let’s discuss territory-marking at work

by Alison Green on November 14, 2024

Let’s talk about territory-marking behavior at work: people with a high need to make sure you know they they own this work area or this desk or this project (whether or not they really do).

Think for example, of this person who left ridiculously excessive “rules” for the person covering her maternity leave (including “do not make any new contacts without my express permission”) or this man who engraved his name on his stapler and freaked out when someone borrowed it, or this turf war over coffee makers.

Please share your story of workplace territorialism in the comment section. Was it you? Was it a colleague? Spill all.

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  1. WeirdChemist*

    Do laboratories exist where the scientists aren’t excessively protective and territorial over their sharpies/pens?? I’ve personally never seen one lol.

    I once had to physically tie a pen to a piece of equipment because people kept walking off with it… the equipment was directly below the shelf where we stored extra pens too! They could have just grabbed a new pen when they needed it! Gah…

    1. Esmerelda Margaret Note Spelling*

      Pens, no. I knew where the stationery cupboard was, and we had plenty of spares. On the other hand, god help anyone who tried to walk off with the decently-calibrated callipers…

        1. amoeba*

          Hahaha, oh my god – I’m a chemist and it’s very normal to share almost all (all?) labware here, so thanks for that particular picture in my head!

    3. Nonanon*

      We were all VERY upset when one of our students graduated and we found out he was hoarding sharpies in his bench

      1. Bruce*

        My former manager would often walk off with one of my pens, when she moved on to a new job she gifted me a basket full of pens she’d accumulated. Over all this was a minor quirk, she was very successful, cared about her staff and I’m still in touch with her decades later.

        1. Chick-n-boots*

          I can’t decide if I’d have been ticked that she’d hoarded all those pens for years – knowing full well they were mine! – and waited until the end of her time at the org to give them back, or just be tickled by the gift that came with a side of (I assume) chagrined self-deprecating humor and the re-acquisition of many beloved writing implements.

          I think the latter. :)

      2. Chas*

        We has a student who did this, but I had been gradually ordering more boxes of sharpies whenever I couldn’t find one, so we ended up having a pile of spare pens kicking around for months after she left.

    4. Coffee*

      My spouse has Special Sharpies at home. I don’t think those are that good so I don’t really use them but oh boy if someone doesn’t put it back after using! We have several Official Locations of Special Sharpies so at least one is always available

      1. Rosyglasses*

        I’m tickled by the capitalizing and visualizing labeled spots where the official writing instruments live. Hehe!

    5. Blue Spoon*

      My desk used to be right next to a common workspace, and I could not keep my pens. People would grab one to use for a task, then forget to put it back. Unfortunately, the worst offender was my direct supervisor, so there wasn’t much I could do other than occasionally give him a hard time about it (he had many flaws as a supervisor, but he was at least pretty chill).

      1. Vontrucher*

        Exact same thing happened to me when I was an undergrad. My bench was next to the pH meter, and no one would ever remember to bring a pen, so they’d take one from my bench to record their data. I was very particular about my pens, and hated losing them. I ended up putting tape on them in a color no one else used, so I could at least track them down and take them back when they ended up somewhere else in the lab.

        1. Artemesia*

          I think I’d keep them on my person even if it required a pocket protector and the nerd reputation that goes with those. Or in a locked drawer. And then put a container of office pencils and pens on the corner of the desk that I never use.

          1. Blue Spoon*

            I do have a coworker who uses a pocket protector, but he’s an older gentleman so it so it just makes him look a bit quirky. I, meanwhile, have hooked up a pen on a retractable cord to the lanyard my ID card is on. The jury’s out on how nerdy that looks, but it works fine as long as I don’t stand near any magnets.

            1. Ari Flynn*

              When I was in high school, back when you had to look both ways for dinosaurs before you crossed the street, I always carried the pens I didn’t want to lose clipped inside the front of my shirt. Everyone knew I had a pen, but no teenager on Earth would *admit* they knew that when it was wedged between my boobs.

        2. The Leanansidhe*

          I’ve color coded all our micropipettes based on workstation. I understand it’s convenient to have five 200uL pipettes so you never have to change the volume… but the rest of us have to do experiments too!

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

        As a receptionist/office assistant, I had this problem. I could never keep pens. And then one day, a persistent vendor asked if I needed pens* and I said that yes, I enjoy clicky pens, he handed me like 20 of them. When I started finding them on other peoples’ desks, I was able to narrow down who the pen stealers were in the office.

        *One time when I told him I didn’t need pens, I needed a paperclip holder, he went to the car and got me a branded paperclip holder. I kind of wanted him to keep coming so I could outfit my entire office for free.

    6. Merry and Bright*

      A good pen is worth being territorial over. I worked at my college library, and we had one real ink pen end up in our department. After a lifetime of using 10 for $1.00 pens, using an ink pen was a revelation. I absolutely kept it in my work cubby and made sure no one else borrowed it.

      1. Nibs*

        I used to only write with fountain pens and when people would see it they would always ask if they could try it out. Unfortunately it ruins the nib so I had to reply no. I would try to explain and would get eye rolls and such. Finally, I caved and use boring old ballpoints now :(

        1. I Have RBF*

          I’m a lefty, and I can always tell when a right-hander has used my fountain pen. Yes, even the Pilot Varsity fountain pens get messed up when used wrong, steel nibs and all.

        2. Missa Brevis*

          For a while I kept one of the $3 pilot disposable fountain pens in my bag so that I had an alternative when people would ask to try my nice fountain pen (a vintage covered-nib parker I repaired after finding it when we were clearing out my great grandparents’ derelict farmhouse and which I don’t let *anyone* else use for both practical and sentimental reasons).
          All of my coworkers are used to it by now, so I’ve let the habit lapse, but I’ll probably have to start again if and when I change jobs in the future.

        3. Tiny Soprano*

          My father used to have red ink in his blue fountain pen and blue ink in his red fountain pen to discombobulate anyone who tried to steal and use them. Apparently it was very effective.

          1. Disappointing Aussie Office Gumby*

            Can confirm this. I did this at my last job. (Easy enough to swap out the ink barrels of BIC pens.)

      2. Lozi*

        oh, I feel like I’m missing out on something good here … what exactly is an ink pen and how is it different? Don’t all pens use ink?

        1. Bunch Harmon*

          It’s a fountain pen. There are two main kinds – one that uses cartridges, and one that is refillable (from a bottle of ink).

          1. Hobbling Up A Hill*

            Not exactly. Most cartridge filler fountain pens can be fitted with converters to allow them to be filled with ink from a bottle or you can just rinse out and refill the cartridge from an ink bottle (which is fiddlier but eminently doable). There’s also a whole spectrum of different fill-from-the-bottle types of pen up to using the entire barrel as an ink reservoir and filling it with an eyedropper. Something it’s relatively easy to convert your cartridge filling fountain pen into if you have a mind to do that.

            Apart from the fairly crappy disposable fountain pens which sort of defeat the point of fountain pens in general.

        2. Mad Harry Crewe*

          There are different kinds of ink – ballpoint pens use a thick oil-based ink, gel pens use a medium viscosity water-based ink, fountain pens use a thin water-based ink. Rollerball is different from ballpoint is different from felt tip is different from dip pen. Link in reply for a Jetpens article about different kinds of pens and their inks.

          2. Mad Harry Crewe*

            To finish my thought – I presume this person was used to cheap crap ballpoint pens and got upgraded to gel or rollerball, which are going to be very different writing experiences.

        3. Nibs*

          Mostly called fountain pens … if you like writing it can be a luxurious treat … but you usually end up with some ink stains on your fingers (WORTH IT!)

          1. harmonybat*

            My fingers are currently striped with Pilot Murasaki-Shikibu and have a couple of spots of Pelikan Apatite. I love it.

          2. pandop*

            My school insisted on ink pens, fountain or rollerball (UK, 90s), and I ended up with a permanent ink stain on my right middle finger that barely shifted during the holidays.

            I work in a library now. We are territorial about crates and trolleys. So territorial. Stencils. Laminated labels. The works.

      3. Insulindian Phasmid*

        Part of me wants to try fancy fountain pens but mostly I love the cheap-ass Bic Crystal and have since high school…

        1. Reluctant Mezzo*

          Although you can get calligraphy markers–they are specifically cut for calligraphy rather than a standard Sharpie point, and yes, it does matter if they’re for lefthanded or righthanded people.

    7. Ali*

      My current lab does not care a whit about sharpie, pen, lab marker theft because they are all properly stocked by a separate logistics team that does a wonderful job.

      However, if you use anyone else’s labeled dissection scissors there will be friction for months.

      1. Rainy*

        People who use the Good Scissors for Bad Things should always be aware that, work or home, someone now wants both sides of their pillow to be hot forever.

        1. Emmy Noether*

          There’s a common joke amongst sewists that using someone’s good fabric scissors for anything else is forbidden by pain of death. Anyone who grew up around a sewist is not so sure it’s a joke…

          1. Disappointed Australien*

            No jury would convict. Or at least, no jury of peers defined as people who own good sewing scissors.

            Amusingly one breakup I had she took the sewing machine but (still) didn’t understand about the sewing scissors I owned so I kept those. That wasn’t why we broke up, directly, but it was characteristic of an attitude that annoyed me (she left my good secateurs out in the rain!)

          3. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

            I’m not even a real sewist (I play with string, not cloth) and I have a pair of Good Scissors that are labeled NO as in “If you are not Red, then NO, don’t the eff touch these scissors.”

          4. Six Feldspar*

            Not a joke, living alone has its downsides but at least I don’t have to guard The Craft Scissors…

          5. Hannah Lee*

            I’ve seen many posts on SM about people putting notes out for their good fabric scissors:

            These are fabric scissors
            They are ONLY for cutting fabric
            If you use these scissors to cut paper I will cut you

            … but not with these scissors
            Because they are ONLY for cutting fabric

          6. LifebeforeCorona*

            My ex and I repeat ex used my very expensive paring knife to try to cut a cable that was wrapped in plastic. One more reason he became an ex.

      2. Black Horse*

        I was going to say the same about dissecting forceps. Don’t. Don’t touch those. They were sharpened to perfection. I kept them hidden in the back of my desk drawer and was careful to never let anyone see me take them out.

      3. goddessoftransitory*

        I’ll never forget my college theater costuming professor telling us the story of a woman she knew looking all over for her Die Shear German sewing shears (I’m probably spelling it wrong, but they are quality, EXPENSIVE top of the line scissors) and panicking, only to have her husband bring them to her–he had had them out. In his truck. To cut wrapping paper for Christmas presents.

        I believe that story ended with how the woman divorced him.

              1. Sharp-dressed Boston Terrier*

                I can’t tell if I’m embarrassed or proud to be old enough to get that reference.

    8. Viridian*

      Not pens, but tweezers. Our stuff is small enough that we nee the finest tweezers that we can get. Drop them from 3 feet onto a concrete floor and they’re forever useless. The good news is that (1) we prepare samples for the whole lab, so no one wants to piss us off too much by taking and breaking our nice tweezers, and (2) we work with stuff that is very visibly delicate, so if you don’t work at that table *you don’t touch the stuff on that table*.

      I’ve seen people get moved to different projects for dropping too many tweezers. It’s not quite as petty as it sounds, because it’s a pretty decent litmus test for if they’re too clumsy for what we’re doing in other ways.

      1. The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon*

        Oh my god I can feel myself getting clumsier just reading that. Thank goodness there are graceful elven creatures like you and your colleagues to do that delicate work because I cannot even imagine!

        1. Viridian*

          We are all super clumsy on the macroscopic level! There is not a sports player among us, and usually the people who are good at it are into model-painting or embroidery or jewelry-making or something like that. We’re just a bunch of obsessive crafting nerds who got dropped into a lab by mistake.

      2. Stunt Apple Breeder*

        I am also particular about forceps and scissors, and refuse to let anyone else in the lab borrow mine. My advisor’s tech kept a set of whetstones to ‘fix’ any forceps that got dropped and were still salvageable.

      3. Elizabeth West*

        I used to work in a materials testing lab — although I was the clerical worker, part of my job was doing Igor stuff like recording the sample fridge temps, preparing sample bottles, disposing of old water samples that were safe to pour down the drain, and washing glassware. We had two of this fancy bulbous thing with spouts that I was told were extremely expensive. Every time I washed them, I was terrified!

    10. Tempest*

      I don’t work in a laboratory, but I have worked at a company that sells tweezers (among other things) to laboratories for over a decade. I have heard so many stories of how protective people are of their tweezers, it’s crazy!

    11. AnotherOne*

      My mom worked as a bank teller for many years and they always had pens walking away.

      At some point, I was cleaning out my desk at home and ended up with this massive bag of random pens that still worked but I didn’t want anymore. She took them to the bank and made that the pens should would give customers to use. If the pen got taken, it was fine. If it didn’t get taken, it was also fine.

    14. Nesprin*

      Omg yes. The good ethanol proof pens have legs and even sharpies will walk off if you let them.

      At one point I bought a full 3 cases (144 ea) pens, sprinkled them in the lab and still struggled to find a pen a week later.

    15. PostalMixup*

      Especially if you happen to be in possession of one of those discontinued ultra-fine industrial sharpies!

    16. Apt Nickname*

      I am a pen thief and I know that about myself. I mark all my pens with colored tape so if I have a pen without the tape, I know to return it to somewhere.

    17. Lab Boss*

      Our lab pens are pretty interchangeable, and we have enough sharpies it’s never been a problem except for one woman who would inspect the tips of her sharpies and accuse people of using them without her permission if they looked blunter than she thought they should be.

      Now, when I worked at summer camp, we had to write camper’s names on these little tags to keep track of who was buddied with who in the pool. The tags had to be weatherproof so they were kind of slick plastic and hard to write on unless you had just the right pen- and if you lent that pen out, you stood immediately behind the person borrowing it and watched them until you got it back.

      1. coffee*

        I had a supervisor who would constantly wander off with my pens. One time she asked to borrow my pen, we discussed her habit of taking them (in a lighthearted way), she wrote a few sentences, and started walking off with the pen. I was like “Hey, remember that’s my pen, as we were literally discussing one minute ago” and she suddenly got super aggro about how it was her pen and she would totally remember if she’d borrowed it from me.

        Bizarre. She gave my pen back but as a “I will humour your delusions” gesture.

    18. Esme_Weatherwax*

      I had a supervisor who believed she invented marking up printed copy with a red pen, and therefore when she saw me editing a printed document with a red pen, screamed at me for 20 minutes about how I must have gone through her desk and stolen her red pen: I was dishonest and unethical and so on. She insulted me in every possible way. Eventually, as the tirade wore down, she opened her drawer and, yep, her red pen was still there–because I was using a different red pen and also our office had dozens of red pens in the supply closet. And, you know, I’d been editing things this way for decades before I met her. She immediately pretended the whole thing hadn’t happened, until I failed to resign my contract to work with her, at which point she asked if this was about “that pen thing.”

      1. Middle Aged Lady*

        Not terrotial but maybe a little OCD about red: before a vacation, way back in the paper days, I was showing my coworker how to handle parts of my job. One was to count items with five-bar gates: some with a black pen and some with red. At the end of this mini-training, I asked if she understood and she jokingly asked me if the marks had to be exactly 3/4 of an inch long like I made them.

      3. iglwif*

        What on EARTH.

        Marking up printed copy with a red pen (or pencil) was a standard practice before I was even born, and I’m half a century old. Good grief.

      4. Lindumgirl*

        That takes me back to my early days in the law when documents being negotiated would be posted back and forth. First set of amendments in red, then green. I can’t remember what came next, but (hopefully) before it became illegible the document would be handed back to a secretary to create a new clean version. Even then share sale agreements were at leat 80 pages long.

    19. Alice in Hinterland*

      I’ve worked in labs and in the Army, and the Army was way worse for pens or any other supplies. When we shipped to Iraq in ‘03, we brought half a shipping container full of mostly AA batteries, which we mostly used in night vision goggles. But the supply sergeant would only issue one set of batteries per solider at a time, since he “didn’t want to run out”. Well, our unit was the type that gets split up, so we had no contact with Supply for 8 months. Supply really should be called Hoarding, since their entire purpose seems to be maintaining as much stock as possible rather than actually dispensing it.

      On the way home, they didn’t want to bring back the heat-damaged batteries (99% of our original load), so we were ordered to wait until after dark and drive around sneaking a few cases into each dumpster since it was against regs to throw out batteries!

    20. DJ*

      I don’t blame the technician in this situation. Even if it’s close to supplies painful to have to grab a pen when needed!

    21. TheLinenPorter*

      Well, I think I kind of have one. It might also be on the ”petty” side of things.

      I work in a hotel as a linen porter. We use large bin bags. Also other departments use the same bags, but of course each department has a separate budget, and the bin bags have no name on them… you can see where this is going. I got a delivery in, and put a full box in each linen service cupboard. The next day opening up, there is only an empty box in one of the services. Not the first time this happened, the bin bags tend to ”vanish” and my boss is moaning about having to order them.

      Well, I stuffed the empty box full of Gideons’ books and added a note ”you shall not covet your neighbour’s bin bags” and closed it back up… the next morning I see someone had opened it… No literature had been nicked. I’m still having to hide the bin bags tho.

    22. Chas*

      I’ve worked in a few labs and always seem to end up being what I think of as “The Supply Fairy” because people would always grab stuff from my bench and take it away and I’d be the person who “magically” got more out of the easily-located supply closest.

      I think the most memorable example was when I was a PhD student and had just got myself a new roll of tissue paper because mine had gone AWOL, and a few minutes later the student who worked on the bench opposite mine came in, saw that her bench didn’t have tissue paper on it either, and grumpily walked over to my bench and snatched the roll I’d just got out. She obviously thought I’d taken hers instead of getting my own! (And I couldn’t be bothered to correct her, so I just walked 5 steps away to the store cupboard and got another one out)

  2. Toot Sweet*

    This takes me back to my maternity leave many years ago! We brought in a temp administrative assistant to cover my leave. I had a three-hole punch that my whole department used, but it was stored at my desk. When I returned, another admin, Tracy, told me that she’d gotten some rather extreme pushback from the temp that “that’s actually Toot Sweet’s hole punch, and it needs to stay here at her desk.” Honestly, Tracy just wanted to punch some papers and put it back. And it wasn’t made of gold.

    4. Cedrus Libani*

      You’ve got to be territorial about those, though, or you’ll end up replacing them every five minutes. They have legs.

      In grad school, I bought 4 staplers in ~2.5 years. The fourth was neon pink. Problem solved. I still have that one.

      1. allathian*

        My cousin’s a construction worker. His tools are always pink or purple and they never get stolen on any jobsites. Heck, only women ever ask to borrow them and they’re always returned by the end of the shift. He doesn’t get any flak for it either because he’s nearly 7 ft tall and weighs nearly 300 lbs, most of it muscle, so nobody dares to make fun of his “effeminate” tools. The fun thing is that he’s a big cuddly teddy bear with no macho mannerisms at all in private.

      2. Elizabeth West*

        Haha, I had to do that at OldExjob. I bought this garish shrimp-pink monstrosity from Staples. After that people stopped using my stapler, lol.

    5. Bossy*

      I mean it sounds like the temp was trying to maintain your area. Lend something out, get it back doesn’t seem that odd.

      1. Toot Sweet*

        It was just a hole puncher, and we were a pretty tight group. I didn’t have any concerns about my coworkers thieving it. This temp was odd in more ways than one, and I got to hear all of the “dirt” when I returned. The hole puncher was the one that really made me laugh out loud.

  3. GiantPanda*

    My keyboard has no lettering. That was no problem when everybody had a fixed desk.
    We have recently switched to hybrid work and hotdesking, but for some reason few people want to take “my” place.

    1. NotRealAnonForThis*

      I feel like “hotdesking” is a great way to bring out the worst in territory marking ::cringe::

        1. Admin of Sys*

          eh – I don’t mind it where I am currently, because office work is optional and you can wfh forever if you’d rather. And since there’s not enough spaces for like 1/5 of our employees in our building since we went wfh, it makes sense to hotdesk.
          That said, I definitely have ‘favorite’ cubical and if someone has claimed my usual one, I feel discombobulated the entire day.

          1. English Rose*

            Same. “My” desk is next to the window with a lovely view and I find myself coming in unnecessarily early to secure it! But sometimes that pesky woman from another team gets in first…

            1. She of Many Hats*

              During the pandemic I got *really* used to having The Primo parking spot when I came in to check the office for leaks, etc. and collect the mail. Now that the building is hybrid, I don’t get my primo spot anymore but I come in earlier to get the one of the next 4 primo spots.

              Not getting one of those primo spots leaves me grumpy the rest of the day.

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

            It makes sense for situations where coming into the office is optional and there’s no set days when a particular person might be in, but the company I just left doesn’t allow telecommuting unless there are extenuating circumstances AND they moved to hotdesking just within the past couple of years. Absolutely the worst of both worlds.

            1. Admin of Sys*

              yeah, if everyone has to come in every day, there’s no reason to not just have assigned cubicals.

              1. amoeba*

                I mean, in my office (and any other place I’ve ever worked), we’ve *very* quickly just arranged ourselves so that everybody takes the same desk every day, anyway. I’d be so confused if my colleagues suddenly started changing desks just for fun!

        2. Coffee*

          Not American and call centre doesn’t probably even count as hot-desking, but my work was noticeable worse when seated in certain areas! I came to the conclusion that floor in one room was tilted and all calls were sliding down to other side of the room

          2. goddessoftransitory*

            I bet that WAS true of the noise in the room! I’ve worked in a call center for twenty years and where you sit is HUGE productivity wise.

          3. je veux m'en passer*

            Ah yeah, same kind of problem that leads you to put a bucket under an unplugged ethernet jack so all the packets don’t puddle on the hardwood

        3. ChattyDelle*

          it’s awful. I am extremely visual & creative-brained (ie, disorganized), so keeping things exactly where they belong enables me to function.

        4. Ally McBeal*

          Cubicle life sucks, but I didn’t think it could get worse than the long tables without dividers. Hotdesking is, in my opinion, even worse.

          1. Rainy*

            We had long double rows of desks with no dividers in the reading room in grad school, but most of us just immediately built walls of library books.

            1. Artemesia*

              There was an open concept elementary school in the district I taught in where several classes were assigned to areas of a large hexagonal pod. The teachers had soon constructed walls of book cases, boxes of materials etc; of course the noise problem couldn’t be solved that way. The geniuses who invent these work spaces never have to actually work in them.

              1. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

                Artemesia, you are either even older than I am or that god-awful idea is still around. Two of my elementary school years were in open pods with 4 classes with of children. The teachers basically just did crowd control of the rowdier students and worked with the students who were struggling academically – they would hand out the week’s assignments on Monday, and as long as I finished by the end of week and wasn’t disruptive, I could spend half the week or more reading Nancy Drew and Trixie Beldon. My mom was a classroom aide working with some of the more active kids (I remember one who met his need to move by swinging from the top of the door frame). She insisted my younger sister get into a single classroom as Sis’s ability to be distracted by others was unparalleled.

              2. Bumblebee*

                I went to an open classroom elementary school in the early 1980s. I credit that experience with my ability to tune out background noise and/or my preference for writing in coffee shops, etc, rather than in the silence at home. Panera definitely gets credit for my dissertation!

          2. I Have RBF*

            Open plan benching (long tables without dividers) made me nostalgic for even those crappy low-walled cubes.

            Cramped benches for office work are so dehumanizing that we had to either take all of our personal stuff home or lock it in a locker, otherwise it would walk away.

        5. Rex Libris*

          It really is like The Powers That Be looked at a cubicle farm and thought “There has to be a way to make this more uncomfortable.”

          1. I Have RBF*

            Seriously.

            “Cubicles? Our people are too comfortable! Lets save money and blow smoke about collaboration with an open plan wall-less noise pit! Oh, damn, they got used to that. Let’s make getting your workspace every day into a Hunger Games competition by hotdesking in said open plan!”

      2. Andrew*

        ugh, I worked for a place that did ‘hoteling’ and you could sign up for the desk of your choice up to 30 days in advance. But, somehow, I managed to convince the person who oversaw the whole system to let me book 90 days instead. She was adamant, however, that I must occupy the desk 80% of the days so to keep it for the 90 days after that. If I could maintain that for six months, the desk would be permanently ‘mine’. I’m a bit of a creature of habit and the desk they assigned was next to a window overlooking midtown NYC so I had incentive! lol But I also split my time with the NJ office and would have to go out there on occasion. So, I did what anyone in my situation would do- I would go into the NY office to ‘swipe in’ and then go back across town to Penn Station and catch the train to the NJ office. There were TONS of unused desks in NJ so there was never a need to reserve a desk (thus, I was counted as “occupying” my NY desk.

        I realize this sounds like a LOT to do to keep a desk but after six months I was awarded the desk on a permanent basis.

        And then Covid hit two months later and I would not be back in the office for two years and by then they had re-designed the space and “my” desk was given to someone else.

        But I had a desk for two months whoo hoo! lol :)

        1. Andrew*

          I should also mention that, strangely, the NY office also had TONS of unfilled desk before and “after” covid so I never could figure out why on Earth they would bother with the hoteling thing.

    2. learnedthehardway*

      I work from home, but my keyboard with worn out lettering did keep my kids from using my desktop for the longest time. They couldn’t type on it. Unfortunately, I eventually had to replace the keyboard and while tempted, I haven’t taken sandpaper to the lettering yet.

      1. Momma Bear*

        I had an IT problem and after trying to use my keyboard, I was gifted a new one with the keys intact. I warned him that it wouldn’t matter as I’d wear them off again and I touch type so I don’t care, but he insisted. I just made sure it was the kind with the satisfying to use raised keys.

        I used to hot desk at an old job when we visited the client. I felt so exposed and did not like it, even though I had my own laptop and only used the docking station for connectivity and power. It’s disorienting.

      4. Filicophyta*

        I don’t know if it’s still possible, but in the past you could buy keyboards with no letters on them, which were used for typing tests.

    3. CanadaGoose*

      Hahaha this is so reasonable, on both sides. Yes, people should use the equipment that suits them best. There should also be enough for all, but that’s a different problem.

    5. DJ*

      Yeah we tend to book the same desks when in. I count it as a trade off for a hybrid working arrangement.
      But hot dealing and being in the office full time.
      Ugghh

      1. allathian*

        I agree. I don’t mind hotdesking at all, mainly because I only go to the office maybe once a week at most. I’m also an early bird so I can usually get “my” cubicle, too.

    6. ASD always*

      Getting an assigned desk in an otherwise hot-desking office is the only “reasonable adjustment” I’ve ever asked for. And then to make extra sure no one used my desk I took away the external keyboard and the cables to the external monitors because I prefer to just use my laptop keyboard and screen.

      Of course I did this when planning to be in the office 4 half-days a week, which lasted all of two months before I slid back into WFH basically full-time. Oops.

  4. Cruciatus*

    This is not at work, but it’s a memory of my mom. She hated when we took her pens and pencils from spots she liked to keep them, so she would put a piece of tape with something like “mom’s pen! If you take this you will burn in hell!” I found some of those pencils recently and will keep them forever.

    1. Margaret Cavendish*

      I have definitely told my kids they’ll go to the Bad Place if they keep taking the scissors from my desk. I think I would have liked your mom!

      1. Selina Luna*

        I only say that in my house about the kitchen shears. Do not use the kitchen shears to cut open zip ties because they will then need to be re-washed.

        1. Bunch Harmon*

          I have three pairs of scissors in my kitchen – two regular and one for food. I still haven’t managed to train my spouse not to use the shears for non-food items. I should hide them, but my memory is crap and I wouldn’t remember where I put them.

      2. KaciHall*

        I have given up on my husband and kiddo not using my fabric shears for everything. I figured out i can get cheap scissors from temu that are actually pretty decent and then just swap them out once they’re ruined

          2. Atalanta*

            I was only half joking when I threatened to use my good fabric scissors on my ex if he touched them. Don’t Touch The Good Scissors!

            1. LaminarFlow*

              I have a decoy pair of good scissors that my husband is free to use. My fabric shears are hidden…I just don’t play fast & loose, lol.

              1. MissMaple*

                Same. I will neither confirm nor deny that my hiding spot is the bottom of my work bag and I carry them with me pretty much everywhere in their own pretty leather pouch :D

          4. goddessoftransitory*

            I posted upthread about the woman I heard of whose German sewing shears were taken by her husband to cut wrapping paper.

              1. allathian*

                What’s your floor tile made of? Ours is ceramic, and no scissors in the world would cut that. When my husband laid our kitchen floor, he rented a ceramic cutter that looks like the old guillotine paper cutters that offices and photo shops used to have to do the job.

          5. Black Horse*

            YES. I overheard the 16-year old tell her friend “ohhhh no, we can’t use those”. There was fear in her voice. As there should be.

        3. k*

          I got a cute little engraved tag that says in script “for fabric only” and attached it to my sewing scissors, only to find my son using them to open some packaging. I showed him the tag and said “what does this say?” and he said “I dunno, I can’t read cursive.” facepalm.

        4. Rainy*

          I walked back into the living room after getting a fresh glass of water once to find that my first husband had sat down in my spot on the couch, grabbed my fabric scissors (I was watching tv and sewing), put his disgusting feet up on the coffee table, and was busily cutting his horrible toenails with my good fabric scissors.

          You might think that’s why he’s my first husband, but his death was unrelated to his horrible misuse of my fabric scissors.

          2. Rain, Disappointing Australian (formerly Lucien Nova)*

            The sound I just emitted may be the essence of pure horror.

            1. Mad Harry Crewe*

              Yeah, we were all on vacation together in that nice little cabin by the lake when he died. Of course Rainy weren’t involved, how could you have been?

          5. Six Feldspar*

            That’s a new verse in the Cell Block Tango right there…

            (“And then he ran into my scissors. He ran into my scissors ten times.”)

    3. Wendy the Spiffy*

      YES. My mom famously keeps a pair of “good” scissors in a ziploc bag, *in the freezer*. She got tired of kids and grandkids losing or ruining scissors and this is her way of always knowing where to find a sharp pair. This system has been in place for 40 years in her own home and the cabin shared by extended family. Woe betide the person who uses them and doesn’t put them back in the bag under the peas.

      1. EngineerRN*

        I work with older adults with dementia, I’m just picturing a new caregiver in your mom’s home tweeting to understand why she’s looking for scissors in the freezer, and it made me smile!

        Knowing family history & lore is so important.

        1. Black Horse*

          This makes me remember when my very sweet aunt was being assessed for her word-finding skills, prior to her brain tumor diagnosis. The person giving the assessment held up a knife, and my aunt called it a “kuh-niff-ee”. They were very confused, until my cousin told her that our whole family calls them that. No idea why we do that, actually, probably in reference to some silly movie from back in the day.

    5. Susie*

      When I was a teacher, I used to label my pens. Teachers are very particular about their pens. Ideal pens reliably write, are visible on paper when projected with a document camera, help my writing be more legible (some pens flow too fast and I write sloppier), and bring be a little joy by being fun colors and something nice (Flair or LePen brands fit the bill).
      Teachers are also surrounded by students who are constantly in need of a pen or a pencil, a subset of whom are boundary challenged and think nothing of grabbing something off a teachers desk.

