what’s the smallest amount of power you’ve seen someone abuse?

by Alison Green on March 3, 2022

Remember the person whose company accountant was nitpicking his travel expenses to the point of responding to a $12 Chipotle tab with,”Ordering extra guacamole is wasteful of member dues”? Or the weeks-long battle about the purchase of a $10 calculator? Or the admin who wouldn’t give anyone a new pen unless you turned in your old, used-up pen first?

There is no amount of power too small for someone somewhere to want to abuse it. In the comments, let’s hear your stories about about the smallest amount of power you’ve ever seen someone abuse at work.

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  1. Dr. Rebecca*

    I may have posted this before, but my dad had a heart attack (he’s fine now) years ago, and I answered the phone while at work and left to go be with him at the hospital. The next Monday I came back to work to find a new “no phones on the warehouse* floor” policy, only enforced if you weren’t related to the owners.

    *I was the shipping/receiving person, and much of my day was pretty dull–having a cell for emergencies wasn’t impactful on my job performance apart from, you know, when there was an emergency.

    1. mcfizzle*

      *shudder* Are you still working there? Did you just ignore the super fun new rule?

      So glad you’re dad is okay!

        1. Dr. Rebecca*

          I quit. I went and finished my undergrad degree, and then a MA and a PhD, and definitely ignored the rule while I still worked there.

        2. Anon for This*

          We’ve an employee whose job is to submit requests to someone else, who has to approve them. “Make this happen automatically without needing to submit a request for this” is something which can be approved, but the approver refuses to approve this because they like being asked to approve everything.

          Request submitter’s been on their way out for the last month or so, and on their way out they’ve been deluging approver with requests to approve access for people who already have it… and sneaking in “and make it happen automatically” on a few requests each week. It’s incredibly petty, it’s probably taking them more time to write up the requests, but they’ve apparently made it their goal to flood approver into submission before their last day.

            1. Raboot*

              Happens to me too sometimes, I’ll click the “add one” link above the comments but it takes me to a random thread. I assume it’s because the comment volume is much higher than the plugins were meant to handle.

            1. No longer new reader*

              We had somebody who approved various requests for the entry of data into the PDQ system who couldn’t handle the powers granted to her and consequently had them removed. She objected to almost all requests, citing faulty supporting documentation. Supplicants would be summoned and made to review said documentation with her for up to an hour. She was on the lookout for offenses such as attaching required printouts in an order she considered incorrect.

              We had a similar bureaucrat who made it almost impossible to send out required mailings via USPS without engaging in tense and protracted negotiations.

          3. Caaan Do!*

            I mean, Request Submitter is absolutely being a dick, but seriously, everything has to go through Approver because Approver can’t let go of being the middle person?

            I work in academia and I feel the pain of knowing something can be really easily made more efficient but it needs a committee, a working group and consultation with the unions to make the change, but something as simple as automating requests and moving Approver on to something else should be a no-brainer and I feel like Request Submitter had a straw/camel back moment. To be clear though, they are definitely taking it out on the wrong person.

    2. Avril Ludgateau*

      Early in my career, a supervisor set up my workspace at not-a-desk so she could literally watch over my shoulder as I worked. When I say “not-a-desk,” I mean it was a row of cabinets against a wall, with about 2 feet of space between the forward edge of my “desk” and the far end of her desk. It was actually a walkway and my workspace was arranged in a way that I just barely had somewhere to put my legs when my belly was up against the “table” and people were always bumping me to get past (in the <1 foot of space between the back of my chair and my supervisor's desk). I'm 100% sure it was a fire hazard (obstructed walkway).

      Anyway, one time I finished all my duties, didn't have any busy work, check my email and documents a few times over and still didn't find a smidge of work to do. So I switched from my work e-mail to check my personal e-mail. The moment I did – when I tell you it was the moment the page loaded – she stomped over and in an ominous and frantic whisper told me I was committing time theft. She didn’t actually have any work to give me, either, when I asked if there was something I should be doing at that moment.

      What I learned in that moment was that she literally spent her day peering over my shoulder to catch me slippin’. Guess she took “supervision” too literally.

      Surprisingly she wasn’t generally a mean person or a “power hungry” one. I think she was a little naive for her station. I have a feeling she may have been scolded once in her career and fed lines about how the employer owns 100% of your time when you are on the clock, and it stuck with her.

      1. Avril Ludgateau*

        crap this was supposed to be a new comment! Sorry Dr. Rebecca I did NOT mean to piggyback onto your thread!

        1. Dr. Rebecca*

          No, no, it’s totally cool because it’s very much related! Like–the only thing my phone was “distracting” me from is the entire lack of packages to send out at that point.

      2. Dutchie*

        Didn’t she have any other work to do beside supervising you? Wouldn’t looking at your screen all day instead of doing actual work also be a waste of company time?

        I realize you probably don’t have answers, but just reading your story made me mad.

      4. jstep*

        I had a supervisor exactly like this. Made me sit directly next to her so she could see my computer all day. The funny thing was, she would spend six hours “writing” a single email. Literally sat there staring at the same screen all day. Once she reported me for using my PTO, one day at Thanksgiving and one day at Christmas, because I was going through it “too fast”.

        1. NNN222*

          This is one of my biggest problems with this type of surveillance micromanaging. You spend more time and energy worrying about looking busy than you do on just doing your job in a way that your brain works.

        2. Ginge1*

          Omg. That’s exactly like an ‘office supervisor’ I worked with. She was horrendous. Constantly watching what everyone else was doing but never actually doing any real work herself. Swanned around the offices trying to look busy. All sales orders has to come through her and she dished them out to the team (2 staff, including me). Wouldn’t learn the system either to help out when anybody on holiday/sick. Wouldn’t give any support whatsoever. Always picked and chose what she wanted to do, no one else got any opportunities. I could go on. As far as I know she still works at my previous employer. Suckers.

          1. Suzy Q*

            I temped at a law firm decades ago, and the managing partner’s secretary was a former Miss Texas runner up, and lord, she thought she was the QUEEN. All secretarial work output had to go through her so she could make “corrections” that were often wrong. I ignored her bullshit as much as possible. One day, I bypassed her (on purpose) and went into the lawyer’s office to ask a question, and I thought she was going to have a stroke! He was totally fine with it, which made her more angry. Heh.
            That was also the office where the guy I worked for was fired and no one told me for half a day. I was thereafter unceremoniously also dumped.

      5. Salymander*

        That is so weird. If she is so worried about time theft, why isn’t she trying to do some actual work herself? Pretty sure her supervision is costing more than your email checking.

      6. Amy*

        Time theft as a concept is so funny to me companies can understand Labor is a commodity when it effects them!

      7. Gruvbabie*

        OMG I had this exact same situation!!! It was a contract and the manager sat right behind me and positioned so that she could see my screen at any time. I even got in trouble if colleagues would come over to my desk to talk to me (even about work related issues).

    3. Read and Find Out*

      Let me tell you about Evil Kevin. We were in the same academic department but I was more junior in rank. As the new director of a program Kevin had previously run, I was given authority to assign work to a more junior colleague. The department faculty even voted to give me that authoirty–that if certain circumstances worked out in a particular way, I should assign that work. Those circumstances came to pass, I checked my plans with my supervisor and the employee, and assigned the work. The employee went to Kevin to ask for help with one of the assignments, and Kevin goes on a rampage because I did not get HIS approval to assign this work (forgetting that they had participated in the vote several months before). They complained to everyone in the department that I dared to set work for a junior colleague (within my job description) without checking with him first. He then insisted that the next department meeting agenda include time for him to berate me.

      I didn’t attend that meeting–as a rule I don’t attend meetings with peers where yelling at me is on the agenda–, and soon afterwards quit running that program. He was mad because I had negotiated a raise for the position after he quit it.

      1. Read and Find Out*

        Ack–I did the thing!!! I’m sorry–I’ll repost below as new comment!!

    4. Frickety frack*

      My dad was hit by a car while riding his bike about 14 years ago, and my mom called to tell me he was in the ER. My sister and I worked at the same place at the time and told one of the lead workers that we were leaving to go to the hospital and she said A) we weren’t supposed to have our phones on us, even though I hadn’t actually clocked in yet, and B) she would see if she could find coverage so we could go. I said, “oh, no, we weren’t asking, we’re telling you we’re going.” She got reaaaal huffy about it and said we could be fired if we left. She didn’t actually have that authority, but we said if that’s what *management* decided, we would just have to accept that.

      We didn’t get fired, but we did both quit not long after due to that place being literally the worst place I’ve ever worked, and I had a job where I was routinely sexually harassed AND had to clean public toilets, if that tells you something.

      2. Ben C*

        My dad actually was fired for leaving without permission many years ago. He had a job moving film canisters and went to take his lunch. The supervisor told him he had to move the remainder before going – said remainder would have taken the rest of the day to move. So he said no, and that he was taking his lunch. Supervisor threatened to fire him and my dad said go ahead. Came back to find himself (happily) unemployed.

    5. Observer*

      but my dad had a heart attack (he’s fine now) years ago, and I answered the phone while at work ~~ snip ~~. The next Monday I came back to work to find a new “no phones on the warehouse* floor” policy,

      So they instituted a policy EXPLICITLY to keep people from finding out about emergencies. Nice folks! NOT.

      Amazon recently was forced to walk back a policy like this (one that was apparently enforced in some warehouses but not others) as they have been sued over it. The claim is that they would have known about a tornado risk early enough to take more effective safety measures had they had their phones.

      2. Dr. Rebecca*

        *nods* Exactly. If you don’t find out about emergencies, they don’t disrupt the workday!

        And I’m glad the one at Amazon was revoked–the company I worked for was (very much) under the 50 employee cap that requires more oversight by the government, so they got to do their own thing in a lot of cases. Absolutely revoltingly bad place to work for many, many reasons.

        1. Hillia*

          My husband is a supervisor at a similar small company. They also have a ‘no phones’ policy, but he’s told his people look, just don’t make me acknowledge you have it. Put it in your pocket, turn the volume down and listen to your music or whatever. So of course he has employees wandering around with their phones out, heads down, surfing whatever they surf, until he’s forced to write them up before he gets written up for not enforcing the policy. Sometimes you can’t win.

          1. DJ Abbott*

            The store I worked at had a rule against phones on the work floor that wasn’t enforced till I’d been there a few months.
            I expect it was because of employees being distracted by their phones in front of customers.
            There are always the oblivious/clueless/defiant ones ruining it for everyone.

    6. Autumn*

      I work in numerous schools as a substitute school nurse. One day we had a situation where a child needed to be taken to the doctor to make sure something was checked on. The child was fine, it just HAD to be checked.

