day for every bank holiday
    3 – Sometimes you’d end up working that day anyway! So you’d lose two days of annual leave and still have to work on the bank holiday

    Now I’m older I know this was wildly illegal, but I’ll never forget manager at the office job I left for looking at me like I’d grown a second head when I asked how to deduct the bank holidays on our HR system.

    1. Lexi Vipond*

      There’s no law that says that you have to be given bank holidays as leave, or that they can’t be counted as part of the 28 day minimum if you do get them.

      (I officially get 36 days plus the 4 Christmas and New Year holidays, and work the other bank holidays unless I specifically book them off, but the way our current leave system works means that I’m allocated 40 days and then have the 4 bank holidays booked in automatically as annual leave.)

      Making you work a day *and* take leave for it does sound like a problem, though. (And illegal if it takes you under 28 days leave in total.)

      1. Opaline*

        Our annual leave balance on the HR system didn’t include the holidays, so we only “officially” got 20 days. I think the expectation was your manager would not deduct the bank holidays if you were off or give you time in lieu if you worked them. But our manager didn’t do either.

        She did explain it in a way that made it sound legal but unfair if you didn’t question it too hard… This was about fifteen years ago and I don’t miss that place.

    2. Caz*

      It used to be legal to include the 8 bank holidays in the 20 day allowance – so depending how long ago this was, this might have been legal.

      Making you take leave for a day you were working, on the other hand…no.

    1. TGIF*

      Although to be fair, I see many many videos of people who bring their own to the office because they like them better.

      1. Project Manager*

        Difference being that’s by choice, and not a worldwide multi million company being stingy about pens .

      2. Chocolate Teapot*

        Yes, I take meeting minutes and have my pens of choice which the company won’t pay for since they bulk buy ballpoint pens.

    3. DisneyChannelThis*

      Wait is this not normal??? I just bought myself a new ten pack of pens and brought it to work today.

      1. Paint N Drip*

        I don’t think doing it is weird (I am particular about some things, so I relate), but being FORCED to do it is wild

      2. ThatGirl*

        Buying/bringing specific ones because you like them is all good. But your workplace not providing any is not normal.

    5. Skippy.*

      There was a legend about an executive a Bear Stearns who decreed that the company would no longer purchase paper clips. (I think it was a big deal in principle but not that much in practice?)

    6. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

      yeah I had that at one place I worked.

      I also had to purchase my own IBM manuals, and software product manuals.

      Boy did they raise hell when I resigned — AND TOOK THEM WITH ME.

      As far as pens, I preferred Bic Sticks which were under $2 for 10. And that was a year’s (or more) supply.

    7. Long time reader*

      If my company provides pens, I’ve never seen any! I remember my former supervisor telling us she discovered there’s a process for requesting office supplies but I can’t remember if she ever shared it! My work pens are a random collection of free pens I’ve picked up.

    8. Seven If You Count Bad John*

      My current place is like this. They provide yellow notepads but not pens or sticky notes. Phone message forms are printed out on regular printer paper and cut apart with scissors.

  33. yet another celiac*

    My partner’s former place of employment had a large container (think one of those giant plastic snack mix or cheese ball containers with a screw-on lid) that the hole punch was emptied into. It was labeled “Confetti.” I thought nothing of this at the time, but the more I think about it, the more it perplexes me. When did they use it? Who cleaned it up after? Did they put it back in after using?

    1. Strive to Excel*

      I’d guess it was probably just chucked regularly and was there to keep the little hole punch bits from spilling everywhere.

    3. Possum's mom*

      A former coworker used to put them in the defrost vents of cars owned by whoever ticked him off that day. In the winter months when most people leave their car heater on it was an instant paper snowstorm, but sometimes the paper blizzard happened weeks later when air conditioning was used the first time. This was long before parking lot security cameras.

  34. Selina Luna*

    Most schools where I’ve worked have weekly staff meetings, so that’s not unusual. At one school, at these staff meetings, the teachers would pass around a huge picture of lips attached to a plunger. It was a kind of “staff of the week thing,” except the staff member who had it would select the next staff member to have it. There was a whole speech involved every time. And because it was chosen by the staff member who had it, there was no vetting process, so one person could have it many times throughout the year (though I admit, the kids adored the teacher who got it the most, so I don’t think it’s a huge issue).
    When I worked for a very small computer repair business, we opened on Christmas Eve, but no one ever came in, so we had a tradition of bringing in snacks and treats and watching the worst Christmas movies we could find (The Star Wars Christmas Special made several appearances). I’m glad I don’t work there anymore (a lot of customers were super sexist), but that tradition was one of my favorite times.

      1. Selina Luna*

        The only consolation is, it was clearly a new plunger, obviously purchased by the principal for the express purpose of taping a laminated picture of lips to the handle.

    2. Bluenyx*

      An old job of mine had a similar tradition! Not a plunger, but definitely a gag gift kind of trophy the winner could keep on their desk for the week. They tweaked it a bit with a couple rules: no managers could get it, and it was encouraged to give the award to someone on another team/ in another department, to encourage collaboration and cross-department connections. That did mean the people with support or overlapping roles got it a lot, but e.g. teapot Quality Tester tends to be a thankless job so not much of a downside :p

  35. RIP Pillowfort*

    We had a rotation chart for a very old F-150 (from the early 90’s) when I started work at my employer. No AC, janky suspension, etc. Everyone was required to drive it once a month going to job sites. I didn’t mind because I was used to no AC and somewhat loose suspension from personal cars.

    Me being new and inexperienced to fleet vehicles assumed that was completely normal. And didn’t question why we had something old. It wasn’t until later, I realized that the rotation for driving it was specifically set up to keep it in service.

    At the time if your assigned vehicle was ever pulled for non-use, you were no longer assigned one because you didn’t obviously need it. So EVERYONE drove this truck to preseve it. It was a priority because at that time vehicles were a precious resource. There were no fleet contracts and the agency owned every vehicle meaning we had to budget replacements. We were underfunded at the time and headlong into the 2008 recession. If you lost a vehicle, no one was sure it would ever get replaced if it wasn’t pulled for the correct reason.

    Your vehicle only got replaced during this time when it failed a safety rating. That F-150 was the sturdiest vehicle and apparently safest vehicle my agency had ever seen. It was from 1991 or 1992 and lasted until the mid-2010’s in active use. They finally pulled it because we got new fleet contracts (and better budget) which got us more vehicles. They started aging out vehicles and that one was the first to go. Whatever magic graced that machine is still there because someone my office bought it when it went to auction and still has it running today. They’ll drive it into the office.

    1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

      I kind of love this truck, although I’m not the one who had to drive it and bounce along on the shitty suspension.

      1. RIP Pillowfort*

        Then I have to tell you that if you had to off road at a construction site it was pretty much your personal roller coaster. It had 4-wheel drive if you were strong enough to shift the floor panel.

    2. RLC*

      At one former workplace we had a low mileage 1958 Chevrolet 4×4 1-ton pickup still in service (this was in the 1990s). One day the powers that be realized that it received very little use, and off it went to auction complete with brand new tires. An employee bought it for the price of the tires ($850). He was a vintage car collector and knew exactly what a wonderful deal he got.

    3. Susie Occasionally(formerly No)-Fun*

      Those Ford trucks could last. My dad bought a Ranger in 1982. It had absolutely nothing fancy—stick shift, no AC, hand-rolled windows, no power brakes or power steering. But I learned how to drive stick in it, and it a) survived that and b) kept on going . My dad sold it around 2005. For all I know, it’s running still.

  36. Former Gremlin Herder*

    My first job out of college I was a classroom assistant, which included a lot of admin work done on a computer. We were given the option to request a laptop from IT, but it seemed like devices were limited and most people were using their own, so I went with the flow and did the same. There were no data protections like VPNs, I just had tons of students’ files and reports on my personal computer. It wasn’t until years later that I realized what a terrible liability that was when it came to student data! I still feel guilty sometimes and think about how I should have insisted that I get a laptop.

    1. Rock Prof*

      You’d think this would be different now, but most faculty I know will happily use their own devices for grading and student information. The only thing I have to use a VPN to access campus is for certain software licenses, not for anything student-related.

    2. Charley*

      Yup! Had this same situation when I got a job at a university during Covid. We were mandatory WFH, and apparently I couldn’t be issued a laptop because I ‘already had a designated work computer’ – my desktop, in the office where I had literally never been.

  37. Zombeyonce*

    My first job was bussing tables and washing dishes at a country club restaurant. I also had the side job of folding boxes and boxes of laundered cloth napkins into a specified shape every day hours before we opened for dinner.

    I thought it was a little odd when they led me to the storage closet my first day where the napkin boxes were, sat me down on a little stool, showed me how to fold the napkins, then left and closed the door behind them. No one else seemed to think it was strange to close a 14-year-old in a tiny closet for an hour every day to fold napkins when there were dozens of empty tables I could have folded at and no customers around to bother.

  38. Nightengale*

    My medical school tried to convince me their way was the only way, and specifically that disability things needed to be really really hard. It took 17 meetings in 12 months to get permission to type notes (back before universal EHRs). My residency program took 1 conversation and a phone call. Medical school also told me that the resident HAS to carry babies around the delivery room after birth (which is something I couldn’t do, so they implied I couldn’t do my job.) But many hospitals have a nurse or someone else do it.

    1. Jay (no, the other one)*

      Sigh. I have the stereotypical terrible handwriting and back in the days of paper charts I wrote my notes in Microsoft Word and filed them in the charts. I did this in two separate jobs for years with no issues. Then my practice was purchased by a large multi-specialty group and someone decided this violated HIPAA. I was using an office computer and storing the notes on the hard drive – not even the network drive. They decided that patient safety would be better served if I wrote notes by hand. I did not give in and finally they decided it was OK if I didn’t type any of the patient info in my note and put a printed sticker on the page with the patient’s name and medical record number.

      Mind you, we got all sorts of patient info faxed to us and it sat in the tray of the fax machine just behind the front desk. Anyone could walk back there and pick it up.

      1. Nightengale*

        I have an actual disability affecting handwriting and it was so hard to explain to people that the problem wasn’t typical doctor illegibility but inability to write more than 3-4 sentences at a time, even if those sentences were legible.

        The solution, which your sticker story reminds me of, was for me to type notes on a PDA with external keyboard, stick the sim card from the PDA into a computer, load staff note paper into the computer and print lickity-split before any of the nursing staff accidentally printed onto the staff note paper and fussed at me. Then I would run the staff note paper through the addressoplate. ..

        For a few lovely years, everyone used EHRs on the computer and life was good

        Now everyone is expected to be able to use a smart phone/touch screen and I’m back to trying to find accessible ways to verify prescriptions and etc.

    2. KateM*

      Babies are carried around in delivery room? Do you mean like from mom to warming/washing table to mom or just held and carried round and round and round?

      1. Nightengale*

        the specific situation was a baby who needed extra care right after birth, who carried the baby over to the table for oxygen or whatever is needed. I don’t have the balance and strength to carry babies and a doctor told me that meant I shouldn’t be a pediatrician. But then when I actually did pediatrics training it was never an issue.

        Babies who don’t need that extra care aren’t really carried around by staff.

  39. Mason R.*

    The first “real” job I had in a small office, everyone answered each other’s phones when they weren’t in. It was encouraged by our boss so no customer or client “never left a message and felt heard” during office hours. So, if I was in my office and Sally was out for the day, if her phone rang, I had to go into her office and answer it. I would say “I’m sorry, Sally is not here for the day but can I take a message and have her get back to you?” This was office wide, no matter your position (so yes, we even had to answer our bosses phone). I didn’t know any better and I thought that’s just how things went when you worked in an office setting.
    Fast forward to my next job. My first week there, my office neighbor was out for the day and her phone rang so I got up out of my new office and went and answered it. This was a bigger office, and the amount of “what the hell is this guy doing?” looks I got from everyone was astronomical.
    After I explained how it was in my old office, everyone laughed it off and explained that definitely is not how offices work and is why answering machines were invented!

  40. Sylvia*

    My first three jobs as a teen (house cleaner at age 14, dishwasher at age 16, and waitress at age 17) all had male managers in their 30s who took a very high level of interest in everything I was doing and made sure that they were nearby to guide me if I should make the slightest “mistake”. Two of them were also interested in the clothes I chose to wear. (Did I wear that tank top for my boyfriend?)

    I finally realized that was not normal in my fourth job. I worked with several men, most of whom did not feel the need to closely mentor me. However, there was one man who took a keen interest in my work quality. He was arrested for stalking a woman about three weeks after I started there. It was then that I made the connection that this was predatory behavior.

    1. Bananapants Modiste*

      That reminds me (female) of my first student job in the office at a famous electronics company where the male colleagues would give the women “free” shoulder massages.
      I actually believed that was a perk of office work and never connected the dots of how these men were picking up the women as side pieces. I will spare you the details.

      I was a bit disappointed in my next office job that there were no massages for my shoulder pain… but very gradually got the point it wasn’t innocuous at all. And cringed.

  41. Same but different*

    Still at my first company (which is massive) and seeing the culture in different departments has me still questioning what’s normal sometimes lol.
    First department: thought it was normal to never be on camera except for ice breakers and socializing. We were all overworked, logging in wearing pjs. We also didn’t trust anyone who came too polished to work cuz how did they have the time, they must be slacking. Lunch time was sacred thankfully, let people eat.
    Second department: No lunch meetings, no Friday afternoon meetings, no meetings before 10 nor after 4. Then some people would share their schedules to work around (1 guy went to gym twice a day, another would share when he was getting a haircut). If someone couldnt be accomodated, “how could leave that person out! we need to reschedule!”
    Everyone thought it was normal, but drove me crazy how slow it was to get anything done. Didn’t stay there long.
    I still don’t know what’s the norm for meeting hours

    1. dulcinea47*

      I think your second department was good on meeting hours, but not with the working around peoples’ personal lives.

      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Agreed. No Friday afternoon meetings is a good idea in general, because everyone is usually fried by then and won’t be able to concentrate on anything. My last job, my boss and my grandboss worked 4-10 weeks and were out on Fridays and it was awesome because I got a lot done not having any meetings scheduled and also knowing I wouldn’t be interrupted by them (especially grandboss who was one of those annoying types who would just call you out of the blue when she had a question that could easily be answered in a one-sentence email or Teams msg).

        When I started my current job last year I had a ton of mtgs, and almost always one on Friday afternoons, until my project was put on hold. While I’m excited for the project to be starting up again soon, I’m kind of dreading all the mtgs.

      2. amoeba*

        Eh, for us, it’s basically “any time within the Outlook working hours of the participants is fine”. People set those, so if I’ve put 8-18 h there, I can’t complain if I get an 8 a.m. invite, even though it’s not my favourite time of the day!
        No lunch meetings though, that one’s been pretty universal in all of my jobs, haha. So 11.30-13.00 is usually out, although meetings running until 12 are begrudgingly accommodated…

  42. Super Anonymous*

    Oh gosh so much, where to start…I need to note that this was a family own business, it was NOT in the government sector at all, and we did work that you all see the minute you step outside your front door.

    – Cameras in the office
    – Another employee reading all the inter-office chat communication. You were then questioned if there was a negative interaction.
    – Having to mark every stop you make with a company vehicle, including bathroom breaks. An employee would then spend hours cross-checking your handwritten list with the vehicle’s GPS.
    – Getting written up for being 2 minutes late(no, we are not in a medical field, and this is not normal for my field)
    – Getting told that I would be “better at my job” if I waxed my eyebrows
    – Doing the job of 5 employees
    – Only 4 paid holidays

    That first job made me physically ill with stress and burnout and I do not miss it at all.

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

      The first time someone tells me I’d do my job better with waxed eyebrows is the moment I laugh and quit.

      1. Super Anonymous*

        It happened not too long after that. I was not financially stable so I needed to make sure I could even afford to move before I got a new job.

  43. Habitual Reader/Writer*

    TW: Vomit talk
    Definitely my first job out of college, where puking from stress in the bathroom was not only seen as normal, everyone would comment on how loud you were once you exited the toilets. It was this awful circle of shaming and normalizing how unwell the job made you. I finally left once my puke turned green from bile overload. I legitimately thought I was going to die. On a happier note, I have not been ill at any of my jobs since. The puking and the bile vanished once I switched jobs.

    1. Scrimp*

      Was it just the job, or is it possible the building itself had dome kind of problem as well?

      It seems really strange that everyone would be vomiting ftom stress specifically, and not each have their own symptoms.

      1. Irish Teacher.*

        Yes, while vomiting from stress is definitely possible, it seems odd that everybody would be reacting to stress in the same way.

  44. municipal*

    I recently learned that some workplaces do not require you to fill out a March Madness bracket. There are places where you can go the entire month without even mentioning March Madness. That was a nice surprise!

    1. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

      I used to fill out a bracket and select weird schools like the University of Rhode Island. I would sometimes win a week and surprise all the knowledgeable people in the office. These days I politely ignore the whole thing.

      1. Rocket Raccoon*

        I filled out two brackets this year – the first one I did alphabetically, the second one I chose which mascot I liked better. If they want me to play, they get to deal with my trolling (and both sides enjoy this)

    2. UKDancer*

      I don’t think this concept has reached the UK. Could you expand on what a March Madness bracket is? It makes me think of someone putting up very brightly coloured shelves. But I don’t expect that’s it.

      2. Hlao-roo*

        I’m linking to Wikipedia because I’m sure I would get some details wrong if I tried to explain it:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_Madness_pools

        The “NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament” Wikipedia page includes a “workplace productivity” section:

        During the tournament, American workers take extended lunch breaks at sports bars to follow the game. They also use company computer and internet access to view games, scores, and bracket results. Some workplaces block access to sports and entertainment sites, but the rise of mobile devices and live-streamed games bypassed those restrictions, and even workers not normally in front of computers then had access.[citation needed] Workers spend an estimated average of six hours on the tournament each year.[67] As of 2019, U.S. employers were projected to lose around $13 billion due to lost productivity during the tournament.[68][69]

        My experience as an American worker is the “citation needed” is doing a lot of work for those first few sentences, but it’s probably true for at least a few workers in the US.

      3. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        Nope, it’s sports, but now I’m thinking of where my drab office could use some brightly colored shelves, so thanks!

        I’m glad our bracket thing is optional, because I happen to have gone to a university with a very good men’s basketball team that’s strongly reviled by the fans of pretty much every other team. Every year when this starts at work, someone remembers I went there and urges me to submit a bracket, implying that I will definitely pick my school and that I must be a front-running jerk because I went there. (For grad school, no less!) Take my word, I was there for several years without stepping into the stadium, and I disliked most of the school’s rabid fans just as much as everyone else does.

    4. Sillysaurus*

      They REQUIRED you to fill out a bracket? Wild. And yeah, I never hear March Madness mentioned at work and I’m in the US. I usually hear someone at work mention the super bowl, but not always! I’m in Portland, OR, so if there’s sports discussion it’s usually soccer lol.

      1. Rara Avis*

        If I was required to fill out a bracket, I’d pick based on which mascot could eat the opposing one.

  45. Kali*

    I’m a first responder. Before we hang out with normal people, my spouse regularly reminds me not to bring up (a) dead bodies (b) bodily fluids and (c) other disturbing tales that me and my coworkers view as ‘amusing’ or ‘interesting’ instead. He reminds me that, for most people, that is not dinner conversation. In fairness, sometimes people ask!

    1. Jay (no, the other one)*

      Husband to me a few years ago: honey, normal people don’t have the coroner on speed dial.

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

      I had a coworker who had been a former ER nurse. You betcha all of our overnights in retail were full of her telling me horror/humorous ER stories.

      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        I’ve worked with former psych nurses. One had Ed Gein as a patient.

        I love working with nurses. They have seen everything.

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

          This particular nurse was shocked that people were so hostile to retail employees. She mistakenly thought that they’d be happier when shopping as opposed to in the ER or their loved ones were in the ER. This was 20 years ago- I don’t know what she’d think of today’s retail environment.

      2. Kali*

        Oh yeah, the rules fly out the window when I’m with nurses (or fire). My spouse gives up if he realizes I’m talking with them, lol. (I’m lucky – he’s got a normal job but grew up in the infancy of the internet and has a strong stomach, so I can tell him all my stories!)

    3. Glad I’m Not Still in the Rat-Race*

      My first job for a major defense contractor, two of my immediate work group of tech-graduated engineers and IT-types were children of medical professionals. You had to have a strong stomach to each lunch w them, because they were used to anatomy being standard table talk. It took a newbie turning a touch green their first week eating with the group to make them (and the rest of us first-job-types) realize it wasn’t normal to discuss the details of illnesses and accidents as small talk. Especially with food.

      1. Rocket Raccoon*

        Married a farmer, same problem. On the up side our kids got very comprehensive sex ed with no particular effort.