      One day, a student brought me back one of my pens, label removed. He said he saw someone else “borrow” the pen and take the label off. He told the other student it was my pen and brought it back to me.

      This filled me with such joy-I know the pen labeling is excessive, but it was so nice that the outcome was a student looking out for me in this small way.

    6. A large cage of birds*

      Haha, that reminds me of a meme I saw recently. It was scissors(? possibly a stapler?) labeled “2nd floor do not remove” and someone took it traveling with them and took a bunch of pictures of it in exotic locations.

    7. Artemesia*

      I always tried to have flashlights stationed at various places in the house so we always knew where one was if there was a power issue. This never worked for long.

      1. Stunt Apple Breeder*

        I hide small flashlights in the cookie jar, along with my tape measure, small screwdriver, etc. My spouse doesn’t like sweets so my tools are safe!

    8. Nightengale*

      my mother wrote threatening messages all over a roll of Scotch tape but my favorite was “I bite.”

      I mean, that cutter part did have pretty sharp teeth

    9. Red Bug*

      I have a similar one.
      My predecessor at my current job taped a drawing of a sharpened pencil above the cup where he kept his pens and next to it he wrote: “None of you will go to heaven!”

    10. the cat's pajamas*

      One of my niblings went through a phase where he was obsessed with tape. My sister could never find any when she needed it. For Christmas that year I bought her a paper towel holder, and a roll of every kind of tape I could find that would fit, and put a scoop
      zip tie on the scotch tape to make a bigger loop that would fit over the pole. I labeled it “mom’s tape!!!!” She loved it, best inexpensive gift ever.

      I also now keep my tape on a paper towel holder, works great!

    1. Ostrich Herder*

      Right? I really hope LW made some minor improvements, got a glowing recommendation, and leveraged it into a fabulous job literally ANYWHERE else!

      1. KateM*

        Oh and also, wondering how much there is common for OP of that story and Marcia from two stories back this one.

    5. Mrs. Pommeroy*

      Absolutely! Possibly more than for any other letter I have ever read on aam. That was absolutely mind-blowing.

  6. Judge Judy and Executioner*

    A pretty tame one, but my desk chair kept going missing at one company. I sat outside conference rooms and huddle rooms, and if I wasn’t at my desk there was a good chance someone would swipe my chair to roll into their meeting. There were never enough chairs in the meeting rooms, and my chair was almost never returned. This left me to go find a different chair or wait until the meeting was over to try to get my chair back. I ended up using a label maker to put my name on my chair, and then could easily find it. Once people caught on that I literally put my name on my chair, it stopped going missing so often. And as a bonus, when it was borrowed, it was usually returned. :)

    1. Harper*

      Oooh, I think I would have marched into every meeting and said, “Who took my chair?” It’s ridiculous that you had to go chairless, ever.

    2. Lisa*

      I left my previous career path years ago but still dream I come back to a desk there and my chair has been moved. Usually also the keyboard and monitor and sometimes computer, but always the chair. Which is weird because I don’t think this actually every happened to me like it did to you!

    3. HR Chick*

      Someone here posted a similar story but the person used a dog leash (or something similar) to keep the chair at their desk. Imagine the surprise on their face when they tried to pull the chair into the meeting room only to have it jerk back because it was tied to the desk!

      3. The Cosmic Avenger*

        Maybe a bungee cord? That’s what I thought of when I read the comment, I’d wrap the cord around the base of the chair once, hook it to itself, then hook the other end under the desk somewhere. Most people won’t crawl around under the desk to borrow a chair, and if you do it right, you might not even have to unhook it to use your desk.

    4. Grandma Cassie’s lady slippers*

      I had that too. The worst part was people would adjust the height, the back, the arms and then when it finally came back to me I had to readjust all the levers to get things back to my liking. I was tempted to use industrial strength glue (like super glue but different) to glue my settings.

      1. Rainy*

        My old office hotdesked for a couple of months after a move to a new office suite and the chair thing was a big part of why it stopped. The people who would sit on anything and didn’t care weren’t the problem because they didn’t adjust other people’s chairs. The problem was the people who didn’t acknowledge chair ownership (our names were on the backs!) and still changed all the chair settings! Who does that?!

        1. Archi-detect*

          same with the drivers seat in my car- you can move it forward or back but touch absolutely nothing else

    5. Chick-n-boots*

      I get that there were not enough chairs in the room and understand the need to seek outside chairs to fill the gap, but I cannot imagine seeing a chair at an actively used desk (whether you were sitting there at that moment or not) and thinking taking that chair was a reasonable option! I mean, did it not occur to people you might have just stood up to get coffee or go to the bathroom or use the copier? That would have made me so cranky! Labeling was 100% the way to go.

      1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        I used to ROUTINELY get people stopping by my cubicle to ask me if they could take my chair – the one I was actively sitting in and working – to the conference room at the end of the row. I never did figure out why they thought that made any sense.

    6. KatieP*

      Similar. The conference room on our floor never had enough chairs, so faculty (higher education) would tell their grad assistants to go get chairs from the business office. Except we had employees using those chairs, and the grad assistants never brought the chairs back. Worse, the conference room doors were self-locking, so I’d have to go down 3 floors to get an admin to come up to our floor, unlock the door, and retrieve our chairs!

      Meanwhile, my direct reports were standing around, unable to work.

      After a couple of months of this, the department’s chief of staff told faculty to cut it out, business office chairs stay in the business office.

  7. soontoberetired*

    We have a support admin who looked a supply cabinet and only allowed people 1 pen, 1 pencil at a time for the group she supported. this was 30 years ago. She’s still in the same job, but she can’t lock anything up anymore. She still attempts to control a lot of things, but is ignored. she’s decent at the rest of her job.

    1. Ostrich Herder*

      People like this are fascinating to me. What did she do if someone claimed to have lost a pen? Did she make people prove it if they claimed their pen had run out of ink?

      2. soontoberetired*

        I have no idea. I wasn’t in her department but worked with people from it. We freely opened our supplies to them. Because nobody cared! The pens were cheap and bought in bulk by the company, not her department. We give notebooks and pens away to customers. She was the only one who cared.

    2. Caramel & Cheddar*

      I kind of get this one. Office supplies disappear ridiculously fast because people think there’s just an endless supply, and it’s a budget line item that really shouldn’t be that big if people just pay attention to where they put their stuff. Your pen runs out of ink, sure, but why are you asking me for a new pen every three days. Are you taking them home? Handing them out on the street? Eating them? It’s baffling.

      1. Bast*

        In anywhere with clients/customers of any type, they disappear quickly, no matter how close of an eye you keep on them. In a regular old office with no clients/customers, I’ve found people just tend to misplace them– the same people putting their glasses on the top of the fridge, behind the computer, in the bathroom and losing them, are doing the same thing with pens.

        1. Tea Monk*

          Yup. once I left my car keys in the fridge. I constantly lock myself out of the house. Like my brain won’t function better just because its your pen *( I buy tons of pens which I constantly lose)

      2. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Yeah, if you are the kind of person, like me, who doesn’t tend to lose their pens, you realize that pens will last a really long time. Replacing them every three days is wild. I, too, wonder where the pens go. There’s gotta be at least one person in every office who has a pile of pens in their car or a drawer full of them at home, or else pens all over their house (I am guilty of this, but not because I lose them, I just like having them handy). It’s such a weird mystery.

        1. AnonInCanada*

          Or you’re the kind of person like me, who’s had to Spray ‘n Wash one too many ink stains because I would put a ball-point pen in my pocket nib-side up and left it until I got home and discover such ink stain on my pant leg. Ugh!

          1. Snudence Prooter*

            isopropyl alcohol will get most inks out of most surfaces, but you’ll want to test them on a discrete piece of the clothing and you may want to rinse out under cold water to avoid a faint ring where diluted ink was carried to the edge of the wet spot

          2. LaurCha*

            If you have hair spray, it works a treat to get ball-point ink marks out of clothing. Spray and then wash in cold. No, I don’t know why it works, but I’ve done it for years.

        2. ASD always*

          My husband was terrible for bringing work pens home at his old lab job. He’d grab one to make a quick note, put it in his pocket, then forget it existed until he got home and left it on a table somewhere, so it would never make its way back to the lab.

          I found a charity that delivered pens to kids in schools and sent them well over 100, and we still have two jam-packed pen pots.

      3. Sue Smith*

        My boss was grabbing a bunch of pens from the supply closet. He explained that he needed them for his kids. It was the beginning of the school year. I didn’t stick around to see if he was fully supplying them.

      4. The Cosmic Avenger*

        I think this is laziness. An office manager could easily say you get one pen per month, or just log who asks for what and limit it to a total of X pens per year overall. Of course, IMO the hours spent on this cost the company more than the supplies, but the fact that you hear complaints about supply Grinches and not supply trackers makes it pretty clear that for them it’s just a petty power play.

        1. anotherfan*

          had a boss once who refused to allow anyone more than one pen and when you needed a new one, yes indeed, you had to give him the old one to show it had no more ink in it. And we were a newspaper. Never understood that mindset. Unless he wanted us to buy our own so he wasn’t on the hook for supplies.

          1. Rainy*

            My dad worked on a newspaper for years and years and I’m pretty sure he had to show an empty pen and a filled-up notebook to his boss to get a fresh one of either.

      5. Grandma Cassie’s lady slippers*

        I was in charge of office supplies for 3 departments, at that time nothing could be locked up. Every August supplies would disappear very quickly. Employees were taking things for their kids for school supplies!
        I learned very quickly to put out very few supplies in that month. Later we got a mocking cabinet for pens/pencils and I had a locked cabinet in my area for extra notebooks/note pads etc. it was a pain. Thankfully that job duty was assigned to someone else. The manager also sent out an email that said due to theft the majority of supplies would now be locked up.

          1. Violet*

            I do, too, Mamadryad! Do you think it’s an IKEA thing, and it makes fun of you while you try to assemble it?

            4. Rain, Disappointing Australian (formerly Lucien Nova)*

              You mean you’ve never tried to assemble a MÖCKING?

              :)

      6. Ally McBeal*

        Eh, I think there are better ways of keeping office supply expenses low. I don’t know anyone who PREFERS those cheap Bic pens, which is probably why they’re so frequently bought. At some offices I’ve been allowed to special-request Pilot gel pens that are delivered directly to me, and at others I’ve just bought my own. Granted, I don’t lose pens often, so I’ve never requested Pilots so many times that anyone has said anything to me about it, but if I were the type to lose them, I would gracefully accept my Bic pens as a consequence.

      7. Possum's mom*

        Reminds me of a former job that supplied cheap white pens and my manager would keep one tucked up behind her ear. She once offered me a ride home from work when my car was in the shop, and when she had to suddenly hit the brakes. an ocean’s worth of white caps( not waves) came rolling out between my feet from under the passenger seat. She coyly remarked ” so that’s where they went!”

      9. Kara*

        Honestly? My advice would be to start keeping track of how often everyone asks you for supplies. Once you’ve got a few weeks worth of data, check to see who ISN’T constantly asking you for more. Try giving -those- people supplies periodically instead of waiting for them to ask, and see if everyone else’s requests go down.

    3. Sabina*

      I was an office admin who put a lock on the supply cabinet. I did this because around Christmas time every year all the batteries of various sizes would disappear, and I mean hundreds of dollars worth of batteries. Less dramatic petty theft happened year round. Ths first fiscal year after securing the supply cabinet we had about a $2,000 decrease in office overhead expenses. Did I mention this was a law enforcement agency and the sticky fingers belonged to cops?

      3. Rainy*

        My old job had a person in charge of ordering supplies who objected to batteries on environmental grounds, which is great except that the mice and keyboards that the organization bought us all used batteries. Did she order rechargeables and a charger? No. Did she campaign for peripherals that didn’t use batteries? Also no.

        She just refused to buy batteries until a manager ordered her to and then stood over her while she did it. She’d also buy the smallest number possible, so we’d be out again within days of them showing up, because everyone would grab spares while they were there against the next Time Of No AAs.

    4. Eeyore's Missing Tale*

      She might have done it because her office was like my old one. A former worker of mine hoarded all kinds of office supplies. When she retires and I took over her position, I found at least 20 unopened boxes of pens and highlighters, multiple new or partial used notepads, more correction tape than anyone can use in a lifetime, etc. This doesn’t include the amount of random office supplies tucked away.

      To me, it was really sad. Over half of her pen and highlighter stash was unusable/dried out because it was so old. What was still good was returned to the supply room. I did keep a box of G2 purple pens. It’s my favorite.

      1. Payroll Lady*

        Oh Eeyore’s Missing Tale – if you like the G2’s you will love Pentel EnerGel. My receptionist orders me a box ever 6 months or so and I am the only one who uses the purple. And yes, I have searched the office more than once if it goes missing!

    5. Hotdog not dog*

      I worked with someone like that years ago. You had to turn in your dry pen or short pencil nub to get a replacement, and if Judy felt that your implement had a few more uses in it, she would refuse to give out a new one. Most of us just started bringing in our own from home, and any time a vendor showed up with free logo pens it was chaos.

      1. allathian*

        When one of my coworkers retired a few years ago after working for our organization her entire career of more than 50 years, having started at 16 as an “office girl,” she told me that when she started, she had to hand in the stub of her old pencil that couldn’t be longer than 2.5 centimeters (about an inch = 2.54 cm) to get a new one, and the office dragon whose hoard consisted of perishable office supplies would use a ruler to measure the stub to ensure it was short enough. Only people of a certain pay grade were allowed pens. She had to borrow a pen if she needed to sign something with indelible ink, but she wasn’t allowed a pen of her own. She once told me that one of the highlights of her career was being promoted to a pay grade where she got her own pen, and that none of her subsequent promotions gave her as much satisfaction as that first one.

        1. amoeba*

          Oh wow. I mean, I’d probably just have “sharpened” the pencil down to 2.5 cm once it got too uncomfortable to write with (surely not the original intention, but hey) – but wow. (I wonder if it was also forbidden to bring in your own pen?)

    6. JanetM*

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

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

      2. Seeking Second Childhood*

        I want to know what to do about a VIP visitor from the UK asking me for tea. Imagine telling a VP you need the used teabag back!

        …On second thought that may well have gotten the teabag queen dethroned.

  8. Jackalope*

    At one point in time our office admin ordered some high-quality left-handed scissors. As one of only 2 lefties in the office at the time, I grabbed one and took it to my desk. I also wrote my name on it with a sharpie. I’ve frequently joked that any of my other office supplies can and may disappear, but my good scissors will be pried out of my cold, dead hands.

    3. JEBurroughs*

      My daughter is a leftie and to this day she will say that her left handed scissors were the best Christmas present ever. She lost them during college and posted a “lost” poster that was just hilarious! She even got them back!

    4. Strive to Excel*

      Oh man the scissors.

      Paper dulls scissors relatively quickly. On ordinary office scissors or kitchen shears this isn’t an issue, especially since they’re big enough to be resharpened if needed. But for *fabric scissors*, it shows, and they can get very expensive. A nice pair of Ginghers is something like $60? So it’s a well known trait in the handicraft world that sewists of any variety get vicious over their scissors.

      1. LaurCha*

        At my museum job we put the fabric scissors in a gallon baggie, wrote in sharpie “ONLY USE FOR FABRIC,” and put the baggie in a drawer far away from all of the other office supplies. Behind a locked door, in the art storage area. This only after several other pairs of fabric scissors were ruint.

          1. LaurCha*

            Lol, it was down a flight of stairs, but sadly we couldn’t put a “Beware the Curator” sign on the door.

      2. LilPinkSock*

        My mom is a very kind, thoughtful, reasonable person. In the days before “gentle parenting” was a common concept, she was usually pretty mild-mannered and encouraging.

        Except. There were a small handful of behaviors that she did not ever tolerate or gently correct: lying, physical unkindness, and using her fabric scissors to cut out our paper dolls. Yikes.

      3. Kelly L.*

        It might be a little weird that I’ve seen this more than once, but whenever someone in a mystery or horror show murders someone with their sewing scissors, I always call foul. You can’t murder people with your fabric scissors! You need dedicated murder scissors for that!

    5. Momma Bear*

      I am not left handed (insert Princess Bride reference here) but I was tired of my scissors going missing so I put a label on them with my department name as big as I possibly could. Haven’t lost them since.

  9. Sharpie*

    In COVID times all the packers at the warehouse where I worked were given their own box-cutters and tape guns. I got one of the two blue tape guns and really would have liked to have been able to sneak it out with me when I left, that was a great tape gun.

    1. SansaStark*

      A good tape gun is worth its weight in gold. I once hid the good one under a pile of papers in my desk. In fairness, I did almost all of the exhibit packing for my office. I did not confess when confronted about the missing tape gun. I kept silent when an office-wide email went out about returning the tape guns. We were a $50m/year organization; buy more tape guns.

      1. Paint N Drip*

        100%
        The good ones seem to tape all by themselves, and the bad ones seem to be imbued with some kind of evil spirits hungry for tape and blood

  10. Tiny Lab Rat*

    I’m 5’0″ and used to work exclusively with guys 6’0″ and over in a lab. I was given a ladder as an accommodation because I couldn’t reach anything above the benches. As a joke, one of my colleagues carved “[anon]’s ladder, do not use” into it and now 5 years later all of the new employees avoid it unless I explicitly tell them they can use it. I find this extremely funny even though it probably makes me look like one of these people!

    1. anneshirley*

      I had a similar accidental thing! I was a young admin assistant and one day we got a nice purple sample pen with our usual order of blue, black, and red. I happened to grab it, and found that it was handy being the only person in the office with a purple pen; I could tell at a glance if I was the one who had processed a document, or if it was me who had completed something. (This was some years ago, when almost everything at least started on paper.) Over the years, word spread, and this without my doing turned from “Oh, this has a purple date on it, anneshirley must’ve processed it” to “ONLY anneshirley can use purple ink, that’s her ‘thing’ and we don’t want to cause confusion!!”

      2. lizzay*

        Ooh, this reminds me of way back when in my first job as a [redacted] – suffice to say it involved like 90% Excel. I had seen a spreadsheet someone had where they had color-coded some of the fonts – blue was typed in. I took that and ran – green was a formula that was different than the others in that same column! Maroon was a link to a different workbook! I had a whole system! Then others came along behind me & introduced their own color-coding – orange was a different formula! Or maybe orange was a link to a different workbook! Or maybe purple! They were all inconsistent! And drove me absolutely batty! At least some shade of blue was still generally hard-coded cells.

        As frustrating as it was when other people changed *my* (i.e. “the correct”) way of doing things, I think it was mainly Microsoft’s fault – for some upgrade the default color palette changed and my preferred green wasn’t on it & orange was. Grrr Microsoft…

  11. BlueCactus*

    You can tell me if I’m being unreasonable about this! My graduate program (medicine) has two floors of a building for all ~400 of us to use, and as a concession to the insufficient space we have exclusive rights to those two floors. The number of times I have had to kick non-medical students out who were taking up whole rooms as individual study spaces is in my view somewhat egregious*, especially given the prominent sign saying “MD Students Only” on both the staircase and by the elevators and the presence of an open workspace a level down. It was especially annoying when I kicked the same physics grad student out of the same room three separate times. I know the nursing students view us as being territorial, but they have their own whole building and I can’t find a room to run a tutoring session in half the time.

    *I always ask what year they are if I don’t recognize them to ensure it’s not just someone who I haven’t met, although we mostly all know each other at least by face

    1. Caramel & Cheddar*

      People don’t read signs! I don’t think you’re being unreasonable, but I 100% get why people are in those spaces. I’d bet they also don’t realise there are 400 of you squashed in there, nor that you have exclusive rights. Like, if I saw an “MD Students Only” sign I’d probably assume that was people being territorial, not that there were logistical (4oo students) and administrative (exclusive rights) reasons happening.

      Are the entrances keyed at all? Like can you get something added to an access badge/app that only lets med students onto those floors?

      1. BlueCactus*

        Alas the staircase is open to the floor below without a door (design flaw, imo, especially because it can get loud during mealtimes and echos downstairs to the quiet open work area). We do have keycard access to the elevators, but most people take the stairs. The sign itself is pretty official looking, and does point people to the floor below, but people definitely don’t read it! I think the building is so sought after because the building is newer and has lots of great whiteboard space.

        1. Insert Clever Name Here*

          When I was in college, almost all history classes were held in the History Building and the department steadfastly refused to have whiteboards installed — professors had to use chalk. I asked one of my professors about it and they said “look what happened to the English Building. They installed whiteboards in all the rooms and how many English classes have you ever had there? If rooms are updated, any department is allowed to use them so now the English faculty can hardly schedule a class in their own building!”

          1. KatieP*

            Sad, but very believable. The amount of politicking and jockeying that goes on for physical space (classrooms, labs, offices, anything with a footprint) in higher ed is mind-boggling compared to industry.

            1. Smurfette*

              It depends. I’ve never worked in education but I did once work at a conpany that rapidly outgrew its (brand new, specially designed) office building. As more people were onboarded, meeting rooms were converted into mini offices, until we started having meetings in the canteen. Formal, scheduled meetings, not quick catch-ups. Last I heard they were looking at how to convert part of the parking basement into offices =(

        2. Smurfette*

          So they spent extra money making the elevators access-controlled and *also* built a staircase that anyone could use? smh

      2. ferrina*

        Seconding that people probably don’t realize that the MD students are overcrowded. At my college, we barely knew anything about other programs, and if I found an empty room, I would tell no one my secret. And it was wildly ambiguous whether an empty room was actually one that you could use or actually belonged to a program (to this day, I have no idea if the small music room I used for a few hours each week was open to the whole school or just the music program.

        1. Arglebarglor*

          GAAAAH! I just posted below about having to kick non-music students out of the music rooms. That said, if no one complained then it’s all yours!

    2. Elizabeth*

      Here’s my thought:
      If there is a rationale added to the “MD Students Only” sign, it may go a LONG way to making people respect the request.
      The sign as it stands may be feeding into the elitist stereotype medicine has: “we are superior and extra special and need our own exclusive space away from other mortals.”
      If people knew space was so tight that you can’t find a room to run a tutoring session, I suspect they would respect your sign.
      Experiment with it! Add a humble request saying you are super tight on space and see what happens.

    3. Karo*

      I don’t think it’s territorial, especially if you actively need that space! If you’re looking for a place to have a tutoring session and someone outside your department is using a private room, you’re 100% within your rights to kick them out. It’s a little different if you’re kicking them out and then not actually using it, but I’m also certain that if they’re not kicked out regularly they’ll get into the habit of just grabbing one of those rooms.

    4. Skeptic53*

      When I was in med school, a few cute undergrad women used to study in the med school library hoping to meet a future doctor for a husband. This was 1980-84, I couldn’t believe the stereotype had some truth to it. And no, they didn’t flirt with the likes of me!

    5. Name Anxiety*

      My grad program was in a majority undergrad building and because it was ultra modern and cool had glass walls. The rest of the building was always packed but because our program office space was only accessible with a key card you would occasionally see undergrads plastered to the glass trying to figure out how people got in.

    6. Sue Smith*

      I don’t think you’re being unreasonable, but I do understand the desperation for quiet study space that some might have. Our undergraduate library was noisy with lots of socializing. The graduate library had carrels, but they were often fully occupied. I went to the law library for several weeks until I was told it was for law students only. Eventually I found a tiny math library. I hated the lighting, but it was quiet.

      1. BlueCactus*

        The thing I find funny is it’s not quiet, at all. We get very reasonable & frequent reminders from admin about being too loud! I actually go to the main library if I need a quiet space because the main library staff are hawks about maintaining quiet spaces. Most of these spaces are used for group study and classes except for the large discussion room which is quiet study when it isn’t being used for lectures or events. The whiteboard space is excellent, though, which I suspect is a big factor.

      2. Adamantine*

        The law school got a renovated building while I was there, and the undergrads started seeping in. One of them started singing in the study area. During finals.

        I’m surprised no one brained her with a case book.

    7. Jane Bingley*

      Ugh, yes! The law school library at my alma mater was much more beautiful and pleasant to use than the general use library – think light wood shelves and floor-to-ceiling windows vs a metal and concrete bunker. But during exam season, when we basically lived in the library, we’d get an influx of what we called “SNAILs” – Students Not Actually In Law School – that the librarians would go around and kick out. It was a small enough program that we all recognized each other and the librarians knew us all very well.

      I feel your pain, undergrad students – I got my BA at the same school and the general use library was absolutely miserable – but law school tuition and my need for easy access to reference books means I don’t feel bad at all about kicking you out!

    8. Arglebarglor*

      I don’t think it’s unreasonable. When I was studying music 30 years ago as an undergrad we would always have to kick non-musicians out of the practice cubbies. The rehearsal room was subdivided into multiple soundproofed cubbies, some just big enough for one person to sit or stand in and play an instrument; some could accommodate a small ensemble of 3 people, and a few had a piano. They were truly soundproof and had glass refrigerator-type doors, so you could always see in. I would come in to practice and find several cubbies occupied by other students who would sit on the floor to study, as it was a quiet place, or spread out on a piano to use as a desk. People would be upset but I would point out that it wasn’t like I could practice my instrument in the library, but they could study there.

    9. Caz*

      I worked in an office with high levels of chair drama!

      It all started with one person who had a medical condition that was helped by her having a chair with arms (not the standard in the office). As the chair was a necessity for her, she put her name on it on a small post-it note. The note fell off, someone “borrowed” the chair. The chair was retrieved and the note replaced, with a larger one. Repeat several times with several iterations of notes including white-out used to write directly on the chair and eventually a whole A4 sheet saying “Anon’s chair DO NOT TOUCH! MEDICAL NECESSITY!”

      Everyone else in the office ended up also labelling *their* (entirely identical) chairs. Someone even labelled my chair for me when I was on a day off.

    10. Momma Bear*

      Do you have any contacts in the other departments that you could leverage? Ask them to remind their students to use the first floor only and why. I would also tell the offenders that this is your meeting space or your tutoring space to emphasize that it’s not just being territorial, but using your department’s resources as intended.

      This is probably more acceptable than greeting them with, “Oh, good! My test subject is here! I hope you’re not nervous. We’re only taking four vials of blood and the experimental drug is only given at very low doses during this phase.”

    11. Wayward Sun*

      I always tell people the most valuable and fought-over commodity on any campus isn’t money, it’s office space!

  12. OrdinaryJoe*

    A co-worker has a fairly public desk near one of the main copiers and break room. Not an ideal location. His pens go missing ALL THE TIME from his desk as people ‘borrow’ them for ‘just a sec’. These are not high end pens, he gets them from the main supply closet, but it drives him crazy, which I understand.

    The pens are now all stored in a cup on his desk with a note that says … I’ve licked over half of these, the odds are not in your favor.

    Problem solved!

    2. Ally McBeal*

      I used to have this problem and started stashing them in the filing cabinet under my desk. It was never a problem after that, but if it gets really bad I suppose one could hide them specifically in a hanging folder.

      1. amoeba*

        I basically just keep my pen inside my notebook. Works handily as a bookmark as well! I’m really not good at keeping track of my belongings, but this way I haven’t had to go and get a new one from the supply room for, like, years. (And we do have enough pens freely available!)

    3. lizzay*

      Argh one of my old bosses used to come to my desk, pick up a pen I had laying there to jot a note then just leave with the pen – leaving the cap on my desk! Once I figured out he was the culprit, I noticed he had probably 20 pens in his office with no caps, so I wasn’t the only victim.

  13. megaboo*

    I bought myself a beautiful swingline (unfortunately not red) stapler. That I am territorial about, since it was something I purchased myself.

    1. Not Milton*

      At my old job years ago I purchased a red Swingline stapler with my own money and that thing absolutely came with me to my new job. Alas, now I work from home and I never staple anything.

      1. TK*

        Fun fact: Swingline didn’t actually manufacture a red stapler at the time Office Space came out. The one used in the film was custom-painted. The popularity of the movie and the iconic status of the red stapler in it led them to start manufacturing one, and they have ever since.

    2. Schwa Alaska*

      I work in public education. My current administration is reasonable about supplying us with the materials we need to do our jobs, but at my last school the only thing the school provided was basic classroom furniture (desks and chairs for students) and enough consumable supplies for approximately half our classes. (I was issued one box of 12 pencils for 27 students for the entire year.) We had AmeriCorps volunteers in that building, and I know they thought we were all crazy, because when I triumphantly retrieved my long-lost, clearly-labeled-with-my-name, purchased-with-my-own-money scissors from their workroom, and one of them told me “Wow, all the teachers in this building are CRAZY about their stuff!” Yeah, because we bought it all ourselves!

      2. Selina Luna*

        In my experience if you actually say “yeah, because we bought it all ourselves” to AmeriCorps volunteers, they’ll actually leave it the heck alone. Not students though. Students will happily steal any pen or pencil on your desk.

        1. Bread Crimes*

          I actually just ordered a whole set of pencils with my name and class engraved on them. At least this way when students inevitably steal ’em all, they’ll be reminded of their crime every time they look at the “Learn Latin with Dr. Bread Crimes” pencil.

        1. I'm Always the Phoebe in a Group*

          AmeriCorps volunteers are usually just out of college, so they probably wouldn’t have that knowledge yet.

          1. Paint N Drip*

            AmeriCorps volunteers are such a strange group. All of them are newly adults, whether they’ve been to college yet or not. They’re also paid pennies, at the whim of the gov’t program, and typically on SNAP food assistance – so you’d think they’d understand poverty! But in my limited experience most people doing AmeriCorps hail from fairly well-off families/support system, and don’t have a TON of life experience

    3. ferrina*

      My (very eccentric) mom sent me a small stapler in the shape of a chicken when I was in college. I have never had a problem with that going missing in all my decades.

      1. Chicken Tender*

        I would like it, but wouldn’t actually take it! Having chickens has shifted my ascetic design.

  14. so anonny for this*

    I worked with a manager that kept customer information in a Rolodex to prevent any one else form making calls to them. And I mean a classic Rolodex, the big spinning thing that had index cards with hand written notes. It was kept in a locked drawer, so if the manager was sick or on vacation, then no calls were made and no money was made.
    She completely refused to enter the information into the CRM, or to allow anyone to else to enter the information. She even tried to walk out with the Rolodex on her last day.

    1. Meep*

      lol. I had a manager who was very weird about collecting business cards to the point she often stole ones from connections I had made. One day, she rolls into the office with THREE labeled gallon-sized ziplocked baggies of just business cards and starts going through them like scrapbooks wanting me to make a list of people she should contact for marketing reasons. Half of these thousands upon thousands business cards were a good 20+ years old and from a completely different industry.

      People are so weird about their collection of connections.

    2. Mark This Confidential And Leave It Laying Around*

      Oh she’s an amateur. The way to leave with a Rolodex is a few cards at time.

  15. ScruffyInternHerder*

    I once purchased neon pink office supplies for myself.

    The person in charge of supply ordering was….interesting. I found it easier on myself to just obtain the supplies I wanted rather than go through her gymnastics (the requisition forms required reasons for more than one color of highlighter, for example, and “to do my job properly” wasn’t accepted…she wanted a REASON dagnabit. And scissors? Why do you need scissors?).