      The parents worked for a warehouse and were not allowed to have cell phones on the floor. I called the main number and NOBODY answered. I tried several times then the principal and the district superintendent had to become involved and shortly AFTER dismissal the parents finally showed up. Nobody told me how they finally reached the parents.

      If you don’t a;;ow cell phones SOMEONE has to answer the freaking phone? What if I’d had to send the student in an ambulance??

  2. Marketer*

    I was a very young junior employee, with a very low salary. I printed two sheets of music at work. The CEO of this 5000-employees company found it, and screamed in the open space : “Who used the work printer to print some music ? Whose is it ?” until I spoke up.
    I felt so small and guilty at the time. Now, I know he was just a terrible person.

    1. RandomCPA*

      Yeah, *technically* using company resources for anything other than business purposes is considered misappropriation of assets, but the managers that nitpick to that level do nothing other than tank morale. I will say as an auditor I do not care about personal printing as there is no way it’s material to the financials.

      1. Clisby*

        Depends on the company. I’ve worked places where they said occasionally using the printer for personal reasons was OK. I’m sure they didn’t mean printing out your novel manuscript, but 2 pages of music would have been fine.

        1. Lacey*

          Yes, I was coming here to say this. I’ve printed put driving directions (pre smart phones, but post mapquest), coupons, emails. No one cared.

        2. sofar*

          Yes, everywhere I’ve worked, using the printer for personal stuff was A-OK. And it’s one of the things I actually miss about being in the office full-time.

        3. TootsNYC*

          I worked at a place where it was in the employee handbook. Wording that said, in effect, “a little bit of this is expected and all right, but it cannot be for an outside employer, and we get to decide when it’s too much, at our own discretion, and you can’t argue with us.”

        4. BeeKay*

          I once worked at a place where we *could* print out novel manuscripts (or in my case a technical book I was writing). Among the duties of my department was writing software for mammoth printers the company made – the kind of printers Amazon would buy for their print-on-demand operation. So of course we had one for testing the software. It turned out that if Gigantor-the-Printer sat idle too long, the toner caked up or something, so management would beg us to pricing stuff.

          This is probably a unique case, though.

        5. Winterborn*

          I know someone who runs a small poetry press by printing and binding the books at the law firm he works at. He’s been doing it for years and I don’t know if they know.

          1. Anon Supervisor*

            I doubt it…with all the paperwork that lawyers filter through, I’m sure it’s not even a percent of the amount of paper they use.

            1. mb*

              I’m not sure how they don’t know. Most law firms have tracking set up on their printers/copiers, either through user codes or actual software that monitors this so they can bill clients for every piece of paper they print related to their case.

          2. Dove*

            I worked in the print shop attached to a corporate law firm for a year. The print staff would asolutely know…but also, if a lawyer or paralegal told us to print and bind something into a book, it wasn’t our job to care why.

        6. A Feast of Fools*

          Same. My company is OK with us using any company resource for personal use *within reason* and as long as it isn’t impacting our actual work and it isn’t NSFW.

          So, printers, copiers, computers, pens, paper, whatever. They don’t care. We’re a mid-size $4B company and they understand that actual humans work for them and that we don’t suddenly stop being humans with non-business lives during working hours.

        7. Reluctant Mezzo*

          Although I made an arrangement to repay the company 5 cents a page when I *did* print my novel…

      2. Anon for this*

        Many years ago, I worked for a company that made… items. My unit made items for civilian use, other units made military hardware.
        Copies were billed to the team that made them.
        Accounting found that one team had made way more copies than reasonable and did some investigation – which ended in an employee led off site by the police, handcuffed, for espionage. They apparently had sold copies of secret engineering files – this was still during the cold war so definitely a big deal.

        3. Rolly*

          Reminded of a roommate I had who delivered ice cream to ice cream parlors. Every driver “took” one of those big tubs of ice perhaps once a month, for home use. No one cared. They delivered hundreds each month.

          Till one driver started stealing a tub *a day*, to sell in cups on the street, to pay for a drug habit. Then they stopped anyone taking any amount of ice cream. Sigh.

      3. Stephanie*

        Recently the head of Operations sent out an email that the person who had printed 60 COLOR copies of theme park tickets could pick them up in her office – I felt so embarrassed for them. Would I print one or two? Yes but 60 in color is so much worse.

        1. Esmeralda*

          We lost use of our color printer for almost four years because of the colleague who abused it. Just got it back a couple weeks ago. Said colleague has been gone a couple of years…

        2. Nanani*

          Copies of tickets like, they were trying to use the same ticket for than once/with multiple people? Does that even work? Do you work for a theme park company to make it ironic?
          Or were they just printing out theme park tickets for their big family reunion at Local Rollercoaster World?
          So many questions that do not matter.

          1. Stephanie*

            We do not work in anything related to a theme park. My guess is they wanted to print a few pages and messed up based on the technology experience I’ve seen demonstrated…

            1. Lego Leia*

              My guess would be repeatedly sent to wrong printer. Printed the same 4 or 5 tickets repeatedly, to the wrong place, because “they weren’t at the printer”.

            1. Marketing Queen*

              Argh. Page did not refresh for me to see you’d already responded. That must have been an awkward conversation when they went to claim those tickets.

            2. Cath*

              My husband used to work in the print center of a law firm and got a talking to because one of the secretaries thought he was to fast. Just like…walking too fast for her taste.

      4. emm*

        I work for a public entity and legally we can’t use anything. The cost is so small though, that when our accountant announced this apologetically we all just handed her a dollar and she said we’re good for life.

        1. Sorcyress*

          I would absolutely give the public entity I work for a dollar to make up for the ~100 personal pages I’ve used of their copiers in the last five years, but honestly, I know the extra work I’ve put in that I haven’t been compensated for and I’m just gonna call us even ;)

      5. Susan Ivanova*

        Our company’s sales department got a very expensive color printer that was set up near engineering instead of in their section. Not your typical color laser printer, but something fancy that they claimed cost $1/page to print (thermal wax, maybe?) So we must be very careful never to send ordinary print jobs to that printer, or use it for anything frivolous.

        One day a print job went wrong and instead of printing very nice color pages, it was printing raw code – the sort where it’ll be a couple of lines of text gibberish and then a random linefeed, so it spews page after page. We couldn’t stop it by any means other than turning off the printer, so we did, and then tried to find someone who could cancel the job.

        “Oh, just let it run.”

        So we did. 50+ sheets, $1/page, and they don’t care? OK, time for some frivolous – I mean, absolutely necessary – printing to brighten up our cubicles.

        1. Worldwalker*

          The cost per page is for the ink (or whatever), not the paper, so it actually wasn’t as much as it might seem like, if the pages were almost blank.

          1. Susan Ivanova*

            It was special paper too; it might not have been a $50 print run but they still wasted more than we did with a few pieces of cube art.

            1. Anonymous4*

              We got one like that in our marketing department! Really Nice Printing, really expensive to run, NO ONE was to touch it — and I don’t remember what was so extra-specially wonderful about it, but we were all firmly instructed in no uncertain terms that we were NOT to print anything on it. ‘Cause it was special.

    2. RCB*

      The smartass in me would have yelled “Do you have nothing better to do with your highly paid time than to worry about 2 sheets of paper? If you do have time for that are you really that important to the company?”

      1. Spero*

        Exactly! With his salary, the time he spent wasting on this temper tantrum was almost certainly more valuable than the cost of 2 sheets of paper and a tiny amount of printer ink.

      2. Zennish*

        This was my first thought. The CEO probably wasted $100 worth of time ranting over 3 cents worth of paper and ink. I generally think that if the time spent addressing a problem costs more than the problem, you’re doing it wrong.

        1. Working Hypothesis*

          There are always people who are firmly convinced that it’s more important to make ABSOLUTELY SURE that nobody is ever getting one pennyworth of anything they don’t deserve than it is to optimize for results. Many of them are in government, but there are plenty at the tops of corporations too.

          1. Distracted Librarian*

            Exactly this. At Previous University Library, we bought tons of books from Amazon. We wanted to purchase Amazon Prime to save on shipping, because at high volume shipping added up to hundreds if not thousands of dollars per year. We were told no, because Amazon Prime comes with personal benefits, so the employee who managed the Prime account could get to watch movies or other bennies on the state dime. So the taxpayers of my state spent hundreds/thousands of dollars to make sure a poorly-paid employee couldn’t use taxpayer funds to watch a movie.

              1. Observer*

                It’s financially stupid. But it is possible that the Uni is not allowed to do it differently or that they have reason to think that they may not do it differently.

                This kind of nonsense shows up ALL. THE. TIME. when dealing with government funders and / or IRS / State tax auditors.

              2. DataSci*

                I honestly don’t think it’s mean-spirited. I suspect it comes from needing to be ABSOLUTELY SURE there is no appearance of abusing taxpayer money, and not wanting to hear a hostile legislator railing about how tax dollars are paying for someone’s Amazon Prime account. (We all know an explanation will never catch up to a hostile sound bite.)

                (Same reason why my wife, who is a scientist working for the government, can’t accept any ‘gifts’ whatsoever. She’ll go give a scientific talk at a university where the policy is that the department pays for the speaker to go to dinner with the grad students and she’ll need to hand over her credit card first thing to pay for her meal, because under NO CIRCUMSTANCES can she have anyone else pay for her meal when she’s on official business.)

            2. Ruby Julian*

              I also work for a university and am not surprised at the insanity of that logic. Our departmental office’s purchasing person refuses to make more than one office supply purchase per month because she doesn’t like reconciling paper work. So when we run out of things, we either do without or buy them ourselves, and then we can’t get reimbursed for them because we did not purchase them through official channels. It’s really quite hard to run an office with no toner for the printer and no pens to write with.

              1. Observer*

                I think that it’s time for malicious compliance.

                Make sure that the requests are documented. Then request permission to make purchases that will be reimbursed. I’m sure that they will be refused, but you want to create the paper trail that you are trying to do your job. Then, when you run out, document that you cannot do X, Y or Z because you don’t have said supplies. Keep your boss (and her boss) in the loop.

                Either she needs to order more at a time or she needs to order more often. And her boss needs to make her do it. But they won’t unless they are pretty much forced to do it.

                1. Distracted Librarian*

                  Exactly this. Stop buying any supplies with your own money. “Yeah, sorry, can’t send that donor acknowledgment letter. We’re out of letterhead, and the next order doesn’t go in till the 20th.”

            3. Susan Ivanova*

              Mom worked in a government office back when they were first given Windows machines, when the standard install still included Solitaire and other games.