      2. Paint N Drip*

        I grew up in a ‘medical’ family and was so shocked when my elementary school classmates were not excited to see the images from my mom’s knee surgery lol

        1. "It was hell," recalls former child.*

          Me too! In first or second grade for show-and-tell, I brought in a pink plastic set of lungs that had been left in my dad’s office by a pharmaceutical rep. They could snap open to show the insides of the lungs and everything, yet strangely no one in my class cared.

      3. EllenD*

        One friend at school had a father who performed autopsies and a mother who was a theatre nurse, who talked about work over evening meals. She shared some of their stories with us at lunchtime. For some reason, when boys tried to gross out our group of friends, it never worked. Sometimes we’d relate one of her parents stories and gross them out.

    4. Strive to Excel*

      Family member in medical. Went over to a friend’s house – husband is also in medical. I bailed when they started talking about the VERY LARGE NEEDLES used in certain heart procedures.

    5. Suz*

      My ex used to assist on autopsies at the hospital he worked at. Dinner conversation almost always included talk of dead bodies

      1. StarTrek Nutcase*

        As a high school senior, I got a part-time job in our science department. I spent half the year prepping various animal skeletons (cats to possums to gators) to be used as classroom models. Surprisingly few people are interested in how to butcher, preserve parts, & clean bones. I found it fascinating. And probably why I found my time as Emergency Room staff fascinating too. Having a strong stomach, poor sense of smell, & no gag reflex helped in both jobs.

      2. StarTrek Nutcase*

        As a high school senior, I got a part-time job in our science department. I spent half the year prepping various animal skeletons (cats to possums to gators) to be used as classroom models. Surprisingly few people are interested in how to butcher, preserve parts, & clean bones. I found it fascinating. And probably why I found my time as Emergency Room staff fascinating too. Having a strong stomach, poor sense of smell, & no gag reflex helped in both jobs.

    6. Emily Byrd Starr*

      My sister is a nurse, and I am the most squeamish person ever when it comes to bodily fluids and bodily functions. The first few years that she worked, I had to repeatedly remind her not to share details about work that would nauseate me so much I would almost pass out.

    7. Sack of Benevolent Trash Marsupials*

      This is also true of veterinary medicine! Turns out the appetite for hearing about cuterebra removals, gory surgeries, HBC injuries, bacterial ear infections or parvo poop is not universal, who knew.

    8. Blue Spoon*

      My husband is a 911 operator. He gets a lot of prying questions, but telling his decapitation story usually stops them.

  46. Edna*

    An old employer that was notoriously cheap kept some costs down by not allowing employees to use the elevator without a doctor’s note. At first I didn’t realize quite how bonkers that was because I was fresh out of school and (at least way back then) plenty of high schools and below didn’t allow all students to use elevators, so I guess I read it as an extension of that? I realized how thoroughly bizarre it was when a colleague broke her ankle and had to crutch up and down three flights of stairs in a cast for the few days it took her to get a doctor’s note certifying that she did indeed need elevator access.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      That’s just cruel to that poor employee. And imagine her doctor being like, “Jane’s employer needs me to write a note to allow her to use the elevator??? What kind of monster does she work for?”

      1. Zombeyonce*

        I wondered about this so did some googling. It turns out that, depending on the type of elevator (I didn’t even know there were differently-powered types), elevators can account for an average of 3-10% of a buildings total energy cost.

        While that seems like a lot, it’s not enough to justify this inhumane policy (is anything?).

      2. Thomas*

        The excuse given at my 6th form was pupils would habitually overcrowd the lift. Everyone’s in a rush to move from one room to another at the same moment several times a day after all. That wouldn’t apply so much in an office though.

    3. Kay*

      This doesn’t even make sense as a cost saving measure, how much does an elevator cost per ride?? I kinda see their reasoning if it was “we refuse to do renovations that would trigger the ADA and force us to install an elevator” (even though that’s wrong ethically). But having it and not using it? Seriously? Nonsensical.

  47. NCA*

    My first job, company IT support, we were not supposed to respond to manager messages in the Teams-equivalent with ‘ok’, because it wasn’t showing enough enthusiasm. We had to respond with “Party!” Didn’t matter if it was something like a mandatory OT announcement – “Party!” It ended up being a Thing a lot of us used mockingly outside of work, and I still sometimes do it. Definitely had to train myself out of it at my next more normal communicating job though.

      1. Jess*

        You want performative, I got you.

        I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, that much is true. I was young and decided to take an older, attractive customer up on an ask out of boredom.

        I knew I’d find a much better place, either with or without him, but when he offered me a sales job because I was “so good with customers” I took him up on it.

        Anyway, the short end is, he was a top producer in another city until his horrible personality caused him to be managed out, so he opened his own franchise far enough way to beat the NDA. It was insane for many reasons, but the performative thing was you had to call a week a “strong”.

        Yep, as in “I need the strongly sales total report”. Unironically, and he didn’t take kindly to my eye roll.

        6 months there back in the 90’s pitching in-home water conditioners to poor people did break my lifelong fear of public speaking. I can speak at any event size comfortably, and have even done some MC work here and there as a volunteer. Silver lining to a terrible experience/time in my life as a young single gullible mom.

    3. Nina*

      I had a job where you spent a lot of time on a two-way radio net, with vox (voice-activated). I frequently still catch myself saying ‘copy [key words of what you just said]’ and less frequently ‘break break break’ [which was the radio way of saying STFU].

    6. Wolf*

      My friend group has a very, very unenthusiastic “hooray” for things that nobody wants. Like tax season or dentist appointments.

    1. Ms VanSquigglebottoms*

      My office is decorated in goats. Our obsession started before Severance, with the awarding of a monthly G.O.A.T. trophy (of course in the shape of the animal goat). Then around election time, we voted on a new office clock, and a goat clock won. Since then, we’ve moved into a new suite where all the meeting rooms are named after goat breeds, which are pictured on the placards. We also give goat-themed notebooks and bookmarks and such for prizes. Recently, we had a contest to guess the number of goats in the office. I picked a three-figure number…and I was not far off. (Ok, I was a little far off, but still!)

  49. MigraineMonth*

    For my first professional job I worked as a software developer at a company with both tight deadlines and a 4-person QA review process. The way we handled this was with clear expectations for turnaround times at each stage of the process and a team lead coordinating all the steps.

    Ha, no. The company had a mandatory training course called “Effective Badgering”, where it was explained that the original developer was the only one responsible and they had to cajole the other four people into doing the reviews (instead of the work they were primarily responsible for). We were encouraged to send each other frequent “check-in” and “reminder” emails, to escalate to calling them, and if it got too close to the deadline to even show up at their desks and stand there until they finished their review. It was an official culture of nagging and passive aggressiveness. Quid-pro-quo favors and cookie-related bribery were rampant.

    All of which is context to explain why I had 5 photos of badgers in a folder on my computer, ranging from an adorable sleeping baby badger to a snarling “don’t fuck with me” adult badger, and I would insert these into my progressively more urgent “badgering” reminder emails. Fortunately, I had a good enough read on the inside nature of the joke (if not professional norms) to not email anyone a photo of a snarling badger at my next job.

    1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

      I kind of want those for my job (grant writing/grants management). I also have 100% responsibility and 0% authority.

  50. CzechMate*

    I used to have a job with no PTO and another with only five days of PTO per year (hello, US of A). I got used to coming into work when I was violently ill. When I needed to take time off for something serious (like a family) I would go to my managers like a supplicant and beg for the extra day and promised to check email when not with my family. One year, some coworkers and I all came in to work an unpaid Saturday so that we could convince our boss to let us take Christmas off.

    Then I started at my current role, where we have extremely generous vacation time and unlimited sick days. I’m slowly learning to take time off, but it’s hard. My boss recently told me in a performance review, “The only thing you can do to improve is take more time off,” but it’s hard to unlearn.

    2. Bird names*

      Glad your current boss is supportive about time off. I’m sure you’ll get used to it in time. :)

    3. Lily Rowan*

      I’ve never worked at anywhere that crazy, and I’ve been at my current “use your generous time off!!” place for years now, but it still takes me a while and a “good reason” to take time off.

    4. Employee of the Bearimy*

      My husband spent years with no PTO (retail, then independent contracting work), so it took a solid year to convince him that he could just take time off for something like parent-teacher conferences.

    6. All things considered, I'd rather be a dragon*

      “something serious (like a family)”

      You were allowed to have one?

  51. Elsa*

    In my first teaching job, the Teachers Room was a sad, sad place, where tired looking teachers guzzled coffee and groused about the students. I figured that all made sense, since it was what I had always imagined when I was a student.

    Later I worked in other schools where the Teachers Rooms were full of fun, energy, and meaningful conversations! I learned so much in those other teachers rooms.

    1. Teaching Is Its Own Kind of Dysfunctional*

      My second interim job when I was trying to get started as a teacher, I wouldn’t go into the staff room at lunchtime because all they did was complain about the kids. Not in a “hey, I’m having this problem with X; do you have a similar one?” or “Hey, I’m new to this, how do you manage XYZ” way, but in an “everything sucks and I hate this and I’m just riding out the days til retirement (which is still more than a decade away)” way.

      That place was dysfunctional in sooooo many different ways, though. I was not sad that I was only there for half a year.

  52. Birdie*

    I work in education. At my second full-time job, I was bamboozled that they gave me a copy of my signed contract for my records. See, my very first job outside of college wouldn’t let me see my contract once I signed it, “lost” it a few weeks into my time there, and then made me sign the last page of a blank one or I’d be out of a job by end-of-day (which opened the door for wage theft and exploitation that messed up my comp package for years, all under the guise of “other duties as assigned”). I thought we just wore many hats in academia, and being a team player was more important than my own personal comfort and safety. What do you mean I have legal protections and the right to say no?!

        1. Employee of the Bearimy*

          “Bamboozled.” But nitpicking grammar is against the commenting rules.

          1. Sorrischian*

            I think a note that a word fully means something different – and not being used as a pretext to undermine or disagree with the original comment – isn’t a nitpick, though? It’s just useful information.

            (I’m guessing the word Birdie wanted there was ‘befuddled’)

            1. linger*

              They *both* can mean “confused”, so Birdie is not wrong.
              It’s just that “bamboozled” also can (and more often does) mean “cheated”.

              1. Lexi Vipond*

                I don’t think I’ve ever heard ‘bamboozled’ used to mean ‘cheated’ – I’d have said ‘baffled’, but ‘bamboozled’ was fine. On the other hand, ‘befuddled’ for me is an old-fashioned euphemism for drunk on the job.

                (And we’re actually nitpicking semantics…)

      2. Birdie*

        See, this is why I shouldn’t post while distracted. (lol) I went back and edited a few times, and “bamboozled” is a leftover from my original draft of the post that I totally missed while clarifying the rest.

        I should have put baffled. Sorry for the confusion.

  53. Blue Spoon*

    Not particularly bonkers, but my first job would often just send part-time staff home half an hour before closing if it wasn’t particularly busy (they typically had us working just under the threshold at which they’d have to give us benefits, so there was never any discussion of keeping above a minimum amount of hours, just below a maximum). I thought it was a little odd but did not realize that it wasn’t typically a thing until I got a different part time job and asked my manager if she wanted me to leave early because it was quiet and she looked at me completely baffled. In retrospect, I think the old job just wanted to shave a little bit off of what they were paying their part-time staff.

    1. Blue Spoon*

      My old job also did not have scheduled lunches. You went to lunch when a supervisor told you that you could go to lunch, and hoped that they didn’t forget (or “forget”) that you hadn’t eaten yet. I was shocked to move on to a job where lunches were scheduled so I was guaranteed one at the same time every day.

  54. The Passenger*

    My current company has frequently and forcefully told us that when we are travelling we should us public transport rather than taxis whenever it’s safe to do so. They also make us fill out an extended missing receipt form to claim the cost of the public transport tickets, which we don’t have to do for taxis (which provide receipts). We’re talking USD 2 or 3 dollar bus tickets . . . this doesn’t really count, though, because I’m fully aware it’s weird, and so just always take taxis.

  55. Amy*

    My very first “grown up job” was at a company where sexual harassment was everywhere and ran completely unchecked. I had anonymous notes left in my cubicle that said I gave someone an erection whenever I walked by. Another person made a crude sexual gesture at me. I felt sick at the thought of going to work, but I thought this was just how it was and every job would be like this or even worse.

    The icing on the very gross cake was when a mass email went out that said one or more men were ejaculating onto the walls of the bathroom stalls and it needed to stop. I mean, I guess I’m glad they called it out, but I was horrified it had apparently happened in the first place.

    That was pretty much the last straw for me. In my exit interview I told HR about everything and she was duly appalled. But she also said if I didn’t make it clear to the perpetrators that I didn’t like what they were doing that it wasn’t sexual harassment. It had taken a lot of courage just to talk about it to her, let alone confront the offenders themselves, and I’m also not sure how she expected me to confront whoever left the anonymous notes about their raging erections. Overall, I was underwhelmed by her response.

    Thankfully, my next job had a much healthier environment and I realized then how unacceptable that first company had been.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Oh god, that’s so so so awful. I hope your first company went out of business quickly, preferably because they were sued for harassment.

    2. "It was hell," recalls former child.*

      Amy, I came to post this exact same sort of thing…and I thought I was going to be “original” by reporting the rampant sexual harassment at my first professional job that I thought was part of the environment, because, you know, I was just a young female. I also assumed that Alison would think my post was just too weird and against the humorous spirit of her request for bizarre norms at individual companies. But apparently not!

      I worked at an engineering and construction firm with ~6,000 employees. As the editor of the company magazine, I was out in the field a lot, photographing construction job sites. Many of the guys were fairly rough, but none gave me any trouble–they were almost uniformly gentlemen. The executives at the company were a different story. One, a senior VP in his 60s, had me drive him back to the office from some event. He then launched into a discussion of his hernia surgery, but kept directing me to look at his crotch as I was driving. Despite my youth and relative innocence, I knew exactly what he was doing, so I kept the conversation on the vagaries of hernia surgery. (“Oh my gosh, how long were you in the hospital?” etc.) But other guys in the office were far creepier. A long-time human resources(!) consultant in his 50s kept crowding me into the corner of the office, asking me why I was crossing my arms over my chest and what I was hiding and saying that I must hate people if I have such negative body language. This same guy chased the cleaning lady’s daughter (who helped out her mom regularly) into the bathroom after hours, trying to force her to give him a blow job (can I say “blow job” on AAM?), but luckily she was able to escape.

      Later, in terror she explained to me what had happened, and the two of us young women in our mid- to late 20s couldn’t figure out what the right solution was. If we told, would one of us get fired? Would the harassment get worse? We decided not to tell, because it didn’t occur to us that anyone would help her. This was around 1992 or so–but this seemed normal if you were young and female and didn’t know any better. And the kicker is that my department was HR (though I was an editor and not an HR person), and this guy was an HR consultant (long embedded in the company, jovial friends with the executives).

  56. tk*

    For my first student teaching placement, I was paired with a really awful mentor teacher who dumped two of his freshman classes on me a full semester before I was supposed to take over. I got my assignment part way into the school year and the kids were already several chapters into the book I was supposed to teach, which I had never read before. I was also still taking a full course load at grad school and had a part time job so I could cover rent. I was so overwhelmed and sleep deprived (not to mention terrified I was dooming the kids to a subpar education) that I cried on the drive to the school most mornings. I thought it was normal, that it meant that I loved the job so much that I could do it despite how awful it was. It wasn’t until I started working part time at a library in my second semester of the program that I realized that you could just like your job in a chill way and it didn’t have to feel like life or death all the time.

    1. Somewhere in Texas*

      … that I realized that you could just like your job in a chill way and it didn’t have to feel like life or death all the time.

      ^^ Still trying to get to this point in my professional like. I want to be like you!

  57. DancinProf*

    My previous job in higher ed (hired straight out of grad school) was at a university that was extremely strict about expenses in general. Folks in roles for which p-card access is a best practice (including me) could not get them, and every single expense required some kind of preapproval: travel, for example, would either be booked by the university or preapproved, booked by the employee, and then reimbursed afterward–sometimes with weird overreach-y requirements like having to submit receipts to get a per diem, which . . . kind of defeats the purpose of per diem.

    At my new (current) job, I was granted a p-card within my first few weeks without having to ask for it. I had to discreetly ask my supervisor “What do I even do with this?” and would check with her the first few times I used it to get a hotel for work or buy office supplies or whatever. I just wasn’t used to having the latitude to make my own judgments about expenses. Nearly 3 years in, I still don’t use my p-card a whole lot!

  58. Charley*

    I used to work as a tech in a fly lab where they called the aspirators (little tubes you use to move small/fragile insects around) ‘pooters,’ after the little sound it made when you blow the fly out of the tube. I didn’t realize this was an in-lab joke until I joined another lab and they all found it hilarious.

    1. Cinders and ashes*

      Pooters is what our primary school called them too – U.K. – not a joke.

      1. Charley*

        That’s good to hear! The people in my current lab looked at me like it was the silliest thing they’d ever heard.

        In my old lab we did also use it as a verb in a way that was probably not standard (e.g. ‘poot that fly right there’)

      2. MountainGoat*

        Yeah that’s actually a widely used name! The Wikipedia page for aspirator says it probably comes from the inventor Frederick Poos (also not a joke!)

    2. Black horse*

      I love this so much; having worked in a fly lab I can absolutely see calling those thing ‘pooters’. Science is a whole special realm of weird. (in the best way!)

      1. Wolf*

        Yeah, in one of my labs, those 10-50ml sample tubes with a pointy end were called “rockets”.

  59. Caffeine Monkey*

    My first job was as a reporter on a local newspaper. When a reporter left the office on their last day, we’d all slam something metal against our desks.

    When I moved to an airline, it was quite a surprise to discover that wasn’t universal.

    (I’ve been told the tradition dates from the days when reporters would have their name permanently set in lead, rather than being made up every time. It started with the reporter’s name being hammered out of the lead so it could be re-used. Over time, and as newspapers began to be digitally printed off site, it just became One Of Those Things.)

    1. Zombeyonce*

      This just brought up a long-buried memory of when I worked at a daily newspaper in college. It was the first job I worked where employees were mostly over 21. Everyone had a drawer in their desk full of liquor bottles to drink during their time in the office. Cue my surprise when I went to my second office job years later and realized it wasn’t normal to keep alcohol on hand at all times just to get through the very stressful day that could go until midnight (the deadline for the paper to go to the printer).

      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        Was everything in black and white, too?

        I’m getting a very His Girl Friday feeling out of this.

    2. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

      I worked in newspapers and one tradition was that when you left, your colleagues would make up a fake front page full of satirical stories about you. I still have mine from 1989.

      1. What name did I use last time?*

        My brother got one of those when he retired in 2004. I think the fake articles were mainly kind, inside jokes.

      2. Caffeine Monkey*

        My newspaper didn’t just do them for leaving but for significant events. I have one for my 21st birthday, as well as my leaving one.

  60. Defiant Jazz*

    I worked for a small business for a decade, and so when I moved into a more corporate role I knew there would be some growing pains and there were, but there was one thing that drove me crazy: anytime – and I mean every single time – someone at the new job emailed a file to someone in the organization, they would immediately follow up by walking to your office and asking if you received it. Even if I replied to their email with a “received, thanks!” they would still physically come up to my office on the third floor to ask me if I received it. This was everyone in the building. Didn’t matter what department they were in or what they did, or how important the document was – if they emailed a file it was followed by a visit and verbal confirmation. And it didn’t just happen during regular work time, it could be any time. I was asked during meetings, in the breakroom, via text message, and once in the bathroom, through a stall door. I tried to be the change I wanted to see in the world and NOT participate in this madness, but my boss expected me to. If he asked me to send something to someone, he expected me to go ask if they received it. I tried talking to IT about it (they agreed it was stupid but it was so ingrained in the culture they didn’t think they could change it), I tried talking to my boss about it – pointing out how much productive time was being wasted by this practice, but it didn’t matter. And to be clear, this was not asking if you had SEEN something, like “did you get a chance to look at (thing)”, this was entirely “did you RECEIVE (thing)?” Email was not a new thing at this point, so that wasn’t the reason. I don’t know what the reason was, but it was a brutal time waster. I don’t mind a periodic break to walk around the building, but the constant interruptions of people walking in to ask or having to get up and go to another office suite to ask was a lot.

    1. Mariana Twonch*

      I would flip out if someone followed me into the bathroom to ask if I got their email. That’s a die on this hill moment for me.

      1. I Have RBF*

        .Seriously

        Coworker (through stall door): “Did you get my file?”
        Me: (toilet paper roll sounds): “Of course not. I’m on the toilet.”

    2. Scott*

      What bizarre behavior. This is one of the best stories in this thread. I wish you knew the origin of the practice.