    Pink is not my favorite color. But…completely male dominated industry, male populated office, and latent homophobia….meant NOBODY touched the pink office supplies for fear of being called out to defend their identity as a straight alpha man!!!

    2. Irish Teacher.*

      I work in a school that up to two years ago was all boys (12-18 year olds) and I know some teachers who got pink calculators, staplers, etc so they could let students use them if necessary and have no problem getting them back since most teenage boys don’t tend to want those.

      1. ScruffyInternHerder*

        “Teenage boys” described the approximate maturity of most of my coworkers at that place. Trending towards more “middle school” than “high school”.

        It was ridiculous, but I never had to look for my scissors or stapler!

    4. Goldenrod*

      “Pink is not my favorite color. But…completely male dominated industry, male populated office, and latent homophobia….meant NOBODY touched the pink office supplies”

      Well, this is brilliant.

      I have pink office supplies too, but that’s because pink IS my favorite color.

      1. But Of Course*

        I bought a pink cat carrier once because it was on clearance where the black and grey versions (otherwise identical) were not. Strangely enough, it has made no one gay, not even my cat. I am 100% sure latent homophobia is why it was on clearance.

        1. NothingIsLittle*

          “Not even my cat,” but did you ask your cat? Because you know what happened to the frogs…

          1. Sharp-dressed Boston Terrier*

            They infiltrated the Board of Directors over at Global Tetrahedron and exacted their revenge.

        2. Mad Harry Crewe*

          I got a pink and black cat carrier from the rescue where I got my cat (asked if they wanted it back, they said I should keep it since they can’t sterilize the fabric carriers anyway) and it is 100% Not my style but it is very recognizable.

      2. Possum's mom*

        I once knew two brothers in business together, and one of them spray painted all of HIS tools pink so that the other brother couldn’t claim them.

    6. Butterfly Counter*

      I remember reading a similar story in the Reader’s Digest a million years ago about a woman who was working at an auto shop whose oil rags kept getting “borrowed” and not returned. So she went home and sewed lace around all of her rags and never lost another one again.

    7. Coffee*

      I ended getting that pink toolbox with pink tools for basic home stuff. I am not sure if everything is still there because it’s pink or because it’s clear sign that these are not allowed to go missing

    8. Not The Earliest Bird*

      Do we work in the same office? I started doing this when I was the ONLY woman in my office. Now there are six of us. But I find that my Pink G-2 Breast Cancer edition pens do not walk away with the other women, only the men. And I know that pinkwashing is problematic, but it’s convenient to be able to buy all pink office supplies.

      1. Frankly, Mr. Shankly*

        Did we all work together?? I used to work on a trading floor for an investment bank, so open floor plan. I was unlucky enough to have an “end spot” on an aisle, andthe heavy traffic meant that people would grab things off my desk….. so I converted all my stuff to (very not me) glittery pink. I even got a high heel shoe tape dispenser and stapler. Some of the FinBros would grab a pen (not ask) and then indignantly say “don’t you have a regular pen?”

        1. ScruffyInternHerder*

          Ridiculously, no, I see things in every comment/reply on this thread that makes me go “nope, not a coworker”. So its widespread.

    9. LaurCha*

      This is why I always purchased pink lighters when I was smoking. Dudes will not wander off with your pink lighter.

    10. Retired Merchandiser*

      I can relate. When I did merchandising for Proctor and Gamble our company issued us bright yellow Stanley toolboxes. The men refused to use them because they looked “girlie” to them.
      The problem was they never brought any tools with them so would constantly borrow mine and never return them. After losing three hammers and untold number of screwdrivers, I finally ordered myself a set of hot pink tools. (You can buy them anywhere now, but in those days were scarce.) Tool theft cut WAY down after that!! If they HAD to borrow something it was hastily returned.

    11. NMitford*

      You used to be able to buy pink Kleenex tissues, and that’s what I always bought to take to work because the guys wouldn’t take them. When I brought in white tissues, I’d have to buy a box a week because it was open season on my desk (and why these guys couldn’t buy their own darn box is beyond me).

      I also had pink thumbdrives.

      1. LaurCha*

        Memory unlocked! My friends’ male roommate just would not buy toilet paper for the house. This was back in the 90s, so they were able to buy an enormous pack of pink toilet paper. White TP magically appeared shortly thereafter.

      1. Milltown*

        Years ago I worked in a medical office. We had a supply of pens for patients to fill out forms. We were constantly needing to replace the pens because people would forget to give them back.

        My coworker took it upon herself to go to the dollar store & buy several artificial flowers, which she taped to the non-business end of the pens. Didn’t interfere with using them but kept you from absentmindedly putting one in your pocket. Bonus — they looked like a little bouquet sitting in the pen cup on the desk.

        One day a male patient picks up a pen, grimaces at the plastic flower, and in front of me and the coworker who added them, rips off the flower before using the pen. Talk about toxic masculinity! You can’t use a flowery pen for 5 minutes to fill out a form??

        1. LaurCha*

          I do regular business at several courthouses and a downtown PO. All of them have enormous fake flowers taped to their customer pens.

    13. Nesprin*

      Oh yes- if you ever need a set of tools to not walk off, a can of pink spray paint is your best defense. I even did the test- the orange painted socket set was picked over to the point of uselessness while the pink one remained intact.

      1. Dinwar*

        I know a lot of women in field geology that carry pink tools for that reason. A 9/16″ socket will vanish as soon as you turn your back, but a pick set of tools won’t even be touched.

        1. AFac*

          And then we wonder why the gender balance is so horrible in geology.

          I don’t have a pink one, but I swing a 3/4ths weight hammer because my shoulder is dying. I have had men borrow it, complain about how little it weighs, then give it back without using it. Usually the rocks they’re trying to get at are soft enough not to need a massive weight to crush anyway.

    14. DEEngineer*

      I bought a pink rope for “my” equipment calibration set after a mechanic took the rope out of my set, cut it up for something and then threw it out after he cut it to the wrong length. I was so angry! Once I had the pink rope everyone knew it was “mine” and it was always returned. I don’t think anyone cared that it was pink vs another color. It was an effective territory-marking technique.

    15. Tammy 2*

      I used to be in charge of records at an office that assigned specific colored file folders to different principals. We had light pink and magenta in our supply closet, but no one would agree to have pink as their color, so I had to keep ordering new folders in increasingly subtle shades of colors that were already assigned (yellow and goldenrod, brick and fire engine red, etc).

    16. Snudence Prooter*

      Doctors kept walking off with my stethoscopes. I lost three in a month! I started buying cheaper and crappier stethoscopes, but it still cost a heck of a lot of money.

      Then I got one in hot pink and put a Hello Kitty charm on it and it never walked away again. Yay for hot pink!

    17. MissMaple*

      I’ve done the same thing and it’s worked almost flawlessly…except for one gorgeous magenta metal barreled Pentel refillable gel pen that walked off 6 years ago. Someday I will find it and I will know who betrayed me (almost certainly my lovely, brilliant, but absent-minded coworker :) )

    18. DJ*

      We no longer have scissors in our stationary cupboards. Apparently not to be trusted as have to ask someone on a particular level for them

  16. Dinwar*

    The only territorial disputes I’ve been involved in have been legally-mandated ones. I’m a subject matter expert (paleontologist, doing NEPA environmental compliance work), and by law certain determinations need to be made by me or someone with my qualifications, under penalty of perjury and jail time. Some project managers do not understand that, and keep trying to make technical calls that they are legally not allowed to make, and we have to keep pushing back against it. I’m perfectly willing to go to court because I’ve made a questionable call (it’s part of the job and they expect differences of opinions among experts); I’m a lot less willing to go to court because someone else made a call in my name!

    Most of the time I have the exact opposite problem. I also do a lot of environmental remediation work, and there the problem is getting people to take on responsibility. I would LOVE for someone to come to me saying “I already took care of ordering equipment and getting X, Y, and Z set up”–it would take a load off my plate, and prove that this individual has the courage necessary to step up and do what needs done (a necessary quality where you sometimes have to push back against groups like the Department of Defense!). I’d say about 70% of my day-to-day work is stuff that I saw needed done, started doing, and didn’t get in trouble for doing.

  17. too many dogs*

    This is DECADES ago, in the Reference Department of a large public library. We rarely sat down, but we had 4 chairs in case we did sit while waiting on patrons. All of the chairs were identical in size, comfort, & height (non-adjustable). They all faced the same direction and were about 2 feet apart. A row of boring chairs. We did not have assigned chairs. None of them was closer to the phone, had a better cup of pens, nothing. One of our librarians, for no reason that we could fathom, liked one chair better & considered it “her” chair. If you were helping someone while sitting in “her” chair, she would stand behind you, drumming her fingers on the back of the chair, ignoring other patrons wanting help, until you finished. At that point, she would sigh loudly, and say, “Are you done?” No amount of reasoning, gentle (very gentle) teasing, helped. She finally, sadly, got in some trouble about it, mainly because she was told that, by ignoring patrons wanting help, she was not doing her job. It should have been funny, but it was just sad.

      1. too many dogs*

        People started getting to work early to & sit & work in The Chair. She would do the same thing: stand behind them & drum her fingers until they either got up, and then ask them what they were doing there. Even if they stuck it out for 5 minutes. That, I think, was the beginning of the end. Important to note that she did this to everybody, even the head of the Reference Department. The sad thing was, she was an excellent reference librarian, eager to help, just wonderful — except for this one, very disturbing, thing.

        1. noncomitally anonymous*

          Could she tell the difference between “her” chair and the other chairs, or was it just position? I’d start rearranging the chairs to see if she could identify it.

      1. UKDancer*

        Really? I let tradespeople use the toilet in the house myself. I think that (along with regular cups of tea and digestives) is part of the deal with having stuff done.

        I mean I wouldn’t want to piss outside so I don’t make them do it.

        1. Unkempt Flatware*

          Oh of course I would let them! I didn’t mean to imply that. But IME, contractors have made me wish they’d pee outside so if one were, I’d be thrilled.

        2. Random Bystander*

          Yeah–in fact, a couple years ago when my whole house was being re-wired (desperately needed work–the house belonged to my grandparents before me and still had some knob and tube wiring from the original construction in the late 1930s, and the most recent work had been done in the 1970s)–I was working from home at that time (still am), and I finally just said “Please, if you need the restroom, just use it … you don’t have to ask each time.”

          1. I'm Always the Phoebe in a Group*

            I was volunteering at a shelter for infants and toddlers in the system. Clothing was shared. Two socks of similar color within a size of each other were considered a pair. You find a onesie in that baby’s size, that’s what you dressed the baby in. I once dressed a male infant in a yellow onesie. One of the staff member thought it was so wrong that she changed him into a onesie in a “male” color.

    3. Nonsense*

      Be careful if you hire a contractor to apply plaster in your home – apparently it’s incredibly common for them to urinate into the plaster mix to prolong the setting time. Of course, it alsl degrades the quality of the plaster mix but what do they care?

    4. Jaid*

      Reddit had a story about a contractor taking a leak in the plaster um bucket(?). The homeowner now wants the entire work redone at the company’s expense.

      1. Momma Bear*

        Yikes! I hope they did get their plaster redone. Can you imagine the smell if he used pee plaster at any point? One hot and humid day…ew.

    5. juliebulie*

      Yes, he peed on my siding. I didn’t intend to make eye contact, but he whipped his head around with a guilty look on his face and I withdrew, pretending not to have seen anything because in the moment, I couldn’t find the right words to convey what I was thinking: I have a toilet that you could use.

      The other guy used the toilet, well, vaguely in the direction of the toilet. There was a smear on the baseboard where he wiped it. At least he tried.

      1. Zelda*

        The time I encountered such a scene, the worker clearly spoke almost no English and may have expected based on previous jobs that any request to use the indoor facilities would have been rebuffed. Sometimes they work where no one is home to let them in, sometimes the client is some flavor of -ist; I can see how they just don’t make a habit of asking.

        1. UKDancer*

          Yeah I always tell them proactively where the toilet is and ask them to put the seat down when they’re done. That way they’re clear they are to use that toilet. I tell them when I am going to be making tea, check their preferences for milk and sugar and ask if they want digestives or custard creams (the former being usually preferred).

          That way I can make sure we’re sorted. I make tea twice in the morning and once in the afternoon so I can check they’re doing ok and getting on with it properly.

          I’d never have someone working in the house without being there to keep an eye on them and make sure they’re not doing something I don’t like.

        2. Slippers*

          This just reminds me of the time my mother was having some roof/siding work done after a storm and told me how aghast she was that the contractors had lunch on her deck table/chairs. Like..why? Why were you mad? I don’t even think the contractors were people of color, which absolutely would have made her shit herself. (But she will swear up and down she’s not racist). My mom is a gem.

        3. Wayward Sun*

          Where I live it’s common (and in some cases, legally required) to rent a porta-john for the contractors to use, if it’s a multi-day job.

    7. ProtectTransKids*

      Ack! Ick!

      In the place we rented many years ago I spotted one of the neighbors peeing in bushes at the back of our side of the yard. They rented the 2nd floor of the duplex next to ours, which I knew because of the extension cords coming from an upstairs window into the screened pop-up tent in their backyard they basically spent all their free time in during the summer. It was obviously too far for them to go inside to their apartment to pee, so they just went in the bushes instead. I saw it happen a couple of times, which is why I even believed my eyes – the first time I was like no effing way is that what is happening. Anyway, this was when we were in the process of buying our house and preparing to move so I never said or did anything about it. Later I learned that it was possible that those bushes at the far side of “our side” of that yard area might have technically been within the property lines of the house next door. There is no way they would have known that (I only know because the house buying process made me become a bit of a geek about our town’s publicly available GIS map), and either way it was effing gross.

      I guess that is well beyond the scope of work stories. But definitely a story about someone claiming things as their own literal pissing ground. (Even if that property line was really that bizarrely shaped like some gerrymandered congressional district, they were also not the only renters in that house, so were pissing on yard space that was shared with others.)

  19. Deni*

    I am guilty of making my own parking spot. I am usually the 1st one in and have been parking in the same spot for 8 years. We had a new person start and a few days in they parked where I do. So I had to tell them they were in my spot, which they replied I didn’t know we had assignment spaces. Where I said “I do.” Still my spot.

    1. Texan in exile on her phone*

      So you don’t have assigned spots?

      If you don’t have assigned spots, you don’t get to dibs. If I were the new employee and found out you had lied to me, I might spend years plotting your demise, but I am exceptionally petty that way.

      1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

        I had two coworkers spend an hour after lunch that people took “their spot.” They each went to lunch and when they got back, people had parked in the spots they’d had because they started earlier. “They KNOW that’s somebody’s spot who just went to lunch, but no! they have to steal it.”
        I’m from Pittsburgh, so I drew a kitchen chair (with chalk) in one person’s “spot” and put her name on it after work, since I’m later shift. She didn’t like that either. I was just trying to help. :)

        1. Panicked*

          As a Pittsburgher, I approve!

          Speaking of chairs holding spots, my hometown (NW PA) has a great 4th of July parade. People used to put their chairs out to hold their spots weeks ahead of time! The city finally had to put a limit on it, so now people can only put out chairs a few days ahead of time. It’s serious business and the first chair makes the front page of the local paper every year!

          2. Grimalkin*

            We do this in the Chicago area too, albeit a bit less extreme–a local town’s parade is known for having chairs being set up to save spots the day beforehand. Our family did that for several years… until our chairs got stolen one year. Now we just hustle for a parade spot the day of.

      2. Unkempt Flatware*

        Yes indeed. I’d laugh at being told I’m parking in someone’s spot. At first because I’d assume they were joking and then for real when I realized they were not.

        Not cool, Deni.

      3. FricketyFrack*

        Me too. I’d park in that spot every single day. I get having a preferred spot, because I generally park in the same place, but if someone else gets there first, I cannot imagine having the audacity to tell them it’s mine.

        1. Audrey Puffins*

          Yep, I have a preferred spot that I got to park in for several months, until my co-worker decided it was also his preferred space and started turning up earlier and earlier every day. I’m still annoyed by it every day, but at this point he’s sitting outside the office for at least forty minutes every morning, and I’d honestly rather have the extra time in bed

      4. Deni*

        There are only 10 of us, and yes I park in the same unassigned spot every day. Most everyone has their preferred spot too.

        2. amoeba*

          If you want that spot, you have to be there before coworker. I might be annoyed, too, but those are the options – either come in earlier or accept it.

    2. Spacewoman Spiff*

      This reminds me of when I worked for a consulting firm where we hotdesked and could book our desks for two weeks in advance. I worked from the office every day, unlike many other consultants who were on client sites 3 or 4 days a week. A couple weeks after I started, I introduced myself to a consultant who was usually on site, and he said, “I know who you are. You stole my desk.”

      I want to say he was completely ridiculous, but when he said that I fully committed myself to booking that desk so far in advance he could never get it, and only ceded it back to him when my manager left a year later and an even better desk location opened up.

      2. lizzay*

        Also approve. But this is totalling different – sitting at a preferred desk all day is totally different than claiming a parking spot.

    3. A large cage of birds*

      K, is that you? :-D

      Pre-Covid we had someone who was very protective of her parking spot. There was plenty of parking, none of it very far. But K was very possessive of her spot. Another employee put a sign there labeling it as “K’s parking spot.”

    4. Lady Ann*

      A few jobs ago I always parked in the same spot in the parking lot. It was pretty far from the door so not a preferred spot, therefore almost always open. I went on vacation and a new employee started during that time. Apparently he parked in “my” spot and was told by several people “you can’t park there, that’s Lady Ann’s spot!” I clarified when I returned that I actually didn’t care and had no issues parking in another spot, but it was funny that my coworkers felt the need to defend “my” spot from the new guy.

    5. MissMaple*

      I’m going to admit this here, because I’m pretty sure no one will be able to tell it’s me, but my petty amusement is to create minor chaos by parking in every random spot where I know people like to park. I also occasionally park beside people who park their new cars far from the building and park next to my friends and “enemies” for several days in a row just to see if they notice. I never park in the same spot after lunch, I hide my car between large trucks, I generally have too much fun choosing a parking spot everyday and it’s stupidly something I look forward to upon arriving to work :)

      1. Insert Clever Name Here*

        I have a few parking spots I prefer at work, but if they’re taken I just…park in another spot. It’s always so interesting to me to consider that there’s someone ENRAGED that I’ve parked in their shady spot in the parking lot because I made it to work earlier than them that day. The world is such a tapestry.

      2. SimonTheGreyWarden*

        I do something like this – I look for the line of SUVs the same color as mine (there are at least 3 others in our parking lot) and park there so we look like some kind of government escorting group.

      3. lizzay*

        Ha! That reminds me of a video I saw online (no idea where – TikTok? YouTube? whatever) where a guy is videoing the far end of a parking lot where like a Corvette is parked next to a junker and he’s complaining that he parks his car at the far end of the lot, far away from the doors so that nobody will park next to him. Punchline is the guy gets in the junker & drives off still fuming. Haha!

    6. Disappointing Aussie Office Gumby*

      At the old job, I had a set of concurrent parking spots I’d use, depending on the time of year. I preferred them because my car would be in the shade of the One and Only Tree at the end of the day during the hottest months. Since the tree wasn’t terribly big, the best spot would move each month. One would only know this through long experience or a degree in astrophysics.

      One time I showed up, someone had taken the best spot. Since you can’t tell it’s the best spot in the morning (direct sun), I presumed it was taken through ignorance. But the car was back the next day, same spot. Now I knew it was personal, because there were at least a hundred more spots, including some that were more geographically convenient to the building entrance.

      I was annoyed for about a week as they parked there, until the shade shifted to the next parking spot (which I had claimed). It was about another week or two until the other vehicle no longer parked there.

    7. CommanderBanana*

      I don’t know why my responses to this thread keep getting removed – they’re not out of line with the mod rules – so just echoing another comment in this thread. Not cool, Deni.

      1. Ask a Manager* Post author

        I’ve removed a few that I thought were overly harsh. When I invited people to share stories like this, it feels pretty unsportsmanlike — or perhaps entrapment-ish — to come down viciously on them (exceptions made for things with more serious consequences, obviously).

        1. CommanderBanana*

          Totally fair.

          I still think that being a jerk to new hires for not being able to psychically divine that you’ve awarded yourself exclusive claim to one specific parking spot is a great way to get a reputation as the office glassbowl, and I think it’s kind of bananapants to act like it’s some sort of cute quirk.

  20. Tech services librarian*

    As one of the people in our Acquisitions department: book carts!
    We’re very territorial about those, and many are marked: Name’s cart, [do not move]!
    There are other, general carts all over the department, but every person has at least one “personal” cart.

    1. desk platypus*

      As a library worker, for sure! Especially when you have multiple colored carts. I used to have a gorgeous inky green cart I hoarded in my office. Another coworker who just left sadly placed her favorite coral colored cart back in the general line.

      In another department I’ve seen they’ve lovely decorated one of their few carts and labeled her “Carty-B”.

    2. NMitford*

      As a proposal manager, I worked for a company where the proposal team had a cart for carrying boxes of proposals to the mail room for shipping. It was kept in our proposal production room.

      The HR department routinely came and “borrowed” it without asking, for whatever they were doing. We asked them to get their own cart (I think they had one, but one evidently wasn’t enough) but they said they didn’t have a place to store it when it wasn’t being used. We pointed out that the cart for us wasn’t a nice-to-have, it was effectively a safety device because big boxes of proposals could be very heavy and we didn’t people hurting themselves carrying them or dropping them.

      Well, sure enough, I had a 25 copies of a big proposal to ship and the cart was gone. I went over to HR and couldn’t find it, so I had to carry the boxes down. I had gotten all the way to the mailroom and, as I was trying to wrangle my access card and open the door, the box started to slip. I twisted to grab it before it hit the floor and ended up tearing most of the ligaments in my right (dominant) hand. This lead to years of fighting with the company’s workers company, which didn’t want to pay for the surgery I needed.

      When I left the company, my HR representative was shocked! shocked! that I cited the cart situation as one of the factors in my decision to leave.

      1. Proposal Gnome*

        Wow. I know those proposal boxes. Your HR was inhabited by truly terrible people. I’m sorry you were hurt & that your company fought with you.

  21. Unkempt Flatware*

    There was a commenter in the Friday threads who was really upset that her personally procured office supplies were stolen off her desk by a newbie who should have clearly seen these were someone’s things. She was so angry and couldn’t believe the person wasn’t fired. Many of us tried to reason that while shitty, it was not a fileable offense as she relayed it. I hope everything is okay with that commenter–if you’re reading this, could you provide an update?

    1. Hlao-roo*

      The comment was from “Bookworm” in the “open thread – October 4, 2024” post for anyone who wants to read the original. I’ll link in a follow-up comment. I also hope everything is OK with Bookworm and agree this is a great thread for an update.

    2. Meep*

      TBF, theft could be considered a fireable offense if they didn’t get it back once they realized.. Especially if she paid for those things.

      Not worth getting upset about, but, I mean, as someone who had half-eaten chocolate (I am talking about WITH teeth marks) stolen during the pandemic from INSIDE my desk (by someone who also kept funneling my raises into her salary, but that is ‘nother story), I have a higher standard of “WTF is wrong with you??”

      1. Unkempt Flatware*

        She said she went to the offender, got all her things back, yelled at him in front of everyone, got his manager involved who issued a correction but she still wanted him fired.

      2. Galloping possum*

        In the days when I worked at a grocery store, we had a small break area in the back, with a mini fridge. One day on break, I’d gotten a soda, drank about half of it, wrote my name on it, and put it in the fridge. When I came back at lunch for the rest of it, someone had drank it, and put the empty bottle back in the fridge. Man, WTH, just throw it away at that point.

        1. Slippers*

          That’s painful. Someone stole (threw away?) my Lunchable at Big Box Store when I was in college on a day I was really hungover. I cried.

        1. Meep*

          lol. The funny thing was the way the desk was structured, it was this little open cubby, but it was definitely not in plain sight. I left it there to go to the bathroom and came back to find it gone.

          The owner is a big chocolate fiend, so she literally went through my stuff (and hopefully took off the eaten bits!) to find something to appease him and make herself look good. Interestingly enough, there WAS existing not-half-eaten chocolate in the break area which was closer and very clearly visible to get to my area.

    3. Coffee*

      Taking everything from desk drawers when it’s clearly someone’s actively used spot is pretty bold move! I wonder what newbie was thinking

    4. Bookworm*

      They were stolen OUT of my drawers, not off my desk. There is a difference! Newbie tried to take my stuff again last week. He has zero reason to be near my desk. I was coming back from the bathroom and caught him. He had some of my large post it note pads in his hand. What he didn’t know is that on the inside back cover of each pad, I had written my full name with a Sharpie. A coworker said they had caught newbie at my desk, and that’s when I showed up. My coworker and I accompanied newbie back to his desk, called his manager over and relayed what happened. His manager took him aside for a private chat and now he’s very sullen when he sees me and blames me for his issues. I buy certain supplies (such as the large post it notes) as they are for MY use, not for someone with sticky fingers who needs to buy his own if he wants them.

      2. Hlao-roo*

        Newbie tried to take my stuff again last week.

        o.O

        Wow! Thanks for the update. I’m sorry that Newbie still felt entitled to rifle through your desk drawers. Hopefully this chat with his manager sticks.

      3. nekosan*

        Yeah, taking something OUT OF THE CLOSED DRAWERS is quite different than taking something visible from on top of the desk. The latter can be viewed as merely rude, but snooping through someone’s drawers is a big no-no.

      4. ferrina*

        Yeah, the Newbie is definitely in the wrong. If this is a hard-to-fill role, I can see why the company hasn’t fired him. They’re assuming that they tell him to stop and he stops. The fact that he did it AGAIN is really bad- the first time could just be questionable judgement, but if he’s doing it after his manager told him to stop, that’s a clear choice.

        I have a suspicion this isn’t the only issue with this guy. Someone that is this entitled and flagrantly breaking rules won’t stop here. Keep calling him out whenever he tries to touch your stuff (and good on your coworker for stopping him), but don’t jeopardize your reputation trying to get this guy fired. He’ll make more trouble for himself soon enough.

      5. Strive to Excel*

        Yup, at this point the Newbie is in the wrong.

        Once might be an accident/someone not familiar with workplace norms. Now that he’s been told not to do that and is still doing that it’s no longer and accident.

      6. Frank Doyle*

        This dude is definitely in the wrong, but the larger question is, why are you buying so many of your own office supplies? I’ve worked for very small/broke companies my entire career, and while I do sometimes get my own pens that I prefer, I’ve never had to buy my own post-it notes.

        1. Bookworm*

          Office supplies the regular sized small yellow post it notes, crappy stick pens, and only yellow highlighters. I like the large 4″x6″ post its. I have to write copious notes on my files and these are perfect. I also like BRIGHT post its. Yellow don’t do sh*t for me. Also, highlighting in yellow on my files doesn’t stand out. The BRIGHT colors do. Plus I don’t like being told to be stingy with correction tape, so I get my own.

      7. WorkplaceSurvivor*

        I must be overly territorial and angry too, because I’m on your side Bookworm. Maybe not an immediate firing, but I’d be watching him like a hawk. Who just takes stuff out of people’s desk drawers, especially when new?

        I’m not overly surprised he did it again, because doing it the first time shows he has no sense of normal boundaries. Sorry you’re dealing with that!

  22. AndersonDarling*

    I worked at a family company that took up the whole floor of an office building. For some reason, there were no bathrooms in the office. All 60 employees had to walk to another floor to use a public restroom.
    Well, I eventually learned that there were “executive bathrooms” only for The Family. It was the wildest power play. Four guys took the mens and womens bathrooms and converted them into a giant, glamorous bathroom for their own personal use. All us plebians were told that there just wasn’t a bathroom on the whole floor due to some bizarre building design flaw and we had to take the stairs to the public use bathrooms in the lobby.

    1. Texan in exile on her phone*

      And Situation #2 in less than a minute where I would spend a lot of time and energy planning the demise of the instigators.

  23. The Starsong Princess*

    At an old job, we moved from a location where our store manager had a little office to where his desk was in a corner of the stockroom. He was incredibly bitter about this and expended much time and energy trying to persuade corporate to enclose an office for him. No dice and he was devastated. So we decided to give him a pseudo office. We taped off the floor to indicate walls and a door and would knock on his imaginary door if we needed him, acting out opening the door and stepping into his office. Weirdly, he loved it. Shades of WKRP in Cincinnati’ Les Nessman!

    1. Admin of Sys*

      Aww, that’s actually kind of sweet? I get that it was done to gently tease him, but I hope people kept it up if he enjoyed it happening.

      1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

        I think it was what’s that think from the Office? Gutenprank? He felt disrespected by corporate. His employees showed, “we respect you!” and with the little they had, they made him an office. And he chose to see it as an O. Henry story not and Oh, get over yourself and everyone was happy.

    3. SarahKay*

      Many years ago, I was asked to go and provide support for a stocktake on a different site. When I arrived they sat me at the admin manger’s desk in the main admin office.
      At both sites the admin office had about five desks – four facing the walls for the staff to sit in, and then the manager’s desk which was set so the manager could sit with their back to the wall and see their staff.
      The difference between my site’s office and this one: the manager clearly felt she needed a private office, so had created one by putting up six foot high cubicle ‘walls’ around her desk – as in touching both sides and the front of the desk, leaving just enough space at one side to get behind the desk.
      Since there was a real wall directly behind the chair, the effect was equivalent to sitting in a badly-lit four-foot square box. The only reason I lasted the day with that set-up was because I spend about half of it out on the shop floor; otherwise I’d have been begging for another desk, anywhere but there.

      1. Filicophyta*

        In fact, after being reminded of it here, I had to go watch some clips on Youtube. There was some great tv in those days.
        Here’s one of the door scenes. Notice Herb’s face when the door slams shut.
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkP9DKnOgn0
        (Sorry everyone, I know this will be slow because of including a link.)

    5. AnonInCanada*

      Did you also “knock on the door” by tapping your foot as you gestured the knocking with your fist? Hehehe… I loved that show!

  24. Kitten*

    12+ years ago I was an account manager in a small office where 98% of the employees there were salespeople. I got assigned to 1 salesperson (basically was her assistant), “Daphne” who was a superstar, but very unliked internally (she was a pretty awful person). Anyway, the salespeople there were SO territorial and competitive. Everyone’s book of business and clients were theirs. They used Salesforce to mark leads.

    Once Daphne and this other salesperson where calling the same company, then they ended up choosing Daphne. This other person threw her papers at Daphne and screamed, “LIAR!!!” in the office. Another time, one of Daphne existing clients changed jobs where a new company, that was a client of someone else. This client said she only wanted to work with Daphne, so this other coworker threw a fit, and went around the office loudly telling everyone “Daphne stole one of my clients!!”. Then this woman went on to ignore ME, because I was Daphne’s account manager. I was 25, these people were in their late 30s – mid 40s. I developed really bad stomach and anxiety issues at that job.

    I stay away from sales people now lol. I find them so overly competitive.