              Government bean counters were shocked! shocked! that employees might play those games, and they must be removed at once! Now this was so early in the computer era that most of the people using them knew how to get to the work app and nowhere else, and didn’t even know how to find the games, much less play or remove them. IIRC Mom said if they wanted it off, they could do it for her, and ignored them. If they tried to accuse her of playing the game she’d have told them to prove it.

            4. mb*

              Now you could get around this by signing up for a Prime Business Account. The manager of the account would have to jump through a lot of hoops to be able to watch movies, and I believe that the option for movies and music could be turned off, thereby still getting the shipping reduced and avoiding anyone using the account for entertainment.

        2. Carol the happy elf*

          I’m sticking in my concern about the cost of his BP meds, his take-home monitor, and his stroke….

      3. Reluctant Manager*

        Those are the people who expense their bathroom renovations. I swear there’s a link between believing you’re entitled to use the company as your personal cash cow and being outraged that anyone else gets a completely reasonable perk.

    3. Anonym*

      We don’t have a currency denomination small enough for you to pay back the cost of that… maybe you could have clipped a penny in half? Amazing.

    4. Lady Blerd*

      The only time I’d have an issue with this is if you’re doing it at time where the office is busy. We had a receptionist who used to photocopy entire cookbooks during work hours. I didn’t care for the why she was using the copier, only that I need to get work done but she was holding up the machine.

      1. Evelyn Carnahan*

        I had a coworker who planned her entire wedding at work. Fine, whatever, not my problem. But our offices had drop ceilings and no sound isolation whatsoever. She somehow managed to get herself a brand new desktop printer for her office when about half of the people in our department had no individual printers at all, and then spent most of a week printing out her wedding invitations while she worked. Everyone else in our row of offices spent the whole week wondering what that constant noise was.

        1. Bern Notice*

          Same here – I got to listen to someone yell at people on the phone all day (the phrase “it’s MY wedding” still makes me shudder) and do all her planning at work. And as an added bonus, got snapped at when I asked for help with something I was doing that was actually HER job, she was just too busy not working to do it.

          1. Evelyn Carnahan*

            Luckily my coworker was not that loud usually. But I know that the supply closet ran out of ink when she was printing her invitations. And then years later she became an “acting interim director” (what a mess of a workplace) and squeezed every single bit of power out of that ridiculous title for the few months she had it, including monitoring how other people used their time at work!

            1. Lenora Rose*

              I suspect that’s not as uncommon as it might be. After all, she knows *she* got away with spending a lot of work time not working, so of course she’ll assume everyone else does, too.

        2. Anonymous4*

          We had someone who not only planned her wedding at work, she was also interviewing various guys to see if she could get a better deal on a groom. Seriously. I guess she was on a dating website, but she talked to at least half a dozen guys and asked them where they worked, how much money did they make, what were their future job prospects, so forth and so on — and I’m sitting in the next cubicle, about three feet from her telephone receiver, thinking, “Just – shut – up, would you? JUST – SHUT – UP!”

          She eventually married the original guy, and I have no idea how it worked out. I moved a few months later.

          1. RebelwithMouseyHair*

            We’re getting off topic here but this reminds me of my SIL. There was some deal in her family about not wanting to be the last sister to get married. SIL got engaged to my brother and announced a wedding date that was about 2 years off, smirking because one other sister was not yet engaged.
            That sister promptly announced her engagement, and a wedding date that was 18 months off. SIL was livid.
            The sister’s fiancé then suddenly left her in the lurch, and SIL started breathing again.
            Only to nearly faint when six months later she received an invite for her sister’s wedding: same church, same date, just a different groom…

      2. Margaretmary*

        I’m a teacher and once worked in a school where there was an issue with student teachers photocopying large amounts of text for their course (like taking books out of their college library and photocopying the chapters they needed in the school rather than at college, where they would have to pay for photocopying) just before the summer tests when teachers were trying to print out the tests for the students in the school. (I’m guessing the college and the school had end-of-year exams around the same time.) The principal was saying she needed to make it clear to them that of course, it was fine for them to print out stuff for college when the photocopier wasn’t urgently needed but not to be printing out large amounts of text for personal use when there was a queue of people waiting to use it for actual school business.

        I think even when it was busy, two pages would have been fine though. Might be different in an office but at a time of year in a school when numerous teachers are printing off maybe 30 5 page tests for each of the classes they teach, I really don’t think two pages would make any difference.

      3. Observer*

        The only time I’d have an issue with this is if you’re doing it at time where the office is busy.

        The truth is that with a high speed printer, 2 pages takes almost no time. Given that it looks like a shared printer in a high use environment, I suspect that it was a high speed printers, not something that goes at 8 pages per minute.

        1. GingerJ1*

          Based on my time as a student teacher, sub, and tutor….schools did NOT have high-speed printers or copiers.

          Copier time is a huge deal at a public school.

          1. BlueSwimmer*

            Yep- former high school department chair here, whose classroom was next to the copy room. I became the de facto person for all copier complaints.

            School copiers/printers are typically not high speed, not kept in prime working condition, and have so many users who jam them and clear them incorrectly that they constantly have issues. Teachers also have limited time before school or between classes, so every school I’ve ever been in has a 5 minute rule for the copier. My last school actually posted the number of 1 sided or 2 sided pages you could do in 5 minutes prominently because there were always those people who ignored the rule or sent a massive job and acted like it was an accident and they didn’t know how to cancel it.

            I needed to print 15+ page practice tests for large classes of 35 students a few times a year and would come in on Saturday or stay until 5:00 or 6:00 when most teachers were gone to have the time to copy them all. I could grade an entire set of essays in the time it took to print them all.

            When teachers talk about lack of planning time- it’s stuff like this that takes away from their actual work of planning instruction or giving feedback on student work.

            1. Sorcyress*

              The school district I worked for just finished and opened a new high school building last May. The project cost was something around a quarter of a million dollars total.

              I cannot express in human noises the rage I felt when I went into our shiny brand new prep room for the first time and saw the same 10+ year old copier from the old building, complete with tattered “You MUST use Tray 4” sign taped to it. Thankfully we did get new copiers at the start of this school year, but oh, I was _furious_

              1. RT*

                “Oh no, looks like the copier short-circuited and mysteriously caught on fire. Hmm, guess we have to get a new one.”

      4. Anon for This*

        Looooooong ago, the College of General Studies in the school on the south bank of Charles river went and bought themselves a fancy photocopier that was allegedly SO expensive to use that we had to get written permission to copy more than 20 pages or something. I had about 20 students per class, if I recall, so I could basically do a 1-page handout each class period and no more without a lot of useless paperwork. I wound up doing a LOT of after-hours photocopying so that I could teach my classes properly.

        Bonus: College of General Studies (and the school generally) yelled at faculty if we didn’t give low-enough grades. I was supposed to make the class average a B- if I recall, no matter how much better than that the students actually did.

        I quit.

    5. Eleanor Shellstrop*

      At my first office job, I printed ALL my choir music at the office. No one seemed to notice, ever! Maybe not the best idea in hindsight, but for just one or two pieces, the idea that someone would a) actually care and b) scream about it in front of everyone!!! is bananas.

      1. Salymander*

        When I was six years old, with terrible pneumonia, my mom brought me to work once I was fairly on the mend. She set me up in a corner with a sleeping bag and my giant pile of books, and I was happy to spend a week lying around and reading rather than going to school. On my second day there her boss was trying to be nice, and offered to pay me a dollar every day to run the copy machine. My mom showed me how to make copies, and I happily spent the rest of the day figuring out the machine. I learned how to fix a paper jam, how to load the ink, and everything. Over the next several days, I cheerfully stood in front of the copier for hours, making photocopies of novels including but not limited to: the first two books of the Chronicles of Narnia, Little House on the Prairie, and The Hobbit. So many books. No one bothered to check my work, so I was given a dollar every day and went home with stacks of paper in my book bag. The following Monday, there was much confusion because all of the copier paper and most of the ink had mysteriously disappeared. I don’t think my mom ever told anyone, and her boss forgot all about it, so I remained blissfully free of any consequences.

  3. Expiration Date Keurious*

    We had a coworker who was responsible for budgeting. They were kind and I believe were trying their best, but they didn’t want to order new K-Cups and sent an email stating that the expired K-cups (year-plus) were completely safe to consume.

    One of my coworkers also said they had to justify why their staff needed real laptops and couldn’t do their administratively heavy work on iPads only.

    1. ThatGirl*

      To be fair, old K-Cups wouldn’t be dangerous to anyone unless they’d gotten contaminated … but they sure would be stale as hell and not taste very good.

      1. Expiration Date Keurious*

        I hear you! I think it’s more about what the K-Cups represent. We were an office that felt constantly overburdened and understaffed (jobs hadn’t been filled for a year+, saving tons of money because that work was redistributed to existing members without any salary adjustments or removal of responsibilities), and our one small joy was a free hot chocolate or donut shop coffee in the morning

        1. ThatGirl*

          Oh I get it, I wouldn’t have wanted to drink them either!

          The stupid petty office coffee thing I witnessed was the company I worked for *taking away* free coffee to save costs. They installed Flavia machines (similar to Keurig, but pouches, and made by Mars) but told us we had to buy our own pouches. You could buy them in bulk through the company at something of a discount. But it was just so dumb and such a small thing on the bottom line of a Fortune 500 company. Eventually people revolted and free coffee returned.

          1. Expiration Date Keurious*

            Yeah it’s so “penny-wise, pound-foolish.” To motivate folks to do good work and be positive brand representatives, you don’t take away small perks that have little to no impact on the bottom line.

            1. JustaTech*

              Oh, someone else who has those machines! We got them so people would stop stealing the K-cups (I’m not sure that theft actually happened). Before the holidays I noticed that we were running out of tea bags on our floor (the only floor that regularly has people anymore) and when I asked about a re-supply I was told that we were only getting the Flavia tea pouches going forward “to save money”.

              Which is utterly laughable because acceptable tea (Tazo) is very cheap and the Flavia stuff is so not good that no one drinks it.

              1. Librarian of SHIELD*

                My preferred brand of tea costs about $0.08 per cup of tea. I’m willing to bet the Flavia stuff is more than that.

            2. rita*

              Right? I worked at a company that was super stingy, and I worked at a company that was relaxed and generous, and you get one guess which one was the place where we figured out ways to work around the system and “punish” them for being cheap in the first place. My expense reports were MUCH larger at company A than company B…

              1. Rachel in NYC*

                I was wondering how bad the company was the people were stealing k-cups. I work at a university- we don’t get a paid well (see university pay scale.)

                want to know what doesn’t happen? people taking home k-cups and other drinks and snacks.

                though we’ve always been pretty sure some of the security guys used to stop by our floor for night time snacks. But honestly, we’re fine with that.