    3. Defiant Jazz*

      Oops, hit submit too soon. All that to say, a younger coworker and I were recruited around the same time and left to go work for a new company. Former company was her first professional job out of college, and so she thought this was a normal thing people did at work. She drove everyone she interacted with for the first couple of weeks absolutely up the wall by continuing to do this. I tried gently telling her but she kept at it until her manager sat her down and told her to stop.

    4. Honey Cocoa*

      It would have been weird if you had to call people on the phone, or text them and ask- but no, you had to get up and walk. These people really didn’t trust technology, did they? I wonder what infamous email wasn’t received and started this madness?

      1. Paint N Drip*

        you know there was ONE EMAIL that created some biggg drama on one fateful day lol

    5. Laura*

      I had a boss who was forever sending me an email, then calling me to tell me she sent me an email and then describing the contents of the email even though I was in the middle of other work and told her repeatedly I wouldn’t be able to do anything until I was done with work in the lab and back at my desk. It was never urgent, but the lab work she was interrupting was almost always time sensitive. She would keep calling until someone answered. Drove me up an effing wall.

    6. Lilac*

      Did you work at Sebben & Sebben from the show Harvey Birdman?
      Peter Potamus constantly asks “Did you get that thing I sent ya?”

    8. Rain*

      I really feel like this is because of one moron who kept using the ol’ “I sent it, didn’t you get it?” trick that we’ve seen a few times here on AAM, whether to get out of doing work or to deflect blame when deadlines weren’t met. Then some manager finally blew up and said “FINE! For every email you send with a file, you MUST go PHYSICALLY to that person’s desk and ensure they got it!”

      And then it never stopped.

  61. Suz*

    At my 1st job after college we had a lab cat. A real cat, not a stuffed animal. Each of our production facilities had a small QC lab and they all had lab cats. When I moved to my next job, it was surprising to learn that most labs don’t have cats.

    2. Llama Turner*

      I am offended that lab cats are not ubiquitous. Please unionize and correct this error immediately.

    3. Junior Assistant Peon*

      Workplace cats used to be common before modern pest control. I’ve pushed the idea at my job to solve our mouse problem, but we’re too corporate to get away with it.

      1. Calamity Janine*

        have you suggested one of the collars that looks like a button-down collar and tie for the cat?

        this may not actually sell them on the idea, but it’s also an excellent excuse for looking at business cats,

      2. Tiny Soprano*

        We can’t have an office cat, so I bring in a fresh skin every time my pet snake sheds, and we make snakefetti out of it and stuff bits under all the furniture. It’s effective for about three months, and then you need a fresh one to convince the mice that the “snake” is still in residence.

        It does scare the crap out of people who don’t know what it’s for though…

        1. Tiny Soprano*

          And it just occurred to me that we’re probably raising a generation of student casuals to believe that snake skin under the furniture is a totally normal workplace thing…

          1. Susie Occasionally(formerly No)-Fun*

            “Hi new boss. Do you need the office snake skin refreshed? My python shed over the weekend.”

            *New boss backs away slowly . . . *

    4. Wolf*

      At one of my previous employers, we had a running gag to request a minipig. It would live in the staircase, and get access to all the office kitchens – the idea was that the kitchens could only get cleaner with a pig eating the gross mess everyone left behind.

  62. pinyata*

    This is more a perk that I assumed was normal than it is “weird,” but at my first job when I was 16 at a small retail store, the owners would buy lunch for everyone on Saturdays and we’d eat together. When I quit and got a different job, my first Saturday there I didn’t bring a lunch because I assumed it would be bought for me. Lol, nope!

  63. thedude*

    The poop talk makes me LOL. My son used to be a wildland fire fighter and they often slept outside for long periods. He told me they could have an entire night’s conversation about how best to poop in the woods.

    1. Dinwar*

      I don’t think you’re a field person until you’ve experienced a few things:
      –A life-and-death situation or six
      –Digging a cat hole with a tremendous sense of urgency
      –Learning to consider an upside-down 5-gallon bucket the height of luxury
      –Survived on [insert favorite snack here] for 48 hours (pretzels for me)

      1. Wolf*

        I’d like to add:

        – ants or bees in your trouser legs

        – thinking you found a shrubbery that gave you enough cover to poop in private, and then finding you’re very visible

  64. Mkitty*

    At a not-long-after-college job in the 1980s, the small company where I worked made EVERYONE take lunch at the same time, from 12:20pm to 1:20pm. The place literally shut down every day and, except for the receptionist who stayed at her desk to answer phones, all 40 or 50 employees took lunch (the receptionist took lunch later and someone covered the phones while she was away). I have no idea why the powers that be decided this was How Lunch Must Work, nor why it was at such a specific time. This was a company that did pension administration, not a manufacturing or other facility where all the workers needed to be present to keep things going. We sat at desks and did paperwork all day. I thought it was odd at the time, but didn’t realize how odd it was until I worked at other places.

  65. Mariana Twonch*

    I used to work in a department where we weren’t allowed to set out-of-office messages to recipients external to the company. Instead we had this convoluted system where if you were going to be out of office, you had to forward your emails to a shared box that was accessible by X number of other team members selected by the manager to handle the messages for the person on PTO. This was because one time, a customer emailed a team member who was out of office, got their out of office message, and instead of just emailing their backup as instructed in the OOO message, they panicked and called the president of the company to resolve their low stakes customer service issue. The president was so bothered by this single phone call that we basically had to start keeping it a secret from our customers and vendors when we were out of the office. Ridiculous.

    1. TM*

      Part of the reason for doing this is to minimise spam. Spammers will do drive-by mail bombs where they generate firstname.lastname or FirstInitialLastname combos of common names (or names harvested from the internet) and fire them at mail servers. If they get an OOO reply, they know that is a genuine, active email. Those get added to various lists for more spamming or resale to other spammers.

      There are all kinds of techniques used by spammers vs email providers in the spam-prevention arms race, and I’m not sure how common that is these days, but it was definitely a well-used method.

      1. TM*

        Oh, and also to prevent OOO ping-pong if an email was sent “from” an address that had some form of autoreply message when it was emailed. It was a lot easier to stop that kind of thing happening with internal emails. (One reason for “DoNotReply” sender addresses too.)

  66. Csethiro Ceredin*

    My ex worked at a place tangentially related to the auto industry where
    a) the boss walked around and put a beer on everyone’s desk on Friday afternoons
    b) everyone took cold medication every day because it perked them up
    c) screaming, profanity-laden fights were common even between bosses and their direct reports, and it generally was shrugged off as clearing the air.

    I went to one of their holiday parties, which was quite an experience.

      1. Csethiro Ceredin*

        Same! I assume you know about the spinoff trilogy which just completed…. :)

        1. Blue Spoon*

          I know of it, but I haven’t read it yet… I’ve tried, but I just miss Maia too much

    2. The Prettiest Curse*

      Yeah, I imagine that that combination of factors would make their parties quite a scene!

    3. Wolf*

      Was b) the mild kind that is mainly alcohol and some herbal extracts, or something more intense?

  67. Zona the Great*

    I didn’t really think it was normal but it did become the norm: I worked in a ski resort pub in the back-of-house. It was a mix of mega-stoners, bros, Native Americans from the nearby Pueblo (American SW), Mexican Nationals, and spoiled rich kids forced to work for their ski pass by Mom and Dad. Every single day, we hugged each other hello and goodbye and said I Love You very often. We also smoked hella blunts together multiple times a shift (Safety Meeting on the docks!). Def not normal.

    1. LTR FTW*

      Hahah I love the phrase Safety Meeting… which I learned at work but have transferred to my personal life…

      1. Rocket Raccoon*

        My husband works at a place where they have actual OSHA safety meetings and he still snickers every time.

        1. I Have RBF*

          I’ve know of several places where the “Safety Meeting” was a daily break to smoke, or “smoke” and drink.

    2. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

      Hey, it’s nice that a staff with so many differences came together around something, even if it was weed! I figured you were going to say that people from each group hated all the other groups, so everyone getting high at work sounds almost wholesome. :-)

  68. Help Me*

    Oh I have a few tales!

    At my first full time job working at a for-profit college, the manager would regularly yell in people’s faces and reem them out at weekly meetings. Nobody would ever blink an eye or even acknowledge her doing this.

    At Next Job, I had coworkers that wouldn’t actually do…anything. I mean they would have assignments due by a certain date and it would be months later but still not done. The shared printer/copier never worked and when someone came by to fix it, it was still just as broken. Nobody ever saw a problem with this.

    I also had a job where my coworker in the office next to mine would regularly break his computer to the point that the poor IT girl started venting to me about how she couldn’t figure out how he kept breaking his computer. That same coworker would talk to himself and loudly pass gas while exclaiming ‘OH!’ as if he was somehow surprised by his own butt.

    I have so many stories of whacky workplaces and coworkers.

    1. Zombeyonce*

      “That same coworker would talk to himself and loudly pass gas while exclaiming ‘OH!’ as if he was somehow surprised by his own butt.”

      This might be the funniest sentence I’ve ever read.

      1. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

        I had a dog who was always surprised by his own butt when he passed gas.

        2. Tiny Soprano*

          My mother’s dog does this too! She always acts affronted like it couldn’t have possibly been her.

    2. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

      My favorite aunt worked in academia, and would regularly hand things in a year late, and IT WOULD BE OK. As a young adult working in newspapers, this blew my little mind.

  69. First Job*

    My very first real job after college and internships. It was at a local arts organization. One day, there were a lot of closed door meetings, board members present, etc. Obviously something was up. At the end of the day, we had an emergency all-staff meeting. It was announced that the box office manager had been embezzling funds over about 18 months.
    The Big Boss asked the staff (about 15 people) what we thought should happen. He said, “Send me a memo and let me know if you think we should fire ‘Fred’…if you think it’s OK for him to stay, if he gets counseling…or just what you think we should do.” I sent a memo saying my vote was to fire him.
    After a few days, they decided he could stay! WTF! About a week later, they fired him because he was in the board room saying he was going to kill himself.
    About a week after that, he was going to pay back the money to avoid prosecution. They sent me, the lowest person on the totem pole, to meet Fred in the parking lot of a different arts organization (it was centrally located), get the check from him for the stolen money, give him a box of his belongings, and have him sign some type of HR form. About an hour before the meetup in the parking lot, Fred called me and said there were two personal belongings that he wanted to be sure I brought. One was his suit jacket. The other was a Halloween photo of him dressed in blackface that he thought was in his desk drawer. I opened the top drawer and didn’t see it immediately, so I abandoned looking for the photo.

    I was so young and green that didn’t know that I could say, “Um, I’m not going to meet him there. I think a board member should go and maybe an attorney, as well.” I also didn’t know if it was weird or normal for the director to ask everyone for their input on whether Fred should get fired.

    Years later, I looked up “Fred to see whatever happened to him. He was in prison for producing child porn. The mismanaged organization that I worked had gone out of business.

    6. Calamity Janine*

      i would call this a roller coaster, but quite frankly i am absolutely certain i have seen, and been on, roller coasters that are far more sedate!

  70. Sulcata Turtle*

    Printing Excel sheets. I loved that job, great company, caring staff. Even the VP cared so much about us that she hand-delivered Christmas presents to our houses mid-pandemic (and included a toy for my pet!). But the finance department. Printed. Excel. Sheets. Like, printed them out to mark them up and look through the numbers. They liked to highlight things physically. I wasn’t even on the finance team, but the mere idea made me slowly shrivel into a raisin whenever I thought about it.

    Surprise, not surprise: same person in finance department was fired because they were taking paper invoices, and just shoving them in the trash without processing them. Seems they didn’t always like paper.

  71. Nat20*

    This is a positive one, so maybe it’s more of a unique perk than an unusual culture thing. But I’d love to know if this is actually weird, or if others who have worked at ski resorts have this too.

    At the ski resort I worked at, everyone was allowed to take daily “ski breaks” during their shift (which became “bike breaks” in summer). And this was a front-desk type job at a facility in the base area, not even like a lift operator or something actually ON the slopes. Aside from your half-hour lunch, every person was also allowed a one-hour break specifically for hitting the slopes. All employees of the resort already got free lift passes, of course. Hearing “so-and-so’s on their ski break right now” was incredibly normal.

    Caveats: obviously you had to clock out, it couldn’t be right at the start or end of the work day (meaning you couldn’t just leave an hour before the end of your shift or start an hour late), and you could only go if you had a coworker around willing to cover you and it wasn’t a busy day/time that would make it inconvenient. Plus the time it took to change (on both ends) and get to the lifts and back had to happen within the one hour, so you might only get 20-30 minutes or so of actual shredding time.

    I don’t know if you were allowed to take a full-hour break for anything else, though, so if not there’s definitely some possible unfairness there. (I think my own manager would’ve been fine with it, but I don’t remember the official policy.)

    But yes, it was awesome. Obviously jobs that let you take advantage of the product/service they sell aren’t unusual, like how employees got free lift passes, but leaving *during the work day* to go play for an hour seems weird in the best way. So I wonder if that’s normal in the broader industry or not. I didn’t take it super often, but most people took it at least every week or two, and there was one manager who went pretty much daily.

    1. Nat20*

      Edit: lunch was also a full hour, not half. So if you took lunch and a ski break, that’s two full hours you were allowed to be away for. That’s two unpaid hours, but it was still worth it for a lot of people.

  72. Down the hall*

    My current job has a number of things I find odd but this one makes me laugh – across nearly every department, people refuse to say “bathroom.” And yet, it is the norm to let others in the office know you are leaving the immediate area for whatever reason. So instead of saying, “I’m going to the restroom/bathroom” everyone says “I’m going down the hall.” On my first day of work, I was handed off to a co-worker and told to shadow them for a couple of days, meaning follow them around. At one point, this person said, “I’m going down the hall.” I replied, “oh, I’ll go with you!” thinking they were headed to another department… down the hall. This person did not correct me to understand they were going to the bathroom but let me follow them like a little duckling all the way to a mysterious door that turned out to be the bathroom. To this day, I REFUSE to say I’m going down the hall and have told multiple new hires that “going down the hall” really means going to the bathroom. This is my hill and I will die on it.

    1. Lady Danbury*

      I worked at a job where they would frequently use the terminology “bio break” during meetings, instead of just saying let’s take a break. I absolutely hated it because I really don’t want to be thinking about the biological substances that might be exiting your body.

      1. Zona the Great*

        I agree! It reminds me of this trend of calling eateries “gastropubs”. It is so offputting!

        1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

          Heh, I assume it means gastronomy, not gastroenterology, but it sounds like some place you’d get colonoscopy prep.

      2. Nice cup of tea*

        I’ve heard “comfort break” as a euphemism for toilet break.

        I guess it is uncomfortable if you are waiting too long.

        1. Troutwaxer*

          I sometimes say ‘visit the vending machines’ when I’m not sure whether referring to a bathroom break is okay.

      3. RLC*

        I once worked with someone who referred to his washroom/toilet breaks as “coffee breaks”. His logic was that he was taking a break to dispose of coffee consumed earlier in the day. Very confusing to all.

  73. ACA*

    In my first job, which was at a call center, my team was all on the same anti-anxiety medication to the point that we called them “tictacs” when we needed to ask a coworker for a pill.

    1. froodle*

      ahh call centres. a leading source of normalised nightmare behaviours and long term mental health damage.

    2. Ed 'Massive Aggression' Teach*

      I went to my doctor because I was having panic attacks three times a day at work (right before I started, on the lunchbreak, and just after finishing my shift).

      She said “You work in a call centre, I take it?” and signed me off work for three weeks with stress. Apparently I was the third person she’d seen that month with the same job and the same problems. Everyone I knew in that hellsite either was on pills or needed to be.

      Thank God for that GP, anyway, because that sick leave time was the only way I managed to get out: applied for 50-odd jobs in that three weeks and thankfully I got one of them.

  74. HomerJaySimpson*

    My first ever non-service industry job was in Nuclear Power, so I came away from it with very rigid ideas about how to get broken things fixed. It took me the better part of a year at my new job to realize that it wasn’t like that everywhere. I went from basically hyperventilating when I couldn’t find documentation detailing what needed to happen for equipment to be considered “fixed” to being able to look at something broken, shrugging and saying “it’s already broken, I can’t make it much worse” and just digging in and doing my best.
    I appreciate the rules from my old job, especially since I don’t think people want Nuclear Technicians winging it, but it’s so freeing to be able to just do what needs to happen, and trust that I can justify my repair enough to not get in trouble.

  75. 653-CXK*

    At ExJob, we used to have flex time where if you came in earlier or later, you could leave earlier or later (e.g. if you came in at 7:30am, you could leave at 4pm, or if you came in at 8:30am, you could leave at 5pm).

    At CurrentJob, flexible time was also available until there were some people abusing the time clock system; hence, management declared that we cannot clock in more than ten (10) minutes before our actual start time. (I begin at 8am and am a non-exempt worker, so I cannot begin work before 7:50am.)

    It would be nice to begin at 7:30am, especially if I have a project to do, but I would have to change my hours, rather than get that flexibility.

  76. Emmeline*

    One university department I worked for right out of undergrad grossly misinterpreted the rules on retention of student records, both the types of records that need to be kept and the length of time required to keep them, such that they believed anything even remotely related to the student’s time at the university must be kept far longer than was truly necessary. This resulted in the entire basement of the building I worked in consisting of a labyrinth of locked storage areas full of boxes upon boxes of student “records” that should have been recycled a decade ago. It looked like that scene from the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark except there was nothing cool hidden in the boxes, just lengthy descriptions of academic advising sessions from fifteen years ago. I’m pretty sure nothing was ever cleaned out because the task was too daunting by that point.

    Upon changing jobs I realized that the laws surrounding student retention required far, far less stringent application and the only thing that most of the storage facility in the basement was good for was probably mouse housing.

    2. Ann O'Nemity*

      At my old nonprofit, we kept federal grant records and receipts indefinitely. Not because of a deliberate policy, but simply because there wasn’t a process for regularly recycling them. We had a huge basement, so space was never an issue. People just kept stacking banker boxes into increasingly precarious towers.

      It wasn’t until the basement flooded that we were forced to sort through everything and decide what actually needed to be kept. That’s when we realized there are rules for record retention that we should’ve been following. Instead, we’d just been keeping everything… forever.

      Fortunately, the flood spared anything remotely recent. We cleaned out the basement and, in the process, created a simple, effective system for dating, storing, and eventually recycling old files.

    3. Lexi Vipond*

      University records can be kept for 80 years, just in case the student decides to come back at the age of 100 to do another degree. But plenty aren’t!

    4. TM*

      I think this is the case at almost every educational institution I’ve dealt with, including two where I’m working now. It drives me nuts.

      “No, we do NOT have to indefinitely retain the free student mailboxes which they all get and the majority never use. Please ask your records management people about regulatory requirements and ‘systems of record.'” (hint: does not include student mailboxes. Nor staff mailboxes, actually!)

  77. The OG Sleepless*

    This is something I know intellectually is just a tradition at my workplace, but it feels so normal I have carried it to other places. I’m a vet. We have a rule that the doctors do not leave sharps (needles, scalpel blades, etc) for the techs and assistants to have to discard. It’s a major foul to leave one where they can’t see it, the way restaurant workers aren’t supposed to leave knives in the dish tubs where the dishwashers might stab themselves. The joking-not-joking rule is that if a tech finds a sharp you left behind, you owe them chocolate. (Just a bag of M&Ms or something). We always cheerfully bring them chocolate after lunch or the next day, no hard feelings. So, when I worked a per diem day somewhere else, I was mortified when I left a scalpel blade for a tech and I said “Oh no! I owe you chocolate! What kind do you like?” It took her a second to realize I was dead serious.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Oooh, I love that. I can totally see my cats’ vet doing something like this, she is awesome, as are most of the vets I’ve had contact with over my 25 years of cat servitude.

    3. Sack of Benevolent Trash Marsupials*

      I love this! We had like one doctor ever at my veterinary hospital who cleaned up her own sharps. We actually had one doc take an epic poop not just in but on top of and around the staff toilet that clogged the toilet – and walked away after taping an ‘out of service’ note to the door. We did not have a cleaning service. The techs cleaned the hospital after closing. I still hate that guy.

    4. Good Enough For Government Work*

      This is charming but does remind me of PC Danny in Hot Fuzz being required to supply desserts for the whole station every time he screws up…

    5. I Have RBF*

      I think that’s a sweet solution to the issue of leaving biohazard sharps for others to deal with. It is not expensive, but essentially says “I messed up, here’s a token of apology.” I hope it caught on in your new workplace.

  78. Superhero Girl*

    I taught in the same district for my first 10 years. They counted sick time to the nearest 15 minutes. So if I had to leave 10 minutes early for an appointment, even if my students were already dismissed, I was docked 15 minutes of sick time (that’s ~.035 of a day, really important /s). But if I signed out 7 minutes early, that was fine and 0 minutes were charged. This is regardless of the fact that I always arrived before and stayed past contract time.