    1. Technically a Former Director*

      It’s hard to be too critical of being competitive in a commission-based environment designed to promote it, though.

  25. Freddy*

    My coworker and I marked our territories without intending to. We worked the day shift at a business that was open 24 hours. First my coworker became pregnant, and it was a Whoopsie situation. A couple months later, I became pregnant, another Whoopsie. At that point, the women who relieved us at the end of the day refused to sit in our chairs. They would be shoved in to the hallway for the evening shift. We took our chairs back each morning. We both left that job after giving birth but I always wondered how long they kept doing that.

    2. Ginger snap*

      Were they afraid your chairs were cursed, like they’d have a whoopsie too if they sat in them or something? O.o

    4. Rusty Shackelford*

      I worked in an office that had a chair like that, but it was just the one chair. One whoopsie, and one infertile woman who’d actually been trying for years before she ended up with The Chair.

    6. JanetM*

      At the same job as the teabags, the owner’s daughter was forbidden to sit at the receptionist’s desk because several receptionists had gotten pregnant and left.

  26. roisin54*

    We had someone who fancied herself a Subject Specialist, even though officially she wasn’t one. She did however know a lot about this particular subject, so most people just deferred to her on it. I’d had a deep abiding interest in her so-called specialty for many years, so I had a good amount of knowledge myself. Once during a shift at our public-facing desk, I assisted a member of the public who had basic questions about the subject. When she found out, Subject Specialist lost her mind, and after scolding me she sent a department-wide email demanding that she be called up to the desk to assist anyone who had any question about this subject. Our department head had given up trying to corral her long before so nothing was done about this.

    Much later, due to a reorganization, she did become a Subject Specialist for this particular subject. The reorg also meant we got a new department head, one who was less inclined to put up with nonsense than the previous one. Subject Specialist lasted all of six months before she suddenly retired (allegedly in order to avoid being put on a P.I.P. due to insubordination.) Before she left she meticulously went through all of her files, digital and hard copy, and deleted or removed anything that could’ve been useful to anyone else on her subject while leaving everything else behind.

    After a couple years of managerial shenanigans, I eventually became the official Subject Specialist on this subject. I’ve been doing it for several years at this point, and I don’t care if my co-workers assist people with it.

  27. Sharkie*

    I had a former colleague that was very territorial over almost everything. It was exhausting. Here are a few examples:

    1. She had a total melt down in front of clients at a conference happy hour our company was running for clients because they showed up 30 minutes late and I used my credit card to open the bar tab. She wanted the airline points.

    2. She would yell at anyone who spoke to the interns because she was their “manager” and they should only come to her for help. Manager is in quotes because during a chaotic time for our team, she strong armed her way into it. She was not the manager, someone else was. Yes she fought with the other manager as well over this.

    3. There was a report that she was in charge of that needed to be ran on certain days, no exceptions. She refused to cross train the rest of the team for coverage reasons. When our manager made them cross train me, she trained me the wrong way at first. On days that she was out and the report needed to be ran, she would only tell me she was out for the day 5 minutes before the report was due so it was always “late” on my coverage days. I think she thought that our boss would drop the coverage requirement if the people covering were unreliable. It did not work.

    4. She got into a screaming match with a coworker at a large client event because one of her clients was chatting with the coworker. The client was the coworker’s uncle.

    5.Got into with with our boss during a meeting because our boss wanted the rest of the team to cover for her when she was out for a month. She did not understand why we would need to cover, things could wait for her to come back after a month.

  28. Meep*

    Sorta fits, sorta not.

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

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

      1. Meep*

        Yeah, she was definitely a card, to put it nicely. More than just the blindly taking credit for someone else’s work. I remember one time I told her months in advance I was going on vacation. Blocked it off. She seemed excited for me and made some off-handed comment about how she should also take vacation during that time. Didn’t think much of it, tbh.

        Reminded her a month before, two weeks before, and a week before. The day before she pulls me into her office and tells me how it is inappropriate that “we” are taking vacation at the same time, but she is soooo nice and will let me take it just this once.

        She literally could not function when I used my PTO and had meltdowns. It was bizarre, because despite being my “boss” she was head of Marketing and Sales and I was a lowly code monkey. Our jobs should not be intersecting in the slightest.

        1. Bossy*

          Sounds like a complete ass! That vaca thing, oh hell no. I feel like I would put a note in with hr or just made sure to keep documentation.

          1. Meep*

            Unfortunately, (as she loved to remind us), she was also HR. It was/is a tiny company. Hence why she was my boss.

            She was eventually fired for breaking employment laws in more egregious ways. This was really just the tip of the iceberg.

  29. Llama lamma workplace drama*

    We had a VP that claimed a certain parking spot in the employee lot. There were no assigned parking spots. (Maybe the CEO had one but he would be the only one) Everyone knew that she claimed it and would go on the warpath if someone parked there. Well a new employee started and parked there not knowing about ‘her spot’. She actually tried to get him fired for parking there!

    2. HRneedsAdrink*

      Same- had a VP park his BMW in the same spot every day. Absolutely nothing special about this spot, and no assigned parking, he just claimed it. New person parked there unknowingly. He spoke to her about it, very angrily. He was an a$$. I think what really killed me was that we worked for a nonprofit known for helping very poor individuals. No doubt he probably made 6x more than the rest of us. Nothing against his car or how he spent his money, but just incredibly tone deaf given the work we did, the population we served and the employees’ wages.

    3. Insert Clever Name Here*

      At my office campus, there are a few buildings, one small parking lot, and a large parking garage. The parking lot is in front of the building that is mostly executive offices and the garage is closer to the other two buildings — this de facto makes the parking lot an executive parking lot but there’s no signage or anything.

      A few years ago our area had a rare snow storm and several of the parking spots were full of plowed snow. An executive arrived and was furious to see that there were no open spots for his car and a car that *clearly* did not belong to an executive was in one of the spots. He parked behind the car and went into the building and insisted that the security guard go find who had parked there…the security guard returned with a heavily pregnant employee who was afraid she’d fall walking across the slushy parking lot from the garage. According to a coworker who witnessed it, the executive’s eyes went wide, he blushed, apologized profusely to the employee, and meekly went to move his car to the garage :D

    4. Been There, Done That*

      I work for a very small college with one very large parking lot. I’ve seriously never seen more than half of the spaces full. The only “reserved” spaces were for admissions guests… until a few months ago when the new president and new provost suddenly had signs marking their parking spots in a prime location. This went over like a lead balloon. It shouldn’t have been a surprise though, given their inability to “read the room” and their continual ability to annoy/enrage the faculty, staff AND students.

  30. Pangolin*

    My old department had a staff room for two distinct teams, one larger general one and a smaller specialist one. There was one fridge, but the smaller team felt there wasn’t enough space for them so they, between themselves, personally saved up money to buy a second fridge just for them. Using the Grey Fridge and Not The Black One is a key point in induction tours for new staff members in the other team, as putting your milk in the black fridge is a guaranteed way to have your stuff thrown away. If someone is found to be using the wrong fridge they are lectured and then ignored by the entire specialist team for the rest of their time in the department.

  31. Coffee Please*

    Lunch spots! We have a 12 person table and typically every spot is taken. For a long time I would sit in the same spot, but eventually a woman started marking it as her spot, getting to the kitchen 10 min before lunch to claim it. It would annoy me but whatever! If it means that much to her…

  32. Anon for this*

    I work in a library, and while I’m not territorial about how my department’s carts are used, I do admittedly get weirdly territorial about how the carts are stored. I’m not diagnosed as having OCD or anything like that, but it drives me absolutely crazy if the same kinds of carts aren’t lined up together, if the colors are mixed up, or if the wrong carts are against the wrong wall (there are different lengths of carts, and one length exactly fits against one wall, and the other exactly fits up against the other). I fix it absolutely every time they get mixed up, and I grumble to myself the whole time I’m doing it. The one day a year that the janitorial staff moves everything to wax is an effing nightmare.

    I know it’s not rational. But it soothes my little cataloger brain to have them in order. And I just can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t put them in order when there is so obviously an order. I don’t say anything to anyone though, because I know it’s my own weird thing and everyone’s got a lot of other more important stuff going on.

    1. PropJoe*

      Lol. I’ve been known to spend a couple minutes organizing the cart return at the grocery store because people keep mixing regular and small carts together.

    2. Blue Spoon*

      Oh man, library carts can get wild. I remember back when we were closed to the public for covid, I suggested changing how our return carts were organized/laid out so it would actually line up with how the shelves were currently arranged rather than how they’d been laid out a decade ago. You’d think I had suggested setting the stack on fire. The main argument was that it would confuse volunteers. You know, the ones who couldn’t be in the building due to the plague.

    3. Zombeyonce*

      This is me but about how I load the dishwasher vs how my husband (an engineer!) puts dishes in all out of order and inefficiently, then handwashes what he can’t fit because he loaded it so wonkily. At least they’re all getting washed, but what chaos!

      1. Anon for this*

        Oh, we have the same thing in my house! We’ve basically come to a “I’ll rearrange them every day or so in order to fit more in, you do the unloading once they’re clean” arrangement. I just…it’s so weird that he can’t see there’s an efficient way to put things in there! The top is full, the bottom is almost empty, take the bowls that can go in the bottom OUT OF THE TOP. Stack the plates NEXT TO EACH OTHER, not at random angles! Etc.

        1. Just Sayin'*

          It makes me wild how often my family does the same thing, and I have to play yet another game of Dish Tetris.

      2. JanetM*

        Seen some time ago, somewhere:

        There are two types of people: the ones who load the dishwasher like a Swiss architect, and the ones who load the dishwasher like a Muppet on drugs. They inevitably marry each other.

        1. The Prettiest Curse*

          I’ve seen this quote before and it definitely applies to my marriage! My husband is the Swiss architect type and can’t load the dishwasher without either tutting or sighing.

      3. Rain, Disappointing Australian (formerly Lucien Nova)*

        Ah, dishwasher stories!

        Mum does not like it when I load the dishwasher because according to her, I “load it funny”. Everything gets clean. She’s fully admitted that the specific way I load bowls and plates if actually more efficient (but won’t load them that way herself.) She does at least own the fact that she gets tetchy over it simply because it is not The Way that she would load it. But she still does not want me loading the dishwasher.

        At this point it legitimately amuses me, because me loading it inevitably results in a back and forth volley of “Stop that.” “No, may as well get this done.” “I’ll load it later.” “I’m loading it now.” “Well don’t, you load it funny!” “You’re the one who loads it funny!” and by then we’re both in fits of giggling.

        We do both agree my dad should never be allowed to load the dishwasher even if he had the mind to though. :)

  33. Olive*

    I’m about to be a territory marker. My workplace had to move buildings and we’re going from having separate reserved offices for 1-3 people to hot desking. I am going to leave my things on a desk until someone forces me to move them. I don’t need the “best” desk, next to a window, not next to anyone else, etc. I just hate the idea of having nothing personal unless I move it in and out of a locker every day. I suspect a lot of other coworkers will be doing the same thing.

  34. ArchivesPony*

    Mine’s not even a desk but a parking spot. In an massive parking lot, with no assigned parking! I was parking where I was parking because it was under a light (the only one in said parking lot). I often left when it was dark out and our building wasn’t in the greatest location, so I wanted my car under the light. Coworker couldn’t handle this, so he started coming earlier and earlier just so he could park there. Then when I made arrangements to have a different working hours (in part due to him for OTHER reasons), he then asked for the same schedule. It was ridiculous.

  35. Irish Teacher.*

    As a student teacher, we had an assignment where we had to use IT in a lesson and write a report on the class. This was back in 2003-2004 when computer equipment in schools was limited and it meant taking the class to the computer room, so I asked the computer studies teacher and he was like “well, you CAN use the equipment, but make sure you don’t touch X because it can blow the system and don’t let the students near Y” and generally made it so difficult that I just write up a hypothetical version and didn’t teach the class for real. I think the other student teachers in the school did the same as he clearly didn’t want us using it.

    1. Admin of Sys*

      I mean, depending on how duct taped the system was, those may have been legit warnings? Lord knows I’ve seen schools where similar warnings apply – it’s not that the systems are off limits, it’s just that they’re all temperamental, and unless you know their issues you can destroy things. I remember a community college lab where each machine had a little warning card. Stuff like “don’t type to quickly or the networking will drop” and “will overheat and power down if you run more than 3 programs” and “do not use, do not turn off” (I think that one was acting as a secret print server).

      1. Irish Teacher.*

        Yeah, I take the point, but his tone was very much “well, I suppose I can’t refuse since the computers are for everybody’s use, not just mine, but I would really prefer you didn’t use them.”

  36. restingbutchface*

    Funny how Alison mentioned desks because The Great Desk Incident was the first time I realised I would never stop being surprised by other people’s behaviour.

    I ran a team of 20-ish IT/engineer types and all I heard all day was complaints about their desks. My desk doesn’t fold up (no, mate, it won’t). My desk is too big. My desk is too small. I don’t like the colour. Is this sustainable wood?

    Luckily, I had a cunning plan! I knew I would have a budget surplus that needed to be spent so at the end of the year I ordered 20 beautiful, top of the desks. The number at the bottom of the invoice made me sweat but happy team, happy manager.

    I had them all delivered and set up over the weekend so nobody had to do anything. We had a strict clear desk policy so all items had to be off the desk and locked in a cabinet over night, so nothing personal was touched. I ran all the cables myself and actually, at the end of the day I had to admit they looked so much better than the old ones.

    I got in on Monday morning to a near riot. Where is my desk?! Mine smells wrong! These desks are AWFUL. I hate the colour. They’re too big and too small. I’m getting mine out of the dumpster.

    The bizarre thing is that over my time with the team we went through restructures, job losses, salary renegotiations and I never heard a peep out of them. I guess they were saving all their emotions up for important stuff. Like desks.

    1. Retirednow*

      I realize you were doing what seemed like a really gracious thing, but I think that was a little over reach. If you were going to order 20 fancy desk, you could’ve found out from the team what they might’ve wanted individually.

      1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        Yeah, I’d have been annoyed if there was budget for new desks and they used it to get something I hated, rather than, say, offering a choice of three options.

        1. restingbutchface*

          I get your point if it was chairs, which have to be different for everyone. Ideally, we want a chair that is either adjustable or personalised so it meets everyone’s height/weight etc. But these were standard office drsks, very similar to the previous ones but nice and shiny new.

          I’ve never been consulted over what desk I want and if I was to do it now, I just wouldn’t have the time. Same with filing cabinets or boardroom tables – it’s facilities decision (unless there are any accommodations in place).

      2. restingbutchface*

        Individual desk consultation was not something I could accommodate – there were three or four options and I went for the one that would accommodate everyone physically.

        1. froodle*

          yeah, if I’d been through restructures, job losses and salary renegotiations, I can see getting overly invested in “my” desk – or whatever comfort or solidity I was able to find in that workplace

    3. Binge Crosby*

      Ironclad rule of workplaces #2,145: People never want the changes they say they want. What they really want is to complain.

  37. Elbie*

    I really want to see an update to the update for the maternity leave example! (I am currently on maternity leave, and thankfully I have a wonderful team. I did try to leave them in a place where they are well resourced and set up for my time away – and they are reportedly doing a great job. No rules or territory marking from me, lol)! I truly hope that the OP was able to finish off that leave with her head held high (and can add some good accomplishments to her CV) despite the whole department sounding like it was a nightmare!

  38. Library Lady*

    I worked at an organization where one of the staff members in another department literally had a line of masking tape that separated her desk space from her neighbor’s. She had been there for DECADES but still resorted to a strategy most frequently used by warring siblings who have to share a room. Several people talked about slowly moving her tape every month to see if she’d notice but I don’t think they ever did.

    1. Not Australian*

      My mother marked a line right down the middle of the minuscule dressing table in her *caravan*, so that my dad didn’t take more than his fair share of the space…

  39. Rara Avis*

    Teachers are incredibly territorial about their classrooms. I started a new job at a school that didn’t have enough space, so I was scheduled to “float” into 5 other teachers’ rooms. I went around to introduce myself and check out the set-up. 4 of my hosts were welcoming or at least decent. The 5th greeted my explanation of who I was with a “You’re what?” that was clearly a “Oh hell no” — the next day I got an email that my class had been rescheduled to a different room. Floating is tough and not a choice anyone would ever make for themselves, so it was not a great start to that job.

    1. Selina Luna*

      Ooh, that sucks. Floating teachers should never, ever be a thing. Not your fault, and I’m sorry the teacher reacted like it was, but every teacher should have a classroom that is theirs full time. It’s so annoying to work when you have to pack and move everything all the time.

      1. Rara Avis*

        My first school was like a college– no one at the high school had an assigned room, and I also taught two middle school sections as a floater. I taught an academic subject in the religion room (set up for discussion; bookcase blocking the board), in the first grade room (these were 7th and 8th graders who definitely didn’t fit in first-grade desks), and the fifth grade room (pet rat which traumatized one of my students who was scared of it. Like screaming scared if anyone took it out of its cage.) I am very happy to have my own room now. So many more resources I can offer my students.

      2. amoeba*

        I find that interesting as we have a different system in Germany (or at least had when I was at school) – it was always the *class* who had an assigned classroom, with the teachers rotating in and out. We had fixed classes who had (almost) all subjects together until grade 10, so that worked quite well. For us, I mean – might have been bad for the teachers!

        1. Selina Luna*

          Did the teachers have offices or something? For me, the classroom is both the place I hold my classes and the place I do my grading, call parents, etc. The school where I did my student teaching had floating teachers, and they had to do all of their non-classroom work in the staff lounge. There was never, ever any privacy or anything in there, either.

    2. Violet*

      I’m a teacher, and I totally understand why people are territorial about classrooms. I’ve had to float and share with other people, and I’ve always tried to be considerate and minimize my impact on the classroom, keep my students from using things that aren’t mine, and so on. But I have also had to share my classroom (or at least a primary classroom where most of my classes met) with people who took over the (limited) space without even asking, let their kids trash my stuff, and used up supplies without replacing them. So I kind of understand the “oh no” response.

    3. LaurCha*

      Floating as a teacher is AWFUL. My first (and last) year as a high school teacher, I had to float. It was perhaps only in the top ten reasons I bailed on that career, but it was definitely a factor.

  40. desk platypus*

    When I worked at a movie theater I was so territorial about one of the only two left handed popcorn scoops we had. Normally we rarely ever had more than left handed person on shift but when we did I never let my preferred scoop out of my sight. The handle was ever so slightly better! Honestly, I felt like straight up stealing it by the time I left for another job.

    1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      I had to google “left handed popcorn scoop.”
      I would have guarded it with my life. I’m right handed and if I had to scoop and pour with my left hand, it would not be pretty.

      1. desk platypus*

        Many, many times I had coworkers who would accidentally remove my precious left handed scoop and toss it into the sink thinking someone brought it out by mistake. I’d very loudly brandish my scoop and demand no one ever touch it, which people eventually listened to because I was otherwise very chill.

    2. WS*

      At my primary school, every classroom was given 24 pairs of right-handed scissors and 2 pairs of left-handed scissors. For some reason, one of my classes ended up with 8 left-handed boys (yes, all boys!) so they all had to sit at the same table and share the two pairs of scissors. My teacher tried to procure other left-handed scissors, but every other class also had 2 or more left-handers, so nobody would give theirs up!

  41. Anonymous for this one*

    Probably not my most shining moment of professionalism, but:

    I worked in a casual, open plan office, where my block of desks sat next to a wall with a poster board that tended to haphazardly accumulate decorations, including an 8.5 x 11 printout I’d put up.

    At some point, a well meaning and Very Senior colleague who’d previously had his own office was ousted to our desk block to free up more meeting space, to his understandable unhappiness. He brought all of his (cool!) office accoutrements out with him, and, while installing them, unceremoniously trashed the paper.

    I found out about this through other eyewitnesses and I never confronted him about it. But I did print out, IIRC, maybe a half dozen identical new copies of the picture and hang up ALL of them next to his stuff. To his credit, they remained there, in approximate sextuplicate, for years without further discussion.

    1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      He removed a sign/picture from a shared bulletin board? And hung up his own stuff? I could see if he thought it should only have business documents (we get emails about communal bulletin board rules) he should have said so – and not hung up his own stuff. That’s odd. I’m glad you met it with equal energy.

  42. Snarkus Aurelius*

    I worked at a government agency with two huge assholes. They’d been there since 1972, hated everyone, especially young people like me (I was in my late 30s but okay), threw a fit at the smallest changes, and hoarded knowledge as a way of job security. They refused to write anything down or train people or answer basic questions about their jobs. They would never respond to email; they’d go to your office or call you to respond because they never wanted to be quoted later on.

    Back in the late 1970s, they thought they were hot shit because they got a bill passed (illegal but whatever) to mandate my agency produce an annual report. They were the only two who knew how to do it so they bragged that was their job security.

    Until one day, I was in a meeting about why the report needed improvement, and I said, “The annual report is a copy and paste job from the year before with data updated so perhaps all the offices could overhaul their respective sections this year.” These two were furious at the idea they couldn’t do all the annual report this year and pointed to the Code to which I said, “The Code requires us to produce this report every year. It doesn’t mandate a **specific person** to do it.”

    They genuinely didn’t think anyone read the report so they thought no one knew they had been copying and pasting all this time. It’s a public document! They were also not aware, in the year 2015, that one could do a side by side PDF comparison of documents as well as control-F all in a laptop in two seconds. I really blew their minds when I projected it onto the conference room screen! “Where did you get that?!” They were aware that we are required by law to post these reports publicly, but they didn’t know that we actually did it.

    It was pretty courageous of these two to loudly demonstrate how clueless they were in front of their boss!

    A new administration fired those two a year later for making racist, ageist, and sexist jokes along with a hostile work environment. To this day, I don’t know why they thought they were so damn smart. Maybe no one ever called them out for 50 years.

    Last I heard, they still go to all the public meetings my old agency hosts and complain. They also try to imply that they still work there. I guess that’s their retirement dream!

    1. Funbud*

      I When I was young, I occasionally thought a government job might be nice. I never had one and, reading stories like yours, I’m not sure I missed anything.

      1. Bike Walk Barb*

        Having just sweated with an entire team over a legislatively required public report, I’ll say that it doesn’t work like this in every agency. Yes, a few sections are copy/paste with updated data because a program description doesn’t usually change year over year and it’s helpful to have consistency to find the same information in the same place. That doesn’t mean everyone phones it in like your two.

        My government job is great. I’m doing mission-driven work I believe in, I have good benefits and work/life balance, and we just produced a really good report. Glad I don’t work with your two examples.

  43. A11ons-y*

    I exclusively use hot pink pens (both in external color and ink color) because it means 1) engineers find them silly and don’t want to use them and 2) if someone did steal one it’d be so incredibly easy to track down.

    1. Pam Adams*

      When I worked at McDonald’s, I got a hot-pink box cutter. It was the only one that was never stolen.

      1. whistle*

        My parents do a lot of group volunteer handiwork, and my mom prefers pink tools because no one else takes them

        1. Stinky Socks*

          This is why I keep a pink screwdriver in my kitchen drawer for tightening pot handles. It stays put.

  44. Lou's Girl*

    My husband worked in a small dept of 4- him and 3 females. Their shared office space had 1 bathroom, but there were public bathrooms in the building (just outside their office space). The women decided that they wanted the office bathroom all to themselves and asked him to use the public bathroom. He did not want to use the public bathroom as many, many, many other people also used it.
    He asked me if he should take the matter to HR, as the 3 females were getting pretty adamant about the issue. I told him it was really a matter of whether or not he wanted to ‘keep the peace’ with his coworkers, or start a bathroom war, but no, they really couldn’t stop him from using the office bathroom.
    He very nicely told them that he was not going to use the public bathroom, but that he would keep the office bathroom well furnished with cleaning equipment and deodorizers. The women then stacked the bathroom full of feminine supplies, but that was not a deterrent for my husband in any way (especially since he had grown up living with women). They finally acquiesced and the matter was dropped (although he still got the ‘stink eye’ on occasion).

    1. HB*

      At my previous firm there were two single occupancy bathrooms in the building. The larger one was the women’s bathroom (and had shelving for storing various toiletries/other items) and the (much) smaller one was the men’s bathroom. If they were going to split them, that method made sense because of space, but I really didn’t understand why both of them weren’t just considered unisex. I don’t remember if there were signs on the doors or not, so it may have just been a weird unofficial rule established by habit (there were far more women in the office than men as well).

      Also the bathrooms had carpet in them which is just so, so gross.

      1. LaurCha*

        Well there’s your answer. Dudes are far more likely to drip on the carpet. I would’ve been in favor of divided bathrooms too.

        2. amoeba*

          Dudes should pee sitting down in cubicles, anyway. (It’s pretty standard where I live! If you use the pissoir, sure, but otherwise, no way! People do have to sit on that – either women in mixed gender bathrooms, men who have to go No. 2, or trans men, etc. )

    2. megaboo*

      I had a woman I worked with who refused to let men use the single use bathroom because they “smelled.” She would bitch about it all the time. It was unisex and one room. So annoying.

  45. Bunny Girl*

    Okay I am totally guilty of this but I feel ever-so-slightly justified.

    I work in a research lab and despite multiple talks during meetings of not taking each others reagents and please ask before taking things out of other people’s kits, it still happens ALL THE TIME and it’s so frustrating to go to start something and realize someone used all your stuff and then you have to wait days and sometimes weeks for things to get reordered. Or worse, already be started on something and realizing you don’t have enough.

    Some of my reagents have to be put in the fridge and I totally put my box underneath a sample of dead fish.

    1. Ali*

      Despite the dead fish (lol), this doesn’t feel that territorial to me.
      Unless it’s a reliably stocked reagent that can throw off your whole week! People should absolutely ask!

    3. Apt Nickname*

      When I was a student worker in a lab, one of the grad students would contaminate whatever reagents he used. The solution was to give everyone their our own set of reagents despite all doing the same tests with the same reagents. However, he would run out and grab mine since my bench was closest to him. I wish I’d had a dead fish.

    4. madcartoonist*

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

  46. Lexi Vipond*

    I wrote my name on my stapler in permanent marker – it didn’t always stop it wandering, but it did help it get home again. Seems perfectly reasonable to me!

    (We had a stapler on every desk in those days, and a couple of general ones for the students to use – there was no reason to walk off with mine except that it was purple.)

    1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      When I took an admin job in a university department, my coworker said to mark your pens with your name. I wrote my name on post its and taped it around my highlighters. had them for 20 years and three jobs. (honestly, the best highlighters ever. Left the caps off over a weekend at least twice and they never died. Kinkos brand. I called them when I finally had to replace them. The staff had no idea. “We have some Sharpie brand.” NO. No, no, no! I want Kinko’s brand!)

  47. n.m.*

    Had to share an 18-plug powerstrip with the person in the next cubicle, who had worked in that place for years without having to share it before. We each needed like, 2 plugs max.

    I asked if we could put it on this shelf platform thing that sat between our cubicles. She was absolutely incensed by this idea, complained to the building facilities manager about the fact that we had to share at all, and then finally gave in but still insisted on keeping the power strip in her cubicle so that I had to go around the cubicle wall, over to her desk, to plug anything in ever. She was senior to me *and* my supervisor enough that I didn’t feel like I could push back on the hassle.

    1. A large cage of birds*

      I’m impressed that there’s such a thing as an 18 plug power strip!

      I’d probably be petty and take the longest time at the most inconvenient times to plug anything in.

  48. Esmerelda Margaret Note Spelling*

    When COVID hit, a number of people in my team continued working on-site, as we needed access to laboratory facilities. But the desks in our office area were too closely-spaced for social distancing, so it was decided that we could occupy only every fourth desk. Paper signs were placed on the desks stating either “This desk is available” or “This desk is unavailable”, and we were expected to hot-desk between the “available” desks while avoiding the others.

    On one of these desk signs, I crossed out “is available” and handwrote “belongs to Esmerelda” instead. In my defence, I did this only *after* I’d had a conversation with my manager about being allowed to have a specific assigned-to-me desk as a (legally required) reasonable adjustment for my neurodivergence, and after we’d identified that exact desk as the one I’d be using. My coworkers weren’t part of this conversation, though, and might have thought I was just being excessively territorial for no good reason!

  49. Adds*

    When I worked in a medical office I took the “good” pen home with me at the end of every shift to make sure it remained mine (it was a gimme pen from a vendor and I couldn’t ever figure out its non-logo’d counterpart to buy one for myself).

    I did, in fact, take THE red Swingline stapler with me when I left a job.

    At my last job, put all my “good” pens in my desk drawer that I locked when I left the office for the evening because if I didn’t they would go missing. The pens I didn’t like could sit in the pencil cup on my desk but not those. (Just to clarify that I’m not entirely crazy, I locked my desk drawer because it had sensitive documents in it, not just for the pens).

    The most literal territory marking thing I did was also at my last job and was to put my name on electronic equipment. However, it was mine that I had brought in from home because we needed network document storage and the only way to get it was to supply it myself. Maybe that’s not so much territory marking though

    1. Throwaway Account*

      I got attached to a purple pencil at old job. The graphite was smooth and perfect. I had to use this pencil. I had my own desk but still had to hide the pencil because others would take stuff from my drawers if they needed something.

      I was really attached to this pencil! I made sure to take it with me when I left. But after I left, I realized, I had no interest in the pencil at all. My purple pencil obsession was just a manifestation of how toxic old job was – purple pencil was one of the only things I could control!

  50. Selina Luna*

    I work in a high school. For the first 3 years of my work, I tried to implement a “write across the curriculum” program where teachers in non-English classrooms would incorporate writing. In many cases, the teachers should already have been incorporating writing, so this shouldn’t have been anything new. Essays in history, lab reports in science, and writing in Spanish, in Spanish should have already been par for the course. The significant change with a “write across the curriculum” program is that the teachers in other departments actively work with the English teachers to help students write appropriately for their subjects.
    The head of the English department slammed the door shut on me multiple times. Those teachers don’t know grammar (they didn’t need to grade for grammar, just content), those teachers don’t know how to teach writing (this is so the kids can practice, not to have the biology teacher teach writing), and so on. Really, what she wanted was to make everything as compartmentalized as possible. Indeed, she actively discouraged ANY writing in non-English classes. And then she complained that the students struggled with writing and that the middle school teachers must not have taught writing at all.
    This was not her only territorial boxing match. Every other department had multiple people teaching each subject as much as possible. Three math teachers taught algebra, two science teachers taught chemistry, etc. She had one person teaching all the 9th-grade students, another teaching all the 10th-grade students, and so on, except that there was always overflow, and so there would be one “overflow” teacher. But if she could have gotten away with it, the 9th and 10th-grade teachers would have had 200 students each, and the 11th and 12th-grade teachers would have had 150 students each, which would have been that way forever.

    1. Not a Vorpatril*

      As a highschool teacher: That is pretty unhinged. Particularly trying to force one teacher to teach ALL of a class when that means the classroom size is blowing well past 30 per class. Having a teacher specialize is fine (I only teach Geometry, for example, but do have some variations even in that, and many Algebra 1 teachers are doing nothing but the same thing for every class) but no one wants to be crushed under that much student load for even one class, let alone all of them!