                1. Hannah Lee*

                  For a while our UpS route driver would take his break at our company… he’d come in with his travel mug and make some mocha latte espresso thing that used 4 Flavia packets. Every day. Which was bad enough. (Like occasionally? Sure, but every day?)
                  And then he started timing his deliveries to be when the production group was about to take their morning coffee break, he liked to chit chat with them, so everyone else had to wait for Ed the UPS driver to finish helping himself to his free Xtra large coffee… which took a while because of the 4 separate packs and brew cycles… and then wait for the reservoir to refill and heat back up before they could make their 1 cup of coffee and sometimes there wasn’t enough time for everyone to make a cup before they were due back … because UPS Ed was hogging the coffee machine for 8 minutes of their 15 minute break.. One day our production manager handed him a $10 DD gift card and told him our coffee machine was off limits from now on. He’d also come back to our building’s parking lot on his lunch break because it was one of the quieter out of the way places in the industrial park… but he’d eat lunch in his truck with the motor running and his radio on loud, so if any of us wanted to enjoy fresh air or peace outside during our lunch break we were SOL.
                  Again, someone had to wave him off, because he never noticed or cared that he was negatively impacting other people.

          2. AcademiaNut*

            My employer is not legally allowed to provide free coffee, because it’s a public research institute, and buying food or drink for internal events is a waste of taxpayer money.

            I’ve run into the no free coffee thing in four different countries, so it’s not unusual. The pettiest was at a research institute located out at a science park outside of town that had no nearby coffee shop, where a visitor saw the free coffee and made an official complaint, forcing them to get rid of it.

            1. Divergent*

              I’m in government here and we have tap water that hovers around the legal drinkable bacteria count, plus if you leave a glass of it overnight it precipitates about an inch of white goo. So, it’s mostly legally drinkable.

              There is already a water cooler in the building. Employer will not provide any sort of drinking water other than tap normally — it looks bad — so we have to chip in $4/month for the water cooler or bring drinking water from home. The water is tested by the employer monthly and when the bacteria count pops above the minimum limit they pay for the water in the water cooler for that month only since we would otherwise be in contravention of workplace health and safety rules around providing drinking water. Then when the water tests legal we have to pay again.

              As a fun bonus, many of us have heavy field/manual labour jobs that can lead to heat stroke.

              2. Very Social*

                Huh. I wonder how much more those monthly water tests cost than just paying for the water.

              3. Meg*

                I’ve seen a lotta dystopian sh*t on this site, but I think this wins. I want to go cry for a hundred days straight.

          3. Momma Bear*

            We had an old office with a Flavia machine. Corporate pulled the budget for our coffee/tea. I didn’t realize until later that one of the senior staffers was buying more for everyone because he thought that was stupid. When he left (massive layoffs) the Flavia machine was the first thing to go.

          5. Marketing Queen*

            That happened at my old company after we were acquired by a much larger one (think guppy swallowed by blue whale). They bough Keurigs for all the offices, but employees have to buy their own pods. Which they could get through some online marketplace the company sponsored. Except…it wasn’t any cheaper than going through Wal-Mart or wherever. Luckily, management in my office said NOPE, we’re not taking away free coffee.

      1. SaffyTaffy*

        K stands for Keurig, a coffeemaker. The cups are sealed plastic cups of ground coffee and flavoring, so you can get a single cup of whatever coffee you like, rather than a whole pot.

        1. Mischief & Mayhem*

          My parents have a Keurig but were able to find reusable pods. They just fill the pods with their own coffee, wash, and reuse.

          1. CatWoman*

            The refillable pods are available on Amazon, and they are fantastic. Fill with any coffee you prefer.

            1. Always Happy*

              With my current company, before the pandemic when we were actually in office, we had 2 very nice Nespresso machines in our main eating area, as well as loose leaf tea that you could make your own tea bags,and then each floor had a smaller machine that took the pouches. I miss the office somedays lol.

          2. Always Happy*

            Yeah, I tried to bring my own refillable ones into work, and the commercial machines weren’t compatible with them…I will say though, the only upside of working for the collection agency was that EVERYONE who worked there was addicted to either coffee, Pepsi, or Mt. Dew….the coffee was free and you know that the soft drinks were refilled on a regular basis!

            1. JDubbs*

              Off-topic, but as a Canadian, I always forget that Mt. Dew is caffeinated everywhere else, and then I drink it sometimes and wonder why I’m so jittery for the rest of the day.
              (Legally in Canada only brown/caramel coloured soft drinks are allowed to contain caffeine…)

        1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

          An economic one, too. If I’m paying $50/lbs for coffee, I want the grower to be getting the money.

        3. SimonTheGreyWarden*

          You can find ones that biodegrade now! I have some and when I make my coffee, I take the pods home anbd throw the pods into my garden .

          1. Christina*

            The compostable and recyclable ones are still an environmental atrocity – they still take far more resources to produce and ship than just getting beans or ground coffee. Keurigs are nice in offices – the coffee is way better than the normal hotplate industrial machine, but they really are horrifying. At home we use an Aeropress which still gives us a single cup of coffee – we have four coffee drinkers with three different tastes in coffee drinking coffee at different times during the morning – so the hotplate/carafe was a bad idea at home as well. And the Aeropress is way easier to clean the the French Press. Plus, coffee in pods is expensive – even the cheap coffee in pods – compared to beans. We even travel with our Aeropress.

            1. Seeking Second Childhood*

              Side comment about industrial coffee makers. Often coffee tastes burned because the default brewing temperature is higher than necessary. When my inlaws owned a restaurant, they had to adjust the temperature down after every vendor service visit.

          2. CorruptedbyCoffee*

            My favorite is when I worked in food service, worked a 9 hour shift without breaks, short two people, and closed at midnight, only to get a call at 3:30 in the morning from my manager demanding to know why I didn’t clean a pop stain under one of the booths. I would have been back at work at 8am, but apparently the lecture couldn’t wait.

        1. Carol the happy elf*

          My intern last summer “recycled” K-cups and made himself dozens of tiny Jello shots. Yogurt cups were too big, and he was a grad student, so jello shots were academically required.

      5. Anon for This*

        Single use, bad for the environment but very convenient, pods filled with everything needed to brew one cup of coffee (or hot chocolate) that can be plugged into a machine and brewed. It avoids any and all “but I don’t like this brand of coffee” office coffee pot drama by allowing people to select the pod which corresponds to their personal taste, and bring in their own pods if the office selection doesn’t appeal to them.

        1. LinuxSystemsGuy*

          My company (and later my household) switched to Nespresso pods. More expensive, but the pods are made of aluminum and the company has a facility you can ship them to (for no extra charge) that empties them, sends the spent coffee to farmers for fertilizer, and reuses the cups.

          Highly recommend for people that like the convenience of Keurig, but hate the way k-cups work.

          1. Kuddel Daddeldu*

            The Nespresso cups are not exactly environmentally friendly. Aluminum needs a lot of energy to produce.
            Of the Single-Server systems, the Senseo pads are the least atrocious – they are basically comparable to tea bags.

            1. Coffee Nut*

              The vast majority of environmental harms are created by the military and corporations. Every single American could recycle and it wouldn’t even make a dent (especially with places like China rejecting our recyclables). I still do low waste and low impact practices but there’s no need to try to police other individuals on things like this – we should be focusing that energy on corporations and governments!

              Also Nespresso has the best tasting coffee for machines under $200 :)

              1. Working Hypothesis*

                I don’t think it’s policing to give people the information about what is and isn’t environmentally unfriendly. Nobody’s glaring at the folks who absorb that information and then go back to their favorite single-use; we won’t even know if they do. Nobody’s even complaining about folks who choose not to read the thread and find out. It’s their choice. But there’s nothing wrong with making the information available to those who might want it. I don’t drink coffee, so I had no idea, but I might someday have occasion to order it for someone else.

              2. LiraB*

                You’re not wrong, but the reason that corporations have a big footprint is generally because they’re producing goods for the consumer. Sometimes it is important and effective to focus on the individual (although probably not in the case of recycling).

              3. Summer*

                Big Agriculture is actually the biggest polluter on the planet. The New York Times has created some excellent videos recently that really break it down and show how much that industry contributes to pollution and climate change, etc. while simultaneously owning the government thru various lobbying arms. I’m not saying individuals shouldn’t try to help but truly the difference any of us can make is a drop in the bucket compared to what Big Ag is spewing out.

              4. Zweisatz*

                Why would China be obligated to take any body’s trash? You know that the US could take care of it themselves, right?

            2. Lenora Rose*

              But reusable aluminum is still better than only-disposable plastic. It’s manufactured once with that intense process, then cleaned and reused.

              1. Kristi*

                Reusable k-cup pods and filters are available – little plastic thing with a wire mesh bottom, pop in a marching filter, add your own coffee. Environmental impact of a single-cup pour-over, but uses less filter paper.

              1. allathian*

                Yeah. Melting down and recycling aluminum takes about 10% of the energy that extracting it from ore does, and it can be reused forever, unlike recyclable plastic materials.

        2. Delta Delta*

          I worked in an office where the Big Boss only liked hazelnut coffee, and got a little offended if he’d brew a pot and nobody wanted anyone. Dra. Ma.

      6. Random Bystander*

        Disposable cups to make coffee in a Keurig — at one time, the 2.0 version of the machine was made to reject almost every cup not made by a Keurig-approved maker, but they’ve conceded that customers do want more variety–including the capability to use re-fillables, which is my preference. The coffee is pre-measured and comes in a wide variety of flavors, regular and decaf, etc. It’s a really nice thing for an office, or someone who has a lot of guests in their house, since you can get specific varieties to match the taste of your guests or a broad sampler array so that everyone can have their preferred coffee and not have one person’s coffee-making taste rule the office.

      7. *daha**

        K-cups are the little disposable plastic containers filled with ground coffee and other ingredients that are used in the Keurig coffee maker. One cup produces one mug of coffee. The coffee isn’t very good, but it is quick and convenient.

      8. The Buddhist Viking*

        For those who might own Keurig machines but want to reduce their environmental imprint: It’s possible to buy reusable K-cups! Then you simply pour in your own coffee grounds. Clean the cups between uses, and then you’re able to use your Keurig just fine (and save a little money on coffee too, without the K-cup markup).