    I switched to a district where I can come and go (within reason) as I need and am treated as a professional adult who can manage my own time. What a relief.

  79. RussianInTexas*

    I didn’t really think it was normal, but the company I work for only switched to the direct deposit two years ago.

    1. PDB*

      It seems that in the show Andor , long ago in a galaxy for, far away, they don’t have direct deposit either.

    3. JustaTech*

      My in-laws refused to switch to direct deposit for years and years because they were completely convinced that their staff could not handle getting paid every other week rather than weekly.

      Oh they would complain about everyone leaving early to deposit their paychecks, but oh no, those poor dears couldn’t possibly handle floating a single week.

      Finally my husband just asked their like 5 employees if they could handle it, and not only could they do it just fine, but had been begging for *years* to get direct deposit.

  80. Abogado Avocado*

    At my first job out of college in the Southwestern US, one of my coworkers had a pet tarantula slightly larger than a teacup that he would bring to the office and let sit on his shoulder, when it wasn’t crawling up and down his arms. Nobody except me seemed to think it was odd at all.

    2. econobiker*

      Working at a small sole proprietor owned plastics molding company, we had a sugary sweet, very religious, church nursery aide,
      young 20s girl who was one of the two office support personnel. She had a small Ball Python pet snake which the company owner let her bring to work with her whenever she wanted to. She would keep “Herbie” the Python (while balled up) in the big front pocket of her sweatshirt for him to be warm. We’d joke with her that she had Herbie to teach religious zealot snake handling to the church children by using a non-venomous “training” snake. This was jokingly said to her but there were in fact snake handling sects in the mountains north of our mid sized southeastern city…
      But it was weird to have a snake in the office associated with this sweet young lady…

  81. ThatGirl*

    My current job has gone through a merger, so it’s not really the same company I started at. But when I started, the first summer I was told oh, we have summer hours!

    Now, I’ve worked at other companies with summer hours, and generally the format is to work a little extra/take shorter lunches Mon-Thurs and then you could leave at lunch on Friday. And everyone participated, so it made it easy.

    Not so at this new company. They had all sorts of arcane rules, you had to let people know in advance if you were taking summer hours, you could do it on a Wednesday afternoon if you wanted to, and it was sort of implied that nobody did it every week. (And I found out that some people never did it at all.) It was/is otherwise a good place about flexibility, scheduling, sick time etc so that was always SO bizarre to me.

    1. Charlotte Lucas*

      I worked somewhere that used to have summer hours but a change in contract before I started meant they couldn’t do things the old way. Instead, it was similar in that you could request that kind of flexibility ahead of time (staffing levels had to meet contractual obligations). But you could work 10-hour days for one day off, and I found Wednesday the easiest day to get approved.

      People who had worked there a long time often still called it “summer hours.”

    2. AnonForThis*

      I worked at a place that had “summer hours” one year, but my boss obviously thought they were not a good idea, so she added additional rules on top of the company rules. There were 3 of us reporting to her, but only ONE person could leave early on any given Friday… which meant that each of us was able to leave early on THREE Fridays during the “summer hours” season (which was limited to only July and August by the company rules). It was ridiculour.

    3. econobiker*

      I had “Summer hours” which meant changing start and end of shift to avoid the hottest time of day in an un air-conditioned factory metal building. So instead of working 7am to 2:30pm , we worked 5am to 12:30pm so avoiding literally “afternoon” heat…

  82. pinkjar*

    I had one manager who found it “disrespectful and suspicious” for staff not to ask permission before leaving our department’s office. Like, to drop off a paper. Or to return a piece of IT equipment. Or pick up materials. If you were leaving your immediate desk vicinity, you had to find Ms. Boss, ask her if you could go take care of whatever business you had down the hall, and then finish it quickly once permission was granted. This boss did not last long (shocking, right?), but I was very young and so on-edge from her outbursts and micromanaging, that I went to my next job with the habit of asking every single time I needed to leave my desk. Finally, after a couple weeks, my (wonderful) new manager explained that he really, really didn’t care if I needed to go give Jane a paper… I could just, do it.

    1. froodle*

      oh man, i remember being a couple of months out from my old toxic job, asking the person training me a similar question.

      she was so baffled, she apologetically told me she didnt understand the question and could i repeat it.

      the halting “you can just… go? you don’t need permission?” as both our brains bluescreened in mutual incomprehension was embarrassing and freeing in equal measure.

  83. KDO*

    I worked for a tech startup (of course) that ate lunch together every day. Whenever we’d hire someone, their first lunch with the team involved each person at the table asking the new hire an *extremely personal* question. The one question that EVERY new hire got was “if you could choose how you’d die, what would you choose?” One the company got large enough that we couldn’t do this in a single lunch period, we whittled it down to three questions, two of which were fairly normal for a new hire, but the third remained the “how would you die” question.

  84. CJ Cregg*

    I worked in news for a long time. When we covered crime stories, we did what we called “drug math” where we calculated the street value of however much of a drug was seized during a bust. Police reports in my area only wrote the amount (weight, etc.) seized in the reports, not the value. Surprisingly, drug math was not really used in my next career lol

    1. froodle*

      are there tables of formulas for drug math? how DO you calculate it? do you adjust for inflation? i wouldactually love to lern more about the drug math!

    2. Anon attorney*

      I used to do cases involving people trying to smuggle excess quantities of cigarettes into the country and being relieved of them by Customs who then requested a court order to destroy the cigarettes. Invariably the person would claim they were for personal use, so we used to work out how long it would take them to smoke the confiscated cigarettes (like if you smoked forty a day, how many years would it take to finish the cartons). the cases were boring and quite sordid so it cheered me up slightly. Cig math I guess

  85. Yzmakat*

    Until recently, all my jobs were in hospital libraries. The procurement processes were ridiculous – my manager (the head of the dept) wasn’t allowed to sign off our incidental budgets
    neither was her manager
    or her manager.
    Yeah it was one below board members that were allowed to sign off on things, or one person in the procurement office. For a around 9000 staff organisation.
    I worked for the last 9 months to get a replacement bin lid. I was attempting to contact that person every 3-4 days for the last 3 of those months.
    They still have not got one.
    New job is with a private company in finance – their reaction to finding out my work laptop had a dodgy charger? The director just ordered one on Amazon and had it sent to my house within a day…

  86. don't fall down now*

    I worked somewhere that provided fully paid health insurance (awesome!) but only after you’d been there three months (not awesome, since this was when there were tax penalties for not having a qualifying insurance plan, and many of the short-term catastrophic plans didn’t qualify). I knew this was annoying but I didn’t realize until later that it was uncommon.

    1. Glad I'm not in the rat-race any more*

      Eh, I know lots of retailers who, should you be lucky enough to be hired full time, still don’t let you have health insurance for six months or a full year! (RAH USA) Idk what one is supposed to do now that proof of health insurance is necessary to file your taxes. Especially since it looks like ACA insurance will see the WH’s axe sooner or later.

      1. LarryforPM*

        Hang on, proof of health insurance is required to file your taxes? So if you lost your job part way through the tax year, or your job doesn’t provide health insurance, you can’t pay tax?

  87. Formerly Frustrated Optimist*

    I was describing kind of a mediocre job interview experience to a friend who commented, “It doesn’t sound like they were trying to ‘sell’ you on the job at all.”

    It was then that I realized with all of my interviews (higher ed, and higher ed-adjacent), none of these places had *ever* acted like they were trying to sell me on working there.

    Rather, it was kind of the opposite: They acted like they were doing me a favor by speaking to me, and that I ought to be grateful for even being invited into their space to interview.

    I thought that was SOP, until I interviewed with my current employer, who pointed out all the good things about the department, and the fulfilling work I’d be doing.

    “Ah,” I thought, “This is what Friend meant about selling me on the job.” I clearly saw the difference, and was thrilled to accept their eventual job offer.

    1. Swamp Thing*

      OMG. I forgot that job interviews are also supposed to be selling the job to you. I also work in higher-ed and this is all I know… tell us why you are even worthy to be sitting in front of us interview committee members lol

  88. MigraineMonth*

    I worked summers during college at a very small toy store that I assume was a hobby business, because after the first couple of months I just never saw the owner again. Which was fine, except then the manager got fed up and quit, and after that there just… wasn’t anyone supervising me.

    Among the “interesting quirks” at this store:
    – The only way to communicate with the owner/my boss was to call her phone and leave a voice message. Sometimes she would call back a few hours later, sometimes she wouldn’t.
    – There was only ever one person working, so you had to wait for all the customers to leave to take a lunch break, get cash/quarters from the bank, etc.
    – The barcode scanner was broken, so you had to type the barcode in by hand
    – The credit card scanner was broken, so you had to type the credit card number in by hand
    – The cash register was broken with the cash drawer open, so any time I needed to go into the back of the store or the basement, I just stuck all the 20’s in my pocket so no customer would walk in and take them. Once I forgot and *walked home with over $1,000 in my pocket*, and the owner didn’t fire me
    – Most of the big-ticket items like giant stuffed animals and wooden tricycles weren’t priced. Since the owner never picked up but also got upset if I declined to sell, I started just making up prices by finding the price at Walmart and doubling it
    – The electric company kept threatening to turn off our power due to unpaid bills
    – The toy vendors kept threatening to stop selling us toys due to unpaid bills
    – The owner made us keep all credit card receipts. They were kept in a giant pile under the cash register table, along with a bunch of returned and broken toys and old toddler juice cups that still had juice in them.
    – I was paid when the owner remembered to. Which was infrequently. Once she still owed me over $1,000 when I returned to college, and I was leaving voicemails explaining that the next step was taking her to small claims court. That’s when she called me complaining that I hadn’t cashed my paycheck, which she eventually found it in the giant stack of papers next to/under the broken cash register. (Lots of people have told me that I’m naïve to believe that she actually lost it, but she really was that disorganized and flakey.)
    – The toy store inevitably went out of business, and I had to create my own W2 form because the owner didn’t send it to me and apparently dropped off the face of the earth.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      I’d love it if you googled her and discovered that she’s since been arrested and imprisoned due to tax fraud or something like that.

    2. KateM*

      Speaking about walking home with money in your pocket, during high school summer I was taking filled orders and money from people, in a bookstore where my employer had set up a table. In the evenings when the store closed, I would put all the money I had accepted during the day into my handbag and walk home, alone.

  89. thedude*

    At my first job out of college, (I’m old) we used paper reinforcers quite a bit. They called them PAs. It meant Paper Assholes. I love this.

    2. LaurCha*

      The donut shaped things you put on hole-punched paper? I forgot about those! Gummed reinforcements.

    3. The OG Sleepless*

      My husband and his business partner called them that! Not PAs, just paper assholes.

      1. JustaTech*

        My first experience with those was using them to make “charms” we were supposed to exchange with other Girls Scouts at a mall lock-in.
        Each troop made charms with their troop number on it, and then you were supposed to swap charms with other girls.
        Some people had these amazing woven-bead animals!
        We had PA’s stuck on big sequins with a little clip through the middle. Not many people wanted to trade with us.

  90. Also Laura Actually!*

    I’m from North Carolina and grew up in the 80s and 90s. College basketball is religion here. Teachers always wheeled in TV carts during the ACC tournament, and again during March Madness if an ACC team was in a day game. This continued throughout my first jobs in NC. When I moved to California and told colleagues in my West Coast jobs about this, they were quite surprised.

    1. NC kid*

      90’s kid from NC here and 100% had this experience growing up.

      During school spirit week, one of the theme days would inevitably be “ACC day” where you would wear a t-shirt from the school your parents went to/rooted for

  91. Sansa Tyrion 4 the win*

    Oh, I got a good one. Where I work now, we can’t pay people correctly. We’re unionized, with a lot of different collective and very complicated collective agreements, and so we just have a backlog of hundreds of thousands of transactions. If you get a raise here, it may not be effective for two years (but will be backdated). If your pay is wrong, make a request for service and they’ll get to it (in a few years).

    If you grieve it, the employer will say how inappropriate their systems are, and how you should expect to be paid correctly. But that they can’t do anything today. But you can make a request for service.

    I understand most places, employees are paid consistently correctly.

    1. Lady Danbury*

      I’m assuming you’re not in the US, where this would be illegal? It may also be illegal in your location.

    2. Coverage Associate*

      Teacher in San Francisco? They have the worst payroll software, paid the software company extra to manage it and fix it, but I think the situation is still as you describe.

    4. I'm a public servant*

      That is the Canadian government payroll in a nutshell. I still have outstanding claims from a position I got promoted out of 8 years ago (google Canada Pheonix public servant pay fiasco). I actually think they are no longer allowed to collect if they overpaid me (no one seems to know for sure if I was overpaid or underpaid). I changed federal orgs 6 months ago and they’re still “working on” transferring my pay file to the new org. Luckily the old org keeps paying until they do. Total boondoggle.

    5. Wolf*

      Even with backdating, doesn’t that completely mess up your taxes and retirement fund calculations for the meantime?

  92. Suki*

    My first job out of college was for a local chapter of a national non-profit. The organization’s mission meant kids received toys, computers, bedroom sets, or other fun things. There was no company credit card, so I was required to buy everything on my personal card and get reimbursed. I built my credit REALLY WELL AND FAST! And I used a Cash Back card, so that helped supplement my $18k annual salary!

    I’m still benefitting from an amazing credit score thanks to that insane policy!

    1. Sack of Benevolent Trash Marsupials*

      I’m glad this went well for you because I was holding my breath. That had the potential to go so badly wrong!

    2. Sharp-dressed Boston Terrier*

      Is it just me, or is there a whiff of something fraudulent about using the cash-back option on your personal credit card when making a reimbursable company purchase?

      1. Angstrom*

        I don’t think so. A lot of companies allow you to use miles earned on business air travel for personal use, and this sounds similar. Using a cash-back personal card doesn’t cost the business anything.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        If the organization had company cards where the organization would receive the rewards, and the employee chose to use their own card in defiance of that policy, maybe. However, many companies don’t provide company cards and explicitly allow employees to keep any credit card perks (in part as compensation for the hassle of the reimbursement process).

        I suppose someone could accuse the non-profit of not using donor funds well, but considering how little they paid employees, I’m guessing their admin overhead was quite low.

  93. Homeburger*

    Outlook calendars were set to default where appointment details could be seen by everyone. I’m not sure we even had the option to hide the details because I never saw one like that. You could make an individual appointment private to hide the details if you wanted. This was the most dysfunctional place I ever worked and I knew most of the nonsense was NOT normal, but on this I was surprised when every place I’ve worked since has calendars private by default.

    1. allathian*

      My workplace’s like that and I see nothing wrong with it. My work appointments can and are open, there’s no reason for them to be private by default. If I’m, say, interviewing for a promotion, those meetings would be flagged private, and so would any disciplinary meetings be.

      My personal appointments are private and not even my manager can see those. IT could, but they’d need a damn good reason to look.

    2. MigraineMonth*

      Huh, I’ve always worked at public-by-default calendar workplaces. We usually just leave out details we don’t want shared (e.g. “one-on-one” instead of “meeting to discuss PIP progress” or “private appointment” instead of “vasectomy”), though there is the option to set an appointment to private or to only show available/unavailable.

  94. Strive to Excel*

    This is a very mild one by comparison, but CPA firms love them some acronyms. I think there were well over a hundred in daily use at my prior workplace. So a paragraph like this would be totally normal:

    While preparing CY TB noted variance in the PY EBITDA numbers. Upon review noted that the PP&E values have shifted due to new recognition rules from GASB. The IFRS and GAAP standards now recognize PY depreciation differently. Reviewed relevant standards and updated CY P&L accordingly.

    When I started my current workplace I had to readjust my understandings of which acronyms are actually common knowledge (none of them, the answer is none of them).

    Also, for no good reason, the abbreviation ‘M’ at the end of a number does not stand for million. It stands for thousand. ‘MM’ stands for million. This caused some significant confusion my first year.

    1. Just a Pile of Oranges*

      Have you seen the XKCD comic Average Familiarity? “Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.”

      So rather than being a workplace quirk, this is a “human who is expert in their field” quirk.

    2. No Direct Reports*

      I understood that whole paragraph. It’s not just CPA firms, although it was rampant when I was there, its every accounting job I’ve ever had. My current company has acronyms for the various divisions and business units, on top of what we have in the finance dept.

    3. Dinwar*

      “M” doesn’t stand for “million”, but “mille”. As in “millimeter”–not a millionth of a meter, but a thousandth. Or plastic thickness–a mil is 1/1,000 of an inch.

      Not sure why we do that. I think it’s the fact that English was built to be classist. Upper class people–such as those who work with money, or highly paid engineers–would use more Romantic terms; lower class people used the more Germanic terms. Same reason we raise cows but eat beef, to cite another example–poor people raised them, rich people ate them. There’s a lot of that in English when you start paying attention to it.

      1. Strive to Excel*

        While I don’t disagree with your language dissection, I would bet that if you tell the vast majority of Americans “That cost 12M dollars” they would assume 12 million, not 12 thousand.

        1. Dinwar*

          I’ll grant you it’s not intuitive. I was merely responding to the “for no good reason” part. There’s a reason; whether it’s a GOOD reason or not is up for debate.

          Mostly it’s a neat bit of trivia that I thought I’d share.

      2. Glad I'm not in the rat-race any more*

        Agreeing with Strive. Everyone I know assumes K = 1000 except those of us who know K = 1024, but we just adjust our thinking to whether we’re speaking to a layman or other IT wonks.

        3. allathian*

          That’s old hat, if you’re dealing with binary numbers, stick to kibibytes, please.

          Kilobyte (KB) = 1000 bytes (10^3)
          Kibibyte (KiB) = old binary kilobyte = 1024 bytes (2^10)

          Similarly a megabyte is 1000 kilobytes and a mebibyte (MiB) is 1024^2 bytes.

          Kibi, mebi, gibi etc. need to become mainstream.

        1. allathian*

          It’s possible, although MM for a million wouldn’t make sense there.

          Another possible explanation is that many of our banking terms have Italian roots thanks to the merchants in the Italian city states in the late medieval and early renaissance periods. Banking as a concept is older than that, about as old as fixed settlements, agriculture, and writing.

          1. Sharp-dressed Boston Terrier*

            Absolutely MM makes sense for “one million” in that context, since it is a thousand thousands.

      4. linger*

        The standard metric (SI) system for referring to very large or very small numbers has a heavily Western r(European) bias, for which it helps to have a classical education, but it isn’t tied to just one language, let alone English class structures.
        By convention it uses Latin-based prefixes for negative exponents, thus
        milli (m) = 10^-3 = one thousandth (from L. mille ‘thousand’);
        deci (d) = 10^-1 = one tenth (from L. decimus ‘tenth’);
        but it uses Greek-based prefixes for positive exponents, thus e.g.
        deca (D) = 10 (from Gk. deka ‘ten’);
        kilo (k) = 10^3 = one thousand (from Gk. khilioi ‘thousand’);
        mega (M) = 10^6 = one million (from Gk. megas ‘great’).
        (Also by convention it uses small letters for negative exponent symbols and large letters for positive exponent symbols, though this convention arose only after k=kilo was already established.)

        1. linger*

          … and some more recent additions drop the first convention, and draw on a wider range of (still primarily European) languages, e.g. nano (n) = 10^-9 (from Gk nanos ‘dwarf’); pico (p) =10^-12 from Spanish pico ‘small’; atto (a) = 10^-18 from Norwegian/Danish at ten ‘eighteen’.

      5. MigraineMonth*

        I don’t know if English was “built” to be classist, exactly, it’s just that England got conquered by the Normans. When the people speak old German and the ruling class speaks old French, you end up with linguistic class stratification, at least two words for everything, and a truly FUBAR spelling system.

    4. Ppt Specialist*

      And I thought the acronyms at my government job were bad…

      Ours were more like proper nouns though, and there were two kinds. The one kind were “systems” that were used for reference or operation. They were always referred to by their acronyms, and most people forgot what they even stood for.

      The other kind were offices, and these were more frustrating because you had to parse from a string of letters what department you were talking about. For example DOS/CA/PPT/OCS might be the Office of Children’s Services in the passport department of Consular Affairs, which is under the Department of State. But I have a feeling I missed a step or two in there…

  95. Anon For This*

    My first-ever internship was in a large, old organization, very well known in the industry, that I had assumed would be fairly conservative. My division head had a tradition in which they would regularly have parties on Friday afternoons… disguised as meetings, down to an official Staff Meeting calendar invite complete with a fake agenda. I showed up (all unsuspecting) to my first Friday ‘meeting’ and entered the room. Distracted by the conference table covered in snacks, I was nearly smacked in the face with the beer can immediately tossed in my direction. Then I turned my head and saw the *other* conference table, carefully placed out of sight of the door, that was COVERED in alcohol of various types (in comically large sizes). The whole division showed up and we all got drunk in a boardroom, eventually stumbling away sometime after 6pm. This was a regular occurrence.

