Starting a new job can be both exciting and nerve-wracking, but in a few cases, it can be extremely frustrating. Especially getting used to all the specific rules about that workplace environment.
Redditors shared the most frustrating and ridiculous rules from their own workplaces. Maybe keep an eye out for these at your next interview.
Find the source at the end of the article.
I foresee an unforeseen circumstance in my future…
In theory, we are allotted three personal absences a year, which cover “unforeseen circumstances” like a family emergency, car troubles, sick kid, etc. But in order to be approved, you need to get consent from the manager in advance. No one that I know has ever actually been approved in advance for their unforeseen emergency.
Sounds like a video game.
I once needed a pen. I figured this was a reasonable ask. I went to the supply closet on my floor, which was locked. So I asked the floor’s admin, she told me to go to the main supply room in the basement.
I went to the basement and explained my situation of needing a pen. They told me all requests for supplies must be approved by my department head. Problem is, being new, I’d never met my department head.
She also worked in San Francisco (I worked in Milwaukee), so I needed to send an email both introducing myself and asking her if I had permission to get a pen from the supply closet.
No bias here.
All recreational activity is forbidden on company time & resources… Except for fantasy football.???????
Here are your company-issued blindfolds!
Two weeks after I left my previous job a memo went around saying people aren’t allowed to look out of the windows at work anymore.
It’s a big glass building.
What kind of tape is that?
No scotch tape. On anything. I was a teacher, and the principal wouldn’t allow it in the building, threatening letters in your file for insubordination if she saw it on your desk. Only painter’s tape, which by design, is meant to not stick very well. I hung posters in my room with circles of duct tape on the back side, with strips of painters tape on the front side just for show. Subtle, petty insubordination.
You’ll have to start coming up with signals.
We can’t ask others if they want to come grab a coffee in the break room.
Sounds…safe.
We have a lock on the first aid kits. So if you just need a band-aid for a cut, you have to get the key from the Safety guy. Which in turn makes it a ” reportable accident” with mountains of paperwork and investigations. We use an unbelievable amount of duct tape now.
Well this is just silly.
I drive valet. The company handbook says you’re never allowed to back up. Ever.
You absolutely cannot do the job without reverse. It’s impossible.
It’s in there because of liability and our insurance policy. This way it can always be the valet’s fault if an accident occurs.
Step away from the pretzel.
You couldn’t eat at your desk. The team managers, however, were pretty tolerant, on a hot day they would sometimes even hand out popsicles. The regulation people (who were especially in charge on the weekends, when no team managers were around) were very strict with this. A colleague of mine was shouted at because she ate a small pretzel, which was her breakfast.
Then again, some colleagues would casually eat a whole pizza or kebab while making a huge mess.
Is that a designated position?
All the extra toilet paper in the building has to stay in a single closet where it can be overseen by the “toilet paper queen”. I heard her shrieking the other day when she discovered someone had “hoarded” one spare roll of toilet paper upstairs so the people who work upstairs wouldn’t have to walk down multiple flights of stairs when the toilet paper ran out.
Oh no…
A rule that said “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean” which fairly obviously meant if there was no work then you should be cleaning things. It was at an aircraft servicing station that was fairly small, but we needed a crew of at least 3 people for larger planes.
The problem was that sometimes there were just no planes, so there was no work. We would clean for a couple hours and then just run out of stuff to clean, but according to management, that was no good – we had to be busy! It got to the point that we would fight over work when it came in because everyone was so bored, and finding pretend-busy work was much much harder than just working.
I remember getting the crew together to pick up pebbles off the taxiway for a couple hours. There’s an old joke in aviation “go sweep the taxiway!” so we actually did it.
I’d have to quit after the first day
I used to work for a place in Ireland and their toilet breaks were bizarre. Maximum of 10 minutes a day but also a max of 20 minutes per week. You had to change the status on your computer so everything was recorded and some managers would call you out on it and even go as far as threaten your job.
I had an understanding with my manager and told him if I need to go, then I’m going for it. Like any good manager, he just told me that as long as I give him the numbers he wants then I could do what I want.
Just bleed it out.