      1. Dobby is a Free Elf!*

        I subbed in a class once, when I was still waiting for my first teaching job, where the teacher had all 35 students allowed by law enrolled in his class, 2 peer teachers, and some kids in study hall….all in one portable classroom, for every class of the day. There were kids *everywhere.* To give the man credit where credit is due, they were well-behaved, and he was clearly well-liked and well able to handle the load…but I’m not sure how they got away with stuffing that many kids in a room.

      2. Selina Luna*

        Having more than one teacher within a subject also means that if a student and a teacher butt heads all the time, the student can switch to another teacher. This has come up at my school, too! One of the other English teachers went to the same church as a bunch of the students. Some drama happened at church, and suddenly, that teacher and those students couldn’t be in the same room together without a pretty terrible shouting match. I don’t blame the teacher for this. These kids’ parents encouraged the kids to be giant dipweeds, and the kids agreed with gusto. But because I was doing overflow for a different grade and had no classes of her grade level, there was nowhere for these kids to go except the library. Luckily, most assignments were online, and the kids would work on them, but it was a bad deal all around.

    2. Pam Adams*

      I get the opposite of that at my higher ed institution- the faculty who shoul be encouraging writing are now complaining that they ‘don’t know how to teach it.’

      1. Selina Luna*

        I have definitely seen that too, and that’s a separate problem that I had a solution for. She just wanted writing to stay in English, which is completely ludicrous.

        1. N C Kiddle*

          Reminds me of something I witnessed as a student. Our maths teacher asked us to write a short essay about why women are underrepresented in STEM fields. When the English teacher found out, she pretended to be enormously offended that the maths teacher was encroaching on her territory and said our English homework would be a probability study. But she was only joking, I can’t imagine the mindset that would do it seriously.

  51. Miss Kitty*

    When I first started out in my industry 20-something years ago, it was a small tech department of 3. I, as an mid-20s female, was greatful to have two kind 50s/60s gentlemen as my mentors. One was our boss, and the other was our network guy. About a year into my tenure, I noticed that a consistent issue we kept having was that no one knew what the name of their nearest copier was when they tried to print. I proposed we changed the names of the copiers from “Copier 289729” to “BldgX-Room123-Copier” in our weekly meeting.

    Suddenly the network guy was furious. He hated this idea. It meant that each time we moved the copiers, we would have to update the name. (We moved 5-6 of them a year.) Boss agreed with me and I implemented the change. It was a resounding success with the employees, and we got a lot of praise for making this change.

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

    Three years after we changed the copier names, our boss retired. I was the interim while they slowly and unsuccessfully looked for a replacement, and then after 2 years I was hired as the replacement. The department expanded. Any time we hired a new person, he pulled them aside and — without naming names or detailing the history — would “pop quiz” the new hires by saying “If you had the choice, what would you name the copiers? ‘Copier 289729’ or ‘BldgX-Room23-Copier’?” He was not happy that they all agreed with me.

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

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

  52. Throwaway Account*

    At old job, I was asked to run a program I had proposed, but to not run it so well that x department would take it away from my department.

    I actually asked what that would look like (poor attendance, lackluster marketing materials, tell participants to avoid praising the programming?). I did not get an actionable answer.

    2. NothingIsLittle*

      As someone working in government I completely understand how this sort of thing ends up happening. If we increase the ratio of locals attending our events, we lose our funding from tourism, so we have to be really careful to show data that is both accurate and usefully framed. Ugh, interdepartmental politics gets so ugly

  53. Not on Board*

    Due to the parking lot layout around our building and the neighbour building, we just share the parking. The neighbour rents out a number of spaces to an engineering firm down the street. There are signs indicating that those spots are reserved for ABC Engineering. Being on a busy street, people regularly park in one of those spots – the first one – which is reserved for the guy in charge at ABC. He absolutely loses his mind about this – and he won’t just park in one of the other spots because he has assigned each individual spot to specific people and if they park in a different spot, they get chewed out. I mean, I get being annoyed when someone parks in a spot with a clearly marked reserved sign, but just park in the next spot over. Don’t block them in and then come into our office to rant, and then call the neighbour to also rant, causing the neighbour to come in and ask us if we know whose car it is.

  54. Honeybadger*

    At first real job, the Director’s admin controlled the supply closet for the entire 4th floor. Her rules were strict: You were only allowed to have one pen, one pencil, and one highlighter at a time. In order to get a replacement of any of them, you had to return the used up one. The only colours of highlighters that were allowed were yellow and pink. Pencils were regular number 2 pencils UNLESS you were a Lead or above. Lead and above were allowed a mechanical pencil but only one stick of lead at a time. You had to prove you needed a new lead before getting the next one issued to you. Leads were only allowed to order supplies for their group once a week and they would be available to pick up the following Monday morning. Yes, you had to wait to get your pen or pencil or whatever. If you were a lead and you requested paper towels and desk cleaner too often or any other supply at a frequency higher than she thought appropriate, you got a lecture when you picked up your order. Her desk was right outside the bathrooms. Yes, she kept track of usage and it was mentioned to your supervisor if it was too frequent.

    1. RLC*

      I think I worked with this admin at my first real job too! Certainly distorted my view of how office supplies are requested. Was amazed at my second job that I was allowed as many items (within reason) that I needed. And that I could get a full packet of pencil lead to keep at my desk, not limited to one stick at a time.
      Foot note: when I shared the story of the stingy supply person with my mentor at second job, he led me to the enormous supply room at new workplace, grabbed an empty briefcase, and told me to fill the briefcase with all the supplies I needed to do my job. It was wonderful.

      1. Honeybadger*

        I moved to a new group in our other building and they had supply closets in multiple places on each floor that were full of supplies and nobody cared what you took. They even stocked post it notes which the Admin in the other building didn’t allow us to have. It was light night and day.

  55. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

    After getting annoyed at all the pens on my desk or in the drawers going missing I brought in a fountain pen (which I prefer writing with anyway) and started using that.

    I got an annoymous note later saying that I was discriminating against left handed people. I wrote a note and stuck it to my computer saying ‘if you don’t like my pen buy your own!’. And took it home with me.

    It’s currently residing in my handbag :)

    1. Strive to Excel*

      Hello fellow fountain pen user!

      My office is actually quite good about not taking other people’s supplies, so I don’t have the same pen woes as many here. But just to make extra sure (and because I like fountain pens) I have a fountain pen. I’ve been told by coworkers that I’m the “first person seen [they’ve] seen using one of those this decade”.

    2. Sharpie*

      I’m left-handed and we had to use fountain pens at my school. I never had an issue with them… But they do wear in to your own style of using them so they are totally individual in a way that biros just aren’t.

      I don’t do nearly enough writing to make it worth my while to get myself another fountain pen.

      1. Mad Harry Crewe*

        You can get a decent one for very reasonable prices these days! I really like the Platinum Preppy nib (which is sold in a variety of inexpensive pen bodies – Preppy, Preppy-wa, and Prefounte, and Plaisir lines). All pens mentioned range from ~$5-$25 USD and write smooth as butter.

    3. nekosan*

      I prefer fountain pens. I don’t leave them out or lend them (unless it’s a $1 throwaway), because I’ve had people bend the HECK out of the nibs. People will hold them straight up-and-down like a ballpoint, or just align the nib any-which-way, and go “It’s not writing…. let me press harder… harder…. harder… huh how’d that happen.” Or they’ll hold the pen ON the nib and get upset that their fingers are covered by ink and complain that I have a “defective pen” on my desk. (They are also upset when ink splatters when they bend the heck out of the nib.)

      Fountain pen stays on my person at all times, a rollerball is left on the desk in plain sight for people to grab and use.

  56. Don't Comment Much*

    Here in academia it is the space in general. We are always short on offices and desk space but a lot of postions that are student-facing so no wfh. Plus getting funding for administrative buildings is never going to happen. There is a lot of weird hierarchy, who had to give up space last, and refusing so share space with so and so. It’s very entertaining when I’m not invovled in the need.

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

    I did what was referred to as “outside marketing” for a warehouse club for a time, and part of the job was cold calling local businesses to see if we could set up an event in break rooms some morning where we’d bring muffins and have special promotions for buying a membership and such. Sometimes, a business would be open to the idea, but needed us to call back a few weeks later or whatever, so most of us had notes for cases like that. There was no central data source for our individual notes, though.

    Anyway, one of the other marketers had to have surgery and was going to be out for like a couple of months I think. She had been in the department for years while I was fairly new and young…and she had developed a reputation of being very territorial and very passive-aggressive. My supervisor said I was going to take over her cold calling list in her absence, so I asked her if she had any notes, where she was on the list, etc. so I wouldn’t waste anyone’s time by calling businesses that had already been spoken to.

    All she would tell me was, “Just start at the top of the list and move down.” Absolutely would not share if she had already called someone or if any businesses needed follow-ups (and this wasn’t a matter of it being a fresh list; she was acting weird about it and it was so very obvious to me that she was worried I would somehow poach something from her). I probably should have escalated the issue to my supervisor, but…I didn’t for whatever reason, and she went on medical leave, and I worked through her list the way I worked through my own (which, incidentally, did not involve me starting at the top and calling every business line by line because many local businesses only had like 1-5 employees, and most of those didn’t have a break room for us to set up in. I only called businesses with 10 or more employees, which is why I developed a reputation for setting up quality events compared to my coworkers.)

    I should note that we all got paid the standard hourly rate at that company. Raises were based on time worked during the course of your career and bonuses were on a schedule based on how long you had been at the company. We did not receive bonuses or commission based on sales or successful cold calls. If you did poorly in marketing, you might be moved around to a different department, but you weren’t going to get fired or anything. It was so WEIRD to be territorial about that job.

  58. Unfortunately I don't drink cofee*

    I once was a student at an institution that recently had been mashed into two other ones of a large university. And I mean “mashed” – their names were similar, and their research areas were somewhat less similar, yet close enough that a new boss used them to make a statement with a reorg. The three institutions were uprooted and moved into a shared space. No one liked it.

    Since I was part of a small group we were allowed to have our breaks in the formerly-three institution’s break room (normally reserved for teachers and staff). The room was large enough for about twenty individuals, but had three large coffee brewers. While ‘strong coffee and lots of it’ could be this country’s motto, this was still an overkill. But every institution had brought their own brewer when they moved in, and no one dared touch one from a former-institution they didn’t belong to.

  59. Exit Persued by a Bear*

    I used to work with a lady who was convinced the cleaner sometimes sat on her desk in the evening while she cleaned. At the end of every day she would blu-tak drawing pins point up across her desk to make sure no-one rested their bum on it.

  60. A manager, but not your manager*

    Literal claiming of territory:

    My first job out of college had cubicles set up in sets of 4 where you’d have low walls within your pod and high walls outside of that pod. My boss, who worked a few pods over, decided that whenever someone moved out, he should move in. Whenever anyone else left, he put desktoys on it to claim it, and whoever allocated desks (maybe him?) assumed those were already taken (there was stuff on them after all) and put new people elsewhere.

    By the time I got there, he’d claimed an entire 4 desk pod for his own megadesk covered in stuff. I don’t know if he *used* any of them, but they were great for displaying his many tchotchkes.

  61. Elle Woods*

    At my first job out of college, the department I joined had weekly staff meetings. One of my colleagues, Ron, was uptight about EVERYTHING. The first weekly staff meeting happened three days into my tenure. I arrived in the meeting room and chose a seat. I had no idea I’d chosen “his” seat. When he arrived, he glared at me, harrumphed, roughly rolled another chair away from the table, and gave terse answers to every question he was asked the entire meeting.

    A couple of hours after the meeting, he sent me an email that I should be more respectful of my elders and not sit in “his” seat. I apologized I wasn’t aware it was his seat and politely, but directly, told him that if he’d asked, I would’ve moved. His response, “Don’t let it happen again.”

    Yeah, he was a real treat.

    1. Zombeyonce*

      “Don’t let it happen again” would make me sit in that seat every time I was in a meeting with him and happened to get there first.

    2. I Have RBF*

      My response would have been “I didn’t know there was assigned seating in conference rooms. Was your name on it? Is there a seating chart no one told me about” in the most “confused kid” tome I could muster, and CC my manager so ho could tell me where the seating chart was.

  62. Count von tshirt's phone*

    Since the pandemic, we hot desk, which in theory is fine, but the desk I work at has to be at specific height to accommodate my wheelchair. I don’t care that other people sit here, but Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this is my spot. There’s a sign on it. HR has put out “Official Accommodation” emails about it. Our boss has had conversations with a certain someone about it.
    Every Monday I have to wait while he begrudgingly packs up his stuff and wait for him to move.

      1. Count von tshirt's phone*

        several things that I won’t go into.

        I do privately enjoy rolling up behind him while he’s engrossed in something and brightly (loudly) saying “Good Morning! It’s Monday! Please move!” Sometimes he jumps and it’s deeply satisfying

    2. Unkempt Flatware*

      I don’t’ know why I thought of this but there was a show on VH1 in the early oughts where celebrities lived in a house together. Chyna from the WWE arrived before Vern Troyer of Austin Powers fame. Vern discovered that she moved into the room designed for him with teeny tiny furniture and low sink, toilet, and tub. She had no idea and didn’t understand the issue. This giant woman was essentially squatting down to use the toilet and thought nothing of it.

    3. call me wheels*

      When I started uni there was 1 wheelchair desk in the building. I spent my life fighting for it to not get moved away or have a chair left in front of it and so on. There were signs, everyone who worked in that classroom was spoken to, I don’t know what more I could have done but people absolutely could not just leave it in a useable state. After 2 years I finally got them to buy a second desk so I could attend class in another classroom sometimes and continue the fight on two fronts :’) I was lucky the only other wheelchair users in the building didn’t want to use a desk at all so there was no conflict there but I don’t know what we’d have done if there was.

      1. Rincewind*

        There was a wheelchair user at my college.
        They put her in the only “accessible” room on campus.

        2 weeks later, I noticed they’d installed a lift on the exterior of that building.

        Apparently nobody had thought to check that a wheelchair user could GET TO the accessible room?

  63. ASneakierMailman*

    I am shamelessly the territory-marker! At my prior job (and yes, it was a library, may as well just say so), I fulfilled a number of roles since it was in a small community. One of them was technical services- every item that came in, I cataloged, labeled, marked appropriately, covered, and got ready for its first borrow. This required tools that I used every single day- special pens, markers, and non-stick scissors, primarily. Unfortunately, my workspace (no drawers, no locks) was in full view and accessible to everyone at all times. Whenever a coworker or volunteer lost their own item, they’d say, “Oh, hey, ASneakierMailman always has those at her desk!” and help themselves. Meaning I wouldn’t have the *special* versions that I needed, and they’d be all over the place.

    So, I dug out the pencil pouch I still had lying around from High School and started keeping those items in it and hiding it at my desk. At the end of each shift I took it with me and put it in the glove box of my car until I returned. People were fondly amused that I was getting so precious about my supplies, but I needed them replaced at a far slower rate after that, and everyone did just fine without them!

    To clarify, there were enough supplies for all employees to do their tasks. Things were just really disorganized and I was paying the price as the organized one ;-)

  64. Gimme Shelter*

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

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

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

    2. Red_Coat*

      Honestly, I kinda dream of being cone lady, because the students fill up our faculty/staff parking (easy to tell from the type of parking stickers they have) and every time I have to run a lunch time errand I have to risk parking on the other side of campus.

      Your cone lady is inexcusable though.

  65. Bird Lady*

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

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

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

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

  66. I NEED A Tea!*

    I worked in an office that had a garment factory in the back. It’s my first day on the job; I’m told to take a break, so I go to the lunchroom which is completely empty. There is a sea of empty chairs. I choose one and sit down.

    The break bell rings for the seamstresses – they come in to the lunchroom and one of them makes a bee line towards me and says “you’re sitting in my chair”.

    I look around all the other empty chairs and say “there’s plenty of empty seats available.”

    She narrows her eyes and responds “look you, I’ve been sitting in this chair for 50 years and I’m not about to switch now”. So I get up, look pointedly at her and sigh loudly, and move to different chair. I could see I was not going to win and it wasn’t worth the fight.

    1. bamcheeks*

      AAARGH, you have just re-earwormed me with the Livin’ On A Prayer dupe my daughter’s been singing this week:

      woah, you’re sitting in my chair
      Woo-aah, I was sitting there!
      Look at your face, you don’t even care
      Wo-aah, I was sitting there!
      I was sitting the–err–re
      *air guitar*

        1. BlueSwimmer*

          When I was getting my teaching certification, I subbed at a school that had the most territorial teachers in the English department. I walked into the teacher’s workroom/lounge at lunch and sat at a random chair at the long conference table. There were piles of mail on the table in front of many of the chairs, so I picked one with no mail and opened my lunch bag.

          The teachers all came in and I was told I had to eat in the classroom because they each had an assigned seat at the table for lunch and there was no room. They took turns bringing everyone’s mail from the teacher mailboxes in the main office back and placing it at each person’s assigned seat. It was so unwelcoming that I never picked up a sub job at that school again, and chose not to apply to that department once I was certified and looking for jobs.

          I’ve been teaching now for many years, and I’m the department chair at my school. I always make it a point to welcome subs, show them where the fridge is, and invite them to eat with us. If we are having a potluck, I encourage them to grab some food and join us. I chat with them and include them in conversations (if they seem receptive) and my department has followed my lead. We now have lots of great subs who are our “regulars” who say they like subbing for us because we are welcoming.

  67. Pay no attention...*

    Does it count as “territorial” if it’s literally your own property? At work, I have a set of Pantone swatch books, they’re mine, they’re expensive, and people keep wanting to walk off with them to show someone else or take a page out of the deck for their reference. I know that I react as if they want to walk off with my purse. Sorry not sorry.

      1. Paint N Drip*

        I bought a used set from the 90s on eBay – when we moved house, I put them in the ‘pack into the car on the day of the move, maximum importance stuff’ boxes :)

    2. The teapots are on fire.*

      The full set that costs thousands? I’d have it in a safe. Even the $200 swatch book set I’d lock up. And I’d also be advocating for the business to buy a set for the office so I could take mine home and lovingly tuck it into bed every night.

    3. Martin Blackwood*

      My department got a new set of books in june, i believe. One day i go to colour match something and the coated book isnt there. I look literally everywhere short of raiding peoples desks, and when I couldnt find it, I emailed my manager and team, in case any of them a) needed it or b) knew where it was. Turns out, the general manager’s pantone book was too old to have a clients color in it, so she needed it for a meeting and never returned it. Fine, but make sure *everyone* knows! I was concerned because i know my department has a pretty minisucle budget, and twice in a year if it was lost forever, or we would have to Simply Deal with the 5 year old ones with missing pages???
      If i owned pantone books? there would be a lock involved.

  68. They Call Me Patricia*

    I work in a profession where most folks are exempt. We had a supervisor who was very paranoid and territorial over her office and of her staff. If the clock in her office was off from the one in the hall by a minute or two, someone must have secretly changed hers. She was terrible with computers, constantly moving or deleting things on accident by clicking wildly around the screen without reading what she was choosing. But no, she swore people were sneaking onto her computer and messing with her files. We had a sign out system for going into the field, and she started requiring us to sign out if we left our desks at all – to the copier, to a colleague’s office, even to the bathroom (with time estimates of how long we would be gone!) Once, she was on vacation and our grandboss needed a document from her computer. We went into her office to retrieve it and found that (a) she had password protected her computer without permission, and (b) she had covered her office in post-its reading STOP USING MY THINGS, GO USE YOUR OWN.

  69. ADHD Librarian*

    In my brief time as a systems librarian, the head of circulation was particularly territorial. One time near the holidays, our campus-wide IT staff was replacing all the computers in the library and I decided to share some of the complimentary boxed chocolates we’d received from our integrated library systems vendor with them. Well, “apparently” I was supposed to put this box in the library staff break room, and because I didn’t, I got an earful over email (in angry purple font), and a subsequent email to everyone that “Santa” had put other chocolates in the break room to share! I mean, all this, over chocolate? In a separate incident, we were trying to automate student check-outs by linking their student IDs to the system (rather than having to issue a separate library card to each student). We discussed this in a systems meeting when the head of circulation was not in attendance. After the fact, I got another very angry email (also in purple font!) saying: “I am offended…I know I was invited to the IT meeting but I do not understand why Tech Services is analyzing circulation procedures.” I found a new position soon after that, and I think she eventually retired…

  70. ELF Cage*

    The executive secretary guarded the office supplies cupboard outside her office. It was this huge homemade piece with a large creaky door covered in heavy wall paneling.
    We had to go to her to get a single pen or if she wasn’t there sign out the office supply. She got really mad if you tried to access supplies and didn’t get her blessing.

    I worked later than most everyone so I’d wait until the building was quiet and get what I needed. I was up on the poorly lit mezzanine and opened the door and got my pen. As I slowly closed the creaky door, she was waiting behind it looking like every jump scare in a horror movie with deep shadows under her eyes. I didn’t shriek but came close.

    1. A large cage of birds*

      Every move you make
      Every rule you break
      Every door you creak, every pen you take
      I’ll be watching you

      3. ELF Cage*

        Thank you a large cage of birds for that true belly laugh!

        I really wonder how many nights she pretended to leave and waited in her dark office to catch me.

  71. Blue Spoon*

    Several years ago, the full time staff at my workplace got their desks and workspace moved from a cramped space in view of the public to a larger space on the second floor that was only accessible by staff. Overall, this was an improvement for most staff, but one woman refused to leave her spot on the first floor. She had a desk set up in the larger space, but never used it, instead staying at one of the desks left in the smaller space. Eventually she was able to argue that she needed to stay downstairs in order to do a specific task that she was in charge of, so her spot upstairs became a storage table and she still does her non-public-facing work in a tiny fishbowl.

  72. Rusty Shackelford*

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

  73. Anon.*

    I worked in a before and after school program/summer camp for many years. The process for ordering supplies was so arduous, I ended up buying my own supplies. Drawers, a laminator, craft supplies for my kids – whatever made the job bearable by the end. When I left, I took it all with me.

    I still work there running teen programming a couple hours a week. I have a plastic tote bin, locked on two different corners, and have written in all caps to not take the supplies I bought with my own money or I’m going to cry.

  74. Dust Bunny*

    The tenants in our building complex all have 3-5 reserved parking spaces (probably assigned by number of employees?). We have four. The dudes from the business across the lot from ours keep parking in them. They have their own. There is plenty of parking elsewhere because the most populous tenant just moved out, but it would mean walking slightly further. The parking offenders have their own handicap spots, though, so if someone were genuinely in need they could park right by the front door. We don’t have real handicap spaces so the reserved spaces nearest our door are the best we can do (yes, this is not OK but so far we haven’t been able to force our landlord to upgrade and space needs make it hard for us to move).

    We just put another “please don’t park in in spaces for [x organization]” flyer on someone’s windshield.

    1. Dust Bunny*

      By “slightly” I mean a matter of the width of a few parking spaces. The spaces are all lined up around the fronts of the buildings. It’s not a huge lot.

    3. allathian*

      Reminds me of a story about a parking lot outside of a church I read somewhere (for all I know it was here). Something about reserved parking spaces for funeral guests and church staff. The polite requests not to park there didn’t work, neither did the more terse versions. The thing that did work was “Thou shalt not park here” (!) Sure, that probably can’t be generalized to secular organizations, but I thought it was funny.

  75. Ann Onymous*

    A person (let’s call them Frank) at a software company who wrote something intentionally complex and without comments to ensure their indispensability. When Frank moved on, there was much frustration on the part of the person who now had to deal with this code and when they eventually figured it out, a triumphant shout across the cubicles: “I un-Franked, Frank’s code!”

  76. Not Your Pens*

    At previous workplace, I had a coworker who was quite interesting. Nice enough lady, but had some specific idiosyncrasies that were both amusing and frustrating. We had pens that we gave out to customers. They were available to all of us to use and give away, and were paid for out of several different department’s budgets. We had recently received a new supply, and I went looking for some for a group of customers I was going to be meeting, and there was half a box or so sitting in our warehouse. I inquired about the whereabouts of the additional pens, and interesting coworker had shoved several boxes under her desk – to the point where she could barely fit her legs under her desk – because they were “her” pens for “her customers” and had been paid for with “her budget.” I told her they were for all of us and she dug her heels in. Boss had to intervene.

  77. EngGirl*

    My first ever job when I was 15 was at a local visitors center. I would work the front desk and also take care of some intern level office work. During the summer the desk would also be staffed by some volunteers from a local program for retired seniors. Our jobs overlapped by about 80%, we were all at the same desk with a single phone and my shift started about 2 hours before theirs did, so most mornings I would come in and sit at the chair next to the phone.

    I was raised to always be very respectful of my elders, and to make their lives as easy as possible. Plus I was getting paid and these were volunteers so I felt I should be doing the lions share of the work. So when the phone rang, I answered it, when a visitor came in, I greeted them and asked how I could help. Most mornings I’d have all the brochures that we needed to fold/mail ready to go before anyone else came in.

    Apparently this was NOT the right thing to do around one volunteer, Dorothy (a petite octogenarian who referred to the very standard at that point computer as “the machine” and who could barely hear). On one particularly slow morning I was answering the phone and doing my thing. My boss came into the office when no visitors were around and Dorothy UNLEASHED her displeasure. She started yelling at my boss about how there was nothing for her and the other volunteer to do, and how there was no point in them being there if I was there. I stood there shell shocked and trying not to cry.

    My boss was very sweet to me and told me it wasn’t my fault, but also told me that moving forward when volunteers were in the office I would need to sit in a chair behind them and basically let them take care of visitors unless the volunteers asked for my assistance. So basically I spent the rest of the summer walking on eggshells around Dorothy (who did apologize the next time she was in) and trying to look busy while really just sitting in a chair for 6 hours of the day.

    1. EngGirl*

      While thinking about this over lunch I remembered that one of the biggest issues with the new arrangement was that Dorothy could barely hear. So she’d answer the phone and the person on the other end would ask a question and she’d have them keep repeating themselves before either she or they hung up. There were multiple occasions where from my chair 5 ft away from the phone I could hear the caller clearly asking a question and Dorothy would say “Ok, bye,” and hang up because “they had a really bad connection”

  78. pally*

    The lab has an excess of small equipment, including racks, pipettes and such. No need for folks to claim ownership of specific pieces as there’s plenty to go around. Over time, these items circulate from one user to another and back again.

    However…

    We hired one woman who proceeded to write her name on whatever equipment she was using. This struck us as a bit odd. It’s not like anyone thought they should return these marked items to her.

    Now her name appears on each and every piece of small equipment throughout the lab. But no one else’s name is on anything.

  79. see you anon*

    I feel like I’ve had reverse territory marking. I’ve been in my role as an admin assistant supporting research labs for 2+ years. Myself and one of our senior admins (both in title and tenure) had some overlap in work, as a guest speaker was booked for both their event and my event. I was asking a clarifying question about how to process a reimbursement for the guest speaker, as there was a slightly confusing breakdown in which labs were paying for what, and was answered with, “It’s your event, I don’t care”.

    We’ve had a lot of change on our team (myself included) over the past 2-3 years, which involves a lot of training and questions being asked. I get the sense that this coworker is trying to set boundaries (“my work vs your work”) but it comes out in strangely blunt ways, like above.

  80. All over but the shouting*

    I was hired to co create, implement and lead a project. My project partner was crazy ala carte.
    One quirk was I was not allowed to communicate with anyone on the board or project team with out her present.

    She was not my boss. We were equals. She didn’t announce this rule but made her preference clear passive aggressively.

    Since I lived in the smallish town and she didn’t, plus I was generally more pleasant to deal with, the likelihood of running into someone or someone reaching out to just me was high. it was like living in a mine field.

    My 7th grader was attending an arts camp or something and I attended parents night not knowing a board member had a son also at the camp. We spoke for 2 minutes about our kids.

    The. Horror.

    He sent an email a few days later and casually mentioned our chat and she LOST IT. How dare I talk to him without her present.

    My boss was aware of the issue but was kind of hampered from addressing it directly and tried to help mitigate usually by taking me out for lunch and margaritas on her WFH day and with humor.

    After 6 months the powers that be had a conversation with her resulting in her resigning.

      1. Koala*

        OMG my former boss (described below) did this too! One of my coworkers ran into someone from a partner agency at lunch and mentioned it to him and he got all bent out of shape about her setting up meetings behind his back.

  81. DrMrsC*

    I used to have an obnoxious bully of a coworker who would get really aggressive about our parking lot. First it was “the perimeters are for TRUCK PARKING!” Then she started to flat out tell new hires/students etc… that they were in “her spot” and that “everyone knows this.” There were a handful of us that she didn’t quite dare to try this with, and admittedly we would park in “her spot” on purpose from time to time. It was that same few of us that shut her down for good on the day she tried to insist that a student go out and move their vehicle so that she could park where she wanted to. I could fill pages of the unprofessional BS from that coworker. Fortunately she left a few years ago and there is not a single second I have missed her.

  82. KK*

    I had a colleague who came to us through an acquisition. She got herself moved into her new cubicle with her equipment & furniture.

    Along come with her was a tall 5 drawer supply cabinet. She was the admin for her former office & kept the cabinet stocked for a staff of 30. Although that staff came with us in the acquisition, they were dispersed in different locations around the building so they didn’t use the supply cabinet any longer.

    Oh but new colleague was NOT sharing any supplies! She hoarded the contents like it came out of her paycheck. No one in our dept could have a pen, a pad or a binder clip. And it STAYED LOCKED. They key was on her wrist at all times. She had it with her on lunch break, bathroom trips; basically ALWAYS.

    When she relocated to another dept, cabinet went with her. I’ve never seen anyone so obsessed with office supplies.

  83. NMitford*

    I wish I could find it again, but I saw a great post on social media somewhere where someone took a stapler that was labled “Fourth Floor — Do Not Remove” on a trip to Europe and took pictures of it in front of Notre Dame and other important sites.

    1. A large cage of birds*

      Haha, I mentioned this in reply to someone else’s comment. I saw it the other day and it cracked me up.

    2. Can't remember my username*

      I think that was innocent drinks (smoothie and juice brand), their social media is quite fun. The stapler chronicles were great.

  84. Anon for this one*

    I worked with someone who obsessively controlled information. She was a low level manager who was loved by her team, but butted heads with everyone else in the company. Any docs related to her team were locked to her team only, despite there being a cross over with several other teams that needed that information. If you needed access, you’d be grilled on why you wanted it and if your reason was deemed valid (which usually took several attempts at asking), you’d be granted access to the exact doc you needed for 2 hours before it was yanked again. She would do this to her manager and grand manager too! She also believed she knew better about other teams’ processes and would unilaterally claim tasks for her team if she thought another team was doing it “wrong”.

    I left that job about a year ago and last I heard, she was still there.

  85. Lab Snep*

    I work in an area of the lab where things must be done precicely and cleanly.

    People are forever stealing our stuff. I label it and hunt it down. There is plenty of tape in a storeroom. Pipette tips, kim wipes and accel wipes galore.

    But instead of going to the store room they come into this sacred place and take it. Sometimes leaving me with nothing.