    I would learn in future internships that this is not, in fact, normal behavior for our industry or the organization. Boss just liked to party. (:

    1. Charming Kitten*

      I worked in a place where a select group of people booked a conference room on Friday afternoons for “team-building” which was actually Dungeons & Dragons…

    2. Paint N Drip*

      I thought this about the donuts at my first grown-up job, but my boss was just a sugar hound (mad respect to him, always spent the company money buying from local bakeries)

      1. MigraineMonth*

        When I was hired at a rapidly-growing company, the (relatively few) people who had been there 5 years earlier were still bitter that “donut day” had been cancelled and *holding a grudge* against the woman who had given the announcement.

        (It had been cancelled because it had been fun to get enough donuts for 100 people set out every month but logistically challenging to get enough for 3,000.)

  96. Student*

    My first job made me think that I’d have to deal with sleep-related topics in the office on a regular basis. This ranged through some… unfortunate… variations.

    Conflicts from people sleeping in shared office spaces while others were trying to do their job at their desks. People falling asleep while on duty. People sleeping in their direct manager’s office! Being told to share a hotel room with a complete stranger (from a different, completely unaffiliated business) to save on travel costs. Being told to share a bed (yes, bed – not just a room) with co-workers (yes, PLURAL) to save on travel costs.

    I was relieved to discover this is not at all normal after I changed jobs.

    I still experience occasional second-hand embarrassment from the conversation I had to have with that boss. I calmly but firmly explained to him that I was not going to sleep in his office under any circumstances – unlike all of his other direct reports, and himself.

    1. Emily Byrd Starr*

      I read that as “sheep related topics” at first. Now THAT would certainly be unusual!!!!

  97. PomPom*

    In my first professional job, which was not billable or any kind of government work, we had to fill out this sheet on a weekly basis. It had the days of the week, and for each day we had to write down what we accomplished, what we learned, and who we worked with. We turned it in to the big boss every Friday afternoon, right after scrambling to make up things we learned that week.

    At my next job, I asked if there was a template for the weekly report and got a lot of confused looks. Because normal people in normal jobs don’t have to keep the equivalent of a gratitude journal.

  98. Tape Survivor*

    In my early 20s, I worked in insurance (home/auto/life) for a few years at a few companies. The first office I worked at after receiving my license was a very large and successful franchise office of one of the nation’s top home/auto insurance companies, so I assumed (naively) that it was well run representative of the industry. I did learn a lot, but the owner/manager was an absolute tyrant who would scream at us while we were on the phone with customers, move our bonus requirements so she never had to pay us, and required everyone in the office (all women) to wear makeup and keep their hair done and call all the male clients “honey” and “sweetie.”

    Beyond all this, she had a set of strange rules/requirements we could never quite understand. We rotated desks monthly, and she didn’t allow us to have *any* personalization at our desk : no photos, no decorations, no notes. She enforced this by outlawing tape in the office–it was impossible to find a roll of Scotch tape for love or money, and we were screamed at if we brought in our own. The only exception to this was our list of agent names/codes, which was taped to each computer monitor with one piece of tape. If we desparately needed tape for a ripped paper or another normal office use, we would very carefully tear off a tiny sliver of this single piece of tape. If the owner noticed that we’d put tape on something else, she would shrilly demand to know where we’d gotten it and what did we think we were doing.

    When I started my next job at another insurance office, I opened the office supply drawer to find rolls upon rolls of Scotch tape–I felt like the richest person in the world, and almost overcome by emotion exclaimed “oh my god, tape!” My new bosses reaction to this made me realize such tape-based terrorism was not, in fact, typical in the industry.

    2. Coverage Associate*

      I had enough experience to know it was nuts, but I once worked for a law firm that bought the absolute cheapest pens. Like pens on clearance because they were misshaped. I once brought in a dozen rather normal ballpoint pens my spouse got as swag, dropped them in the supply cupboard after hours, and they were gone the next day. This was also a firm that when I asked for something very normal, like better pens or a keyboard designed for lawyers with section and paragraph keys, my boss said I could bring it myself but the firm only did its regular supply orders.

      During my notice period at the cheap firm, we had to stop work one afternoon because the computers were down. (We had been telling IT for a week that there was a problem, but they were offsite and blamed wildfires near us. We tried to tell them that we were in the financial district in Silicon Valley, and if the internet was at a crawl everywhere in the smoke plume, it would be bigger news than the fires, but they ignored us until every system, including the phones, went down.) I contacted my next job, which was 2 blocks away, and asked if I could drop off some personal office items (mostly law books I owned) because I had the afternoon free unexpectedly. So I did kind of a first day tour before I even started, and they asked if there were any office supplies I needed that they might need to order specially. I asked for pink highlighters, and I had a whole box on my first real work day. (I must have seen that everyone had adequate pens, so I didn’t ask for those.)

    3. MigraineMonth*

      This reminded me of a tip about *feeling* wealthy with relatively little spending: re-buy essentials like shampoo, dish soap, etc before you run out so you never feel deprived.

      The relief from scarcity–such as the bizarre artificial scarcity created by your tyrant boss–is what really makes us feel rich.

  99. froodle*

    I worked at a Big 6 Energy call centre in the UK, and at the time, they forced all their phone operators to introduce ourselves with our full names (first and last)

    This sucked for multiple reasons:

    Obviously if you had a quote-unquote “foreign” name, that gave racist idiots on the phone a nice opening to indulge in their racist idiocy

    This was long ago enough that a) printed phone directories were still a thing and b) a lot of people still had landlines, and occasional customers would look up the people they spoke to and bother them at home

    I personally had a caller figure out that I was in the contract centre local to him, then use a bit of social engineering to find out when I was working and try to speak to me outside the office when I got off work

    When I started a new job and answered the phone by introducing myself with my full name, my manager let me know that “you don’t need to do that here. you can if you want, but nobody, including me, gives out their last name”

    Especially weird given that I knew, from firsthand experiance, that it was stupid policy that put staff at risk, but I still went into autopilot the next time I was on the phone with a customer

  100. Governmint Condition*

    I have to do something similar for the days I work from home in my government job. But I can omit who I worked with and what I learned. It’s just a self-audit that shows you actually worked on something.

    (Now to figure out how to write up the time I’ve spent today on this site.)

  101. ReallyBadPerson*

    Not a work norm, but a school one: In many US high schools in the 70s and 80s, girls (and only girls!) were given a chicken egg to carry around for a week as if it were an actual baby, to dissuade us all from teen pregnancy. You were supposed to hire a babysitter if you wanted to go out, for example, and you had to return your specially marked egg intact on Friday.

    We all thought this was completely normal and some girls looked forward to receiving their egg babies in sophomore health class. One of my searing memories from that bizarre experience is watching my swim coach neatly place all the eggs that had been entrusted to him for babysitting into the carton that he had brought for this purpose so that we could all get through practice.

    1. lalaw*

      We had to do this at our southern California middle school in the early 2000s, except we had a potato instead of an egg and all the students had to do it, not just the girls. We were supposed to find a “babysitter” every day during PE class, but most of us would just lock the potatoes up in our PE Locker and make distasteful jokes about locking real babies up in lockers.

    2. Who knows*

      I was in middle/high school in the early 2000s and I remember this being in all the TV shows (usually as a trope to get the main couple together), but it wasn’t done at my school, nor did I know anyone else who had to do it. I always found that odd, and wondered whether or not it was actually true or something made up for TV.

      1. ReallyBadPerson*

        It was definitely a thing at the high schools near me (northern California in the 70s and 80s). How anyone thought this was remotely useful is baffling to me.

    3. Bast*

      My school didn’t do this, but we did have a “smoke pack” thing that was supposed to dissuade us from smoking. Essentially, we took this little, cell phone sized thing that was designed to look like a cigarette pack home for a weekend, and about every 2 hours or so, it would go off with a phrase like, “Let’s go outside and have a smoke” at which point you were expected to speak into like a walkie talkie some phrase — we were given a list of them, such as “Smoking stinks” and “Smoking is not cool” etc. It varied how often you had to repeat the phrase — sometimes it would only make you repeat the phrase once, sometimes two or three times. A good portion of your health grade that semester was dependent on answering the “call to smoke.”

    4. Black horse*

      My kids had to do it (or, the older two did, not sure yet if the youngest will have to since they’re only a sophomore). But it was a bag of flour, and all the students, not just the girls. Seems pretty universal around here–a few weeks ago kid came back from gymnastics laughing at them all taking turns “babysitting” the flour baby so the “mom” could work on her floor routine.

      1. Polyhymnia O’Keefe*

        We did it with something the approximate size and weight of a baby (mid ’90s, grade 8 or 9). Some kids used a realistic baby doll, some used a baby sleeper stuffed with potatoes, etc. Everyone did it, not just the girls, and we had to carry it around for a week. There was a group of jocks that got the most into it and were very serious about their babies.

    5. Lou's Girl*

      Mine was named China and my boyfriend cracked her. I broke up with him immediately.

    6. cleo*

      I was a kid in the 70s. We were given eggs in elementary school and I CRIED so hard when mine cracked.

    7. Skippy.*

      I can’t remember whether it was late-80s junior high or early-90s high school, but yes, us too, boys and girls. (Why didn’t we all just egg the building? Why didn’t we just buy a dozen and duplicate the markings?)

    8. MigraineMonth*

      I was in HS in the late 90s, and they gave us actual baby dolls that cried. When they cried, we were supposed to take off their clothing and stick a special key into their back, and we were marked down if it took us more than 15 minutes to do so. They were extremely disruptive in all classes those weeks.

      (One of my classmates loved the experience so much she tried to keep the doll for longer and decided she wanted to start having kids right away.)

      Another took home a baby doll set on “demo mode” for the weekend, which meant it cried every 15 minutes like clockwork, until one of their parents called the teacher at 2am and told her to come turn off the doll or the parent was going to destroy it.

    9. Bromaa*

      I regret to tell you I took care of both a flour baby and an egg baby in 2006 — but we all had to do it.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        I feel like the logical conclusion of that would have been a cake baby and filial cannibalism.

  102. Sunshine Gremlin*

    At my current workplace: we have emotional support rubber chickens. When one honks, at least one other honks in return.

    We start every day with a quick standup and we frequently bring our chickens. Once, someone put on a rubber chicken cover of Thunderstruck and we all honked at the director of ops.

    On particularly tense days, you can hear echoes of honks all throughout the building.

    Sometimes people come in to interview or to tour our building (we’re in entertainment in a city known for entertainment) and chickenry inevitably happens because we no longer realize that people outside our company might not understand chickens honking down the hallway.

    We had a gorgeous styled Christmas tree this past year and we hid chickens in it and started sharing photos of our Chickmas Tree on social media.

    We have a Slack channel dedicated to chickenry.

    I own four different sizes of rubber chicken, including a 2 inch mini chicken on my keys that my boyfriend got for me after he learned about our chickenry when I toured him.

    3. Aggretsuko*

      I love this.

      I had a teacher in middle school who loved rubber chickens who would love this.

  103. Soft clothes for life*

    At my first job, the leadership was obsessed with our overly strict dress code and with starting work promptly at 8:30. The executive director used to walk around the office at 8:30 and log who was not at their desk. His second-in-command would go around issuing wardrobe infractions, like open toed (think peep-toe, not flip flops) shoes, men without ties, or women without panty hose. We had tag days like in elementary school where we could wear jeans if we made a donation to a charity. This was an NGO circa 2005-2008, not a law firm in the 1980s.

    I’m glad it was my first job, because I would never put up with that now and it was otherwise a great place. I was given lots of responsibility and agency, got a few promotions, and learned skills that helped me in future jobs. I still consider that second-in-command a mentor. But the dress code thing was so weird. She once poked our colleague on her bare back and told her to go home and change when said colleague was leaning over a cube wall to grab something – because the stretch caused a gap between her blouse and skirt.

    1. Tiny Soprano*

      Lord, and peep toes were so popular in that era that you almost couldn’t get pumps that weren’t. How insufferable.

  104. EEB18*

    My first job out of college was at a small (15-person) nonprofit. The two people at the top of the org chart were in their 50s/60s, but everyone else was in their 20s. We all ate lunch together (which was nice!) and also all talked about our sex and dating lives (wildly inappropriate! Horrifying levels of detail!). In fact, while I was waiting for my interview before starting the job, I overheard a lengthy and graphic description of a coworker’s recent bachelor party, which the person nominally in charge of HR was listening and laughing along to.

    Since I was just out of college and used to those sorts of conversations with my friends, I didn’t realize just how inappropriate this all was. When I started my next job, I was in my mid-twenties and the youngest person on the team by several years. Fortunately, I pretty quickly realized that my previous coworkers’ level of sharing would not be appropriate (and I was also in a stable relationship at that point rather than on the dating apps, so I had less to share anyway.) But I look back on some of the conversations my old coworkers and I had IN THE OFFICE and cringe.

  105. Green Tea*

    I worked for a very small company when I was very early career that had a lot of personal relationships, and traditions like wine on Fridays and bringing back small gifts for coworkers after taking trips. I switched to a large organization, and did things like, bring the entire team back snacks from my honeymoon – individual snacks I dropped off at their desks. And, when a colleague asked me to ship something to her for a meeting in another country, I went to the corner store and bought a chocolate bar to pop inside thinking it would be a nice surprise.

    These weren’t exactly embarrassing faux pas kinds of things and people generally responded positively…but it was very out of sync with the larger organizational culture and in retrospect I think made me come across as more young and sweet/less competent and professional than I would have liked.

  106. NotBatman*

    Every academic job I’ve ever had has been filled with people insistent that theirs is a totally normal college exactly in line with all the other colleges, and every single one has had wildly different norms and policies. Examples include:

    • School A has monthly all-hands meetings where every employee in the school meets, and people complain constantly about how “insular” and “disconnected” the staff are for only meeting monthly; School B has meetings where only the tenured faculty of the sub-division of the department are invited, and they occur once a term.
    • School B has a massive student protest about how campus only has one swimming pool; School C has no pools, no gym, and only one athletic field.
    • School A lets anyone teach any class they want to teach; School C assigns everyone every class years in advance. Both assume this is standard and normal.

    My example of how I made an embarrassing discovery: I once asked in a job interview how often I’d be expected to teach classes on subjects I’d never studied. The interviewer, visibly horrified, was like “Why would we ever ask you to do that?” That was half the assignment at my first job out of school.

  107. Hey...*

    I started at my previous company right around the time that Skype/Teams/other chat systems were starting to be used more widely. One of the first things I was “trained” on was that you should never just launch into a chat with a question, always message “Hi” or “Hey” or something to make sure that the recipient is available, not sharing their screen, and willing to chat. This was a very large international company, and it is what everyone did, and if you didn’t, people would get very annoyed. Now I realize the rest of the world thinks this is the rudest thing in the world!

    1. SuprisinglyADHD*

      Wait, is THAT why people do that? It’s the chat message equivalent of knocking on a closed office door? I always assumed that chat, texts, and email were intended to be varying levels of asynchronous, while phone/voice/video calls were in real time but with the recipient able to postpone if necessary. I guess I always treated the notification sound/icon/popup as the “knock” and the actual message contents being the response to “come in”.

    2. allathian*

      I suspect that IMs are seen as more asynchronous now thanks to channels with full posts being so common on the same platforms.

    3. MigraineMonth*

      Nah, pretty sure this is still an open debate with both sides thinking the others are the rudest people in the world. I’ve worked at companies where neither was official policy we have both types of people. I suspect the split may be between people who prioritize relationships vs people who prioritize efficiency.

  108. MusicWithRocksIn*

    My very fist grown up job (in the 00’s) it was against company dress code for women to wear pants. Shockingly, the company was built up and owned by a woman, but when her husband got laid off from a high up position at a super large company he just kind of came in and took over everything. Hilariously it didn’t really matter at all what kind of skirt you wore, there was one girl that regularly wore a short jean skirt with a the hem ripped off and dangling jean bits everywhere. As long as you weren’t offending nature by wearing men’s pants everything was kosher with them.

    That whole place was wildly toxic. Once the fire department cleared the building because there was a gas leak nearby and the owner’s husband yelled at us for an hour for leaving the office without clearing it with him.

    1. dbc*

      I may have posted this previously, but my roommate in the 70’s had a dress code like that at her (big name) university admin job. One day she wore beautifully printed flowing pants that were practically a skirt, paired with a coordinating scoop neck knitted top, and looked stunning and totally work appropriate. They sent her home to change! So she returned to work in a short denim skirt, loose men’s t-shirt and some sort of ball cap. She looked like she was ready to wash her car, but it met the dress code requirements.

  109. Young-ish MC*

    I have spent my career in the world of nonprofit fundraising. My first post-college job was working for a local chapter of a large national nonprofit. We had a big fundraising drive that came right near the end of the fiscal year. Our state director told us to keep all of the cash and check we received in a drawer in the office, and they would call every Friday and tell us how much to deposit that week. They didn’t want us to go too far over our fundraising goal for the year, because they thought it would mean our budget for the next year would be even higher. So we kept this $$ in our drawer for months, slowly depositing over time.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Ooooh, my last job was processing donations at a nonprofit and we absolutely would have had phone calls from donors asking us why we hadn’t cashed their checks yet.

  110. Coverage Associate*

    My junior high math curriculum was published by an evangelical college. We learned how to convert cubits to meters, which was unusual but reinforced necessary skills. We also learned how to score bowling, which was also unusual and less helpful in other areas of life.

    But AAM will love this. We also calculated hours worked from time cards, and total hourly pay, and probably worked on percentages and fractions deducting for taxes and tithes. But part of calculating the hours worked was to deduct a quarter hour if the employee was even one minute late. I think we were also instructed to not pay the extra time if the employee clocked in early. I thought the way I learned in junior high was how hourly jobs worked maybe until I found AAM 10+ years out of law school.

    Obviously, this was decades ago, but I believe such timekeeping practices were already against the law when I was doing these math problems, certainly in our state.

    Today I have to mention: It was an evangelical school, so no constitutional problem with the textbooks.

    1. CowWhisperer*

      Personally, I think the cubits thing was adorable for a religious school and scoring bowling is a good way to do some basic algebra.

      The bookkeeping was illegal, though.

      1. Coverage Associate*

        I have definitely used the cubit thing in years since, including in calculating the energy expended doing a pull up as part of a stupid internet debate about exercise.

        I wonder if there’s a math curriculum where there are lots of hands to meters problems? Kentucky?

      1. Coverage Associate*

        These were textbooks/workbooks published and printed like any other book, so our math homework wasn’t directly benefiting any employer, unless the employer was also paying wages years late. I suppose the examples and word problems could have been real examples from the publisher’s office.

        There’s an OSHA regulation, or there used to be, about testing respiratory equipment. You have to be able to hear and understand the wearer’s speech, and this has to be tested. The regulation lets the wearer say whatever to do the test, but also contains a random paragraph about rainbows that the wearer can read aloud if the workplace can’t think of anything else to communicate. The paragraph reads like it was copied from the homework for a child of whoever wrote the regulation. I used to imagine how that went: “This is great writing, son. I’m going to put it in the Code of Federal Regulations, and it will be famous!”

        I haven’t worked with OSHA regulations since law school, so again no citation, but how many regulations referencing rainbows can there be, for those with legal research software.

    3. Paint N Drip*

      I do NOT know how to score bowling and wish I had that info inside my brain! The local lanes near me require you to score yourself on paper and I alwayssss have to ask for the cheat sheet :(

      1. Coverage Associate*

        Everywhere around here had automatic scoring before I was taught to do it by hand, but I guess not in Florida where our textbooks were published.

      2. Elizabeth West*

        I can’t do it either — we learned it in school too, on paper, but my dyscalculic brain refuses to retain it. And guess what a popular Midwestern pastime was? :P

        Someone else always had to do it. I was so happy when electronic scoring finally came around.

  111. CowWhisperer*

    I was a wet behind the ears first year teacher in the early aughts. The job market was saturated beyond belief for teachers so I was grateful when I landed a teaching position in an alternative education high school near where I lived.

    Teachers go through a very minimal orientation with HR then are assigned a mentor teacher who helps them with all the minutiae of teaching.

    My mentor teacher was absolutely great and she gave me tons of support in classroom management.

    Anyways, all schools take attendance and my mentor set me up with a three ring binder to keep the printed off attendence sheets. Every school I’d ever been involved with used computer-based attendance programs – so a literal paper attendance sheet felt quaint.

    At the end of the first week, I brought my attendance binder to my mentor teacher to double-check I did the right codes.

    She tells me my codes are perfect- but I’ll need to redo them because the attendance codes should be in pencil while my signature and date should be in ink.

    I asked if she was sure about that because in my science lab training we were taught that all lab notes had to be in ink because they were legal documents and ink on paper makes any attempts to change the information later very visible.

    My mentor said the pencil and ink way was right – and we double-checked with a few other teachers.