        And yes, I am aware that industrial/governmental actors are by far the largest contributors to climate harm. But I look askance at the idea that this means everyone should forget about taking actions on their own. One person’s switch to reusable K-cups won’t change anything, but larger consumer shifts towards reusable products and better packaging actually could.

    3. publicsectorprincess*

      I work for a county government organization that did force everyone to do their work on ipads for the 9 months that we worked remotely during the pandemic. I ended up purchasing my own laptop because I could not successfully complete my job functions with the provided equipment.

    4. DecorativeCacti*

      I don’t know why, but your K-cup story triggered this memory in my brain:

      I was in charge of writing the supply order for my department, but it still had to be approved by a manager. One month, I tried to order compressed air so we could clean our keyboards and whatnot. My manager called me in to her office and said, “What is this? Why are we spending $15 on AIR?” I explained what I was trying to order and why. She’s incredulous and says, “You want to clean your keyboard? I’ll show you how to clean a keyboard.” She then proceeded to pick up her keyboard, turn it upside down, and bang it against the desk.

      I didn’t point out that new keyboards cost more than compressed air.

      1. Kuddel Daddeldu*

        I’m still using an IBM MF-II keyboard, built October 1992. The thing is built to last – it weighs almost twice as much as my laptop. If I’d bang it on the desk, I’d fear for the desk.
        To clean it, gust pull all the key caps off, put them in the washer on low (best to put them in a sock), let try and putthem on again. In the meantime just vacuumthe crumbs and whatnot out.

  4. Fleur*

    When I was in college, I worked at my college’s dining hall. Two of the students employees, “Laura” and “Annie,” were promoted to leadership position that involved them being in charge of writing the schedules for other student employees. They were both new employees who were not qualified and put 0 effort into their jobs. Laura used to wear inappropriate clothes, such as low-cut sparkly dresses (better suited for a dance club) and shorts that were so short that other employees could see her butt. (I am also a woman, but I was bothered by the inappropriate clothes.) Annie used to complain that “this job is so boring.” They refused to hire anyone even though we eventually became severely short-staffed. We had about 10% of the staff that was needed for the dining hall to operate efficiently. They would set up interview times with applicants. When the applicants showed up, Laura and Annie would say “We don’t have time to interview you. Go away.” Eventually, they both quit and were told to choose their replacements. They decide to promote the newest, least qualified people who applied for their positions because they thought it would be “funny.”

    2. Imakesigns*

      What?! I worked in marketing for campus dining at several colleges and the way they were dressing is not only inappropriate, but a health code violation?? At our operations even capri-type pants were not an option because it’s not safe to have your legs exposed like that when working in a kitchen. How in the world did the non-student managers allow this?

      1. Fleur*

        I’m not sure why it was allowed. The full-time managers allowed them to wear it. It was bizarre. The student managers refused to work more than minimal hours, and they often worked as a cashier or in the office.

      2. HoHumDrum*

        I dunno, when I was a student worker in the dining hall there was no uniform, students just showed up wearing whatever they wore to class that day and put an apron on. Short and skimpy clothing was pretty standard. But at that school student workers didn’t make it handle food, we mostly cleaned tables and dishes.

        1. Dust Bunny*

          We didn’t have UNIFORM uniforms but we had dining hall T-shirts and mandatory hats and we very definitely had to adhere to basic safety standards–long pants for some positions and closed shoes. The dining hall directors and lunch ladies did not mess around with safety and hygiene.

      3. Bruce*

        I worked for several years in a large, hospital based outpatient treatment clinic. There were 4 or 5 physicians who owned the practice, and about 30 employees. The department was a real money maker for the hospital, and the docs did very well. There were three staff bathrooms-one of them located as part of the break room/kitchen area. At one staff meeting, we we’re told that we would each need to contribute $1 for the bathroom air freshener fund.

          1. Journalist Wife*

            Yes, this!! I would far rather smell crap air than crap-smothered-in-faux-linen-scent air. Barf.

          2. DataSci*

            Except that they are, without exception, terrible. There is no K-cup that corresponds to my personal taste, which is “beans that were ground that morning, and roasted no more than a month ago”. I have preferences for origin of the beans and the brewing style but despite “freshly ground” being a ridiculously low bar to clear K-cups still manage to crawl under it.

            (Pre-pandemic my office had a pod-based machine, I forget if it was Keurig or Flavia. I brought in a grinder and Aeropress from home so I could have drinkable coffee. My morning commute now includes driving to drop my kid off at school (vs walking) so I now just bring a cup in from home.)

        2. Curmudgeon in California*

          Oh h*ll no! I wouldn’t pay to be poisoned with “air fresheners”. Those things cause me breathing problems – it’s hard to breathe when you are tryin to cough out a lung!

          That’s insult to injury in my book.

      1. Dust Bunny*

        At least Romy and Michelle were nice people who (apparently) got it together enough to run a business.

        (That’s one of my favorite “this is so not literature but I don’t even care” movies.)

      2. Hex Symbol*

        This is slander. Romy and Michelle would have had a ridiculous second act screw-up, and then a third act redemption where they made it all work.

    4. Dust Bunny*

      Former college dining hall employee here: What the actual F?

      The guy who ran our dining hall was a jerk but at least he was a competent adult who treated it like a full-time job. Your college was bonkers.

      1. Fleur*

        Their behavior and clothes were so terrible that I reported them to the director of dining services. The director position was a full-time professional position. They didn’t get fired, but I observed that they wore more normal clothes after that. (I quit that job due to their terrible behavior. I didn’t see them as often after I quit.)

      2. Medievalist*

        I second the bonkers. I *was* a student-manager (fellow student employee, who managed other student employees) in a college dining hall, and no way would I have gotten away with any of that! Had to wear long pants, closed shoes, uniform shirts—and HR hired all the student employees, with the full-time adult managers as our bosses.

        I think the only small power I abused was that I arranged my work schedule so that I rarely had to swipe in for meals, and then used all the extra money left on my account to buy cases of chocolate and high-end juice from our campus shop…

    5. bookends*

      I’m shocked at the manager who thought it was a good idea to have two college students in charge of hiring and supervising their peers!

      1. Fleur*

        The dining halls hired my college’s students to be in charge of hiring, firing, and scheduling the part-time/student employees. It was a problem when the people who got promoted to this position didn’t care and/or were unqualified.

    6. Captain dddd-cccc-ddWdd*

      Where was their manager (or whoever ‘supervised’ them in the hierarchy) in all of this? Whoever let them do this stuff should have been held to account!

      1. Fleur*

        It was bizarre. I quit because of their terrible behavior. After I quit, I reported their behavior to upper management. They didn’t get fired, but I saw them wearing more normal clothes after that. I’m not sure why they weren’t fired.

  5. Salad Daisy*

    Our new VP of sales wanted his fingers in every pie so in order to order any office supplies I had to make a formal request to him. My admin was working on a rebate project where she had to tape proofs of purchase to the forms they had been sent in with, so I needed to order 6 rolls of tape at $1.29 per roll. It took 4 emails back and forth before I was given permission to purchase them, which included providing a detailed explanation of how the tape would be used. My thought was, what happens when I need to order bathroom tissue? Do I need to provide a detailed explanation of how it will be used? I never got up enough courage to do that, and would just say that we needed bathroom tissue to replenish the supply.

    1. Mr. Cajun2core*

      At OldJob our accountant was like that. I ordered office supplies including copy paper from an on-campus source. I had to do a written request for everything I wanted to purchase. I couldn’t specify “General Office Supplies”. I had to list everything I was buying. Luckily, I could do one purchase request form for all of the office supplies and didn’t have to do one for each item! Even one of our previous accountants who was previously an auditor at a Las Vegas Casino wasn’t that bad. Yes, there were times, where I had to fill out a form which had to be approved by the Dean and then by the accountant before I ordered a $10 item.

      1. CupcakeCounter*

        Ugh – crap like that pisses me off. I’m an accountant and yes, we have a fiduciary duty to the company to control costs, but a big picture view is needed. A former company had massive workers comp claims and a little investigation uncovered that buying the $60 straps vs the $25 straps would cut down on both workers comp claims (when the straps broke they would send parts and pieces flying), scrap, and replacement parts. The $60 straps were guaranteed for 1 year and the $25 straps lasted MAYBE a month. Nope – because we bought them in bulk and the $60 straps were not a “preferred” supplier, the Controller wouldn’t approve the purchase.
        Same Controller approved upgraded rental cars, monthly golf outings, and allowed his cronies to expense their travel meals as “Client entertainment” so they weren’t limited to the per diem.
        He didn’t survive the annual audit.

        1. Anonymous4*

          Omigod! People were getting hurt because of the cheap straps, and Mr. Golf Outings For His Pals wouldn’t approve the better-quality equipment??

        2. Anon Supervisor*

          Ugh, that’s so gross. I’m wondering if you were self-insured for w/c and the payment of claims came from the company’s budget (part of me thinks it wasn’t because if you are a self-insured company, management tends to take employee safety seriously, just from a financial standpoint).

    2. Cat Tree*

      It really irks me when high-level people don’t understand that labor costs money. The company had to pay both of you to write and read those emails, and the time it took almost certainly cost more than the actual tape.

      1. Distracted Librarian*

        Ugh, yes. I once had a travel reimbursement docked $.05. I’d tipped a nickel over 20%. Someone was checking the tip amounts on every meal receipt, changing the form, and adding a note–for a nickel.

        1. Reluctant Manager*

          I worked for a company that wouldn’t let you tip over 15%. I’m not sure if they enforced it, but that was the rule.

          1. Summer*

            There is no way I would only leave a 15% tip! I tip 20% as an absolute minimum regardless of service. Stingy tippers seriously piss me off!

    3. Summer*

      Ugh I remember at OldJob when they implemented a new policy and all supply orders had to receive pre-approval from the home office. I ordered all of the supplies and got into countless arguments over why I needed to order the more expensive but still reasonable pens instead of the $.30 pens that stopped working after a day. I got pushback over the dang pens while all of the sales people received yearly all-expenses paid trips to a different exotic locale for hitting sales goals. I guess they needed the money more ‍♀️

    4. Tiny Soprano*

      Oh my lord I used to have a boss like this too! He also used to pour the contents of open, out of date milk bottles into open, in-date milk bottles because he personally didn’t believe milk went off and was a complete penny pincher. I still wish I’d been able to work how much money the company actually lost on food poisoning thanks to his attempts to save on milk…

      1. FloraPoste*

        As someone who just had her day* ruined by accidentally making and taking a gulp from a cup of tea with slightly off milk, this chills me to my core

        * OK well the 5 mins it took to make a new cup with fresh milk

    5. Pigeon*

      This was an enormous problem for a team I used to work on… I had to sit down and do the math in front of them regarding our hourly rate vs. costs of items before they’d just buy things like tape without feeling the need to consult me (budget owner) multiple times.