    Yesterday I almost told someone if they took anything I would cut them, but it was a coworker who works in there sometimes as well.

    Today I made a missing poster for a coworker’s piece of equipment she was missing from a different bench.

    1. The Katie*

      In my lab, there are 3 areas where we send out slides, and my colleagues consistently treat these areas as an extra supply if they are assigned to one of them. The admin staff file slides that the doctors are done with, and I only take my trays from there, but my colleagues tray borrowing habits tend to leave me with nothing.

  86. Koala*

    My department has 3 vehicles (2 sedans and a van) that we can sign out for work purposes. The sign out logs are kept in one of the admin’s cubicles. The admin insists that only one unit is allowed to use the van. This is not a rule that exists anywhere except in her mind, AND her supervisor has spoken to her about it, but she will not let anyone outside of that unit sign out the van. Last time I needed to use it I just went in on her work from home day and signed it out; I checked the log, and it hadn’t been signed out for months. At one point her supervisor was working on an online sign out system so we could just bypass her but got sidetracked by other matters.
    It’s such a weird thing to gatekeep.

  87. Corky's Wife Bonnie*

    I have a few…all the same person.
    1. I worked at the front desk of a building with a few companies. I was employed by one of them but would occasionally greet the guests of the other companies so the desk had to be manned at all times. They supplied me with a printer because the printer for the company was deep in the suite and I couldn’t leave the desk. “Donald’s” office was right next to the printers, but printed out to the one at my desk because “that printer belongs to the company, NOT YOU!” It happened to be full of envelopes I was using for a project so they were ruined along with his print job.
    2. There was a guy in one of the other companies that needed a knee replacement. I felt so bad for him, he was clearly in a lot of pain and didn’t have a handicapped tag yet so he parked in the regular spot nearest the door. Donald then decided to arrive early just to park in that spot because spots are NOT assigned!
    3. Most people either went out to lunch or worked through it but I like a mid-day break. I liked to read while I ate so I sat in the farthest-away table to see some sunshine and have a little quiet. Donald used to go out or eat in his office but once he noticed this he took that table and put his things on every chair so nobody could sit down.
    I still have no idea what was up with that guy.

    1. Mad Harry Crewe*

      What an ass. I hope you got some small joy out of handing him a stack of envelopes when he came to collect that print job.

    2. I Have RBF*

      The table stunt would have found his crap on the floor or in the garbage. No “reservations” allowed, asshole.

  88. Holly.*

    I had a coworker who kept ‘borrowing’ my highlighters.
    I got a jar full of tiny ones, and told him to help himself, naively thinking he’d take a few…
    He said thanks and walked off with the full jar…
    On the upside, he now had so many he didn’t take any more of mine.

  89. Spinster Librarian*

    In a too-small public library, with an already too-messy and over-full storage room, the library friends group had a designated space for donations to their annual book sale. It was a chaotic hoard of books, magazines, games, toys and I don’t know what else – the library’s donation policy was loose – and stacks, boxes and bags crept repeatedly into staff areas. Each encroachment brought drama. Moving book sale material was sabotage. Staff complaints were met with volunteers’ cries of “but we do this to support YOU!”

    Finally staff drew a line in the sand: bright red duct tape across the floor to mark the boundary. This was immediately declared over the top, insulting, and bullying, but it met their drama with its own outrageous flourish. Each new incursion was pushed back over the line, to wails of despair and passive-aggression, which eventually, grudgingly, diminished.

    The red line worked. It was still there when I left a few years later.

  90. Gemma*

    I worked as a writer for a publisher of specialist online content. The CEO had previously written all the content himself and didn’t seem to be able to let go of it. Despite employing a team of experienced writers and editors, he insisted on reviewing every piece of content we wrote multiple times. He was a waffly writer, so all the editing would have to be done again too.

    It seemed like whatever you did and whatever part of your experience you drew on, he didn’t like it and he had to redo it. I never understood why he hired experienced people when he actually needed drones to follow orders.

  91. Koala*

    I don’t know if this counts but I had a boss who took credit for everyone else’s accomplishments. I had a grateful client make a donation to our program and he announced in a meeting that he’d obtained the donation. I wrote a protocol (because I was tired of waiting for him to do it) and he turned it into a PowerPoint with nifty graphics and “created by [his name]” on the title page. My coworker organized an event and he presented it as though he’d done all the work. And so on. I hope it made him look good to his supervisors because it really destroyed any respect the people working for him may have felt for him.

  92. Oof and Ouch*

    In college I was a tutor in my schools tutoring department. I’d bought my own supply of multicolored expo markers because they were super useful for explaining things to my physics students (vectors and free body diagrams, if you know you know). One day during a marathon of back to back sessions I had to step away from my table, when I came back half my markers were gone and I saw another tutor setting up his table with them.

    I went over and asked for him to please return the markers. He proceeded to lecture me (in front of his students) about how I couldn’t take all the supplies and how I was being greedy by taking all the “good” markers. I let him finish and then informed him that they were not communal supplies, but instead my personal study supplies that I had bought myself. I told him he was free to complain to our supervisor if it was a problem for him that I’d like to use the materials I bought to tutor my own students. He gave them back but complained the whole time about how I wouldn’t share. Honestly if he’d just asked if he could borrow a couple for his lesson I totally would have let him, but not with that attitude.

    1. Dobby is a Free Elf!*

      When I was teaching, I kept my expo markers in my pocket all day. I discovered quickly that students would just…walk off with them…for no known reason. I didn’t mind kids drawing/writing on my boards as long as I didn’t have anything on them, but I was buying my markers out of my own budget–and as a first-year teacher, that budget was stretched thin anyway. The good ones aren’t cheap!

      1. Oof and Ouch*

        Preach! The tutors were the highest paid on campus workers, but that’s not saying much, and hours weren’t guaranteed. So I was buying these on my part-time job budget and I usually had to replace them a couple of times during the year.

        The tutoring center provided supplies at the beginning of the year, but they only lasted until mid-September, and they only had black markers which we

    2. I Have RBF*

      Sharing is for kindergarten, not for supplying people who aren’t smart enough to bring their own. No, asshole, I’m not obligated to “share” anything I bought with my own money. Stop expecting other people to provide your supplies.

  93. VoPo*

    We have bookable conference rooms and call rooms at our office. I’ve had to referee different employees that get attached to a specific room then get upset if it’s booked at a time they need it. There are a couple people on the same team that are the worst offenders. “I want to use the A call room. That’s the one I always use for customer calls. But Jane booked it. Can you have her book a different room?” Um, why don’t YOU book a different room.

    I’m the Director of Operations at the company. Sometimes I feel like a kindergarten teacher trying to get the children to share. This is so not worth my time, and I don’t put up with it. But for some reason they keep coming to me…

  94. Anon an Analyst*

    I work in clinical research administration, and academic science meets government is like the worst for this, at least in my opinion.. these are just two of my favorites, but I don’t see these much given I’m not in office every week, and most of the staff in our space hot-desk (which, in our case, works great!)
    1) I have an annoying colleague who DOES NOT work in our office space – they’re across the hall. It’s not at all their job to clean in the office suite I work in – but they excessively tidy and always always always adjust the freakin waiting chairs in the main part of the suite when they comes by – you can always tell they’ve been there because the chairs are blocking stuff or are in unnatural sitting angles. They are one of a few people who have a permanent desk, and can set up their space however she likes, so their interference in all things (not only this) is just because this person sucks.
    2) I have a feeling this is something done much more purposefully to justify one’s existence than simply a love of paper, though that is a toss-up. There’s a scientist with a long tenure who’s got knee-high paper in their office, everywhere. Efforts have gone toward getting rid of the paper; this person makes more. In any case, they can’t be moved out of that office, so no matter whether budget impacts other people’s office spaces, theirs cannot be downsized at this point.

  95. CovenRat*

    When I was in graduate school, the lab I worked in was very poorly organized and people were always wandering off with / taking things from others’ setups. Several lab members took to labeling all of their chemicals in foreign languages to ensure that the majority of other lab members couldn’t figure out which ones to steal.

  96. The sacred hole punch*

    I used to work as admin staff in a criminal court. Being public service, we never had enough of anything and what we did have was generally not great quality. This was also 20 years ago and we dealt with gigantic volumes of paper daily…. all of which resulted in intense personal feelings about the office stationary equipment – staplers, hole punches, staple removers, etc. There was a limited amount of quality tools, and many more broken or otherwise slightly useless ones. There was also very high turnover so the dud equipment was constantly recycling round new people.

    Every.single.item (even the bad ones) was marked with the owner’s name multiple times, in all caps. Permanent marker didn’t stay on so everything was covered in bits of paper and sellotape. You’d be sitting in court during a very serious case and using a hole punch with your name in all caps plastered all over it. Anyone who decided they wouldn’t buy into the madness and didn’t label their equipment shortly regretted it when they’d find it either completely gone or replaced with something that didn’t work quite right,. Much office drama could be traced back to stationary issues.

    I started this job as a temp after graduating uni and stayed there for a couple of years. At first I thought it was hilarious that in the office of a criminal court you couldn’t leave anything lying around or it would be stolen. But I was a good worker and quick learner, and after months of spending what felt like several hours a week punching holes in the top left corner of documents to add to case files, and removing endless staples left by other departments so files could be photocopied easily, a departing person bestowed me with their tools. I honestly, genuinely, felt an actual emotional attachment to that hole punch and staple remover. They worked so well! My hand didn’t hurt when I used them! In short, they worked and made my job easier and there was little in that place that could be said to do that.

    I’d like to say that I took great care in choosing the next recipient of The Good Stuff when I left…but I can’t actually remember.

  97. Sack of Benevolent Trash Marsupials*

    Office territorialism is my current life. I work in higher ed and we have off campus space for my program, the management of which is my nightmare.

    Examples: person #1 was asked to share their office – meaning allowing someone else to use the second desk in their office on days they weren’t in. The person’s response? Come in on days they weren’t supposed to be there so the office mate would be uncomfortable and avoid coming in at all. Apparently a good strategy because it worked on the two possible office mates. This person has their own private office now.

    Person #2 requested a private office and rejected two potential office spaces with windows (very desirable) because they didn’t like the view. Person #3 moved their team into a large shared space that is (or I should say ‘was’) occasionally used by others. This person sends me an email any time some unsuspecting person enters “their” space so I can come remove the “intruder.” Person #4 point blank refuses to allow another person to use the second desk in their office on days they aren’t there. Our mutual boss supports this stance to “keep them happy.” Person #5 was asked to move offices and had a complete meltdown which resulted in being allowed to keep the space, which impedes our ability to place a team in the space.

    All of this is in the context of needing to maximize space utilization so we can keep our space, which may be on the chopping block, making it that much more annoying.

  98. AKK*

    My current job is in a very niche industry, but I am just considered customer service and don’t do anything highly specialized.
    The person who had this job before me was VERY territorial as they labeled EVERYTHING (that belongs to the company) with their first name.
    Markers, sheet protectors, rulers, white out, you name. All have been branded with her moniker.

  99. Hermione Danger*

    I used to work at an engineering firm in a rainy city. Engineers who had outside appointments on blustery days would grab the first umbrella they saw to travel to the job site. Those umbrellas were rarely returned, and since my desk was close to reception, the wandering umbrella was often mine.

    So I got creative and purchased an umbrella whose fabric was covered in tiny daisies. That umbrella stayed with me until it got blown inside out on a particularly stormy day.

    1. Bossy*

      Ha ha yes – I discovered the way to be assured of a water bottle in my house was to buy a pink. So easy!

    2. Rincewind*

      I just…how do people not understand that umbrellas aren’t common property? If you didn’t put an umbrella INTO the stand this morning, you don’t get to take one OUT of the stand this afternoon!
      That’s like taking a coat from a coat closet! If it isn’t yours, leave it there. How hard is that?

      1. I Have RBF*

        Some clueless people assume that if it’s out in the open, anyone can claim it. I don’t understand it, but some folks have to be told “No, these don’t belong to everybody. Do not just take one. You can take yours if you put one in here.”

  100. A large cage of birds*

    My last job has an executive assistant/office manager (OM) who was very protective of her work, and it was bizarre. She’s one of those employees whose been there forever and has Her Way of doing things.

    OM was weirdly protective of meetings in particular. It was her job to set up recurring meetings or other large team events. I’d set up a training for my team, at my manager’s request, and I asked the office manager to find a time and set out an invite. Someone on another team had heard about it and asked if she could come for some cross training. I said of course and I forwarded her the meeting invite.

    Apparently OM got an email notification if you forwarded one of her meetings. Within 5 minutes she sent me a LONG email about how managing meetings are her job and I should let her know anytime I needed a meeting forwarded, she’s always more than happy to help with these kinds of tasks, etc. etc.

    OK, but it would have taken me longer to write an email to OM and ask her to invite my colleague than it would for me to just forward the meeting invite myself.

    OM also 1) took it upon herself to manage timesheets for everyone in the department without asking the managers if they wanted her to provide this service, 2) insisted that she needed full access to the personal calendars of all two dozen employees (more than the default view of free/busy times), and 3) sent out an invite to my goodbye lunch BEFORE I’d announced that I was leaving the job (which she knew). But that’s another story.

  101. ManagingManagers*

    I work in transportation managing a bunch of contractors. We have a shift changeover that results in something like 15 to 20 driver’s waiting for keys. My coworker gets out before this shift changeover happens, and doesn’t like that drivers use her chair, and now moves her chair at the end of her shift into the storage room and locks it in there.

  102. Marian Librarian*

    My first job out of college was in an open office plan, where the supervisors had offices and the direct reports had desks in an open area, with no cubicles. My space had 2 walls and 2 desks, so the area was delineated somewhat, but still open. I had gotten some old signs from an antique store, one of which said “Office.” I put it up for a bit of humor, and my co-workers said it reminded them of Les Nesman from WKRP. I never put down tape lines, though!

    1. Workerbee*

      I totally did tape off Les Nessman lines around a colleague’s desk who had been demoted from an office to a cube and who was irked about not having a door anymore. (We shared the same sense of humor so it went over really well; he kept the tape lines up and told people they had to knock on the cube doorway before entering. And they did!)

  103. Snow Angels in the Zen Garden*

    In my former library, I was territorial over the bulletin boards and the only stapler that opened properly to attach things to them (the newer, cheaper staplers didn’t). In retrospect, I should not have been allowed that much autonomy over the bulletin boards because I got VERY upset when I had to start sharing that task. At the same time, one and only one coworker processed the serials. I asked my manager for three years running if I could learn how to do that as one of my professional development goals for the year. After repeatedly being reassured I could be trained in that, it still hadn’t happened by the time I left.

  104. Aspiring Chicken Lady*

    Does it count that every time I get up from my WFH chair my WFH feline coworker steals my seat? And stares at me as if I just signed myself up to bring cheap ass rolls to the potluck?

    1. rando*

      Im sorry, but company policy states that feline coworkers have priority in seating arrangements. You can take it up with HR if you have a problem with this.

    3. The Prettiest Curse*

      Very occasionally on my WFH days, my entertainment for the day is watching my dog get royally trolled by the cat next door, who likes to sit on their fence in sight of the dog but well out of reach. Since my dog is part Malinois and has major Security Dog genes, he does not like this incursion on the perimeter of his territory at all. The cat seems to find it hugely entertaining, though.

    5. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

      I lost custody of my chair to my canine coworkers two and a half years ago and have been standing to work ever since. I did try lowering it and getting a new chair, but suddenly having my desk in woofapotamus nose range led to more having to wipe slobber off my desk supplies than I was happy with, so that chair is now occupied by Edgar the Skeleton and I just jog in place during my meetings.

    6. Random Bystander*

      It could be worse. I have two WFH feline co-workers who can’t stand each other and they both want to make sure that the computer is warm (small desktop). It’s gotten to where one gets put in the front room all morning so the other can have the desk and then in the afternoon they switch.

  105. Spicy Tuna*

    I worked for a company that had a policy that manager level and above got an office, but offices with exterior windows were reserved for director level and above, unless there were more window offices than director level and above employees in a particular department or floor.

    I was a senior manager, and I had a window office. The floor I worked on was being reconfigured, and in the reconfiguration, I had to relinquish my window office to the HR director. However, a brand new, larger interior office was built for me. It was directly across the hall from my former window office.

    As soon as the HR director saw my larger office, he pitched a fit about it being bigger than his. I offered to switch but he said no, he wanted the window, but didn’t think it was fair that I got a bigger office. Then he complained that the window made the office too hot, so I again offered to switch. He said no, he would just keep the blinds shut. And then continued to complain that my office was larger than his!

  106. Retired early Miss the money*

    One of my more persnickety coworkers chained his chair to his cubicle when he was gone so no one else could use it. It was not specially made for him or designed from r some ergonomic purpose. He just didn’t want anyone using it. The more agitated his notes got the more it was being “borrowed” but suggestions that he lighten up about it as that might mean less interest, you know, like third grade, but no.

  107. umami*

    I had a reserved parking spot at my old job (my own sign with my title), and I was in a temporary office for a while during renovations of our building. My assistant had my sign moved to a spot in front of the new building and would watch it like a hawk, calling campus security to ticket anyone who parked in it. I was not at all militant about my spot – there was usually ample parking in that particular lot because no classes were near that building, but she was adamant that there should be CONSEQUENCES for not observing parking signs!

  108. Madmin*

    Recent turf war over a kettle. Our department bought a kettle when sole users of an office, another team moved into our office and labelled the kettle as their department’s (in a seperate kitchen turf war ). We all moved to a new office where they magnanimously said we were free to use their kettle (which is ours). A few of our team got really upset until it was pointed out that the new office had several coffee makers and a constant hot water machine…..making the original kettle completely redundant.

  109. Rook Thomas*

    I use a rollerball mouse (ball on top, in the middle, click on either side) – I bought it years and years ago when I was feeling a bit of carpal tunnel. Not only did it help my wrists, but a bonus was that my boss stopped sitting at my desk (which he would do if he was walking by and the phone rang and I wasn’t sitting there in the moment). He couldn’t figure out how to work the mouse. This also meant he didn’t use my computer (not a big deal), but open mail and leave it all over my desk, open pens and sharpies and leave them uncapped all over my desk, etc etc. So kinda a win-win. I have brought this mouse with me to subsequent jobs — only replacing it once. It’s great!

    2. I Have RBF*

      I will only use a trackball. Holding a standard mouse for more than two minutes is very painful for me. You wouldn’t believe the whining I got when I was in an office and someone else decided to try to use my system. Too bad, so sad.

  110. Workerbee*

    How to Tell The Difference Between Factories and Corporate Offices
    – Where quotation marks mean an unofficial designation –

    Factories:
    – My assigned workstation
    -“My” parking spot
    -“My” seat in the breakroom
    -“My” spot in the refrigerator where I put my lunch bag.

    Corporate Offices:
    – My assigned workstation or “My” preferred hot desk
    -“My” parking spot
    -“My” seat in the breakroom
    -“My” spot in the refrigerator where I put my lunch.

    Anecdotal factory example:
    I was a summer worker at a factory. On the first day, I put my lunch in the communal refrigerator like everyone else.
    Lunchtime: The entire breakroom was treated to a diatribe about how SOMEBODY had put their lunch in that person’s spot.

    Anecdotal corporate office example:
    There was no assigned parking in the lot – it was supposed to be first come, first served. Just an ordinary lot! Nothing fancy! I never noticed which cars were in what spot.

    Then I took an open spot one day, and returned to use it the next day – and oh, the fuss. The person who, I guess, made a mad rush to work to use that spot and who had been gone that first day was now back.

    I have a lot more examples, but it was quite interesting to me, at the start of my corporate office career, how similar the behavior was to factories.

    But perhaps it’s perfectly natural – after all, they instill it in us in kindergarten*:

    -Assigned spot in circle on floor
    -Assigned cubbyhole
    -Assigned desk (if applicable)

    You get really used to thinking of things as “mine” instead of on loan or shared!

    *Not all kindergartens, situations, mentalities, etc.

    1. Strive to Excel*

      It was pointed out to me by a friend of my parents that small children cannot learn how to share until they first have ownership over something. A lot of people try to teach “sharing” by saying “none of this is actually yours and it is your duty to give it up to other people if they need it”. Result – unhappiness.

  111. Keymaster*

    I worked in the health center of a small private college as the practice manager. It was just me and the school RN. On my first day it was obvious the RN had been left alone too long; the overseeing physician was partially retired and didn’t follow up often so the nurse obviously felt untouchable. The students loved her because she let them do basically whatever they wanted whenever they came in, including pawing through medical supplies, and other things that were technically HIPAA violations. She was territorial about everything – I wasn’t allowed to answer the phone or talk to students. I wasn’t allowed to talk to our overseeing physician. I wasn’t allowed to talk to our boss – I had to go through her to talk to our boss. She took my office keys out of my purse (which was locked in my locker) unbeknownst to me and returned them to security, saying she wasn’t comfortable with me having keys to “her office”.

    Lo and behold, she didn’t want me having keys because she hadn’t had the biohazard waste picked up in four years and was shoving bags of sharps containers, soiled bandages, blood, and body waste materials in the utility closet right next to the radiator, which explained the smell I’d called maintenance about. She didn’t want me having keys to the utility closet, or any of the other closets or our records and storage room because they were floor-to-ceiling packed with medical supplies she was hoarding in the event of what I can only guess was the zombie apocalypse: expired medication, leaking IV bags, a full military field kit, and broken medical equipment.

    It goes without saying I quit after the key incident, but not before reporting everything with pictures.

    1. froodle*

      “she hadn’t had the biohazard waste picked up in four years and was shoving bags of sharps containers, soiled bandages, blood, and body waste materials in the utility closet right next to the radiator”

      oh my god I cannot tell you the loud plaintive whhhhhhhhyyy that tumbled out of my noisehole when I read this

    2. I Have RBF*

      She broke in to your locker to take your keys out of your purse to return them to security saying she wasn’t “comfortable” with you having keys to your shared office? What a delusional idiot. I would have quit too if management refused to correct that shit with a (figurative) hammer.

      And the biohazard waste – oh gawd, plague central. Plus expired and leaking medical supplies? WTF?

  112. Alexandra*

    In my warehouse days, we used to have issues with losing tape guns, especially good ones to the point where we were given one and had to sign for it. If we lost it we’d be out $15. We were told to do whatever we wanted to personalize it. I took mine home for the weekend, got out the expoxy glue, and totally bedazzled it. I made sure to incorporate my name in there too. Best work of my life. I could spot it a mile away and if someone, especially a man picked it up without thinking and looked at it, they dropped it like it was radioactive! I never lost it, and when I left people asked me if they could keep it!

  113. Whomst*

    Not exactly the prompt, but I work in tech and my office has always had more stalls in the women’s bathroom than there are women working in the building and I’ve contemplated making us little magnetic name placards we could use to each claim our own stall in the bathroom. I don’t actually work with any of the other women, so I don’t have a good read on whether they would think it as funny as I do.

    1. Paint N Drip*

      I think it would be funny!
      But if we’ve learned anything from this post, you MUST NOT assign them yourself in case someone has a favorite :)

  114. Alexis Rose*

    When I worked in academia, two high-ranking profs (both Directors of their respective program) got into a turf war over wall space.

    One person had their program standing banners in the hall outside their office suite, but behind the banners was what looked like a cork board. The other Director insisted that these “corkboards” be used to display student research posters and kept moving the banners unceremoniously out of the way to hang up posters. The banners were moved back and forth, posters were removed and wrinkled, words were exchanged, heated emails were sent debating the merits of student research versus program pride, on and on. They came to me several times (I was the Dean’s assistant at the time) and I repeated various iterations of “you are adults and this is a non-issue, figure it out yourselves”, and then they finally brought this to the Dean to arbitrate for them.

    The Dean informed them that the “cork boards” were, in fact, sound baffles. They should have nothing attached to them or placed in front of them at all, they were intended to prevent the incessant echoing that a metal-glass-and-tile atrium in the center of your building will cause.

    They both left the office sheepishly, and I never had to hear about it again.

  115. Tree*

    I’m not proud of this.

    2005 welding shop. I’m the third person hired in, and we’re quickly growing. guy #6 comes in his first day, he’s doing fine with training (watching us work so far). I send him to lunch while I finish up the step I was on.

    I get to the break room and He’s In My Chair. (this is so embarrassing) My brain absolutely froze. “You’re in my seat.” He just looked up at me. “Move!” And everyone else looked at him too, until he got up and scrounged a chair from somewhere else.

    I’m a lot better with trainees now.

  116. Anne Elliot*

    In a government agency, the employee elevated to Second Boss decided to broadcast their new importance/authority by ordering curtains for their big new office — floor-to-ceiling velvet drapes with gold fringe and the government seal centered on every panel, along with a desk with the same seal mounted on the front. It would have been a look that screamed Oval Office, except that someone happened to mention the plan to the Big Boss — a responsible, unostentatious policy wonk — who promptly shut it down. If you wonder whether this gave us important information about what working for Second Boss would be like: Yes, it did.

  117. Rage*

    I used to work in a mental health office, and our front desk employee was a bit militant about the scheduling software. I was mostly back-office, but assisted with front-office and so would schedule appointments when she was unavailable or off.

    So I would schedule an appointment for Mike and Patty Smith (obviously not their real names), and in the notes I would write, “Marriage counseling.”

    She would see what I did, and go in to edit the appointment. It would then read: “Michael (Mike) and Patricia (Patty) Smith”. The notes would say “Michael (Mike) and Patricia (Patty) Smith are coming in for marriage counseling.” Even funnier is that while MY initial scheduling would send an email notification to the counselor, her edit would not. (Which, come to think of it, was probably part of the problem; if the counselors kept getting an email update every time she changed something, the situation would probably have come to a head. Since nobody else but her seemed to care about it, it didn’t.)

    If that was all she did, I probably would not have cared either. But then she would complain that she had too much work to do and couldn’t get it all done. *insert Robert Downy Jr. eye-rolling meme here*

  118. A large cage of birds*

    I was once this person with dry erase markers. We needed all kinds fairly often and they’d run off all the time. The real prize though was the fine tip ones. A manager bought a pack and gave it to me. I hid them so nobody else could find them. It was a precious resource and I was going to protect it. (I was one of two full-time employees on the team, other than the managers so I was there most of the time if someone needed them.)

    1. A large cage of birds*

      To explain why, this was at an animal shelter and we had a food chart with all the dog bedrooms. Obviously this changed a lot when dogs were adopted or moved for some reason. So we needed to write which dog was in which room and how much/what kind of food they needed. It got messy with all the changes and especially so if we had to use thick markers to squeeze a lot of text into a small area.

  119. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

    While I would never be as loud about my stapler, I did briefly work for a company that would not provide any office supplies. It was especially irking since they had record profits. I had to purchase all of my own staplers, tape dispenser, hole punch, scissors. And they kept wandering off. I did put my name and extension on them so I could identify them when I had to retrieve them every day. I estimated that in the 12 months I worked there I spent about $8000 in man-hours tracking down my stuff. But of course I was salaried, so that was “free” time.

  120. Juicebox Hero*

    Retail yet again.

    When I was in the men’s department, since it was pretty large, there were two unofficial sub-departments. Each was ruled by one of the two employees who’d been there longest, “Krystle” and “Alexis”. Each had her own way of doing things, from where on a garmet price tags were put to how things were displayed to the way shirts were folded. Krystle was nice to me and would politely explain that when I worked on HER side, this was the way to do things. Alexis was meaner than a snake with hemmorhoids and would rip your head off for breaking her unwritten rules. As merchandise came and went, the lines between the two were invisible, ever shifting, and only slightly less strictly enforced than the DMZ.

    Heaven help the poor clueless timid little mouse of a new employee who desperately needed a job, any job (hi). I knew I was in for it when on the first day the (male) manager told me if I had a problem with one of them, figure it out myself because he refused to get involved.

    Naturally, each had their favorites among the junior employees so I mainly got to work with Krystle, but on rare occasions I had to work with Alexis and I’d panic and cry and have to talk myself out of calling off for hours before my shift started.

    (Quitting was NOT an option because I desperately needed money, health insurance, and to make my mother stop berating me for being a lazy slacker for not finding a job months before.)

  121. lisa*

    We had a row of connecting desks along a wall in our office. While they weren’t divided, but it was clear there where each space started/began. But one staff memember got annoyed someone was “getting close” to them and ended up marking everyone’s sections with brightly color coded tape. And if you crossed her neon green tape area, you got a lecture about it. She even printed out a color legend, so we all knew what colors belonged to whom.

    1. I Have RBF*

      I have so many mean ideas about tape lines. I would have fantasized about replacing all the tape with either black, grey or pink, messing with the sizes/boundaries, etc. Probably a good reason I work from home…

  122. AcerArgentum*

    I’m not entirely sure how much this counts since the ‘territory’ was technically the customers, but I worked at a pharmacy through 2020 and most importantly through the rolling waves of supply failures. During early days we were the point of contact for all customers trying to get hands sanitizer and ended up spending a lot of time gently discouraging people from trying to make homemade versions if we were out (witch hazel is not the same, I’m sorry.)

    In the middle of this insanity my manager grabbed me during a shift and pulled me into the side room. Glancing surreptitiously at the other technicians he palmed me a single disposable dispenser for hands sanitizer, with all the gravitas of a cold war dead drop. He then told me in hushed tones not to let anyone know he had done this for me.

    Apparently he was worried because I was the only one who had to take public transit to get in and he wanted me to be safe. I no longer work there but I still have that dispenser.

  123. Countess Karnstein*

    It me – or rather, my boss wants it to be me.

    Most people in my workplace no longer have assigned desks. I do.

    First she told me to print out a “Permanent Desk of” sign and hang it in a specific place on my cubicle. Fine. I even made it look nice and blend with the org’s branding.

    Now she says to take a dry erase marker and write my name on the frosted glass of the partition. I don’t know if she remembers the sign. I didn’t ask how big to write it.

    The thing is, I expect customers to find my group, like they did before the pandemic, and unload on me in person. Regardless of whether I’m on shift to take their concerns or not. Regardless of whether I’m in deep focus. I have executive function issues – thus an assigned desk way back in the corner – so I absolutely don’t want this, but already know her answer is going to be “suck it up” if I remind her of that.

    I plan to lock up all my stuff and take the only key home with me, next time I’m in, rather than leaving snacks out and hoping it gets the point across. But I suspect all this territory marking is moot; there are plenty of desks for someone to poach on days I’m not in and they’re in the reservation system while mine is not.

    I’ve thought about taking one of the long, narrow canvases I bought for flow painting and just painting my name, then asking her how to mount it, as a way to get ahead of the curve, but that would be like sending up a flare to all of the customers who shouldn’t be going to me directly…

  124. Strive to Excel*

    I’m not normally a territorial person at work (though as soon as my nice art supplies come out at home it’s a different story). But one year it was me in food service with the pens.

    I worked in a deli for the summer and dealt with the hot food cases. Hot food has strict limits on how long it can be out, down to the 15 minute mark. This is tracked by labelling the food and by logging the temperatures on a regular basis. Same with those rotisserie chickens that get put out on the sales floor. As such, whoever is working with hot food *needs* a pen, ideally a Sharpie as they are more resistant to grease etc. Never have I ever seen supplies disappear as fast as a Sharpie in a kitchen. You better believe that when I was on hot food I found a Sharpie first thing in the morning and I kept it on me in my apron all day long. If I could have ziptied it to my arm I would have. Woe betide anyone who took my sharpie.