For a while, we were going through a lot of band-aids and my manager was tired of buying them. So, she locked the last remaining band-aid in the safe (we had to have one; required by health inspector) and no one was allowed to use them if they cut themselves. I worked at a fast food joint where people could knick themselves on knives, tomato slicers, sharp edges, etc. If you cut yourself, you just dealt with it/openly bled. The rule changed pretty fast though when she cut herself while using a box cutter and we had no bandages in the store.
“Inbox Nazi”
Empty inbox
My boss was an inbox Nazi. If you had old emails in there he would flip and make you respond to them or delete them. Apparently, you shouldn’t have anything left at the end of the day, deal with them or delete them.
Jokes on him though, I just made a subfolder marked “personal” and everything went in there.
“I’ve come down with a serious case of not caring.”
If you were literally 0.01 seconds late clocking in, even hours before the store opened, it was a really, really big deal.
You’d not only be formally written up but also lectured like a child often times berated even. If you were tardy three times, bye-bye. However, if you no-showed and then called 2 hours later saying you were sick?—okay, thank you, feel better. This trained everyone to just take a sick day instead of being half a second late to work.
I can’t tell you how many times you’d see a coworker screeching into the parking lot before work after fighting traffic from a wreck or whatever, noticing it was 8:01, and then slowly driving off to go home and feign being sick.
This was particularly upsetting when it was a pulldown stock week when we needed every hand on deck but had unusually early shifts.
Working here is becoming a challenge.
My workplace doesn’t let you use the word “problems”. Instead, we have to say “challenges” if something is wrong. As a problem is a negative word, and the word challenge promotes the fact that there is room to fix the said problem…
Was there cake?
I don’t know if it’s standard, but I worked at a place where HR wasn’t allowed to tell us if someone was fired. It was a big enough place that you might not immediately realize someone had left and, when you found out, you weren’t supposed to ask why.
So, if you wanted to know if they were fired, you asked, “Was there cake?” Which was to say that, if the person had retired or left pleasantly after a number of years, they would be given a party with cake. If they were fired, not so much.
“I haven’t seen Brian for some time.”
“Brian no longer works here.”
…”Was there cake?”
Just lift each other around the office.
I’m a Fireman, our Risk Management department decided long ago that poles were too risky for us. So we use the stairs. We have poles.
Anyway, now the newest rule is no free weights….as in NO free weights to work out and stay fit.
Go into a burning high rise? Absolutely! Walk around the station carrying 40lb dumbells? Too risky
Huh?
If you are 1 minute late it is tardy. If you take a half day nothing goes on your record.
I was told to just take a half day if you are going to be late because they straight up fire you for tardies. Also if you clock out early, it is tardy. If you have to go to the doctor on lunch break and it is going to take an hour and ten min, take the rest of the day off.
Weird.
That’s definitely not gonna start any arguments.
Old job of mine in a warehouse. Our stations were pretty far apart, so when we’d listen to music we’d all usually have our own stuff playing. Not a problem since you could barely hear the neighbor’s music.
Well, the CEO didn’t like hearing multiple songs when walking through the warehouse. He made a rule that we all either had to listen to the same music or none at all.
REALLY?
Do not put half used sweeteners back in the sweeter tray. Throw them away.
I work with adults.
So frustrating.
I worked as a call receiver. We NEVER saw a customer. We were only on the phones with them.
Rule: Your hair must only be a natural color.
I dyed my hair the same exact color that someone from a different shift had and I was reprimanded. I told them that if the rule is not enforced for everyone, they couldn’t single me out. Their reasoning for letting the other person have that color but not me…mine was my real hair, dyed an ‘unnatural’ color; hers was a weave that could be changed very easily.
Really?! Then why hasn’t she been asked to change her hair?
They gave up trying to convince me they were in the right.
Send this to my Coworker who burnt popcorn on Day 1.
My agency has a nine-page document detailing how, where and when someone can make and consume microwave popcorn.
Nine pages.
Does that mean I have to wear pants?
Business casual dress code even when I work at home. (They Skype me to check.)
That seems like a lot of questions.
Not me, but my girlfriend. She works as a server, and the restaurant where she works has a mandatory 105 question quiz that each server must pass (80% or higher I believe) before they can be on the floor. The quiz isn’t even about the meals, wines, or anything else. It’s solely about the owners of the restaurant and their personal family history.
Petty.?
We can’t personalize our workspace. There are no nameplates on anyone’s workstation either. No pictures, no mementos, nothing but work stuff. It is bad enough we are jammed into an open floor plan and have to spend many hours at our desks, but then to deny us the ability to make it more enjoyable? Petty.