    We laughed that education is weird.

    I recopied my attendance, shredded my original, and started the nitty-gritty job of learning to teach.

    Eighteen months later, the lead teacher in my building walks into our building as white as a sheet. Our school’s director (aka principal) had been arrested at school for committing fraud by inflating student attendance counts.

    It turns out that it’s really easy to erase pencil attendence codes and rewrite them before turning them into the state.

    Every other program I’ve ever worked with – or talked to members of – uses electronic attendance.

  112. Empress Ki*

    My boss swear a lot, especially to cold callers, but even to employees.
    It was in French, but the closest translation is ” F. you” to cold callers, and “WTF are you doing?” to staff, if we made a mistake.
    It was my first job and I thought it was normal.

  113. The Starsong Princess*

    Many years ago, I worked as internal support for a consulting company. The partners leading the consulting engagements were, to say the least, a bunch of demanding, entitled, screaming nut jobs. Our team had to listen to them, smile and nod no matter what crazy thing they were making us do or blaming us for that week. My boss had a stuffed lamb she dubbed “The Catharsis Lamb”. When we were particularly stressed, she would invite us to her office where we would ceremonially address the lamb by the aggravating partner’s name before ritual ly beating it the edge of the desk. I must say, it really was cathartic!

    1. dbc*

      At a former workplace, they denied my request for reimbursement for continuing ed– which had been a stated perk when hired; and instead paid to send me to another class of their choosing through their church.
      It must be why I enjoy Life after A Cult so much. She regularly takes an elf-on-the-shelf version of the head of the organization and pounds it on the microphone. It gives me second-hand catharsis!

  114. pally*

    First job out of school we were not given any physical documentation like an employee handbook or health insurance information. We had to ask the sole HR person about what benefits we had or how to access our health care. HR was always very available to do this. The whole set-up seemed harmless enough. I didn’t know any better.

    (This was a very small division-less than 75 people- of a huge global pharmaceutical & biotech company. This company is a household name.)

    One day, a half dozen HR execs from headquarters decided to visit us. We got all dressed up for the occasion (remember, we are jeans & t-shirt-wearing lab folks).

    They gathered us into a room. The visiting HR execs started in with praises of the company’s achievements over the year. Then made a reference to some of the benefits we had per the employee handbook.

    We looked at them with puzzled faces.

    “People, do you not read your employee handbooks?”, they asked.

    We shook our heads and said, “No…We weren’t given employee handbooks.”

    All of the visitors looked at our HR person. She explained that she never gave these out to us because she knew we’d just lose them. But she was more than happy to answer any questions about employee policies. All we had to do was ask.

    That did not go over well.

    The meeting agenda then changed into a reading and discussion of all the benefits outlined in the handbook (at some point, the few copies of the employee handbook they brought along were handed out to folks. And someone was dispatched to generate additional copies). They explained how each benefit works and how to access them.

    Several times a commotion occurred when someone would say, “Oh wow, I didn’t know we had that benefit!” followed by everyone looking at our HR person. She would sheepishly mumble something along the lines of “I figured you wouldn’t be interested in that” or “That benefit really can’t be accommodated here because of the specialized work we do.” She made a poor impression on our visitors. I’m betting she heard about that privately after the meeting.

    The person doing the reading then pulled out several of his business cards and handed them to us. He told us to call him directly if anyone tried to deny any of the benefits listed in the employee handbook.

    After they left, things returned to normal. I know that a few people asked to exercise some of the benefits afforded them. The HR person tried to talk them out of it only to be faced with the business card of the HR exec. She acquiesced.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Ohhhhhhh no, that’s terrible!!! I’m surprised HR person didn’t get the boot immediately!

  115. ElizaBeth*

    At my first professional job out of college it was an unspoken (until it was spoken) rule that you could not take a sick day on a Monday or a Friday because management assumed you were trying to get away with taking a long weekend.

    At one point after being at the company for a few years (I stayed way longer than I should have) a manager pulled me aside and said that her boss had noticed I had taken a lot of sick days recently and some of them fell on Mondays and Fridays which looked suspicious. I looked back and it was something like 4 sick days over the course of 6 months and still well under the number of days I was allotted! When I brought this up, I was told that I need to think about how it looks, and this was just a professional norm. After that if I was sick on Monday, I’d power through the day and the call out on Tuesday – an acceptable day to be sick.

    At my next job, after being in great distress that I was going to need to call out sick on a Monday, I was surprised to learn that some places actually understand that the human body doesn’t always have control over what days you aren’t well.

    1. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      Oh wow. The first sick day I ever took at my first job was on a Monday. I got food poisoning from something I made Sunday afternoon, and was seriously contemplating calling an ambulance about 3am on Monday morning when my immune system and the salmonella finally agreed to a truce. There’s no way I could have ‘powered through’ on Monday.

    2. Zombeyonce*

      Considering that Mondays and Fridays make up 40% of the work week, it’s so ridiculous for higher ups to automatically classify absences on those days as suspect.

      1. H3llifIknow*

        When I worked retail, at a midwestern Dept. store, if you called out 3x on a Friday or Monday, it was an automatic write up. One more and you were out the door. Honestly, since the workforce was mostly young college kids, 99% of the time, the call outs WERE for hangovers or Friday night plans.

    3. Aggretsuko*

      On the other hand, we used to have a manager who was ALWAYS out sick on Mondays. If Monday was a holiday, she’d be out Tuesday. She just could NOT make the first day of the week or a full week of work.

      (She had Mystery Health Issues of some kind that seemed pretty obvious that she couldn’t/shouldn’t be working any more, but it took several years for her to realize that and leave.)

    4. Pocket Mouse*

      My current workplace allows WFH two days per week, ostensibly the same two days each week. It is not allowed for our two-day combination to be Mondays and Fridays, because that would be a “long weekend”. When we’re *working*. WFH days are not days off, people!

  116. Call Center Crazy*

    I worked at a call center right out of college. It was open 24/7/365, which made holidays a nightmare – instead of everyone keeping their regular schedule, they broke the holiday up into 2, 4, and 8 hour increments, which you had to voluntarily sign up for or be randomly assigned if no one picked it up. The kicker was that the sign up sheet was a piece of paper by the front door, and you weren’t allowed to log off your phone to sign up when the sheet was posted. People would come in on their day off to sign up for an 8-10 am Christmas Day shift to avoid getting randomly assigned an 8 hour shift, and people who happened to be working when the sign up sheet was posted were FUMING watching all the good shifts get taken by people who shouldn’t have even been at work that day. It was a bloodbath every time a major holiday rolled around.

  117. higheredadmin*

    I moved from working in finance/Professional Services (aka Big 4 Firm and then Large Bank) to working in Higher Education fundraising. I would regale my new colleagues with “funny” stories from my times in finance, like when my boss threw a stapler at me or when I was yelled at for two hours straight and was able to keep time because there was a huge wall clock just behind his huge screaming head. After wrapping up one comedy story that also ended with a lot of boss screaming at staff, one of my new colleagues just looked at me with huge amounts of pity and asked if I had reported it to HR, and if I was ok. I realized that perhaps these incidents weren’t normal office behaviour. (Also, quickly had to stop swearing all the time, but a habit that does come back if I get especially stressed at work.) On the other hand, my team in my finance jobs would always eat lunch together as we had a staff canteen, and I really appreciated it, especially in my first years in the work world. I was sad to realize that this was not universal, and every time I eat lunch al desko (which is almost every day) I’m sad. Last one – nobody smokes in offices anymore. Not sad to see the end of that.

  118. Ciela*

    “When you’re done with it, just throw it on the floor!”

    I have worked at the same place since just after high school, so decades at this point. One of the bosses has a joke, whenever someone would drop something in a loud, didn’t break anything kind of way, he would yell, “When you’re done with it, just throw it on the floor!” Then sometimes if someone dropped something, they would themselves yell out, “Yeah, I was done with that!” All in jest.

    Apparently humor is not universal? The horrified looks that we have gotten from numerous new employees is priceless.

  119. Allison K*

    I was That Boss. Running a small circus company, we often performed at festivals or corporate event events where we shared rooms. Usually, I got my own room because we would be a team of three and the other two performers would share a room (own beds). But if we went out in a team of four, I shared too, and once I wake up, I’m awake. So everyone knew, do not use your snooze function on your alarm or your phone, you must wake up at the first alarm time, or That Boss Will Be Unhappy.

    We had one performer who habitually overslept at home, hitting her snooze many times. When she shared a room with me, she woke up right before her alarm and sat bolt upright, she was so afraid she’d hit the snooze in her sleep.

    For the record, I also did nice things for the team, but I was Not Good about losing sleep.

  120. Cordelia Comments*

    My first internship was at a theater company in NYC where it was common to have only 8 hours turnaround between the end of one workday and the start of another. The company would reimburse you for the taxi ride home on those late nights, but as an unpaid intern I often didn’t have the money to front on a taxi and ended up just walking home instead (which took at least an hour). When my manager at my next company told me they had a 12-hour minimum turnaround policy I almost cried in relief.

  121. Frosty*

    In my early 20s I worked at a very famous coffee chain (the one you’re thinking of) in a major metropolitan city.

    I was told that we gave away drinks “whenever” we felt like it. Some regulars never paid for their drinks! There was no rhyme or reason, just if you liked the customer, or felt like it. If I had to guess I’d say that at least 20% of the drinks were given away.

    Then I moved to another city and got a job at the same chain there. On my first day, I gave away a drink to a customer and my supervisor just about hit the roof! She had no idea why I was doing that, and I fully thought that it was “company culture” to give away drinks all day long.

    I think about it often – no wonder we never had enough coverage at that first store – higher levels of management never actually had an accurate number for the drinks that we were making. The “spoilage” of coffee & milk etc. must have been incredibly high.

    It was fun while it lasted though – we were always very popular and made a lot of friends in the neighbourhood haha

  122. Sevenrider*

    I once worked in an open concept office with about 10 other people who shared one, yes one, printer. Normal printing was on regular paper but if you needed to print on company letterhead, you had to load said letterhead in the printer. The custom was to yell out “PRINTING” whenever you had to print ANYTHING. Wait a beat and if no one objected, you could go ahead and print. They were terrified you were going to print your meeting notes on the letterhead, thereby wasting it. I now have my own printer and the letterhead is in the online library. But still, I sometimes want to yell out “PRINTING” just for the hell of it.

    1. Toot Sweet*

      Ha! I once had a job like this, only what we would yell out was, “Special paper!”

  123. Palliser*

    I used to work for a world-famous financial firm and whenever someone left, whether they quit or were fired, they were frog-marched from the building. Our security were moonlighing NYPD officers and legitmately intimidating, however, this wasn’t the weird part. The weirdness came after that person left, and the culture was such that no one ever spoke their name again. If you slipped up and asked about a project that Mary was working on yesterday, there was a sudden nearly visible chill in the air, everyone shifted uncomfortably, and whomever was responding would do so in a way that avoided saying the blacklisted person’s name. There were ticketing systems for everything, but the old employee’s name was removed immediately so there was no visible record of them anywhere. It was as if they had never been. They also refused to rehire anyone who left, even if they had done so for innocuous reasons.

    My old employer’s culture had a ton of internal propaganda pushing the idea that there was no better organization, period, and the people working there the best of the best. So, the idea that someone would leave under any circumstances was pretty much heresy.

    Many years later I think of the old company as a cult, and many of my former colleagues/escapees agree.

  124. A Nony Mouse*

    At my dysfunctional office job after I finished college, it took three people and upwards of half an hour to send even a short internal email. You’d write the email, recruit a coworker to read over your shoulder and critique/wordsmith while you wrote, and then have your supervisor do the same.

    This was not the kind of office that did life or death work, it wasn’t a field where that level of word choice mattered, to this day I have not heard a better explanation than “someone in upper management was afraid of our department looking bad with an insufficiently perfect word choice.” I don’t even think the other departments did this! I was a recent college grad and had no idea this wasn’t normal for corporate jobs until I mentioned it to a friend, who looked at me like I’d grown a second head.

    1. Aggretsuko*

      My old job made me have to get every email vetted by my supervisor because I couldn’t be trusted to write emails correctly. They piled up for DAYS.

  125. AnotherSarah*

    The ED of a non-profit had her own, org-purchased soda. Just for her. I have no idea if that’s normal as I never worked for another similar organization but woof.

  126. The teapots are on fire.*

    I worked at a proprietary post-secondary school (secretarial skills and medical assisting) in the 1980s. We had to fill out our grade books in erasable ink (so it looked like ink to the accreditors when they came to audit, but administrators could change our grades), and we were given ONE erasable pen at a time. If you needed another one, you had to report to the assistant director of the school to be issued ONE MORE pen. She would also issue one stick of chalk at a time and one strip of staples. I taught typing and was grading 100-120 timed typing tests a day, and she often hassled me about needing so many staples.

    The typewriters were IBM Selectrics and the school used off-brand ribbon cartridges. They’re supposed to autoreverse so you can use the ribbon over and over until it wears out, but these were so cheap that the ribbon would fail to reverse and just wrap around the shaft so the student was typing on the same spot of the ribbon over and over until you couldn’t see the letters. I complained and the assistant director told me the other teachers weren’t complaining. I explained that the other teachers would just tell the students to move to another typewriter or take a smoke break, and she just blinked at me. I persuaded her to buy ONE IBM ribbon cartridge to see if it lasted longer. It never wore out. I couldn’t get her to buy another one. I took to disassembling the junk cartridges and manually rewinding them.

    Wait, I didn’t think any of this was normal.

    One year, for Teacher Appreciation Day, we got a gift bag with a box of chalk, a box of staples, and single pad of Post-it notes. No typewriter ribbons, though.

  127. Alex*

    Not gonna lie, I was expecting the link to the goat shrine to be a clip of Mammalians Nurturable, not an actual story that happened to real life people

  128. Eddie Elgar*

    Our university begins each academic year with a campus-wide faculty and staff meeting (state of the university speech, introduction of new faculty/staff, announcements of major initiatives, that kind of thing) which always involves door prizes. These prizes are usually envelopes of cash from local banks–just enough to treat yourself to a nice dinner, nothing life-changing.

    The weird part of this is, that when I came here, the prize winners were selected by drawing seat numbers in the main campus theater where the meeting was held. Since only about half the seats were filled, when an empty seat was called people would dash over and sit in the announced seat to “claim” the prize. This often involved mock scuffles, victory dances, more athletic faculty vaulting over multiple rows of seats, and on one memorable occasion a widely disliked faculty member being actively blocked from a seat by multiple people until somebody else could claim a prize.

    Our current President was once a junior high principal, and apparently got tired of the junior-high style hijinks; when we resumed in-person meetings after Covid, he had quietly changed things so that we are now each issued a raffle ticket and we remain sedately in our seats for the door prizes.

  129. Jigglypuff*

    I taught at a private religious K3-12 school. The 7-12th grade operated as a junior and senior high, with most teachers teaching some junior high classes and some senior high classes.

    Every year they redid the school schedule. And by redid, I mean they changed what subjects and grade levels people were teaching. There were years when I taught 4 different grade levels! This astronomically increased the amount of prep work I had to do from year to year.

    One year a colleague and I sat down with the schedule and realized it was completely possible to set things up so that each teacher taught only two subjects, rather than 4-5 subjects. Unfortunately we could not get the powers that be to listen to us poor lowly teachers, so they continued the tradition of messing with everyone’s teaching schedule every single year.

  130. Miss Direction*

    I worked in TV news production in the late 80s through the mid 90s. First station I worked for called press conferences provided by an outside organization for all networks a “gang bang”.

    First week at my second TV station as we were going through the newscast rundown prior to the show I asked if the live shot was a gang bang. And thus I discovered that it is not, as I assumed, an industry standard term.

    1. Charming Kitten*

      That was not used during my time in TV news but I think it kind of fits the vibe of a lot of local TV stations.

    2. Good Enough For Government Work*

      I believe that, at least in the UK, the industry standard phrase for one of those horrendous media scrums focused on one person is a ‘ratf*ck’.

  131. Gmezzy*

    I worked at an organization that had all sorts of cultural craziness. You 100% know this organization – many people use its services daily. Everyone had the right to comment on all-staff channels (of hundreds of people globally) about anything that they felt was Wrong in any team at any time. For example, the flame war that went down because one team decided to use Slack instead of Internet Relay Chat, which has been around since before AIM and has no concept of an easy user experience. How dare the non-technical folks use a tool they could actually use!

    The most egregious of these instances I’ll never forget. The entire executive team approached the Board to say that the relatively newly hired Executive Director wasn’t working out during a Board retreat over a weekend.

    The next Monday, the entire staff (globally) had a meeting placed on their calendar. Those of us in the office kind of knew how bad things were, but most of our remote colleagues had no idea and were invited to this meeting. The Board Chair, the Founder, and the Execution Director sat in front of the entire staff and took questions/vitriol from anyone. It was supposed to be an hour, turned into 2 or 3. It included one staff member calling the ED a liar and others leveling all sorts of inappropriate, but largely true, accusations. I’m embarrassed to say I participated.

    For some reason the Board kept this ED in place for a few more months, despite the fact that nearly her entire team from executives on down didn’t trust her. Finally she left when it was about to show up in the media because the volunteer community was at its wits end.

    Shortly after that incident I discovered AAM. Alison, you helped me get some better boundaries inside that job, which eventually led to me leaving (on mental health medical leave at first, then permanently). Soaking in your advice for the last years has gotten me to a much better place about my own work and what I’ll tolerate in a job. I would run for the hills in that kind of a place these days… but at the time it seemed like participating in the toxicity was how to do a good job!

  132. iglwif*

    At my first employer, where I worked for a really long time, was not-for-profit with incredibly thin margins and was thus always focused on keeping cost of sales reeeaaalllyyy low, which led me to think “sure, totally normal” about practices such as

    * salvaging “new” office furniture from other locations, or furniture people’s spouses’ companies were throwing away
    * making an elaborate business case for an ergonomic chair
    * collecting quarters and loonies to fund the coffee machine
    * potluck holiday parties
    * getting a “new” computer that was someone else’s old one (someone whose job required a computer with more power or memory than my job did)
    * a travel policy that included “you can’t claim tips of more than 15%” and “take public transit from the airport to your destination unless no public transit option is available”
    * being closely questioned by the Finance team about why my team had budgeted $35/month for a software subscription but ended up spending $40/month
    * having to use my personal credit card for travel, accommodations, etc., and wait to be reimbursed because only a certain number of people who travelled a lot were allowed to have a T&E card
    * bringing my own pens and notebooks from home because we were only allowed to order very basic stationery on the company dime

  133. The Other Evil HR Lady*

    I don’t think it’s normal – AT ALL – but everyone else in HR at my current company is trembling at the thought of seeing other people’s compensation!

    For context, I’m in HR. I just took a job that came with a significant pay raise. Even though I’d seen a few red flags during the interview process, I took it anyway. But this particular flag… I had not seen in its full glory. Turns out that HR doesn’t know how much anyone makes. So, part of the HR suite of crap we handle is compensation, for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. Yes, we want to make sure we keep up with the market rates and keep the people we worked so hard to recruit. But also, knowing people’s compensation ensures that we are able to gauge equity: men and women making the same for the same job, among many examples.

    Anyway, my company was bought by a national conglomerate that operates its HR the “correct” way, with compensation as part of the HR function. Everyone here is … distressed? Upset? Perplexed? I’m not sure what type of emotion to ascribe to my colleagues about this change. It’s so odd to me, because in every job I’ve had, I’ve been in charge of entering compensation into the system (not so here), writing offer letters, making sure Payroll had the right information regarding compensation, and so on. We’ll see how that shakes out.

  134. Jane*

    This is a tiny example compared to some that people have submitted. But in my first job after graduation, we had to ask a senior executive’s assistant for any new office supplies, although almost nothing was actually available anyway. My main request was for a new pen — the cheapest kind they could buy in bulk — which I could only get one of at a time. And you had to show that your existing pen was clearly out of ink. If I had lost it, the assistant would quiz me about what happened to my old one and where it was. When I moved to my next job, there was a whole closet of office supplies and I still remember the amazing moment when I was just casually told I could take what I needed. I was so nervous that for a long time I’d only take one pen at a time in case anyone saw me taking — god forbid — two.

    1. allathian*

      About 15 years ago someone who’d worked for my employer her entire career and who was retiring after nearly 50 years of service told a story about her early days when employees were issued with an ink pen and one pencil and eraser. If you wanted a new pencil, you had to return the stub to the office supplies dragon and prove to her satisfaction that it was too short to write with.

      1. I Have RBF*

        I gotta admit, I’m the kind of joker who would consider buying cheap supplies at the dollar store and sneak one of two into her stash, just to make her crazy that her count was off. Because you know she justified her job of counting everything every day, too. (I’ve worked with nuts like this, and I just brought my own pens. I’m an office supply snob.)