    In my defense, everyone was like that with pens there and it seems to be a very common pattern in restaurants.

  125. Edward Williams*

    Employees at one level get 1 desk (with drawers) and one table (no drawers). Higher-level employees get 2 desks. New hire was at level 1, but the janitors bought 2 desks.
    Complainer: He doesn’t deserve 2 desks!
    Janitor, on receiving complaint: There are no more tables in the storeroom.
    Complainer escalated to boss, then to grandboss.
    Grandboss told janitor: Please come back and turn one desk to the wall so the drawers can’t be opened. Janitor did so.

    1. EllenD*

      This reminds me of story about UK civil service from 1970s & 1980s. Depending on your grade the kind of desk you could have varied. Most junior level had drawers on one-side only, next grade up had drawers on both sides. Next level up had slightly bigger desks, etc. Bottom rung of the senior management grades got wooden desks and wooden desk furniture (eg wooden in/out-trays). Also at certain level you got carpet with flooring at the edge, while the next grade up could have wall to wall carpeting. On one occasion, someone moved into an office previously occupied by a higher grade and some one came and cut the carpet so that it wasn’t wall to wall anymore!!! I’m not sure what happened when the person was promoted and entitled to wall to wall carpet. Now civil servants are all open plan areas, even senior management. Only the Permanent Secretary (head of the department) and Ministers (political appointments) get their own offices, which are usually reasonable large to accommodate tables for meetings and sofas and chairs for more informal chats.

  126. Ann O'Nemity*

    We claimed our own restroom stalls and labelled them.

    I was one of three women that worked on a floor dominated by men. The women’s restroom had exactly three stalls, so we each used our “own.” And at some point we labelled them as well. Women who worked on other floors and occasionally came to our floor would joke about using “Ann’s toilet” or “Kathleen’s toilet.” It was all in good fun.

  127. Apt Nickname*

    When I started at my workplace, there was a long-time worker who took more than her fair share of space and was extremely territorial about it. There were two spaces where she (and other people in her job) did work, and there was a computer desk in each space. Those were HER computers (they were not actually her computers). Despite them being shared, no one else was allowed to use them or the desks and she would tell you off. She also kept an entire drawer’s worth of items in the break room. There were four drawers and about 40-50 people used the break room. Our manager was not a strong personality and if the worker wasn’t happy, she’d barge into our boss’ office and complain with a raised voice, regardless of what our boss was doing or who she was meeting with. The only reason it stopped was because she retired.

    1. Rusty Shackelford*

      This reminds me of a particularly obnoxious coworker… we had a full-size refrigerator in our breakroom that was shared by over a dozen employees. You were supposed to label your food, especially condiments that would be left longer than a week, and the fridge would be cleaned out on a regular schedule and anything without a label was to be tossed. Jane decided this was too much trouble and she would just claim one of the vegetable drawers as her own instead. She stuck a note on it saying “This is Jane’s drawer, do not use or clean.” (Naturally, I started leaving my properly labeled food in there.)

  128. R*

    i used to have a job at a entity with two main departments that generally never interacted with or even saw each other. Due to space issues, my specific office in the department of cats had to share a floor with department of dogs employees. so now you had dog employees and cat employees all working on the same floors, sharing the same public facilities. There was some….friction, to say the least.

    At one point, a dog employee put a note over a toaster oven saying “I paid for this with my own money. I decide who uses them. DOGS ONLY.” (Notably, none of us cat employees had used the toaster oven). It caused some drama for a while. (I may have slightly contributed by putting a note on our new microwave which said “this microwave is for everyone, yay!” with little stick people holding hands under a rainbow).

    The funniest thing? Pretty soon after this, we all got emails about how toaster ovens weren’t allowed in the building anyway due to fire hazard, so everyone lost their toaster oven privileges.

  129. Lozi*

    SCISSORS! Good ones, that is. I write my initials on them in sharpie, I have labels on some whether they are for adhesive or cardboard or only paper, etc. and I work a fairly typical office job, but they tend to go missing or get gunked up so fast without this strategy!

  130. Apt Nickname*

    I also had a coworker who would take office supplies from the neighborhood center and then label them with ‘Stolen from the desk of Artemisia Smith’. I never knew the backstory on that but I’ve never felt the need to label a pack of post-it notes.

  131. Island Girl*

    Years ago I worked at a rock radio station overseas, which naturally attracted an array of human nature that most times was amusing. But we hired one sales person whose sense of “ownership” went too far. In an area shared by the 4-person sales team, “P” decided to mark his territory by using a marker to color every-other facet of pencils to indicate they were his. Of course one of the ornery late night DJs then did the same to all of the other pencils, resulting in “P” bristling every time he thought someone else was using one of “his” pencils. “P” also used one of those old-timey dial-and-punch label makers to put his name on the stapler and other shared office items.

  132. Always Tired*

    I have two little ones which I have done and have no shame about.

    When I was a receptionist, the only pens provided were those terrible bic stics. They gave me hand cramps and I hated them. But if I had nice pens, people would just grab them off the desk while walking by. Get up to make tea, come back 30 seconds later and my pen is gone. So I got a fountain pen. A very comfortable, beautiful pen. People kept sheepishly bringing it back after they took it and realized they were not comfortable with a fountain pen. My new place uses pentel energels so my fountain pen lives at home now.

    At the current role, since we are a construction company, there are no basic hand tools in the office. You would think there would be many, but they all gravitate to job sites and disappear. This is very annoying because we own the building and are the only company here, so loose door handles, squeeky hinges and the like are our problem to resolve. So I bought one of those cheap “baby’s first dorm” toolkits. And I paid an extra dollar to get the pink set. They are all still present and accounted for 2 years later. I just fixed a door latch yesterday with the screwdriver, and the tape measure gets used just about daily.

    1. Bookworm*

      Hahah on the fountain pen. I use them sometimes and I guess for some people it would be like trying to drive a manual transmission when you’re used to an automatic. That’s a lovely solution. :D

    2. Butterfly Counter*

      Ha! My husband uses my pink “baby’s first dorm room” kits in his car! When we move in together, he had a “legit” tool box was was delighted he had a option he could keep in his car, just in case. He’s not threatened by pink (and I’m actually not a fan of the color, but it was a gift).

      1. Always Tired*

        Oh, I’m not a pink girly either. I just knew that red, grey, black, and orange would all go missing. The dudes are too embarrassed to be seen with the cheap pink tools. If a guest or field staffer stops by, they loudly explain “This is Always Tired’s hammer! Not mine!”

  133. Justin*

    Two jobs ago, about 4 of my colleagues were women around the same age who were all “assistant directors” at a community center. There was no director. They liked their system. They were EXTREMELY close the point where they were godmothers for each others’ children. I’m just giving context, not judging this part, aside from what happened.

    Two levels up, a more efficient boss came in and realized, no, they needed a director because with the lack of boundaries no one was ever held accountable.

    When this woman was hired, the other four changed desks in the (one room) office to give the new director the worst and least private desk.

    The two-levels up boss (who was my boss) shook her head about how petty it was (and these folks were in their 30s). But the new director cheerfully accepted her bad desk and was great at the job.

  134. anonymous state employee*

    Commenting under a different username in case any of my colleagues read AAM, as this is rather recognizable. I am the territory-marker in this story, although I remain convinced that it was absolutely justified.

    I work for a state agency. It’s a fairly large agency with about 1,100 people in the headquarters building and another 500 or so in other locations around the state. Like most governmental entities, money is always tight, and whatever is purchased is sourced for the lowest possible cost.

    As the pandemic broadened in March of 2020, the agency was confronted with the need to socially distance those 1,100 or so people who worked at HQ, ideally by having them work from home. However, because money is always tight, the only employees who had been issued laptops were senior management, i.e., maybe a few dozen out of the 1,100 folks in the HQ building. The rest of us had desktop tower-style computers.

    Again because money is always tight, there certainly weren’t hundreds of unused laptops stacked up in a storage room somewhere just in case they were needed, so there was some serious scrambling to try to figure out how everyone could work from home at very short notice. The IT folks scrounged up hundreds of Thin-Client fobs, issued them to everyone who could work remotely, had each of us download Remote Desktop software onto our personal computers at home so that we could essentially work on our desktop computers in the HQ building from our kitchen tables dozens of miles away, and while it wasn’t elegant, we made it work.

    However, the largest division of the agency was prohibited from telecommuting due to the nature of their work (lots of PII and access to secure federal sites). They couldn’t continue to work all crammed into a single cube farm due to social distancing requirements, but they also couldn’t work remotely. So there were many strategy meetings at very high levels, until finally one of the Powers That Be came up with a Brilliant Idea!

    The Brilliant Idea was that these 400 or so folks who had to continue working in-person in the building would be temporarily moved out to desks on all four floors, keeping at least one empty cubicle between each occupied one, and they could all do their work at those desks using the computers that were on the desks already!

    …..the same computers that the rest of us were working on remotely from our kitchens.

    We found out about this Brilliant Idea on literally the final day we were allowed to be physically in the office. Nearly all of my bureau had already shifted to remote work, and I was one of the two people from my unit still in the building, making sure that desks were cleared and files put away before we left for an unknown number of weeks or months. And the final thing I did before I left the building on March 17 was to print out and tape signs on all 30 or so of the computer towers in my bureau. Each sign, printed in 84-point font, read:

    STOP!!
    DO NOT TOUCH!!
    This computer is being used for remote access!!
    DO NOT TURN ON!!
    DO NOT TURN OFF!!
    DO NOT TOUCH!!

  136. Destra N.*

    About 15 years ago, I had recently started a new job when a colleague on my team, who I liked well enough and who seemed competent enough, was unexpectedly fired.

    To preface this next part, we all had large-ish cubicles, and there was room for a second chair for someone visiting the space to sit in. The entire building kept the overhead fluorescent lights off all day. And bmy cubicle happened to be one closest to the CEO’s office.

    I didn’t know why or what might have happened to my colleague and thus didn’t know how to interpret it without much context to go on. I was just coming off a toxic job experience that ended with getting fired on dubious grounds, and it was during the 2008-2009 recession, so there was a fair bit of trauma playing into my alarm. I decided it wouldn’t be a bad thing to make it clear to the management (who seemed to like me) that I wasn’t planning to go anywhere.

    So I furnished my cubicle. I found a cushy folding moon chair on clearance and grabbed a cute lamp at a thrift store and used those to plant my flag.

    It didn’t cause any drama, but it did have an impact. The comfy chair became a reason for people to stop by and linger a bit, which led me to building a solid network and alliances with my co-workers. I think it came off as slightly quirky to the management, in a good way, and they loved me and my work, and it ended up launching the career path that I’m still on today. I still get birthday cards from the CEO.

    I never did learn why my colleague was fired.

    1. AXG*

      I’ve done this too in my cube! Moved from an office to a cube (office politics) and dragged over a comfy armchair and a potted plant. The number of people who linger because they have a spot to sit is quite high, and it helps continue to build relationships :)

  137. Preschool Guy*

    I am the staff member who is territorial of my items, and I’m a bit embarrassed to say I get easily annoyed when my things are taken. I work in the front office of a preschool, and despite having a cubicle half-wall around 3.5 sides of my work area (the front of which extends in front of another whole desk, so people need to go way out of their way to get around behind my desk), teachers frequently see my office supplies and other desk things as communal—and don’t return them. So I started labeling everything. Not my pens, because I have a ton of them and there are plenty of free pens to grab from other places, but you bet your ass my scissors (a VERY in-demand—and oft-stolen—item), stapler, tape dispenser, walkie talkie, and a bunch of other things all have my name either sharpied or label-stickered on.
    The couple of weeks before school started this year, when all the teachers returned and set up their classrooms, ALL of the scissors disappeared from the office and were not returned. I was out sick for a large chunk of this time, and when I came back teachers were continuing to come rifling through our things looking for scissors. We had our own reasons to need scissors in the office, and had to resort to sitting near each other to share the one pair of scissors we still had between 3-4 of us. It got so bad that one day after everyone left, still tired and grumpy from my recent illness, I went around to every classroom looking for my missing scissors and still couldn’t find them.
    By the third day of school, all scissors had been returned except mine, and extras/replacements had been ordered. My original scissors were returned the following week, after almost a month missing, when I complained about what happened to my favorite teacher. An hour later, sheepish, she came into the office and silently handed me my scissors, clearly labeled with my name. It’s a good thing she was already my favorite.

    1. Preschool Guy*

      On a way more serious note:
      We work in a secured building with dedicated security staff, and all external doors are locked by default. A handful of us have door control remotes that allow us to remotely unlock the front door, only when we can clearly see who wants in and recognize them, or after we use the intercom to see what they want. During parts of the school year, another department has weekly weekend events and are often the only ones using the building, and their office staff are off on Mondays. Their office staff also have a remote.
      Late last year, I came in on a Monday to my door remote missing. This is a HUGE deal, of course, so I escalated it to the appropriate people and was given a stern talking-to about security. I was annoyed at this, as my remote doesn’t leave my desk, ever, so I went snooping. The director of the other department is a notorious snoop, and I had previously left a “you should not be in here” note on top of the things in my desk drawer specifically to deter her, so I had a suspicion. I found the remote on a clearly visible part of the weekend-event-having department’s front desk, where it was unattended and could have been easily taken. I asked around when their office returned and found out that over the weekend a contract security officer had come into my office, taken my remote, taken it HOME, and brought it back the next day, only to leave it in the wrong place.
      Needless to say, I was cleared, and began locking it into my desk over the weekends, along with my mouse and anything else that could prevent my stuff/devices being used by people who aren’t supposed to. The contract we had with that security service was ended for several reasons and we like the new guys a lot better.

  138. Perilous*

    I’m an engineer. Long ago I worked on a project where I used a bus analyzer (if you need to ask – probably not the type of bus you’re thinking of ;). A couple of teammates occasionally needed to borrow it. One, a woman, always asked first. The other, a man, just took it, leaving me to search the lab for it.
    My solution? Moved it to the back of the same drawer it was always stored in, but now behind my box of tampons.
    Despite the fact that the guy in question was married with 3 daughters, he never again retrieved it from the drawer himself.

  139. reject187*

    This one is incredibly minor, but I had a favorite mug at a part-time job. All the mugs looked exactly alike, but “mine” had a glaze crack on the inside. If my mug wasn’t available, I just wouldn’t have any coffee.

    When I left the job, they let me take the mug. It happily lives on my mug tree at home and is still used frequently.

    1. Blue Spoon*

      Being possessive of mugs does actually make sense to me, just because I would feel weird drinking out of a mug that had someone else’s mouth on it.

  140. Anita Brake*

    This past summer I took a temporary job with a friend. Here is an example of a conversation we had MANY times per DAY:
    Boss: “Can you take care of the xyz report today?”
    Me: “Yes.”
    Boss: Ok great. You want to do that on Microsoft Excel.
    Me: “Ok, I’ll get that taken care of.”
    Boss: “And then when it’s done, file it in the xyz file on the OneDrive.”
    Me: “Ok.”
    Boss: “Then call Lorenzo at XYZ Services to let him know it’s done.”
    Me: “Ok.”
    Boss: “Then print out a copy and file it in the xyz file.”
    Me: …at this point I would stop responding because she’s just going to keep going on and on…
    Boss: “Remember to (I kid you not!) file the report with the title facing the wall. And then take a screenshot. Send that to me on my phone, put it in the One Drive in the XYZ Drive, in the Copies file. Then send it to me in my email. And also copy Lorenzo. And, you’d better print another one and put it in Lorenzo’s file so we have proof you sent it….”

    Or perhaps…

    Boss: “Do you want to use the company card to get us coffee on the way in?”
    Me: Sure!
    Boss: “Okay. Do you have my order?”
    Me: “Yes.”
    Boss: “Ok. I’ll text it to you now.”
    Me: “But I already have…”
    Boss: [sends her standard order via text. Again.] “Do you have that in your Notes app under my name?”
    Me: “Yes.”
    Boss: “Okay great. And do you have my coffee card so I get points?”
    Me: “Yes.”
    Boss: “And did you check the balance on the card to see if I have enough (points, money, whatever) to pay for the order?”
    Me: “Yes.”
    Boss: “Okay great, I’ll see you in a few minutes. Oh, did you remember to order oat milk instead of regular?”
    Me: “Yes.”
    Boss: “And you said sugar-free?”
    Me: “Yes.”
    Boss: “Because sometimes they don’t remember when you say sugar-free. Would you verify with them that it’s sugar free?”
    Me: facepalm.

    Literally every task, every interaction, every order. I cried multiple times during the summer while at work. Oh. My. God. I do love her, and we are still friends. But Oh. MY. GOD!!

    …I lasted 8 weeks. Almost all summer!

  141. CommanderBanana*

    I would be Very Displeased if someone who reported to me was being unkind to new hires by claiming that unassigned parking spots, desks, etc., were “theirs.”

  142. skeptic53*

    Our private medical practice had to merge with a large hospital-based system of clinics. Our clinic is on 2 floors. The new managers mandated that all supplies be kepr in a supply room in the north part of downstairs. The connecting stairs were at the south end. Those of us who worked in the nort part upstairs started keeping stashes of frequently used things in our workspaces. The new managers came around one night and searched the drawers in the exam rooms, the assistant’s work stations, and the provider’s offices including desk drawers and files. They confiscated supplies and reprimanded us all. They took away our sterilizer and made us send instruments downtown to be sterilized, causing frequent shortages of instruments. Often multi-piece instruments would have mismatched parts, causing procedures to have to be rescheduled. Corporate medicine sucks

    1. Strive to Excel*

      Oh boy do I have a story for this one. It’s not territory-marking, but you might appreciate it. It’s from my friend and I am anonymizing it slightly, so if details look off that’s why.

      Friend is a surgeon in an increasingly corporate hospital. Corporate hospital decided that they were tired of losing scrubs and instituted a new scrub system. Dirty scrubs had to be dropped off in the dirty scrub machine, which would give you a token. The token would then be put into the clean scrub machine to get a new set. Everyone would then only have two pairs of scrubs at any given time. In theory you keep one in your locker that you get out when you need to change into one and then refill your backup from the scrub machine.

      Problem one: the locker room was very small, so the scrub *disposal* machine was in there for reasons of sterility and cleanliness, but the new scrub machine wouldn’t fit so it was in the supplies area. To get to the supplies area you had to go through several corridors and the waiting room.

      Problem two: medical staff, especially surgeons & OR staff, go through scrubs very quickly.

      It didn’t take long for one of the senior surgeons to come out and find that he had no clean scrubs to change into. This dude was an ex-military trauma doc coming out of a grueling hours-long surgery. Excellent surgeon, but his give-a-hoot meter was long-dry and his patience for the finer feelings of societal etiquette was long gone. Even for a surgeon he was abrupt.

      So naturally his solution was to walk to the new scrubs dispenser naked as the day he was born.

      I heard no more about the new scrubs dispenser system after that.

  143. Rep (taylor’s version)*

    At Old Job, for some reason, we weren’t allowed to buy new chairs, so there were many, many chairs well past their expiration date. However, somewhere along the line, the admin got permission to order 4 new chairs. 4. For an organization with hundreds of employees. When people who were blessed with the new chairs left or moved to a different section, there would be a LINE of people waiting to grab that chair. The victor of the chair would then either brand it in some way so if it disappeared, they’d k ow which chair was theirs, or they would chain it to their workplace. Happy to now be in a place where we all have nice chairs that are routinely updated. Though it did take me almost a year to get my own scissors…

    1. Lou's Girl*

      For the love of everything, if you’re going to make people commute and work in person in an office, buy them a decent chair! They really aren’t that expensive.

  144. Don't You Call Me Lady*

    A company I used to work for about a decade ago used to have snacks. They had really good ice cream sandwiches that would go quickly, so a friend and I used to hoard them by claiming they were for the CEO and his assistant and if you have any problems take it up with them. Naturally nobody wanted to bring up something like that to the CEO so we got to enjoy the ice cream sandwiches.

  145. HigherEdEscapee*

    Years ago I worked in a super toxic small nonprofit with a serious case of Founder’s Syndrome. The Founder, who was the president of the board, spent most of his time on the road preaching the gospel of our super niche and extremely privileged cause. When he wasn’t on the road he was usually in our small office.
    He had very specific ways of marking his territory and they were all disturbing and gross. He only showered about quarterly, so whenever he was in the office, even if you didn’t see him, you could smell him. Like a lot of other commenters, since we had a small staff, we had two individual bathrooms, one marked for men, one for women. Our staff had slightly more men than women, but folks were generally good about using whichever bathroom was available and cleaning up after themselves. Menstrual products only had space in one restroom and were supplied by the building in which we rented space.
    Founder would almost always use the restroom marked for women and he would NEVER flush when he was done. It didn’t matter what he’d done, he expected someone else to clean up after him. None of us had that in our job description, so usually that bathroom was closed for the day after one of his visits.
    We had no HR dept and Founder was on the road 300+ days a year, so while these were not frequent occurrences, they were unfortunately memorable.

  146. Chocolate Teapot*

    I don’t there ever was a further update from the story about the maternity leave cover manager. I only hoped everything worked out for her in the end.

  147. Jess*

    I used to get sooooo annoyed with people taking my pens. (Good, ink ball pens which I bought with my OWN MONEY because a few dollars was worth it for me to feel happy when I was writing.)

    I ended up taking up fountain pens. The Pilot Cosmopolitan pen was cheap enough that if it *did* walk away I wasn’t going to be out $$$, but people just get scared when confronted with a fountain pen – they’d put it down c a r e f u l l y and back away!

  148. TinkerTailorSolderDye*

    Alrighty, I gotta say, I’m a little bit guilty of this.

    My predecessor decided to end the transition rather abruptly after I proceeded to fill their former office (now mine) with relatively easy to replace/recreate things for decor, with approval from the higher ups, and apparently, that upset this person immensely when they were still coming in to provide some training. In my defense, I had explicitly asked if it was cool with them before doing so, I got a definitive yes, and carried on merrily. And it’s not A LOT; three small things on the wall (floral D20 cross stitch, a floral 3D painting with some fake greenery attached, a small bouquet of autumn-y fake floral, and three lil punkins)

    Our accountant loves it, so it’s all staying. :)

  149. canuckian*

    I label most of my things that are easily movable (except my chairs but no one tries to take those). I even labelled my label maker. I work in the library so they’re marked “library” (work in an elem. school library). I also have some fave pens (which I paid for) that I do not let anyone else use; I keep the supply room pens for others. I also have public scissors and my in the drawer scissors, which are my really good scissors.

    My hole punch, tape dispenser and stapler are labelled. Which is a good thing because a couple Septembers ago, it allowed the pre-K instructor to return my tape dispenser to me. Neither of us knew how it ended up in her room–she wasn’t here in June….

    I’ve also had to label my electric pencil sharpener…5 or 6 years ago now, I had a fairly large electric pencil sharpener. Didn’t label it because I didn’t think I needed to. It was big enough that no one was going to accidentally pick it up. We were at the first day staff meeting and I told folks they could borrow pencils and sharpen them if they needed to, except I turned and no sharpener.

    I was not happy. I looked in a couple of “usual suspects” rooms and didn’t see it. I sent out an email with a picture of said pencil sharpener, asking for it’s return, no questions asked. Crickets. I waited about a month and finally ordered another one from Scholastic (I used Book Fair credits for both). I came in on a Monday morning to find the shipping box with my NEW sharpener on my desk…and in front of it? My old sharpener. I used the new one and gave the old one to a teacher whose sharpener broke.

    To this DAY I still have no idea who took it or returned it. But you can darn well bet I labelled that new sharpener–top, bottom, on the outside of the shavings tray…. Fortunately, it never went missing…but it was killed by one of the pre-K instructors sharpening pencil crayons…I had to get another new sharpener but the one I had wasn’t offered anymore. Now, I do not let anyone, sharpen pencil crayons in my electric sharpener.

    I do also label my a/v carts but only because they get used by the janitorial staff in the summer and that just makes it easier for them to give me back the right ones (aka the ones I like). In my opinion, lablelling my stuff means that I can prove it is, indeed, my stuff.

    1. Throwaway Account*

      I labeled the label maker at old job with a label that said “label maker.”

      No one laughed. :(

  150. surlygirly*

    The building I work in has multiple “arms”, and each arm has a pair of single occupant bathrooms. Because of how the rooms were set up (one happened to have a full length mirror), one was mainly used by women, and one was mainly used by men, but neither room actually had a specific designation. We used to have an issue with men from the other areas coming to our area to, ah, befoul the bathroom (this issue caused enough consternation that there was actual sleuthing done to confirm that this was a deliberate choice and not an issue of the bathrooms in their areas being unavailable). This practice was viewed by the ladies in our area (because at the time our arm was made up of only women) with feelings ranging from bemusement to rage. Finally there was an incident where one of my managers was waiting in the hallway for the “women’s” room to become available. She hears one flush…and then another…and then another…and then a FOURTH – and when the perpetrator came out the space was temporarily unusable. She was so mad that she went back to her desk, printed out a paper with a big W on it, and taped it to the door. It disappeared within 15 minutes. So she printed another one. Which also disappeared within 15 minutes. So she printed a THIRD one – which was replaced with a sign (from HER boss) that if another sign went up there would Be Consequences. (My manager lost that particular battle, but they did eventually capitulate and create one some specified bathrooms in the building.

  151. I’m retired!*

    The very large lawfirm at which I worked had large copy/supply rooms set up in each pod. Staplers and tape dispensers would disappear frequently as folks would grab them to take into conference rooms etc. one morning I discovered that someone had super glued the tape dispenser to the counter. Two days later I came in and all that was left was the dispenser’s rubber base and a pile of the sand that was the weight inside the dispenser. I wish I could have seen the person prying that thing off the counter!

  152. CommanderBanana*

    I feel like most of the territoriality I’ve run into has been people being territorial about projects and work, not physical things 0r spaces.

  153. Red*

    I went on vacation and to protect my space from salespeople hotdesking and disturbing my work, my coworkers glued a generic white person face from a magazine and placed my work beanie on a 3ft long dried out snake gourd we had laying around and put it in my chair for the week I was gone. I still keep the photo I took when I got back on my desk at my current job lol.

  154. Blue Spoon*

    Seeing someone mention mugs reminded me of a case of inverse territorialism from one of my coworkers:
    My workplace is pretty relaxed about food and dishes. We have enough space in our kitchen and our fridge that staff members can bring their own food and dishes (within reason) and keep them there. We have a sticker system that we use to indicate whether things are up for grabs, a cupboard for personal dishes, and it’s generally considered good form to put your name on any personal items that live in the kitchen.

    One of my coworkers, I’ll call her Celia, isn’t too fond of people being possessive of their own dishes. I’m not sure why she thinks this is an issue, but it was enough of one that she brought in her own coffee mug and labelled it “Celia (but I share)”. As far as I know, no one has taken her up on her offer to let them use her mug, but it did prompt another coworker to label her mug “Isobel (and I don’t share)”.

  155. Puffin*

    I am that person.

    Not so long ago, I transferred internally from one state to another. At my old state we had our own designated seating, my new state has recently moved to hot-desking & you can reserve a space online. My position requires me to be in the office every day & so I like to reserve the same seat every day and people around me even refer to it as my seat.

    Except someone else recently started beating me to my seat and grrrrrgh… it’s so annoying even though she’s doing nothing wrong. Like why does she feel the need to sit there and not somewhere else?

  156. pally*

    As I sit in my little office and gaze out of the window, I spy a pair of signs posted directly in front of two adjacent parking spots. One sign reads “Reserved parking for Mercedes only. Look but don’t touch.”. The other, “Reserved. Porsche parking only”.

    So we created a “Fordcedes” by taping a paper cut-out of a Mercedes symbol onto the front of a co-worker’s old Ford SUV and parked it in the Mercedes spot.

    There were tears. Mercedes owners are very sensitive.

  157. StellarJay*

    I had my territory marked for me, I guess?

    We hotdesk in a particular area, but I always end up with the same desk because my coworkers all prefer other ones. I do prefer that spot, but only because I’m used to it. I’m fine with others.
    One day I came in to find that a new employee was sitting at “my” desk. I just shrugged and picked a different one. But each time one of my coworkers walked by, they’d go “Oh my god, Claire! You took Jay’s desk! Why would you do that? Poor Jay!” and I’d have to say that no, really, it’s fine. After the fourth time this happened, Claire and I switched desks. Balance was restored to the universe.

  158. Legendary*

    I used to work with someone who labeled everything they used with their name, even communal items like copiers and printers. It was Larry’s Lobster, Larry’s Lightbulb, Larry’s Library, etc (name changed to protect the guilty). He labeled phones, cords, cups, books,
    printers, chairs, tables, etc. We found stuff he labeled for years after he left, and so The Legend of Larry was born.

    1. Lexi Vipond*

      Did he have one of those amazing machines that print labels on a little strip? Because if so his actions were perfectly reasonable.

  159. Rainbow Bridge Troll*

    I shared this in a request for stories of petty behavior last year. I think it definitely meets the definition of territory-marking as well.

    This is one of my best stories from my infamous library career (book in the works). I worked in a community college library for 10 years with a woman (“Mickie”) who shared my job title (library technical assistant–the people who catalog, process, and circulate all the books) but who had been with the district herself for over 30 years. In her time, she had carved an extremely limited and literal niche for herself in the cataloging room upstairs where no one else was allowed to step foot. She kept the cataloging office locked, and only she had the key. If we went up there searching for a book for a patron, we had to knock, then she’d open the door about 4 inches, put her face in the crack and say, “What do you want?” Then she’d CLOSE THE DOOR IN YOUR FACE while she looked for whatever it was you wanted. Despite being extremely behind on cataloging and having an office literally overflowing with towers of unprocessed books and media for the collection, the other LTA (“Bowie”) and I were expressly forbidden from learning cataloging or anything else because that was Mickie’s Domain, period.

    Until we got a new Dean. He saw the backlog of unprocessed materials, looked at our skills and the level of work we were doing and forced Mickie to start training Bowie (who was in a library master’s program) and I on cataloging. Bowie really took off with it and discovered that the situation was pretty bad: decades of unprocessed items that were now outdated; thousands of items that hadn’t been catalogued properly, meaning that patrons searching for materials weren’t getting the results they needed and thought our collection sucked (which, it did – but that’s another story). So we began to make pretty quick work of paring down the backlog and improving our general catalog. Mickie HATED us for this.

    Then Mickie went on her annual month-long vacation. Bowie went up to the cataloging office to carry on with the work we’d been doing. A minute later, I got a call at the Circ desk, “Um . . . you need to come up here and see this.” Her voice was quaking.

    I ran upstairs, opened the office door, and it was like a signage bomb had gone off. Before she went on vacation, Mickie had printed out DOZENS of full-page signs saying “DO NOT TOUCH!” and taped them to every single shelf of every single book truck and bookstack, front and back, in the cataloging office. So, 30 book trucks that have three shelves on each side had SIX “do not touch!” signs on them; bookstacks wall-papered floor to ceiling with DO NOT TOUCH. Bowie and I stood there, alternately shocked into silence and bursting out laughing. There were so many signs! It was a ticker tape parade of DO NOT TOUCH.