Read between the lines.
Old workplace had assigned desk location for various things like phone and stapler. You were also only allowed 2 personal items on your desk. I was written up because I brought my own red stapler and it didn’t fit in between the lines put on the desk.
Oh this is very bad.
When I was in the military I saw a buddy of mine sitting outside crying. I went and consoled him best as I could – apparently he was just depressed and unhappy.
After he was feeling a bit better I went to go and find someone to tell them what was happening. They knew. In fact, he had been crying so much lately that they had instituted a ‘no crying at your desk’ policy – which is why he was outside.
There’s always that one guy.
I used to own a pest control company. One day I walked into one of our bays and found a technician licking the inside of a cap from a bottle of herbicide. When asked he told me that he just wanted to know how it tastes. I told him that any future pesticides will taste like unemployment and created a no ingesting pesticide rule complete with signs.
Well that’s an issue.
I used to work for a large bank. We had an attendance policy that was so complicated it actually created an incentive for employees to take an entire day off rather than be tardy too often.
The opposite of childcare.
I work at a small, cheap childcare center. The boss/owner’s (who is a complete wacko) office is next to the preschool room, which consisted of three to five year olds. The kids are not allowed to be within arms length from the wall because they are too loud. This is a childcare center… I’ve never been in a childcare center that’s not loud.
Oh. And her air control is linked with the infant and toddler room, so in the summer time, when it’s hot as hell, we would turn on the air for the rooms because its obviously hot in the rooms. Plus, we’re constantly moving! But because SHE gets cold in her small office we have to turn it off. To make matters worse, our changing room is in the middle of both rooms. So, when the air is off, and our trash is filled with poopy diapers, it stinks up both rooms and with the wet diapers it makes the rooms so musty and humid. It’s disgusting. The owner complains about the smell and YET refuses to turn on the air BECAUSE SHE’S COLD. Apparently she doesn’t know what a jacket or coat is.
About that promotion…
We get evaluations. Either annual, when departing the work place for an extended period of time, when receiving a different manager, when promoted, and a few other reasons.
The stupid thing is, unless you’ve royally messed up, these evaluations are usually just pieces of paper that has some generic copy and paste of why said individual did such a good job doing a certain thing at a certain time. However, if you actually did excel beyond what is expected, did jobs outside of your realm and succeeded, ensured others succeeded, etc., this will be annotated but may not reflect the way you think it would/should. Yeah, it’ll still be positive, but it won’t put you too far ahead of your peers in most cases. Why?
Because your manager (the one writing the evaluation) has to maintain a certain tempo, grading, scaling, or whatever you want to call it based on the evaluation matrix. If he grades you too high, then he establishes a high baseline which he’ll have to maintain even for poor evaluees. If he grades too low, then excellent workers will get bad scores. If his matrix is all over the place, it reflects poorly on him as a manager. So, everyone is generally evaluated the same, no matter what (this does fluctuate in certain cases).
So, essentially, your promotion is based off of time and not effort.
When you REALLY hate coffee.
I worked in an office where we couldn’t drink coffee from an open cup/mug.
One of my coworkers, let’s call her “Rebecca,” claimed to have an allergy to coffee. If she smelled coffee or saw someone holding a mug with dark liquid in it (even black tea — yes, someone did this to test her) she would start coughing and run out of the office and take a break from the smell. When she came back to the office she’d proceed to loudly blow her nose and cough for a ridiculous amount of time to show her displeasure with the coffee. She eventually went as far as reporting a coworker to HR for having the audacity to drink coffee from a mug at his desk. The coworker called her bluff and asked for a doctor’s note to prove she indeed had an allergy. What do you know? They never got one.
Manager ended up buying some tumblers off of Amazon and giving them to employees to use since she wouldn’t have this “allergic reaction” if tumblers were used. It became part of on-boarding.
P.S. We all brought in Keurig pods to share so we could have a variety to use at the Keurig machine in the break room. I stayed late one night and caught her grabbing a handful of the pods on her way out and trashing them.
Also, she once got super cranky when someone forgot about her aversion to coffee and asked her if she knew where the nearest Starbucks was. You couldn’t even mention coffee around her without her getting upset. What a weirdo.