  6. Sandy*

    I’m not sure if this counts as power — more like Potemkin power— but I have had two different colleagues in two different jobs repeatedly change their signature blocks within hours of their boss being out of the office.

    One of them would change his signature block to “Acting Deputy Spokesperson” every time his boss took even an afternoon off to go to the dentist or was out of the physical premises of the office for a conference.

    The other changed hers to read “Acting Deputy Director” within an *hour* of her boss sending around a message that he had to go into five day quarantine because his son got COVID.

    Hot tip: don’t do this. It doesn’t make you look like you stepped up to the plate, it makes you look desperate and insecure.

    2. Banna*

      I once had someone do this for a two week acting!! Everyone thought they were ridiculous and they did not get the full time job when they applied.

      2. Anon for This*

        See, if they’re acting as a direcotr because the previous director is gone, this makes sense. The person who is acting as director for my department in my former boss’s absence has changed their signature to acting director for because they got tired of people asking why they’re chiming in on this issue, where is oldboss, and oldboss has been gone for less than a week.

        1. Squeakrad*

          in California, governor and Lt Governor are voted on separately. So it has occasionally happened that Lt governor is not of the same party is the governor. So Jerry Brown was governor and Mike Curb was Lieutenant, whenever Brown left the state Mike Curb would take over as governor and do all kinds of wacky things. Nothing to put anybody in any peril Burt signed executive orders that Brown never would have

      2. La Triviata*

        At a previous job, one director-level person would decide that if her superior was out of the office that day, she could take the day off but claim it as a work from home day.

    6. The Cosmic Avenger*

      OMG, did these two also list everyone in the department in an Order of Succession, and a rotation for the Designated Survivor who should remain offsite?

      Also, yes, they sound exactly like Dwight.

    7. Red5*

      There’s a guy in my office that has his signature block as “Deputy Branch Chief.” There are two people in the branch, the Branch Chief and him. LOL

      2. Wintermute*

        reminds me of that meme of the little dog and the big dog both carrying the big tree branch, with the small dog more hanging onto it than carrying it.

      3. Captain dddd-cccc-ddWdd*

        This might actually make sense though, because ‘deputy’ often has the same or close to the same level of authority as the person they are ‘deputy’ to (in the way that an Assistant Manager generally doesn’t), so any communications that go outside the branch or when dealing with head office etc, it makes it clear that he has branch chief-level authority.

      4. kitryan*

        At one job I used to *joke* that I was the head of the Fabric Dyeing department (and the only person in the fabric dyeing department) but it was very obviously a joke.
        Ditto when I was the only person in my current role/department after layoffs, though that time it was more black humor, as the department’s workload is really more like 2.5 to 3 people’s worth and being the only person in my department was basically crushing me.

    8. ecnaseener*

      At that point, why not just include the org chart in every email? With an X over the absent boss and a little arrow showing that they’re stepping up into the vacancy :P

    9. Wait, what?*

      When I was at teacher’s college, one of my classmates listed her degrees in her school email signature. No one else did. She included B.Ed. in her list of degrees, even though she didn’t have a B.Ed. yet. Which we all knew because we were all in the B.Ed. program together. It was weird.

      1. Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain*

        I think I’ve told this here before; for years my boss added “RGB” after his name (as a joke) and no one ever asked him about it. He was the Director of the graphic design dpt.

        I’m irrationally irritated by people who add undergrad degrees to their sig. We had a board member who insisted in adding her BA to her name/title on everything. Several of the other board members had PhD or EdD or other doctoral degrees; adding it just made her look insecure because it’s not the standard to list undergrad degrees, and at a certain level, it is sort of assumed a person has one.

        1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

          If I ever have to add qualifications to my email signature, I’m going to rephrase whatever I’ve got repeatedly until I get the acronym RtFM.

        2. Software Engineer*

          The only time I mention my degrees is if I’m applying for a job. Putting them in my email signature just seems crass.

          1. OtterB*

            I put my PhD in my work sig. It felt a little pretentious when I first started doing it, but most of my email is with people at academic departments and it gives me more credibility and more cooperation. I didn’t use it in my previous job, because it didn’t matter to anyone there.

            1. AnonCanadian*

              I work in academia in a staff role – I was told by my first boss to put all my credentials in my signature because I would always be taken more seriously. Unfortunately he was right. I also felt very pretentious at the time but now it’s just normal.

          2. Reluctant Manager*

            We had an HR director who used PhD in her signature. I could see using the HR credential letters, but that one was weird. (Not related to the field, not an academic field, just someone who wanted to tell us about her PhD in Sociology.)

        3. Free Meerkats*

          In one of RAdm (Ret) Daniel V Gallery’s books (I think U-505</u) he talked of when he was stationed at a joint base with the Brits in WW2 and added DDLM to all his correspondence. When asked, he said it was like a KCB (Knight Commander of the Bath, a prestigious Chivalric title), and they accepted that for a while. Finally someone asked and he replied that it stood for, "Dan, Dan, the Lavatory Man."

        4. Anon for this one*

          In a prior job of mine, people wanted their “letters after their name” in their email signature, and because the email signatures were put into Outlook using an automated process that pulled from the company directory, their surname was in the directory as “Smith, Ph.D” or whatever.

          It had started because there were actually legit reasons certain people needed to put specific letters after their names in their email, mostly about membership of professional bodies where they were writing in their capacity as a member of that body (e.g. registered Chartered Engineer, etc). This then spread out to the rest of the company with people wanting BA or BS etc because they had a degree in History/Physics/whatever it was, so could “legitimately” use those letters.

          I don’t work there any more, but my company does occasionally work with people from this company, so I see some of the emails they send, and they are still doing it! Why no one has put a stop to this ridiculousness I’ve no idea.

      2. Allegra*

        I work adjacent to STEM academia/research (a customer service/support role) and I’m sometimes tempted to put my degree in my signature so people know that I *don’t* actually do the science. Folks will call me Dr. (which is fun and I don’t actually mind) or go off into extreme detail on their projects of the physics of llama grooming and microbiology of alpacas when I just push paper to actual SMEs, and I wonder if I’d head off any of it with “Mx. Allegra Lastname, MFA” in my signature. (Doubtful, but it’s funny to think about.)

    10. Generic Name*

      That’s hilarious. I have one coworker who finagled a title bump for himself simply by starting to put “field supervisor” in his email signature. I figured what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, so I decided to add “senior” to my job title (I’ve got 15 years of experience). I’m not sad that tomorrow is his last day. :)

    11. Richard Hershberger*

      In a few states, the governor and the lieutenant governor don’t run on the same ticket, so they can end with being from different parties. In some of these states, the lieutenant governor automatically is the acting governor whenever the governor is outside the state’s borders. So the governor goes to a conference somewhere, the lieutenant governor issues a bunch of executive orders, the governor comes back from the conference and revokes all those orders. Repeat the next time the governor goes anywhere. Good times!

      1. Martha*

        Yep, this happens in my state. In fact it’s so bad that the Governor quit telling his Lieutenant when he’s going somewhere, because she makes such a mess of things every time he sets foot outside the state.

      2. NNN222*

        You see that happen in Idaho a lot with the current governor and lieutenant governor and they’re from the same party. They’re just both extreme about different issues.

      3. Sorcyress*

        WHAT?!

        I mean, I understand what’s happening but this seems like…such…a ridiculously broken system.

    12. Acting*

      I was worried at first when I started reading this one, because my boss left the organization on a Friday and on the Monday I changed my email signature to my new acting role (his old one). But he’s gone from the org and not just on vacation, and it’s going to take a while to formalize the permanent role (government), and people need to know both that I’m now leading the team and that it’s not necessarily permanent.

      Hopefully I’m not as petty as these colleagues of yours? eek.

      1. Mostly Managing*

        It’s actually going to be your role for more than ten minutes.
        There’s a big difference between changing your email signature as soon as you are officially in a new role, and changing it because your boss is on vacation.

        Congratulations on the promotion! I hope if you want the role long term it works out for you

    13. SallyScience*

      I had a coworker at my old job who changed her job title in her signature no less than 3 times in her first year. None of the titles she tried to use even existed within the organization, and the one she finally settled on and kept didn’t either.

      This is also the same person that announced that she was the manager as soon as she started, which wasn’t the position she was hired for and was news to me (since I was the manager) AND my boss. She then proceeded to change my title on the nameplate outside my office door without discussing it with anyone.

      As far as I know she still works there and is still a miserable petty person. I’ve since moved on to a better (and better-paying!) position in a different industry.

      1. Captain dddd-cccc-ddWdd*

        Who hired her, if both you and your boss were unaware of the ‘manager’ title?! I wonder if it was a genuine miscommunication somewhere — being told (by whoever it was) that you’ll be Manager of a team and having certain expectations that go with that — and then being (from her possible perspective) “bait and switched” — could certainly lead to being miserable and petty!

        1. SallyScience*

          My boss hired her, but to be fair he was a horrible communicator so I can totally see how he didn’t set clear expectations for her. But I had been in the role for 14 years prior to that, so the fact that he let that happen and let her throw her weight around and make ME miserable because of that really roasted my onions, I’ll tell you!

    16. WhiskeyTango*

      I once had a boss who’s title was Assistant Vice President and he reported directly to the Chief Compliance Officer (CCO). On a call with a strategic partner, I accidentally conflated his title with hers and called him the “Assistant Chief Compliance Officer.” He started calling himself that (i.e., changing his email signature, introducing himself that way both inside and outside our company). People started complaining that no announcement had been made about the promotion, not to mention a number of people were annoyed they hadn’t been given the chance to apply for the Assistant Chief Compliance Officer role. Eventually it came out that he had “promoted” himself.
      I corrected myself on the call and I was in no position to confer promotions on anyone. He just liked the way it sounded and went with it. (And for anyone wondering, he was the terrible boss who lead me to AAM.)

    17. Work From Homer Simpson*

      Oh man! I thought I didn’t have a petty power abuse story (just lots of regular power abuse stories), but this jogged my memory! At my previous job we had an odd org chart where I was the only one at this location in a technical role who didn’t report to the engineering manager (long story). When the engineering manager went on vacation for a few days, he’d often pick one of his reports to attend meetings in his place and take notes. If there were actual decisions to be made while the EM was out, the EM’s boss would make them. Even so, when one young engineer had his turn as note-taker while the EM was out, he spent all week walking around like he owned the place and telling everyone he was Acting Engineering Manager. We all just rolled our eyes and ignored his antics. But then, a minor emergency came up and a meeting was called to decide how to handle it. A key decision needed fell squarely within my jurisdiction, and another manager asked for my opinion. Fake Acting EM loudly interrupted me to declare that as Acting EM, he would make the call. I looked him dead in the eyes and told him he was not Acting EM, and even if he was, the EM is still not my boss and this is not his decision. He turned every shade of red imaginable before sputtering that he had “more important work to do” and marching out of the meeting. Absolutely priceless.