    Then I gave in to my pettiest intrusive thought: I marched over to Mickie’s desk, opened her stamp pad, inked up my fingers, and I “touched” every single one of those mother-effing signs. Every. Single. One. Bowie and I laughed the whole time, knowing I’d probably get in trouble, but I didn’t care. THIS AGGRESSION WILL NOT STAND, MAN.

    Mickie pitched a fit when she came back, and I had to apologize to her–which I did, with a big smile on my face, while she scowled at me. I still think it’s hilarious, and I’m not one bit sorry. RIP to my bestie Bowie. She was a good one.

  160. L*

    A few years ago I got seconded into a higher role to cover someone’s medical leave. I left all the office supplies that I used daily in my regular role but wouldn’t need in the seconded role behind for the person who would be covering for me. I also left my posters (related to our work cause) and some other decor behind, since it was only supposed to be three months.

    The temp they hired to fill in my role packed up all the supplies and dumped them in my new office where I had zero use for them and proceeded to get new supplies for herself (we’re talking things like paperclips and post-its, not something where personal taste makes a difference). She also packed up all my posters and decor (badly, stuff got damaged), but rather than giving that to me, shoved it in a storage room and told no one.

    She was so bad at the job she only lasted like a month, which makes her need to erase my prsence from my office more ridiculous. My secondment ended up being extended, then I ended up on medical leave myself, and finally I ended up getting a permanent promotion to a different role at the same level as my secondment. Once I finally knew my new office assignment, I went looking for my decor and found it in the back of a barely used storage room. To this day, one my posters is still missing.

  161. DJ Abbott*

    The manager who started last year refuses to do a small but important part of our procedure that involves writing a certain number on paper. She knows it makes things easier. She knows it would save us time. And she still won’t do it. I think it’s her way of making a mark on our process.

  162. Scott696d*

    While I wasn’t there when this happened, I did work there a few years later and I heard the backstories.
    https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/natl-man-fired-urinate-pee-on-attractive-pretty-coworkers-chairs/1943150/
    HR couldn’t win as there were people there who were upset they *hadn’t* gotten tagged, others who were pregnant and weren’t sure *if* they’d gotten tagged, and of course those who definitely *did* get tagged. They also had a weird chair hierarchy there where how nice your chair was got defined by your role within the company. I circumvented all that by going to HR shortly after I was hired with documented back problems and was given an assigned chair with armrests and other adjustable options which someone at my level should never have gotten. When someone borrowed that chair and didn’t return it I got to show my petty side by getting them in trouble. I am *so* glad I no longer work there.

  163. Eliza*

    Late entry, but…I worked at a specialty grocery store with a terrible manager. It was a small business with only a few locations, and the owners didn’t specifically manage the individual stores but were very involved. This manager had several conflicts with employees, and the owners eventually disciplined her by demoting her. She quit on the spot, expecting them to beg her to stay…and instead, they bid her farewell and sent out an email announcing her resignation to all employees within an hour.

    As it slowly sank in that she would really have to leave, she began to leave notes on the correct procedure….taped up near the relevant station. EVERYWHERE. We had an employee handbook, but she often disagreed with it, and the notes were her way of trying to ensure that things would be done the “right” way. Everything from how to properly seal bottles of product to how to cut samples to where certain products could be shelved. She wanted to make sure we would still do things her way even after she left. The new manager (technically her co-manager before she left, promoted to full manager after she quit) was very conflict-averse, and was worried about taking the notes down since terrible manager lived behind the store and promised to stop in frequently to “check in”. Luckily, that anxiety only lasted a month.

  164. madcartoonist*

    I (a woman) was a young assistant professor (STEM) with a new tenure-track level position at a medical school. My department chair (an older man) controlled my laboratory space and office space and he did something truly insane.

    My chair showed me a room that he said was to be my office (great!). But it had previously been used by my chair’s favorite (male) postdoctoral fellow (postdoc is a much lower level position than my own. Postdocs typically don’t get private offices, only faculty). My chair told me that the postdoc was ‘traumatized’ by having to give up the office and therefore I could only use the office under the conditions of 1) I left the postdoc’s nameplate on the door instead of replacing it with my own, and 2) I be “understanding” about the postdoc “needing” to enter the office at least once per day. My chair said it was important to maintain the postdoc’s mental health, which he said was fragile.

    I said “sure, of course”! I knew that what he asked was ridiculous and would not be supported even slightly by the Dean. So the next day I took down the postdoc’s nameplate and threw it in the trash, and ordered my own nameplate for the door. I hadn’t worked for years to get this position and have someone else’s name on my door!

    Nevertheless, the postdoc would, at least once per day, suddenly open my office door and then slam it again (my office was on a busy corridor and next to the lunchroom, so I typically kept the door closed). This always made me jump and lose my train of thought. Often I would dart out into the corridor but the postdoc was by then nextdoor in the lunchroom eating his lunch with the other postdocs and techs, who eyed me with amusement at the situation. This went on for a while. I complained to my Chair, but he said the postdoc had an OCD “need” to touch the door knob of my office and there was nothing he would do.

    So, the next time the postdoc opened and then slammed my door, I ran out and found him in the lunchroom with his buddies and said “Wakeen!” (not his real name) “Buddy!!! I’d love to talk with you about your experimental results, why don’t you come in an say Hi next time you open my door instead of running away? Otherwise, stop fucking opening my door!”

    Everyone froze. Wakeen froze. And then everyone laughed at him, saying “Wakeen, she got you, what’s your problem?” etc. After that, the postdoc never touched my door again. My Chair never mentioned anything.

    A year or so later, Wakeen was fired for faking his lab results, so karma I guess? And my Chair had to retract 10+ scientific papers published from the fake results. He managed to not be fired for some reason but he had to step down as Chair, thank God. I stayed for 20 years and rose to full Professor etc. Weirdly, this was not the last time I had to aggressively defend my “turf” in ridicuous ways – STEM academia is generally a nightmare for women, unfortunately.

  165. Sleeping Panther*

    My department at work has always had first-come first-served seating, but recently moved from a floor of all equally-sized cubicles to a floor where some desks are arranged in rows with no dividers and others are in three-desk pods with dividers between them. One person was so committed to having one of the pod desks near a window that she left a laptop stand, a keyboard, a mini humidifier/essential oil diffuser, and a box of essential oils on that desk, and even clipped a decorative keychain to the divider.

  166. Sister George Michael*

    I was visiting a nonprofit for a meeting and an intern gave me a quick office tour. In the kitchen, I noticed a lot of mugs on the draining board. I thought, “that’s great that they are so environmentally friendly—they have a lot of communal dishes instead of using paper and plastic.” I asked the intern, “can I just grab a mug here to get some water?” She said, “No, no, don’t do that,” with a look of real horror on her face that told the story of bitter office battles about mug ownership. (She got me some water in a styrofoam cup.) Did that nonprofit have the words “human rights” in its name? Absolutely! Because we don’t always practice what we preach.

  167. Sister George Michael*

    A second one to tell on myself: I have an uncommon name, so I rarely work with anyone with the same name. If someone with the same name gets hired, I get so irritated! But I keep it to myself and my friends who already know I’m weird.

    1. Mad Harry Crewe*

      I was a supervisor at my last job and while I started as the only “Harry” we eventually hired two more onto my department. I was quite pleased when I was able to collect the other two onto my team.

    2. MissMaple*

      My first-last name combo is not super uncommon, so there’s usually one other person with the same name at the larger places I’ve worked, but the other one in the directory at my current workplace just retired, so I feel like I won in some cosmic engineer battle :)

  168. anotherfan*

    This is hardly as extreme as others, but at OLDJOB, I was assigned a desk in a pod of four. this was pre-COVID, so hotdesking wasn’t a thing. I’d worked for the company for more than 20 years, and your desk was your desk; everybody had stuff on their desk — piles of newspapers, three cups, plants, photos, files, dictionaries, stacks of notebooks, clips. Unlike a lot of other reporters, I used to toss all my stuff in drawers at the end of the day so my desk looked neat when I left. Big mistake. Whenever someone was working a night shift from one of the other offices, they invariably chose my desk to sit at because it was neat. I’d come in the next morning and find everything from crumbs ground into my keyboard to spilled coffee on the desk nobody bothered to clean up. When I complained, I got a lecture on how the desk wasn’t “mine,” it belonged to the company so if someone else wanted to sit there, I had to accept that. So I took to unplugging the computer every night and disconnecting the monitor when I left. The plug was under the desk, I left the cords right there. If they wanted to spoil my workspace, I figured they could hook themselves up at the same time. Oddly enough, my desk was mostly left alone after that. Apparently nobody wanted to get down on the floor to plug in the computer or hook up the monitor, so they just worked at some other desk.

  169. Disappointing Aussie Office Gumby*

    At one job, my desk was close to the photocopier. At the time, I worked on the floor where many people often printed documents that needed wet signatures before being posted. Signatures had to be in blue ink, not red, so they’d pause by my desk (when I wasn’t there), use my blue pen to sign, then walk off with my blue pen.
    That meant I never had a blue pen. The steps I took to prevent pen theft was two-fold. (Thing to know: the BIC brand pens our company supplied came with barrels the same colour as the ink inside for easy identification.)
    1. I swapped the ink cartridges between a blue pen and a red pen. The red-barrelled pen thus wrote in blue ink.
    2. The blue-barrelled pen, therefore, wrote in red ink. If I was a cruel person, instead of a highly miffed one, I’d leave it at that and let people learn the hard way. But no, I did have a shred of… (not kindness, but I Told You So) …happening. I marked the blue-barrelled red-inked pen in BIG letters with a permanent marker: “THIS IS A RED PEN”. So big, the letters cover nearly the whole pen. It’s clear, it’s obvious, confirmed by my cubicle-mates. Anyone who’s literate could not miss that this pen was marked as a red pen.
    Then I left both pens on my desk.
    My cubicle-mates told me that it only took two people grabbing the marked pen and signing with it for the entire floor to learn not to take Gumby’s pens. One person complained to my cubicle-mates. They gleefully pointed out that the pen is clearly marked as a red pen, and it was therefore that person’s fault for not reading the adequate warning sign on the pen itself.

  170. CDuke*

    I work in manufacturing. Each production line is assigned a color, and all of the tools for that line are somehow marked with that color (usually colored tape). I find it hilarious that if a tool is not color coded it disappears quickly. But as soon as it is marked with that small piece of orange, red, teal, etc. tape it is completely safe and will always be found in its proper place!

  171. ducki3x*

    My first real job was a great environment, gave me many opportunities to grow, and was all-around a pretty fantastic 17-year experience. In the first move I made out of the department that hired me, it was an analyst role, and my new cube had the BEST rolling whiteboard I’d ever seen. I lived and died by charting workflows out and workshopping data & UX layouts, and this thing was by my side 24/7. As I got promoted to bigger and better things, that whiteboard came with me every time, and nobody blinked an eye…until almost a decade later, when the decision was made that we were going to do a full furniture overhaul and leadership REALLY a uniform vision on every floor – the CEO wanted to be able to step out of the elevator and see EVERYTHING matching.

    I took one look at the flimsy, skinny thing they were proposing as an alternative, and threw a fit. I had never asked for anything the entire time I was there, and I progressively worked my way up the chain, telling each progressive manager that there was literally no way I could do my job with this tiny thing that was going to fall over the second I tried to roll it to someone else’s cube for a discussion. People were sympathetic, but claimed there was nothing that could be done; it was a directive from the top.

    The remodel day was approaching and I was getting desperate. I went to the facilities guys and asked if they would hide my board in the storage closet (they understandably passed) and I considered taking it apart and hiding it until the purge was over. Ultimately, I went and purchased a heavy-duty bike lock and was prepared to chain it to the earthquake supports in our building, but before I could break it out of the packaging, my boss wandered by my cube, saw the lock, and gave the heavy sigh he tended to give when I got really passionate about things. He had me moved to an odd little corner of the floor that wasn’t that visible and pulled some strings, and everyone got a new whiteboard but me. It was maybe the best ridiculous victory I ever had.

    (A few years later when we all got laid off, they offered to let me keep the whiteboard, but I just didn’t have any space at the time. I still miss it and now that we’re all remote, I wish I had it here in my home office. It was a truly fantastic whiteboard!)

  172. DJ*

    I worked somewhere where they implanted a completely clean desk policy but desks weren’t L shape with one part facing the customer and the other could be used for processing work one did between customers. So staff had to keep shuffling files either on to the group or back into the cupboard.
    Also the cupboards weren’t designed so parts could be locked independently from other parts eg able to lock the large bottom drawer for personal items such as a hand bag. But keep the part with files unlocked so other staff could access them. As it was an extreme open plan where customers could roam freely there was a high rate of theft of staff personal items.
    As you can see no staff consultation combined with cram as much desk as possible into the office.
    An obvious solution was to provide individual lockers in the lunch room. But sigh the manager didn’t want a wallnof lockers.

    1. DJ*

      As an aside I worked somewhere else at a desk with a non lockable drawer. So I found a filing cabinet locked my bag in there took the key with me leaving a note of where it was. I got a place to lock my bag pronto!

  173. Hydrangea MacDuff*

    I made a job change from a large location in our organization to my current role at a much smaller location. For almost 20 years I had been used to walking 100 yards or more from the lot to my workspace. So when I started in the much smaller location with smaller, adjacent lot, it was awesome! Every single spot, even the overflow and street parking, was, at most, half the distance to my new workspace.

    It’s all in your perspective I guess, because one of my colleagues would complain every time she didn’t get to park in the very closest row, which only had 6 non-ADA spots in it and was about 5 yards from the door. Then, horrors, we added signage that designated 5 of the spots for visitors only. The 6th spot couldn’t have a sign installed for some reason I don’t remember, and it was tucked in between the ADA spots and the visitor spots. My colleague treated this like an amazing cheat code and parked in that one perfect spot, even arriving early so she could claim it. It was so annoying.

    (She did not have any mobility issues. She just … had skewed and narrow life experience)

  174. Wolf*

    I have a success story.

    We had assigned desks, but shared equipment (tools, pens, scissors, tape dispensers etc). Often, you’d set up everything you need for the next task, and half an hour later, half of the stuff was taken by someone else. Not because there wasn’t enough, but because people were disorganized and couldn’t bother finding stuff so they just took the first thing they saw.

    So, with the next supply order, one colleague ordered a full set of everything in hot pink. And it worked! Suddenly, people were able to walk to the supply closet to get their own stuff instead of using hers.

  175. LabDragon*

    I’m an engineer and have watched turf wars over lab space in virtually every place I’ve worked. The most common scenario is when a project is paused and the owner doesn’t want to take down their lab setup in case it restarts, and so the lab gradually fills with abandoned equipment.

    Anyway, one place I worked was a small R&D lab owned by a large Japanese company. At this point the work of the lab was gradually being scaled down, as the company was starting to circle the drain financially -it went bust a few years later. As a consequence, we had a huge building with massive labs that were barely being used. There had been a convention that each group manager had their own lab. I was posted to one group that was expanding and asked if I could have some bench space for some electronics work. No space was available in our existing lab as we had several active projects, but walking down the corridor it was clear that lots of other labs were barely being used. I asked my manager if I could take some space in a lab belonging to Jim’s group. I wanted one bench, but the lab was so empty that there was a whole run of benches along one side that were empty. Senior management agreed, and Jim was asked to give up this half of his lab to me. He then decided to take this as a personal slight, and rather than share his lab with me, he carted all of his equipment out of the lab and brought it upstairs to our offices where he dumped it all in a huge heap on several vacant office desks. When anyone asked he said grumpily that he had been “thrown out of his lab”. Honestly, what a drama llama.

  176. HelenaHandbasket*

    The car parking dramas could be epic at my workplace.

    There were about 6 car parks that were left unallocated once parks had been allocated to senior management, late finishers or people with a disability. It was understood that it was first in first served for these and people would get to the office before 6am to make sure they got one. Car parking in the area was generally not too bad – you might have to walk 10 minutes at most to get to the office.

    And then there was road cone lady. Who had a road cone and used it to block off one of the unallocated car parks. It turned out that she’d blocked the car park off with a road cone one weekend and when she got to work she would put the road cone in her car and at the end of the day she’d block the cone back to block off the park when she left.

    This went on for a few months and then she resigned. It turns out she went to work for the same company that my sister worked for who also had a couple of unallocated parks where she did exactly the same thing. I met my sister for lunch one day and there was road cone lady’s very unique car parked in the front of the building with the road cone in the front passenger footwell. Yes, I checked.

    It was boggling that she would go to so much effort at 2 different workplaces just to get the park outside the door.

  177. archangelsgirl*

    I covered for a year in a grade 3 room. In spite of being invited to use any resources in the room (2 filing cabinets full), I didn’t touch A THING, because the teacher was reputationally territorial. The ONLY thing I did was remove 4 pieces of “border” placed randomly in the center (not around the outside edge as you would expect) of the bulletin board. I carefully placed them in a closet to replace before leaving. Teacher came in to show off her babies at Easter, did a FULL inspection and very aggressively asked where the border was. “I really need that up there! I use it every day!” I showed her it was safe and assured her I’d put it up before I left in May but… three days later she called to tell me that the thought that it was not right where she left it was keeping her up at night, so could I please put it back. I did so. AFAIK, she never came to check but I guess she might have after hours? Very stressful to create a space for kids for an entire year and not be able to disturb ANYTHING, like working in a museum.

  178. Wolf*

    Oh, almost forgot that one: if you are worried about people taking your pens, try asking pharmaceutical companies for merch. I have pens that advertise medication for bladder problems and for obstipation, and nobody wants to steal those pens.

  179. Danikm151*

    I’m the guilty party here.

    I had a mug with my name on it- it wasn’t in the kitchen. Hunted round the office for it- swearing and stropping in the process- the new big boss had it- knocked on the door walked in and asked for it back.

    Another day, we’d moved offices but my mug had come with me. A colleague told me she spotted a new person using it and took it away from him and told him about the generic mugs in the other cupboard as she knew another tantrum would ensue if it wasn’t were I left it. Don’t get in between me and my morning cuppa

  180. Academic Library, oh, my*

    Can it be more virtual rather than physical territory, although there was some moving? My story is more organizational chart than moving people. In my academic library (aka dysfunction junction), one admin had carefully gathered all the units that 1) determined what stuff to buy (liaisons with academic departments), 2) those that actually bought the stuff or supplemented the stuff (acquisitions, interlibrary loan, etc.) and 3) those that made the stuff available (licensing, proxy services, etc.) into one somewhat happy group. If there was a question, a quick department email or visit would solve it. More major concerns were addressed in department meetings.

    Then the gatherer retired and the upper admin got into a pissing contest. So the deputy to the gatherer was promoted to head of the department, but within the year, the upper admin had dismantled the “get the stuff” department and scattered it around to other areas. And to rub it into the deputy’s face, the main instigator threw him out of his office and squatted in it herself, banishing him to a lower floor/level. Further, the pitiful remains of the original department were forbidden from emailing their former department mates directly or even visit the floor that the people were occupying. Morale, workflow and access for our library patrons was not enhanced.

    There is a saying in the library, “we wish it would just hit bottom, but it keep on going down and down and down…”

  181. Serious Silly Putty*

    Two departments shared a pair of work vans for driving to program sites. Before I was hired, apparently problems with Mr. O (from the other department) always having the van led to the creation of a sign out calendar.
    Mr. O would sign out one van for every day on the calendar. Regardless of programming duties.
    So everyone else would sign out the other one, and if it wasn’t available go to Mr. O and ask if it was okay to use “his” van (to, ya know, do actually work tasks). He was a retired teacher who had come out of retirement to do this job, very mild and “generous”. His answer was always: “Oh sure, baby, that’s fine.”

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

  182. ProtectTransKids*

    I will say that while being weirdly aggressive about things that really don’t matter is not great, I am now in cold-dead-hands territory with my current workspace. Because i made the mistake of being too easygoing and passive, and got really screwed for years because I felt bad about speaking up. And honestly, it got to the point where it felt humiliating to remind superiors that they promised me something and had still not followed through, after months and then years of it being promised. (And possible. I wasn’t asking for the sky – just a non-crappy workspace that literally existed but was being used as a dumping ground for old paperwork, etc.) I never got that workspace. But I got a better one when a co-worker left. So anyway, I feel like I saved up enough years of crap that I have earned MANY opportunities to lay claim to my humble little happy spot here in the office, and will absolutely not make the same mistake of being too passive again. At least not when it comes to really affects my day to day mood and sense of belonging here.

    So here’s some cheer to those of us who are learning to walk that line and rightfully claim what we need and deserve. Without being weird about it to others. I think those of us who need that encouragement know who we are. Doormats no more! <3

  183. not again*

    Some years ago, I split time at a receptionist job with another employee (we each worked half days), and we shared a desk as well as a computer with the same log-in credentials. She set the background of the computer to be a photo of her with her boyfriend. And she set the screensaver to rotate through photos of her with her friends and family, including photos of her in a bikini at the beach and photos of her breastfeeding her baby. This was, of course, the reception desk, so everyone who worked there or visited the office also was treated to these photos.

  184. Ava*

    My office is taking away work from home for independent contributors. They claim that work from home appeared to be reducing productivity (which they don’t formally measure). Of course it is used by managers liberally for anything and everything. One of the managers enforcing this had a horrific year personally, with tons of working from home, and of course plenty of support from their team (who will have to use their vacation days if they, say, have car trouble or have to recover from surgery). I consider this territory marking — this privilege is for me and not for thee.

  185. I'm so old I'm historic*

    Once in a while, my job would require me to use common tools (think hammer, drill) and I would ask our maintenance department for our company tools. They took huge objections to that and it was a fight that costs hours of my time just to get something done. I started using my own tools from home, and would have to chase them down argue that they were mine and not maintenance, and once in a while they would disappear, which was…frustrating. Finally I used my “Girl Power” and bought a complete set of PINK tools. Funny, none of my tools disappeared after that.

  186. Peregrinations*

    Oh, I’ve got one! I work on the national team at a large, dispersed organization with state offices. I was leading an effort to bring staff together from states across a distinct region (think New England) to work together and learn from each other’s efforts to solve a challenging problem, which would benefit all involved. The offices in this region were well known at the time to not work well together, but in the first year I brought folks together from all states and things were going well.

    Until at the end of year 1, the lead of the largest state in the region (think Massachusetts) – who had not participated at all until this point – came in and threw a bunch of sand in the gears. I pushed back on the issues she raised – we’d already covered them in depth – but she was not having it. She called my boss – she wouldn’t even talk to me – and went on an extended, irate, and extremely personal rant that this was HER state and I was not to contact ANYONE in the entire state (whether at our organization or not) because this effort would DESTROY THEIR REPUTATION, then added a lot of personal insults about me (that my boss passed on word for word).

    Readers – this work was so “reputation destroying” that we were awarded a highly competitive multi-million dollar grant to fund it, one of her long-term staff recently told me how much they would benefit from this effort in their state, and one of the external partners who I was specifically told to not talk to expressed interest in our effort to one of my partners outside the organization!

  187. Hot Topic*

    At Old Job, Jane was in charge of a small branch office of the larger company. In addition to her, there were 5 other members of the staff. Jane kept a coffee maker and a microwave inside of her private office. Jane was also a vindictive narcissist. If you were the golden child, you were welcomed and invited into the office to make yourself some coffee, heat up your lunch, and have long, long, chats with Jane instead of working. If you were her current scapegoat, no coffee, no microwave for you, plus heaps of impossible workload. After a reorg, Jane’s branch came under my management. I did 1:1 conversations with each staff member asking them pretty standard “new department” questions like “tell me about your goals and objectives; what do you particularly enjoy about your job; how to do you want to grow in your work; if you could change something about your job, what would it be.” Hoo boy the way they responded to that last question – everything from “Jane is Satan incarnated and I can barely breathe when I’m at work” to “I have an answer to that but I am afraid to share it and if you don’t already know why you will soon” to one poor soul who said “I really don’t think you can do anything about that, but something I would really appreciate would be access to a microwave so I can have soup for lunch sometimes.” Easy peasy, right? Wrong. Not knowing that the appliances were Jane’s tool for reward and punishment, and genuinely wanting to give Jane an opportunity to gain points with the staff (so naïve!), I went to Jane and suggested she could contribute meaningfully to staff morale by putting the coffee and microwave in a space where everyone could use it. You’d have thought, from her reaction, that I suggested she give them the password to her bank account and the keys to her car. Okay, so that’s a no. So I figure, “no problem, I’ll just get them a separate microwave” and put in a budget request. Jane gets wind of it and WIGS OUT. There are messages to the senior leadership about the dangers of microwaves in the office (bugs! spills! horror!). There are claims that the power infrastructure can’t handle the draw. There are suggestions that the staff should all just use the microwave that is 3 floors away, belongs to another department, and is inside of a meeting room that is heavily used, so is mostly not available. There are angry emails claiming that nobody in the branch wants the microwave, and that I am just power hungry. (huh?) But at this point, I have come to understand that I’ve inadvertently threatened her power trip, and decided I am NOT giving in on microwave-gate. So I persist. The senior leadership ask me to get her to stop complaining and move on. I tell them the only way to do that is to install the microwave. So we do. She stomps around yelling that everyone should punish me for the new microwave by refusing to use it. They wait until she leaves the room, and heat up their lunches. She finds new tools to terrorize her staff (I eventually got her transferred which was the world’s biggest accomplishment but a story for another day). The soup-eater, upon her retirement a few years later, told me that my tenacity over the microwave was a “light in the darkness” for her at work, and that she really appreciated her nice warm lunches in her last few years of work.

  188. Rex*

    If you know what compressed work weeks are, skip this next bit. When you need 24/7 coverage, the weeks are broken up. In my experience, usually 4 shifts working 12 hours each. 2 day shifts, 2 night shifts. One week you work 4 days, have 3 days off, then flip it the next week.

    Ok, clear like mud? Great! Moving on!

    We were on call on site. If we didn’t have an assignment we spent time in our assigned area in a cube farm with the usual amount of desks, chairs, and etc. For some reason, one genius decided an ENTIRE desk and chair were his, and his alone. (Having your “own” drawer was common) His attempts to “reserve” his desk and chair went through various iterations from leaving notes (that had rude comments left in reply) to caution tape to tape tape to, finally, steel cable. Since he was as good at securing his property as he was at sharing, all of these were easily circumvented.

    Coincidentally, on the night the steel cable was being removed, one of the people from his shift was covering ours. He said something along the lines of hey, you know that’s “Gregor’s”, right? Beating my co-workers to the punch, I explained to this individual in my best Navy fashion why ONE PERSON DOESN’T GET TO KEEP A DESK AND CHAIR ALL TO HIMSELF WHEN THERE’S FOUR SHIFTS USING IT. I even threw in a free math lesson, demonstrating how each shift was there only 25% of the time and you don’t get to deny the use of common areas the other 75% of the time. After I was done, others on my shift made their feelings known, in even less kindly fashion. To toot my own horn, though, my voice is much more loud and penetrating. For reasons I can’t disclose here, they would probably all agree.

    There were no further efforts from “Gregor” to keep his own territory. Dear Readers, I’m not claiming all the credit, but I’m not NOT claiming it!

  189. Kimberly*

    When I was teaching there was a adult education group that used our campus. One year they used my room they marked my room by
    rearranging the desks so my students couldn’t find their desks

    When told to stop doing that they would move my groups closer together so my student who used a walker couldn’t get through the room.

    Flat out stole my kids crayons and markers – then complained when the replacements I bought were locked up.

    I used a projector and a sheet that covered the chalk board (Allergic to chalk). The 1st time they came they pulled the sheet down and left it on the ground were they walked over it.

    Took the science project in one corner apart – then allowed the children to put the magnets we were using all over the computers and the computer table.

    They were not invited back.

    Then a church started renting out our auditorium on Sundays and Wednesdays. At the same time our building was broken into multiple times so teachers building keys and codes were taken. So one of the Kinder teachers and her husband went by on a Wednesday during the church time to take in a bookcase she had bought. She found church members in her room making list of equipment and things they objected to. THey were not supposed to be in our classrooms. She also noticed them using my projector. My personal property not school property. She made sure I found out.

    I arranged with the librarian to lock my projector up in a cupboard in her locked office. Got a call from the preacher (head thief). He cussed me out and ordered me to come to the school and get HIS PROJECTOR. It told him no. I also demanded to know where he got my personal phone number – and filed an HR complaint about the principal giving my phone number to an abusive man. Also made it clear again to him that that was my personal property. (He kept trying to say I had to share it with other teachers).

    Well a couple more years, more burglaries, and a change of principal – the preacher found out our coach had won a grant to get some new equipment. He demanded that she give him the old equipment. 2 Problems – she wasn’t replacing equipment she was buying things she did not have that the rich schools did bc the PTO bought them. 2nd – If she was getting rid of equipment she couldn’t give it a way. It had to go to a district warehouse to be offered to other schools – or auctioned off. She came in one Thursday – to an empty equipment room. 5th grade specials all went to the gym. The cops were there dusting for prints and whatever. It was explained that PE would be no games for the rest of the year. The kids volunteered that Preacher gave away the equipment saying he had permission. They called their parents and explained the equipment was stolen. They got like 90% back. The church was finally kicked out. The preacher and custodian were arrested and the custodian was fired.

    Yes public school. (Simplified explanation retired teacher not constitutional lawyer)
    There is a Supreme Court ruling that if schools allow any outside group to use the facilities they have created a public forum and have to allow any group who asks to use the same facilities under the same rules.

    Outside groups include the PTO/PTA, booster clubs etcetera because they have their own 501C3 documents. This is why outside groups (scouts, sports, church groups) also get to send home flyers through the school. They must deliver them ready to go – already counted out ready to slide into the teacher mailboxes. On the flip side of the above story there was another church group that delivered shelf stable food packages for our kids to take home that covered breakfast/lunch for weekends and all school holidays where kids didn’t have access to school meals.

  190. rebelwithmouseyhair*

    I was fed up with there never being any clean mugs at work so brought in my own. I always took it back to my desk after washing it. One day it was no longer there and I was furious. Later I saw,it on the desk of the new intern, I made her wash another cup and pour her coffee into it then wash mine. I was as mad as Tom making Nate pour his wine back, for those of you who have seen Succession. Nobody dared “borrow” my mug after that.

  191. A reader among many*

    A group email from my predecessor to the team, sent to prepare them for her vacation, outlined a list of events they should expect and instructions for handling each of them.

    She closed with, “DO NOT ADJUST MY CHAIR. I will know and I will come after you.”

    1. A reader among many*

      I’d forgotten–my boss covered for me when I took a day off, early into my tenure. The day after, she oh-so-casually announced that she’d lowered my chair for her comfort. Not knowing the context, I didn’t realize it was a test! I’d already noticed, readjusted it, and forgotten. Predecessor could be very intense in some unexpected ways; I worked in an adjacent department and was on good terms with her till she left.

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