  135. Fluff*

    A lon time ago, in a galaxy far away…
    College job.

    At this job, when you got promoted, we would have a staff meeting. Our supervisors would call us up to announce our promotion one at a time. The person doing the announcing was wearing a cape and some regalia. The promotee would be called up, kneel, say a short oath, and be knighted. With a real sword (named Excalibur of course). Capes and real sword. I loved it.

    I was honestly surprised that we did not do that in real life jobs. I literally asked my neighbor when they where going to bring out The Sword when our boss got promoted to bigger boss (after college).

  136. Corgisandcats*

    Through high school I worked in a typical indie 2000s-esque hipster coffee shop, it was such an amazing first job. One thing that definitely did NOT fly once I went to college and started working at a siren affiliated coffee chain was the closing routine. At indie coffee shop at closing time we turned off all the lights and absolutely blared Semisonic’s Closing Time, I have to say it was really effective at getting people to leave, way better than chain coffee shop technique of asking them to leave and then awkwardly waiting while they packed up their coffee shop/home office set up after literally only ordering a tall (NOT small, never small) black coffee. I’m a psychologist now and I really miss coffee shop days sometimes and still have unironic love for Semisonic Closing Time

  137. Scarlet ribbons in her hair*

    My first job lasted four days. My second job lasted less than one year, so it wasn’t until I was working at my third job that I found out how a company gives out raises.

    At this company, if I wanted a raise, I had to ask my supervisor. If he thought that I deserved a raise, he told the office manager. If she thought that I deserved a raise, she told the Comptroller. If he thought that I deserved a raise, he told the Treasurer. If he thought that I deserved a raise, he told an AVP. Then it went through all of the AVP’s, then the VPs, then the Executive VP, who told the President, who told the Chairman of the Board. If the Chairman of the Board thought that I deserved a raise, I got one.

    I always got a raise (except for the time that they decided that a committee would meet and decide on everyone’s raises at the same time, but oh gee, the committee was never able to meet), so I don’t know what happened to the employees whose raises were denied. Were they ever told that they weren’t getting a raise, or were they left hanging? I don’t know. Were they told which person blocked them from getting a raise, so that they could approach him and explain what they did for the company, things that the VP in another department wouldn’t know nothing about? I don’t know. But I do know that if your supervisor left the company while you were waiting to see if your raise would go through, the office manager would insist that your supervisor NEVER requested a raise for you, and you were told to get your new supervisor to request a raise for you. And the new supervisor would say, “I can’t recommend you for a raise! I just started here! I have no idea what kind of work you do!” And people quit.

  138. No creative name yet*

    Not necessarily that weird, but I was in a job for over a decade where whenever someone was out of the office for any length of time (even for a short time like a doctor’s appointment or offsite meeting) they’d email the whole team when they were leaving and when they were back. This was a job with somewhat urgent tasks, but also not coverage related and nothing that couldn’t wait a few hours except for specific circumstances–there was really no need to know that level of detail. I remember when I started the next job I continued that practice until my colleague let me know that people didn’t need to know that level of detail since we all had shared calendars and could see when others were out. Now the idea of doing that seems crazy to me and if I had to do it again would probably resent it.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      I had a colleague in an old job who would do this and I could never understand why. Like, I don’t need to know that you’ll be out for a couple of hours (running a work errand, so not even off the clock). She was the finance person so I’m sure there were lots of times when this was relevant to some people but I guess she figured it was easier to just send an all-office email than to tell the two or three people who might need her that she was going to be out.

    2. H3llifIknow*

      Ughhh I work with a guy who does this on Teams. “BRB” and then 5 or 10 or 60 minutes later, “Back”. Or “Oh I’ve been back awhile I forgot to tell you.” WE.DO.NOT.CARE. This happens at least 25 times a day. It’s insane.

      1. I Have RBF*

        I used to have a job where they wanted to know where you were and what you were doing at all times, waaaay long ago. I still have to stop myself from announcing my bathroom breaks on chat. I work remotely. I still try to put myself as “away” for lunch.

  139. TRC*

    This is a backward example of this question. I moved to the Midwest from the West Coast. The first day on my new job, there are all sorts of stuffed toy figures hanging from nooses from ceiling beams in what was otherwise a very classy office. Turns out they were rival college football mascots disliked by the owners.

    Eventually I asked the HR lady if we were ever concerned customers would see those nooses and find them disturbing. She absolutely did not understand why anyone could possibly take offense. I just had to walk away shaking my head.

  140. PickleJuice*

    At one of my early career jobs as a secretary—this was before Admin Assistant was a thing—it was expected that the CEO would periodically walk around and tell ‘ the girls’ how he wanted things arranged on our desks, who was or wasn’t allowed to display family pictures, and if he found our clothing ‘appealing enough’. Yes, we were rated by a 60+-year-old man on how ‘appealing’ he found our clothing.
    He gave regular speeches about the importance of women understanding our ‘role in society and the company’ and ‘keeping a comely appearance’.

    Just… GROSS

  141. Kristi*

    Minor compared to some here, but… I used to work at a well-known, expensive, high-profile American university. They had an odd relationship to money: they regularly threw fancy catered events celebrating anything and everyone, but were known internally for not paying suppliers. Once I was involved with setting up a library research space for people who needed to access a particular resource. I pointed out that it lacked lighting. My boss offered to let me run to Ikea and buy a nice lamp with my own money. I declined.

  142. Seen Too Much*

    When I was in high school, one of the summer jobs I had was at Korvettes in the mall (dating myself, I know). Whoever was opening had to turn the lights on and wait 15 minutes. Then take a long pole and bang it on the floor all the way through to the lockers in the back. This was to chase the rats out of the store. We were told they were mice, but I tell you, if they were, they were on steroids.

    A couple of years after that, I was working for a company that hey sold boxes and packing materials. There was construction going on behind our building. Hundreds of mice made our warehouse home. You had to bang on drawers before you opened them and jump back because the mice would come flying out. I worked there until they were shut down.

    Now, if I even thought there was a mouse I would be out of there.

  143. Kenny W.*

    At one of my first jobs out of college (second one to be exact) I worked for a community organizing nonprofit. I should have known it was abnormal when they sent me on a volunteer training trip (paid for by them) as part of the interview process to see how I engaged with volunteers and made me share a room with someone who was also applying for the job. They ended up hiring us both. Whenever we traveled, the nonprofit would book us in the same room. If it was a trip where I was going without him, the nonprofit would book a room for our male volunteer designate and I to share. I guess because I was still pretty young and impressionable, I never even thought to challenge this practice or ask for my own room. I was totally shocked that this was not a normal practice when I left there to go work for another nonprofit (who assured me in no uncertain terms that I would not have to share a room with a colleague or volunteer on a work trip when I asked who my roommate would be the first time they sent me out of town for a conference).

  144. Just a dude in a library*

    My first librarian job had a unique/crazy culture. I was part of a dual reporting structure. The culture of the 2 units I worked in couldn’t be more different but one thing they had in common was that if you had an issue with something or someone you addressed it… usually in a meeting… usually in a very blunt manner. Meetings almost always featured raised voices and occasionally tears… but everyone was friends outside of work so people would rip each other to shreds during the meeting but as soon as the meeting was over friendship mode kicked in and everyone just went for coffee together happily chatting as if nothing had happened. And although it sounds crazy now, I miss it a lot because there were no games, no secrets, everyone knew where everyone else stood and things got done – even if the path to get there was a bit dramatic.

  145. SicktomyStomach*

    Back in the late 80s/early 90s when I was a legal secretary at a large NYC firm, it was really common to go into the ladies room and find people snorting coke. They were always polite and asked me if I wanted some, but I never really got used to that. I’ve never tried so much as a cigarette, so I sure wasn’t trying cocaine!

  146. BOK*

    This is minor, but my company has full kitchens on every floor for employees to use, with dishes and utensils. Every floor is responsible for washing dishes however that team sees fit. My company also host monthly lunches for our office, using the office silverware, which everyone is expected to return to a certain spot.

    Well, of course the utensils don’t end up in the right spot after these monthly lunches, and apparently our admin had enough, because she went around and took all the forks away form every single kitchen. So now we have a full kitchen for each floor, and monthly lunches, but you have to bring your own fork.

  147. IHaveKittens*

    I think I’ve mentioned this before, but it fits here. When I was a kid, my parents were both public school teachers. Just about all their friends were also teachers. Everyone had the same summer vacation – we regularly went camping for 8 weeks or more at a time. It was a very rude shock when I learned that people who work in “regular” jobs do not have all summer off. I still resent this.

    1. econobiker*

      Likewise! Since growing up with a teacher father and stay at home mother who did odd jobs like house cleaning or non professional senior care, we had years of cheap summer vacation tent camping out of our car across the United States. Only as an adult hearing a coworker describe the one summer that his father took off 3 weeks in a row to travel with his family, did I realize the privilege of family time I received as a young child. Later, as a I was a teenager, my father would pursue part-time summer jobs and my mother went back to office work as a secretary later office manager.

  148. Girasol*

    My first real job was in a call center for a little local newspaper pitching subscriptions. My first night went badly. On my second night the boss plugged me into the calls of some successful coworkers to listen to how it’s done. My coworkers started talking about the paper but then they got sidetracked on how they were lonely after losing boyfriends and how short their shorts were and how they didn’t even have a ride home, and “won’t you please buy a paper so the boss doesn’t get mad again and could you give me a ride too?” It took way too long before my goody goody sixteen year old self realized that the main product they were selling wasn’t a newspaper.

    1. econobiker*

      Wait, what in the heck? Was this a cut rate phone sex ploy to sell newspapers or were the coworkers using the newspaper sales to promote their side gig selling themselves?

  149. LingNerd*

    I don’t have any for work, but this did remind me of the several things I’ve learned are not universal among Christian churches, and are mostly just a Catholic (and a few other denominations) thing: holy water that you bless yourself with at the door on the way in, kneeling and making the sign of the cross before you enter a pew, kneelers/kneeling during service in general, calling the service “mass,” and the one that astounded me most: using communion wafers (others use real bread!) and having communion be part of every single service. Also I think rosaries and the sing-song chanting to bless communion might also just be Catholic things. I had no idea how ritualistic Catholicism is until I was an adult and attended a funeral for someone outside my family, and even at that time I only noticed a few differences. I don’t think the ritualism is bad at all, it’s just interesting that I didn’t notice it because it was something I grew up with

    1. Coverage Associate*

      In his memoir, JD Vance describes his grandmother coming to the opposite realization. She thought all Christians were like the snake handling Pentecostalists that predominated near the family home.

    2. econobiker*

      On the flip side was not realizing that other Christian religions often had the whole Sunday morning through to lunchtime booked up with church activities not just a 1 hour church mass service and then back home changing into Sunday afternoon lounge wear.

    3. bookluvrb*

      Same. I went to a friends’ wedding after college and was stunned that the ceremony only lasted 10 minutes.

  150. A Simple Complication*

    A company I worked for had the corporate value of DTF…you know, Down To Fight. I was not aware it had another meaning until I was doing an orientation of new hires and one of them immediately raised their hand and asked about our harassment policy.

  151. Timeclock CEO*

    I spent 5 years in a very dysfunctional “command and control” style company. About $50 million in revenue, family-owned and the VPs were all related to the owner and had little to no actual experience in their role such as “VP of Logistics”. I was so desensitized that I thought that the CEO requiring all salaried employees to use a biometric timeclock and printed out everyone’s work hours every 2 weeks and the person(s) who worked the least amount of hours got a talking to from their direct supervisor and the VP; with “repeat offenders” being placed on a personal improvement plan with a shout from the CEO was normal. In the climate, I once had 2 direct reports each work approximately 43 hours a week. My supervisor said that if their “light” hours continued, it means that there as no need for 2 direct reports and 1 direct report could do all the work. There were no other KPIs for non-sales people; just hours worked on the timeclock.

  152. wilted spinach*

    This isn’t my first job, but it was at a company that hired a lot of entry-level folk/had long-term employees who hadn’t really worked anywhere else.

    The IT department was really big on security. They did a big security initiative and from that, stopped allowing shared accounts on platforms because they couldn’t track individuals in the account (with the exception of platforms for accounts that didn’t allow for . They demanded admin access to every single platform, account, etc… even if only one account could be admin-level and the department who used the platform needed admin-level access. So for a number of accounts, you’d have to go through IT for basically any issues – there was a period of six months where I couldn’t reset the password for accounts I was the primary and predominant user of because IT decided they should manage all shared account passwords (the only time other people used those passwords was when I was on vacation).

    So a lot of people thought our IT team was just super amazing at security, whereas I’ve spent a lot of my career working in places where digital security is mandated by regulations/law, and it’s a really big deal if there’s a breach. Here’s the kicker: I worked there for 3+ years and I never once changed my user password. And if it wasn’t a shared account, I used the same password for everything. They never even prompted regular password changes.

  153. Cube Farm for One*

    Working 4 AM to 7 PM and being asked as you try to leave to look at “one more thing”. I’ll never ever get over that. It was in service of being salaried but in the rear view mirror felt like indentured servitude.

  154. Belle*

    I once had an internship (small law office) where the lawyer ran out of work for me to do so she had me (19F) spend the next 6 weeks editing her romance novel. At the time, I thought it was really nice she found work for me to do so I could get my full stipend. In retrospect that was bananas-pants.

  155. Peach*

    My first job out of college was in the early 2000’s when pole dancing was becoming popular as a gym/workout activity. My boss installed a stripper pole in her office. In the middle of the floor. I… don’t even think there was enough space to actually use it. At the time, I thought it was weird of course, but just shrugged — a lot of things there were weird! It’s never just one thing! Anyway, she was embezzling and later went to jail. And I work for a company with an HR department now.

  156. Specks*

    Now, I love the NGO I worked for my first 4 years out of college, and I think they actually do some great, meaningful work for a lot of their projects. But man do I now realize how weird and unprofessional it was when it was first starting up. Most of the higher ups were PhDs who weren’t paid by the NGO but rather brought their own grants to it to get the work done, and most employees were straight out of college. My favorite was when we had a team gathering for our team spread out across the US. It was held in the house of the CEO, who was out of the country at the time, and we just took over the whole house. I slept in his elementary school kid’s twin bed. This was a decade into this NGO, so it was considered “professionalized” by then. Old-timers from a decade ago talked about not being paid for months while living abroad for their positions and then the PhD head of the project cutting them a personal check when told about it.

  157. LibraryLady*

    I worked at a public library where they refused to give staff keys or badges. In order for staff to enter before the library was open for the day, the one person who had a key would open the back door and tie a bungee cord around the handle/lock so that it wouldn’t automatically lock; staff would be able to enter through this door and we just kinda hoped that random people wouldn’t notice it and enter. If it was your first day, you’d be told to “go around back and look for the door with the bungee cord.” I was so relieved when I got a job at a much more normal library and was given a key card.

    1. dulcinea47*

      Are you me?? Because I worked at a library that did this for decades. Decades! Finally there was a failure of the bungee cord resulting in early arrivers being unable to get in… they replaced it with a velcro strap instead! Now I work in the special collections library where we take security a bit more seriously.

  158. Advocate for Advocacy*

    Very low-grade weird, but at our organization, the first person that gets on the elevator always pushes the buttons for everyone else’s floors. Two people get on, nine people get on, whatever -first person gives a friendly “Which floor?” and we all pipe up while they push each button in turn. It’s kind of nice and quaint. :-)

  159. BinderLW*

    I took a job without asking about turnover. Come to find out, it was quite high. The reason became apparent on my first day. My boss was the most useless, cruel, and meddlesome person I’ve ever encountered (she once spent two straight days going through my social media and printing out every time I’d used a swear to lecture me about living company values. She went back to my college days). She insisted that we start each day with a team meeting for “team building”.

    Yall, it was an hour or more of personal chat every day. It started at 830 prompt and lasted until 930 or 10. There was no business allowed, we were only allowed to discuss personal matters. I was in my twenties and didn’t quite understand how banana pants this was, though I had my suspicions.

    The entire team hated the meetings, so they mostly consisted of us listening to the boss gossip about her various family members. It was hell. I can tell you the name of every child her daughter fostered and their alleged character flaws (!!!), the level of uncleanliness all of her in laws apparently lived in, and so much more. I would think longingly of my waiting drudge work while sitting through this, trying not to make eye contact with my equally bored and somehow also shocked coworkers. Her boss was aware, and eventually HR, but they just didn’t care. And because terrible people are never terrible in just one way, she would occasionally segue into political commentary or make racist comments. I did develop good redirection skills during this period. I also did not feel even a little guilty when I quit with little notice.

  160. Lilac*

    I’m seeing a lot of Cards Against Humanity mentions so just wanted to mention that in 2020 there was a Polygon article about just how toxic, racist, and sexist the work culture was there and how the cofounder had to step down (but still remained a shareholder). I’d recommend reading it. It honestly changed the way I look at the game and I’ve never played it again.

  161. Lilac*

    As for sharing a story. Once I worked at a federal government department in my country (not the USA). While I know there’s a reputation that public service jobs are extremely secure and once you have one you have one forever, this job took it a little too far. In the lunch room there was a whiteboard with the names of staff and someone had calculated the years until retirement for each person. I was new and didn’t fit into the office culture so I wasn’t on the board, which made me glad. It honestly made me feel depressed when I looked at it, as if everyone in the building was effectively waiting out their lives.

  162. Coverage Associate*

    An author and editor I admired got his “big start” when he was fired from an early writing job by the employer bringing in security guards to meet him at the door on a Monday, march him to his desk, watch him collect his things, and march him out. He had never behaved violently or anything at the job, and there weren’t usually security guards on site. They brought them in special.

    It was his “big start” because he decided that day to start his own publication.

    I read the story as a child, and even today, when my office badge isn’t working or my computer won’t turn on, I get this pounding in my chest that I have been summarily fired overnight and this is how I am finding out.

  163. Employed Minion*

    I am newish at a small company where most of the staff have not worked anywhere else. They have all been here for multiple decades and have no idea how the current business world works. I know my shock offended many of my coworkers but there are so many practices here they believe are normal but are beyond egregious.

    One example: All office computers had the same password -yes, that stereotypical password that just came to mind- If someone was out and a person wanted to know something, they would just sign onto that other person’s PC. People were furious when they could not just sign onto the new people’s PCs. And there was great grumbling when people had to create individual passwords.

  164. Elan Morin Tedronai*

    My first job (PR Firm ABC) had what they called a Trial Week in which basically any prospective employees would be hired for a week to write press releases, social media calendars and bylines, and generally learn “The ABC Way.”

    This was considered the second round of interview for any position and paid the equivalent of US$400 (average white collar salary in my country is about 600).

    I used my money to book a hotel room and think about what they did. Then I came to the conclusion that this was a bad practice stemming from a good idea… Only to accept the eventual job offer out of desperation because I was at the end of my savings. To nobody’s surprise, I had a terrible year, which culminated when I poisoned my own lunch to get a food thief – I wrote about it on another comment somewhere on this site.

  165. SofiaDeo*

    The married boss was having an affair with a (single) woman reporting to him, and she was the only person with “X” title. Up until I was hired; this was the early days of implementing computers so I was going to “X -IT”. We were to share the office that was formerly hers alone. I was also single.

    She was *convinced* I was interested in “taking Boss away” from her, and it wasn’t too far-fetched, he did start to come on to me. I lasted about 8 months. There were other numerous problems with how the department interacted with each other. That was truly the most dysfunctional workplace I had ever seen, I didn’t make it a year before they fired me (sign on & moving bonus, which I was Not going to pay back until the allotted time was up, so I wasn’t budging on me quitting); I kept doing my job as described, he & she did their darnedest to get me to quit but I think she gave him an ultimatum & he fired me instead.

  166. Nostalgic*

    Making me nostalgic for the days when my dept felt like a smaller team with inside jokes and whatnot.
    For daily huddles, someone used to bang a tiny gong until someone complained that it was offensive to be herded like cows. Or something.
    For the holiday gift swap one year, someone brought a Taylor Lautner Twilight cardboard cutout. And then it became a tradition to tape the face of some other celebrity over his and put the cutout in each team member’s cube on their birthday.

  167. Front to Back*

    My first job was as an executive assistant. At the beginning of every year, my boss made me mark all of her calendars for when Mercury was in retrograde.

    1. Front to Back*

      To clarify: I was young and personally into astrology and did not realize until much later that it is not something that has any place in a Real Work Environment. (Thanks to AAM for also teaching me about the perils of tiny companies, which this wasn’t when I first started but quickly became so when the pandemic lockdown hit in 2020.)

  168. Calamity Janine*

    i only have tales from student work-study that are perfectly reasonable given the time and place, but i will be alarmed if i ever have to encounter them again:

    1. tech help desk. ninety percent of the job was going “so your laptop is full of viruses and you say you have no idea how it happened… so you don’t do anything like pirate stuff on limewire, right? …no? huh, because i see the shortcut right here on your desktop” and then running the exact same malware removal and antivirus as usual. i assume now, with limewire defunct, tech help desks might have to look for an entire two or even three things before you get to have a Columbo moment.