      1. ICodeForFood*

        I LOVE that you stood up to him and that he scuttled away, tail between his legs!

    18. Frustration Plantation*

      You won’t believe this, but I worked a gig where EVERYONE. DID. THIS. Possibly worse, there were managers who would send facility wide memorandums (numbered and archived!) to name their “acting.”

    19. NotAnotherManager!*

      Sweet, that means I get to be “Acting CEO” next week while my boss is taking a half-week vacation. Maybe I’ll give myself a raise.

    20. A Feast of Fools*

      Ohhhhhh… they were *serious*??

      We would have done this at places I’ve worked at, but it would have been a huge in-team joke and done every single time the boss stepped out of the office, even just for lunch.

  7. Justin*

    Here for this.

    Probably any number of things in my years as a doc student. Anything involving journal reviews and people taking out petty grievances on other people who are slightly less senior in the academy. Obsession over “data” being plural and docking grades because of it.

    But the most absurd story is probably way back in my retail days when I had a manager at a soap store who was very upset over our supposed lack of cheerfulness and fired people because of it.

      1. Justin*

        I really wanted to pull off a “why are the way that you are” Office moment given that this was only a couple years after that episode aired. But I was planning to quit anyway because I was leaving the country so I just accepted it.

    2. Lab Boss*

      Woah now, I thought this was supposed to be about petty uses of power! As far as I’m concerned, using “data” as a singular noun is a capital offense… :D

      2. Magenta Sky*

        While I agree in principal (proper language usage is a pet peeve – “action” is a noun, not a verb, dammit!), that seems like an awfully small hill to die on.

        1. Justin*

          Oh boy, I have a lot (a whole book I wrote) to say about language ideologies and who decides what’s “proper” but we don’t need to get into all that here.

          1. Empress Matilda*

            Hold on, yes we definitely do! Please tell me more about your book, it sounds right up my alley.

        2. Pippa K*

          Well, academia is not a very hilly environment – we’ve got tiny hills like this, and a couple of big serious hills like academic freedom, but otherwise we’re basically Kansas. I go to war over the Oxford comma just to stay in fighting trim.

          2. Working Hypothesis*

            I will fight for the Oxford comma and I’m not even an academic. I am a writer, though. We get into these battles too.

        3. Cat Tree*

          I mean, those noun/verb pairs are a perfectly mundane feature of our language. It seems arbitrary to draw the line at “action” when you use hundreds of others routinely. I guess my pet peeve is other people getting peeved about this.

        1. MM*

          If you really want to have your datum/data notions bent out of shape, I invite you to google “geodetic datum”!

    3. SallyForth*

      Funny about the lack of cheerfulness. My hair stylist told me she had a text from her past salon owner that she was not actively promoting an “atmosphere of merriment” in the salon. The stylist leased a chair. She broke the lease and changed salons.

        1. Salymander*

          Or like some sort of Jane Austen themed place. We shall go to the ball at Netherfield before adjourning to London to taste the delights of The Season! Such merriment!

    4. LCH*

      i was threatened with firing for not smiling enough. not a customer facing job. it wasn’t clear when i wasn’t smiling enough… like, when at my desk not interacting with anyone? when walking down the hallway? i definitely smiled when actually talking to people. it was weird.

      1. Msnotmrs*

        This is the opposite of that recent letter/update about the office that doesn’t allow humor, ever.

      2. Salymander*

        I was given a verbal warning for failing to smile while I cleaned a bathroom. There were no customers in the bathroom. I was in there alone, scrubbing baby diarrhea off the floor. The manager walked in to check that I wasn’t just hanging out in there (with the diarrhea? gross) while pretending to clean, and noticed that my face was neutral rather than smiley.

        3. allathian*

          We have a winner!

          I would probably have grinned at them like a Tasmanian devil. That look has made grown men quake in their boots.

          Luckily I’m in Finland, where people in the streets look like Jason Bourne for six months out of the year, so RBF is usually fine. Matt Damon has Finnish roots and he’s never looked more Finnish than he did in the Bourne movies, usually he smiles too much to pass as a Finn.

      3. nonee*

        My weird mentor told me this at my first professional job! And she definitely meant for me to be smiling when I was at my desk not interacting with anyone, because she specifically told me that’s when she noticed I wasn’t doing it. My main role was squinting at Excel all day, no smiles were generated.

    5. Dust Bunny*

      My mother doesn’t have a Ph.D. because her advisor was in a power struggle with another professor. Her prof finally transferred to another department and told her she could defend in that topic–one she had not been studying–the following Monday if she wanted the degree. She quit and got a job.

      Her advisor was almost entirely in the wrong. We heard that years later, when he retired, nobody showed up for his retirement party. As in . . . literally nobody. Not just under-attended but unattended.

      1. Richard Hershberger*

        This is a flaw in the system of graduate level degrees, that the advisor has boundless capacity to abuse the system, the existing student is strongly penalized for changing advisors, and the incoming student has little information about potential advisors. I am surprised that situations like your mother’s don’t arise more often than they do.

        1. Dust Bunny*

          This was decades ago. I hope that there is a little more oversight/a little less idolatry now. Not holding my breath, though.

          1. Dragon_Dreamer*

            There’s really not. I know of one professor who pulled a page out of Harry Potter and had his students tested on his OWN work. He’s also known for taking first authorship on his student’s papers that he did no writing on. The few times I met him, he was very dismissive of me.

            He recently changed universities, because the new one bought out the research site that HE wanted. One that had already been worked at for years by a colleague, who was still actively doing research at the site, and was finding exciting stuff. And no, the colleague was not allowed to return to the site.

            At the old university, he offered to let his student transfer with him, IF she could get her own grants. He then left her behind without a thought. She did get her PhD under another professor who had retired from taking students. There’s a reason his nickname around the old university and museum is “Gilderoy.”

            There was also a recent scandal involving an Antarctic researcher, and few female students who came forward. They were denied PhDs, because they wouldn’t let him sexually harrass them. He only lost his funding recently, after YEARS of reports and coverups. He was finally fired, despite his colleagues arguing for leniency! https://www.science.org/content/article/boston-university-fires-geologist-who-sexually-harassed-women-antarctica

            1. PhysicsTech*

              Oph yeah that was an intense case. The woman who reported him has so much respect from me.

            2. Reluctant Manager*

              Oh, that was awful… It was an extreme example, but a reminder that a bad boss can give you lifelong physical injury. (He harassed her when she needed to go to the bathroom, so she held it until she developed lifelong kidney/bladder issues.)

          2. Dust Bunny*

            This guy held at least one other grad student’s degree hostage for almost a decade because he (the prof) couldn’t get any more advisees. I forget how Mom said the advisee got out of that; I think the university finally forced it.

            1. PhysicsTech*

              I know 10 years is the max at many grad schools, often because of situations like this so perhaps that is how?

          3. JESUS IS THE MAN!*

            I defended about a decade ago, and my advisor definitely had petty-power-trip energy in spades, with gobs of casual misogyny to boot (AFAIK, I’m the only woman who has ever completed a dissertation with him, not sure whether that’s tenacity or stupidity on my part).

            The time I got utterly reamed out for not overnighting a printed copy of my entire dissertation to him on a different continent springs to mind. Because he didn’t want to have to print it himself. Yeah.

          4. Nesprin*

            There is not. My PhD advisor was a profoundly sane and decent human, but the horror stories are myriad.
            I tell anyone thinking of a graduate degree that the average length of a marriage in the US and the average length of a PhD are about the same, and the degree of power your PI has over you is similar to/greater than a spouse.

        2. Student*

          Similar stuff still happens all the time.

          In my degree program, I saw a professor withhold a degree because they didn’t approve of the student’s future job plans (as in, a job the student had interviewed for and been provisionally granted based on completing their degree…). The student’s new job would not sufficiently strengthen the professor’s personal network because it was in an area the professor didn’t want to work in. The prof planned to withhold the degree until the student got a job someplace else the prof approved of and found more interesting, or until the student dropped out. The professor succeeded and the student eventually took a job more to the professor’s liking.

          1. Rachel in NYC*

            I haven’t heard any that bad but I definitely know of one where a professor got made a ph.d. candidate because he decided to take a job in the private sector and not in academia. admittedly the job in academia was at the school so it’s very possibly the job had been organized at the candidate’s request.

            but yeah, that was the end of that relationship.

        3. Tau*

          Absolutely agreed, possibly the worst part of doing a PhD (which is saying something). My main advice to aspiring PhD candidates was always to pick your advisor really damn carefully, and that having a good advisor was more important than having an exact match to the subject you wanted to work in. I went to some effort to vet mine and am 100% sure I wouldn’t have succeeded with my PhD if he hadn’t been incredibly supportive the whole way through, while a friend who was, frankly, better suited to research than I was ended up burning out and quitting due to a conflict with his advisors. :/

          1. JustaTech*

            And please, please, listen to the whisper network. I knew a person from undergrad who ended up with a horrifically sexist advisor who harassed everyone, but especially anyone feminine-presenting. The professor harassed this person so hard they ended up suing the school to be granted a Master’s for their time worked but were driven completely out of their field. Basically the professor destroyed their career. But he’s still there.

          2. SpookyScarySkeleton*

            If you interview in person, ask to go out with the current graduate students for drinks/social hour/whatever. We 100% will tell you if your potential advisor is not a good person. My program scared off a potential student who was coming to work with the worst professor in the department just by telling her what he was like as an advisor. We know who does academic hazing. And we know who’s a creep.

            Students have less to lose if the department loses a promising candidate because they aren’t a good fit.

            1. anneotherPhDcandidate*

              Also, if you’re in a program that does rotations or something like that, ask around to find people who worked with your potential advisor but chose not to do the PhD with them. They’ll give you really honest assessments of their flaws & strengths.

          3. Emmy Noether*

            Yes! My advisor and the whole group were *the best* (I knew them from a sort of internship) and they definitely pulled me through some very dark times. I don’t know what would have happened if they had been less supportive.