    2. at a research center where i was kept far away from the interesting science happening (you need far more than an incomplete bachelor’s. incomplete masters at least). “the primates make a lot of noise sometimes but there’s layers of fences between them and you so don’t worry about it.” this was soothing intellectually! but the heart paid little attention to that when walking back to the bus stop in winter evenings, with it already dark out. so i ended up hustling pretty quickly when the hootin’ and hollerin’ of (fairly literal) monkey business began. it turns out you can power walk quick when some old simian My Momma Said I Gotta Go Home Right Now Immediately instincts kick in!

    fortunately i am aware neither of these are exactly usual or universal for workplaces. unless limewire makes a roaring comeback and makes help desk inquiries really, really easy to sort out the cause of, anyway

  169. much happier now*

    This is hardly wild and crazy, but at my first “real” job, during my performance review (the only one I had there in three years, and even then only because I specifically requested it), my manager dinged me for consistently being late… by one minute. You can imagine my surprise when, at subsequent jobs, coworkers would roll in 5-10 minutes after their start time and no one cared.

  170. sulky-anne*

    I never thought office skinny dipping was normal, but my coworkers all thought I was very weird for not wanting to participate.

    1. allathian*

      Oh dear. I used to skinny dip in a past age, but now I’d only chunky dunk. And NEVER in the company of mere coworkers.

  171. Pumpkin cat*

    My first workplace was a small, niche consulting company that hired lots of fresh college grads. Your first day, a very senior colleague comes and sets up your computer (keyboard shortcuts, email rules, email signature, other time saving things). You are also given a small document that describes the company’s digital management structure – how to organize folders, file naming conventions, best practices with emails (who to include, who not to include), information on how to present data effectively (colors, fonts, legends, titles), best practices when working on files that multiple people will use, and many other things that result in efficient teamwork. The people who put this together had actually studied the science behind these things, so it was amazing. Everyone followed these best practices willingly – they were so logical and efficient. I thought all companies were like this! Every single job I’ve had since, I am soooo disappointed. Crazy huge folders full of 100s of documents you have to scroll through instead of neatly organized sub folders, people putting the dates in file names as mmddyyyy instead of yyyymmdd so they don’t sort correctly, linked excel files with broken links, people having their own copies of shared files with their initials at the end, etc etc. I try to put some of the practices in place, but it’s so hard because I’m not in charge! It was so genius to have a very senior person just take that hour and get the newbie on the same page as everyone. Seems rigid, but it really works well!

    2. catabatic*

      I’ve been charged with putting something of this sort in place for my directorate… but I have not studied the science of it!! Figuring out where to start is breaking my brain but I’m glad to hear it can actually be done.

  172. Overthinking It*

    Things that there people thought were normal, but i thought were weird: having no hot water in the building. No one noticed. Most thought it just didn’t get hot in the time it took to wash you hands. I got pushback when I tried to investigate, because I knew there HAD to be a water heater. Turned out it was disconnected for some electrical repairs several years before and never hooked back up. Also crazy:no building maintenance and no IT; having to get permission to call in an outside contractor for the tiniest problem – like burned out lights – or just live with it broken. And no oerson responsible to report these things to.

  173. Starling*

    In college I worked at a used bookstore. Part of the application was for the manager to run your natal chart / horoscope.
    I heard them discussing candidates like “ she was so polite, she didn’t act like a Taurus.”
    I couldn’t roll my eyes hard enough!

  174. Irish Teacher.*

    I knew to an extent that it wasn’t normal, but the first school I taught in (except for the one I did my teaching practice in) had massive behavioural problems among the kids, like my 4th years used literally come into the classroom, shove over the desks, empty packets of crisps out on the carpet, throw coins and bottles across the room… (they were probably a bit worse for me as I was new than they were for the permanent teachers, but honestly…only a bit).

    I knew that wasn’t normal, but I was still so used to having to be a stern disciplinarian that I think I made the kids in the next school I worked in a little nervous at first, because I was enforcing every little rule, expecting them to take advantage at any time.

    Yeah, in my 20 year career, I have never seen another school that compared to that one and when I went for an interview shortly after leaving, I was asked to “tell us about a discipline problem you faced and how you dealt with it and seeing the last school you taught in, I’m sure you have plenty to choose from!!”

  175. JSC*

    My first job out of college was for a nonprofit in the San Francisco Bay Area. I had grown up and attended college in the rural east/midwest. My boss used crystal deoderant (it was, literally, just a quartz-like rock), and typically had really strong body odor as a result. But was also kind of ‘woo’ so there was a lot of hugging. I learned to get used to this, thinking, “Well, I guess this is what California is like?” Our office also had an intense focus on things like vegetarian/vegan eating, recycling, composting, environmental consciousness, etc. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just the level of focus was a lot, especially considering that the nonprofit itself didn’t have anything to do with any of those issues. Again, I found myself thinking “Well….people always talk about California and the hippies and what-not, so….?” The last straw, when I finally realized Something Was Not Quite Right, involved the director proposing (and other staff agreeing!!) that we should have a worm-composting-bin. *In* the office! Like in the tiny kitchenette that we all share. I did a little research and found out that, theoretically if everything worked perfectly, worm-composting is a great way to process food leftovers. But, when worm-composting fails, it really fails. The internet was full of stories of like…dead worms everywhere. Or, even worse, alive-worms everywhere. Also the possible smells involved with composting, even when it’s working how it’s supposed to.

    I finally put my foot down. “I know we’re in California, but, I am Not OK with the worm plan!” One or two others felt the same and luckily that was enough to shut it down.

    20 years later, having had many jobs in many states/regions, with all kinds of work cultures…I now realize this was not “a California thing.” It was just weird.

    It was otherwise a fantastic job though and I’m still in touch with some people I met during that time.

  176. NothingIsLittle*

    I have two from working in government: being given comp in lieu of overtime and needing a hundred layers of pre-approval to buy anything! I didn’t realize until I read this website that it’s illegal to give comp time instead of overtime pay unless you’re the government. And I moved from government to a state university and had my new coworkers horrified when I exclaimed how much less red tape there was, specifically around purchasing. I can just… buy necessary supplies as long as there’s money in my budget and I don’t need to get an emergency meeting with the Board because someone in another department already exceeded our threshold for that vendor! :’)

    1. Jo*

      I’ve had salaried positions in private sector and in government. I loved Comp Time! Honestly, I never claimed it all as I felt I was a salaried professional and didn’t need to count hours that closely. But I kept enough on the books to almost never need sick or vacation leave – which later bumped up my tenure and allowed me to retire a year early.

  177. Anonymous Pygmy Possum*

    My partner still works at the job we both had our first post-college job at, which is a small tech company that’s been around for 30 years. Here’s a few things:
    – This company treats their employees incredibly well, salary and benefits-wise: He and I would receive substantial bonuses and salary increases every year. It was a bit of a surprise to me when it took me two and a half years to get one paltry raise at my new company. To be fair – I was expecting to be hired at less than my old salary because I was changing job functions and they gave me much more when they hired me, so I’m not hurting for cash, but my partner went from earning a little less than me to immediately earning 15k more within a year of me leaving the company. (He now makes 30k more than me.)
    – That being said, they expect a lot from their employees. He always seems surprised that I’m able to push back on deadlines and move assignments to other team members if I’m incredibly busy.
    – The culture at this company has changed a lot for the worse since I left – people spend their lunch hour loudly playing video games in the middle of the office and partying is pretty rampant. He knows that it’s getting bad and he doesn’t partake in it, but I have to imagine that when some of these guys (and it is mostly guys) leave for their next jobs, they’ll have to learn some pretty important lessons about what is okay at work. For example, I have to imagine that their next job will react pretty harshly to smoking weed in a manager’s office during a work party. (The manager and the other person in that office were both not there. And yes, the manager knows that they did it. And there were no consequences!)

  178. NotGreener*

    Mine is good wierd! At my first job, we had lunchtime barbecues in the loading bay / parking lot on the first Friday of every month in the summer (and donuts *every* Friday). It was a great way to show some employee recogniton. Vice my current job, where we don’t even have holiday parties :(

  179. Wrong Takes Only*

    At my very first job, the department expanded suddenly, and we went from two to five people. A lot of informal systems that had worked easily between two people were suddenly difficult to spontaneously coordinate between five. The best example is lunch time—with two of us, we just sort of went whenever we wanted, being mindful of which of us had come in first, or if one of us had something particular going on that day. When the new people started, this led to coverage-related chaos, ALL OF WHICH COULD EASILY HAVE BEEN SORTED OUT by creating a schedule or ANY KIND of visible system. Instead, without anyone ever saying a word, we all just silently competed to be first out the door at lunch, thus establishing what time WE were taking it, and making everyone else have to kind of schedule around it. At one point, I was sitting in my car at 10:45am, angrily eating a sandwich I wasn’t yet hungry for, just because I wanted to know what time my lunch would be and not have it changed suddenly.

    When my next (CONSIDERABLY MORE FUNCTIONAL) job had a lunch schedule, it kind of blew my mind that there was such a completely normal and widely-used way to prevent our daily office hunger games.

  180. merida*

    The department head at a previous job hid the budget. We all were responsible for ordering certain things relevant to our role, but when anyone asked what the budget for their thing was, she’d cleverly avoid the question and just say to email her what we wanted to order and she’d approve/dissaprove the purchase. She took 2-3 days to respond to anything (probably because she was overrun by our constant purchase requests). I was in charge of ordering office supplies for my team. I wasn’t told the budget for supplies no matter how many times I asked her. I was “talked to” once when I ordered a $7 tape measure without her permission (I was new and hadn’t been told of this policy). So then when a colleague told me they needed me to order a $3 ruler from Amazon for a time sensitive project, I had to ask her permission and wait 3 days before I was approved. I’d been in charge of budgets at other jobs so I knew better than to get sucked into thinking that this level of micromanaging was normal, but somehow that policy still rooted itself in my brain. Since leaving that job I still have had to consistently remind myself that it’s ok to ask what the budget is. It was awkward the first time I was told “you don’t have to ask permission! It’s part of your job to order X so you can just do it.” Oh right, that’s what normal is.

  181. Michael*

    I used to work in a small specialised tech support team in higher education. Internal promotions almost never happened.
    When there was a restructure and they created 2 new ‘senior’ positions to fit between the normal technicians and the team leaders, a few people applied. I was surprised when I overheard one of the team leaders taking one of the applicants through all the interview questions one by one, explaining what the panel (which he was on) wanted to hear.
    When I queried it, I was told all the applicants were getting coached because he ‘wanted them all to look good’ to the head of department.
    When I asked how they’d decide which applicant was the best if they all gave nearly identical answers, I was told the head had already decided who was getting the promotions (the person who had been there the longest and the team leader’s son) so this was all a formality and it didn’t matter anyway.

  182. Moist*

    I worked at a company that provided flood insurance, and all of the meeting rooms were named after major hurricanes– Andrew, Sandy, Ian, etc. I just brushed it off as a cutesy naming theme, and it wasn’t until I switched companies that– hey, maybe naming a room after a catastrophic event that caused hundreds of deaths and millions in damages is not great?

  183. Anonymouse*

    I worked at a grassroots nonprofit that was famously, unbelievably stingy. Some highlights:
    – We had to share beds during all work travel
    – Candidates had to contribute $10 toward lunch when they came in for final round interviews
    – I spent MONTHS submitting and re-submitting a budget proposal to reimburse someone for parking expenses when he used his personal car for work (it was never approved)

    When I started my next job, I prepared an elaborate memo asking for approval to purchase a case of paper towels, including a comparison of the cost per sheet among different brands. My boss had to explain that it was just office supplies and I could use my discretion.

  184. It's Marie - Not Maria*

    I was told to set up a weekly One on One with an employee who reports to someone in a completely different department, who primarily worked with our partner companies. While I am sure he appreciated the moral support I was giving him, I actually didn’t have much of a clue what to discuss with him.

  185. Annie E. Mouse*

    My first job out of college was a legal secretary for a solo practice lawyer. He was older and had kids a few years younger than me, so I guess thought of me like one of his kids. If I took a Friday off to go on a weekend trip, he would hand me $200. He bought the staff lunch more often than not. He bought me a new laptop when I started grad school.

    I’d worked enough to know that wasn’t normal, but I sure did miss being indulged like a spoiled teenager when I moved on.

  186. MigraineMonth*

    I graduated during the Great Recession, moved back to my small town far from Silicon Valley, and had terrible interviewing skills (which unfortunately I didn’t realize at the time); as a result, even though I was a computer programmer I couldn’t find any related job. When someone in the area offered me a job at their new startup, I jumped at the chance.

    In retrospect, a tech company that hires software developers as contract workers instead of employees probably should have been my first red flag. Or maybe my second, after the owner/CEO emphasized how much of a shoe-string budget they were on and asked how little I was willing to work for “until the business started turning a profit”. Which might sound like typical startup culture, but I wasn’t an employee and wasn’t offered any equity, just the $15/hr I asked for. I was also offered the team lead position, which I declined since I’d just graduated from college and had no professional experience. I declined, and so he gave it to one of my two coworkers… both of whom were *still in* college. Later, when I’d worked all the contracted hours and asked for a renewal, the owner/CEO flipped out on me and went from love-bombing to telling me I was lazy, my work sucked, and I didn’t deserve a higher pay rate than my colleagues. I felt really guilty at first and fully agreed with the last point; I told my colleague, who had been doing really great work, how much I was getting paid and that he should ask to be paid at least as much.

    Turns out my colleague had gotten paid the minimum wage of $8/hr for the first 100 hours he’d worked, and then just… kept working when the owner/CEO refused to renew. He’d worked at least 700 hours for free for this asshole’s startup. (He’d decided to just do it for the experience like an effed-up internship.) I abruptly lost any feeling of guilt, became a believer in sharing salary information, and made a mental note that employers (even ones who seem like really swell guys) will absolutely take advantage of you if you let them.

  187. Otto von Pencil*

    I’ve got one.

    I work in a field for which there is no formal degree program but rooted in old traditions, and I felt so so lucky that my first job out of college was with a (female) mentor famed as one of the founding members of our profession. It’s customary when we travel as one large group for an event, we pack a large travel case on wheels with supplies, which is always called a trunk. In the summer, there would be smaller subgroups that would travel for outreach and educational events and therefore would pack a smaller case, of which were two sizes, and not with wheels, that were carried in your hand … and therefore had been named – and I swear I am not kidding – “hand jobs”.

    When I first heard this, without anyone ever blushing or smirking and any indication this was some kind of hazing, as a VERY naive kid I thought that maybe my association with the word, recently having been in school elsewhere in the country, maybe it didn’t mean what I thought it meant? Being so fresh to the profession there wasn’t anyone I could ask, and since everyone in the company used that term, so did I – this mentor could make or break my career at that point, so I was too scared to question it.

    For weeks every year we would reference these cases thusly in conversation and email, if they had been packed, did we need the small or the large, on and on. Universally everyone knew what they were; whenever someone said it I would scan the room for any hint that this might not be entirely appropriate, and never saw a glimmer. When I moved to a new job in the same field, I said to my (male) boss, “do we have any hand jobs for this type of event”, he took a long pause, and said that he wasn’t quite sure what I had said, would not be asking me to repeat it, but that we had normal trunks. I explained the backstory, obviously beyond MORTIFIED and worried I would be fired (and helped he knew this mentor), and we still have a good laugh about it today, 20 years later.

    When the mentor retired, I asked their replacement, who’d work with them for many years, if they would change the name of the cases, and she reflected that it did always seem unusual to her, but said something about old traditions and everyone already knowing what they were …

  188. Kelly Paradis*

    My first job out of college, I worked as a receptionist in a small power plant in a fairly small town where everyone knew everyone. My boss had a challenging relationship with his wife, and she would call almost every day to complain to him about something most times he would tell me to take a message, he didn’t want to take the call. This was the early 90’s when there was no texts or emails, and she would tell me all the things at home that were annoying her about him when I would tell her he wasn’t available to talk. Important things like “he left a watermelon in the boat in the garage and now it’s rotting and I’m not going to clean that up” or my personal favorite “he won a free ham at a Rotary event and I don’t want it in the house…ham killed my family.” (I had to ask more questions on that one…it was related to poor eating habits and fatty foods, it an actual murderous ham.) The rest of the staff filled me in on their personal life, so I knew the back stories, but I never let on and would write these things like “Call your wife about rotting watermelon” on pink message pads and tape them to his monitor, and he would leave them up there for months until I ran out of room to tape new ones and I’d throw away the obvious old ones. We never talked about it.

  189. K-Chai*

    First job out of college, working for a fundamentalist Christian education company (which is relevant in that they would justify sacrifices because it was all in service of the mission of reaching people for Christ via our work). I’m one of the only two single people, both women, in my department of 15-ish.

    A new hire from the country next door is being flown in for a month of training. Shortly before this happens, my boss approaches me: would I mind letting the new girl stay with me for a bit? We’ll be around the same age, and my boss (married, dual-income, 50s, female, owned a home) thinks New Girl will be more comfortable with me than staying in Boss’s home, with a man around.

    Reader, I was making $12 an hour, living in a 600-sq. ft. low-income apartment with a roommate. I bought an air mattress (with my own money!) so New Girl had something to sleep on. Of course, neither work nor Boss offered to pay any kind of costs associated with adding a third person to my home. This is a normal thing to expect your young employee to do, right?

  190. K-Chai*

    A second one—same job as the previous comment.

    Fundamentalist Christian education company whose educational philosophy was the same as their philosophy toward employees (i.e., the latter are there to submit to the God-ordained authority of the former). Working as an assistant in a department, my job was primarily to check tests and enter records completed by distance students.

    We all were expected to keep a chat client up on our computer, rather than using phones or emails for most short intra-office communication (things like “are you available for a question” or “do you have the X records for entry?” and so forth). I was informed my first day that I was expected to send my supervisor a message any time I stepped away from my desk, including to use the bathroom, and when I returned. They weren’t recording it and it didn’t affect pay or anything, they just really wanted to know whenever I was…unable to reply to an IM, I guess?

    They didn’t ask you to change your status, so no one else in the office would know you weren’t there. Just the supervisor. My position was not one that came anywhere *close* to needing that level of scrutiny.

  191. Ann*

    My best friend worked for an independent oil company where there characters could have come right off the old “Dallas” TV show. At the annual Christmas party, the office workers would open their gifts from the owner. Everyone got office-appropriate gifts except for one female assistant/receptionist. She always got very expensive jewelry. Like a diamond necklace that cost thousands of dollars. Needless to say, the owner’s wife did not attend the office Christmas party.

  192. amdd*

    Although it was my first job, I KNEW this stuff just wasn’t right:
    1. Refusing to buy copy paper ready for three-pronged file folders and instead having one salaried employee three-hole punch every single paper copy of every single thing that had to be filed.
    2. Requiring employees to turn in used-up pencil stubs before giving them a new pencil. (Same for pads of paper.)
    3. Not allowing personal phone calls of any kind (this was pre cellphones) at your desk phone but having a pay phone in the middle of the office, where everyone could hear your “personal” calls.
    4. Allowing senior employees to take their 5 weeks of vacation one day at a time (every Friday), so they got to work 4-day weeks half the year.
    5. Not allowing access to email on our desk computers. Only one computer had access to email and we each had to sign up in advance for 30-min sessions on that computer to send or reply to emails. This was not personal email–this was how we did business! You were lucky to get two sessions per week.

  193. Senior Paperclip Counter*

    My first job after college, all the entry-level staff reported to… ALL of the managers. Like, five of them, one for every department. No one knew what department they actually worked in. When different managers’ orders conflicted, we had to guess which ones to follow, because asking would get you written up. Every employee was listed as reporting to the general manager. When I went to my next job, and asked if there was a protocol for what to do when two managers’ orders conflicted, they looked at me like I’d sprouted a second head and told me “they’re instructions, not orders, and only your direct manager should ever be giving them”.

  194. Jo*

    Two things, both 90s before everything was digital.

    1) The conference center vendor we used set up reservation accounts using the customer’s social security number as a User ID. No other option available. The SSN was printed on every invoice, communication, and on the MAILING LABELS. My position booked a lot of meeting space, so there was constant paperwork. I raised concerns with my organization that I really didn’t want my personal information displayed like that. My bosses said I was being overly dramatic. Years later it changed, of course.

    2) Our monthly paychecks were delivered in batches to each office location in envelopes so thin, you could read the numbers through the paper. When I expressed concerns about privacy, I was told we were a government agency and everything was available as an open records request anyway, so it didn’t much matter. (BTW, not in writing – but there was an expectation that staff did not disclose/discuss salaries.)

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