        4. Etcetera*

          People who don’t ask around to find out everything they can about prospective PhD advisors are really *painfully* naive, and setting themselves up for a really bad time. There are *always* meetings with current graduate students, and this is a well-known enough problem that they should know to ask.

          1. Tau*

            Also, history. Has this person had successful PhD students before? How many – and is that number high, low or average for your field? How long did they take? Did some of them continue on to have successful careers in academia? Did some of them not continue in academia? (You ideally want to see both.) Do you know if any were unsuccessful, and if so how many? Some of this info you may be able to find out from academic genealogy sites, even – no interviews needed!

            I mean, obviously someone has to be the first PhD student, but it’s taking a risk. A prospective advisor having a track record of successfully graduating their PhD students is a very good sign.

            1. Dragon_Dreamer*

              Then there’s the professor with a habit of marrying his 18 year old students… Yes, he married and divorced more than one.

              1. PhysicsTech*

                ahhhh wow I am always shocked when that doesn’t get someone fired, but then again lots of stuff goes on in academia that really shouldn’t.

                1. Dragon_Dreamer*

                  The professor I allude to in the comment above is actually quite famous, and has appeared in a few documentaries. >.<

            2. PhysicsTech*

              I would add, if you are a minority always make sure that they have graduated people like you. It’s not a sure bet if they are younger / a newer professor, but it really, really says something if a mid career professor only graduates white men.

          2. Dust Bunny*

            In this case, it was a small department and the prof in question was a) new and b) a member of what is now a protected class, so I think the school wasn’t eager to criticize him. Mom was also a first-generation higher-ed student who wasn’t from the area (so no preceding contacts with the school). And I doubt it helped that she was a woman in grad school in the late 1960s. She wasn’t the only woman in the program but I know she got a lot of crap from male grad students, too.

            1. La Triviata*

              When I was in college (class of 1973, so this was the bad old days) I was in a fairly exclusive college with a number of really smart women. Applying to grad school or a professional school was a nightmare for them. Medical and law school had (unapoligetically) restrictions on the number of women they’d accept, so a woman had to be stellar to get in, where any number of mediocre men had no problem. One woman was rejected because she was married and they assumed that, as a married woman, at some point her husband would either move and she’d be required to follow him. Another woman’s husband decided he wanted to be a forest ranger and she was expected to drop out and follow him to a remote location (no schools and this was before the internet).

              1. Working Hypothesis*

                My mother went to law school in 1969. More than one school turned her down by openly explaining, “You’re a 21-year-old woman. Statistically speaking, you’re probably going to get married and have a kid within the next three years. You’ll drop out of law school and never practice. Why should we waste a space on you?”

                Mom politely thanked them for their time and moved on. After NYU Law accepted her, she enrolled… and she got married in the summer after her first year. She took her second year finals with morning sickness, and I was born by Caesarean section during January break of her third year. She went back to class ten days later holding a pillow against her stomach to brace the incision from jostling… but she never missed a day of class, and she had a forty year legal career thereafter.

                Mom was the epitome of the “backwards and in high heels” era of feminism. I have enormous admiration for her and all the women like her who broke the trail, and I’m deeply grateful that I *don’t* have to do things the way she did.

          3. JESUS IS THE MAN!*

            I was painfully naive, now that I realize it. I started my PhD program straight out of college, at 21, with a starry-eyed view of the academy and absolutely no idea how to vet potential advisors. Disaster predictably ensued.

          4. LadyJ*

            Someone I know admitted they ignored all the warnings because it was just gossip even from those who had dealt with the man. She was in tears and a lot of us were fighting back saying we tried to warn you. Also, the way she was raised to define gossip was weird.

            1. Etcetera*

              I’m a PhD student in a department with a <15% gender ratio. I consider a good gossip network to be an essential survival skill.

          5. Zelda*

            “they should know to ask”

            How?

            A well-known problem *in academia,* to (especially female or POC) *academics,* but seriously, how is a brand-new bachelor’s degree holder to blame for being naive and not having connections in academia?

            1. Etcetera*

              It’s not really a question of ‘blame’, I don’t think? Obviously abusive advisors are to blame for their abusive behavior. But it’s like someone choosing to work at a tech startup, burning out, and then asking if the employee is ‘to blame’ for the company’s awful work-life balance. They’re not… but also this is a well-known problem, and they *really* should have done the most basic research before taking the job.

              It’s not expecting them to ‘have connections in academia’, (though given that graduate school applications require three rec letters from professors, I think that most incoming graduate students aren’t totally in the dark). Even the most cursory google search of ‘how to choose an advisor’ would tell you that this is something that they should watch out for.

              So I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that people should look at *the most well-known pitfalls* of a career choice, before signing on for 4-6 years of it.

              1. Seven hobbits are highly effective, people*

                This may be obvious in retrospect, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable that it wouldn’t be obvious to an undergrad student trying to figure out “what to do next” if they didn’t have access to meaningful advising. I know the sum total of advice my undergrad department had on the subject of grad school was “working at a SLAC is totally awesome, so you should go to grad school so you can get a job like mine someday”, with a few anecdotes thrown in. (These were generally professors how had been there for decades and also had no idea of the current academic hiring market, since the department had not hired recently…) The idea that you should probably have a research specialty in mind and find a program with an advisor who specialized in that may have been…under-emphasized as a result.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        My mother doesn’t have a Ph.D. because her proposed thesis was “too European” for the Business School.

  8. Justin*

    Oh. I forgot one thing. But, my colleagues were upset that a person was being hired to manage them (because they were kind of bad at their jobs) so they all switched their desks so the new boss would have a worse desk.

    And then she ended up liking her new desk.

    2. TimeTravlR*

      Or she’s smart enough to not show that she didn’t like it. Might be the reason she was selected!

      1. Justin*

        All I know is she was a great hire for that mess of an office. And then a lot of them left.

  9. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

    The person who won’t let me join the LGBTQ forum at work because as I’m married to a man I count as ‘straight’ apparently.

    I’m not. I’m pansexual.

    1. ThatGirl*

      Thank goodness my company’s ERG doesn’t have that kind of gatekeeping – it’s open to anyone on the LGBTQ+ spectrum and allies! (And we have multiple pan/bi/queer women who are partnered with cis men, because we count too.)

    4. Have you tried sparkling at it?*

      That’s gross.

      I have a related one- the woman who wouldn’t let me leave the Women’s Development group. I’m not a woman. My cis male collegues weren’t invited.

      1. NotRealAnonForThis*

        Ew. (Not you, of course. At the gatekeeper who wouldn’t let you leave a group.)

      2. KoiFeeder*

        Oh, that’s just disgusting. (not you, obviously- the person who wouldn’t let you leave!)

      1. Another Queer Woman Married to a Man*

        Somebody really needs to ask them precisely what they think the B in their own name refers to.

    8. Susan Calvin*

      Not relevant to the larger topic, but allow me a commiseration anecdote:

      Last summer, being a bisexual woman and recently promoted manager, I decided to celebrate pride month (and effectively come out) by making a gently educational “hey, let’s talk about the variety of queer experiences, ‘invisible’ identities, and the folly of making assumptions about your coworkers” post on the social section of our intranet. Great responses all around! My one openly gay colleague was so delighted, he posted a selfie with the little pride flag he’d decorated his workspace with in the comments.

      Guess which one of us was approached by marketing.

    9. Beth*

      And the woman who ran a women’s group I belonged to once, who refused to let my sister attend, because my sister is trans. My very first encounter with a TERF. Her specific reason? The group, as a “women’s space”, was only meaningful for women who had experienced menstruation.

      1. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

        Nothing angers me faster than trans exclusionary women’s spaces. Trans women are women.

      2. CommanderBanana*

        Man she’s going to be very upset when she learns about the variety of conditions that cause some women to never menstruate!

        2. Turtlewings*

          Yeah, friend of mine didn’t menstruate until sometime in her twenties, for medical reasons. Nice to know she was actually male up until then, she and her husband would sure be shocked to know it.

      3. PolarVortex*

        I am so sorry for what happened to your sister and to you, that is completely unacceptable.

      4. Elenna*

        Ah yes, because the only thing women ever discuss is menstruation, of course. Nothing else that might possibly be relevant to your sister is ever discussed. Don’t you know, us women, we just sit around talking about periods all day. /sarcasm

        1. ferrina*

          That is so true. And I never experienced any form of sexism or gender bias before I started menstruating, and the sexism and gender bias I do experience is all based in menstruation. /s

        2. Michelle*

          When I go to ladies’ book club, all we do is menstruate. Together. Just menstruating all night. It’s really the only female bonding experience that counts.

        3. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

          Memories of the boss I worked for long ago who straight up said there’s no point in having a womens forum because all they’ll talk about is having babies.

        4. Salymander*

          Yep. That is literally all we talk about together at all ever. All Menstruation all the time. That is the only topic that can ever be of use or interest to a group of women.

          I wonder if this terf group leader will ever realize how incredibly sexist actions like hers are, and how detrimental to women.

        5. Art teacher*

          If anyone ever invites me to any sort of social group where menstruating is relevant to my participation, I will nope right out of there. For me, menstruation is a strictly individual activity.

      6. Anonym*

        Oh, because menstruation is the sole and primary cause of a female experience in the world. Nothing to do with gender roles, perceptions, bias, society’s expectations, none of that. Cool.

      9. alienor*

        Was she expecting every session to be filled with menstruation chat? Honestly after 35 years of having periods, I think I’ve said all I have to say about them.

        1. Verthandi*

          I’m pretty sure that since I’m done with that bloody* situation, I’m not woman enough for her club.

          *Pun totally intentional.

        2. drtheliz*

          You know who loves a good menstrual chat? My cis husband. Because he’s a feminist, and he listens to his friends and his sister and his wife, and really enjoys providing a sympathetic ear (with the occasional “wait, you’re cool with talking about *tampons*? And period poops? Wtf?” double take).

      10. Storm in a teacup*

        Ugh that’s awful. Maybe the Womens’ group could read Deborah Frances-White’s brilliant book The Guilty Feminist. There’s an excellent chapter all about the experience of Trans women

      11. tinybutfierce*

        Always gotta love how TERFs think reducing women to their reproductive organs is somehow a positive or remotely feminist.

      12. Woof*

        I guess trans women never experience sexism etc eh? (Please read this with extreme sarcasm; my understanding of intersectionality and experiences as a cis woman lead me to believe trans women probably get hit at least as hard and probably harder by sexism – and that’s not including the lgbtq parts)

      13. Nanani*

        TERFs don’t deserve the F. There’s nothing feminist about reducing women to bodily functions – that’s literally what patriarchal systems do!

        2. Tiny Soprano*

          I had to explain what a TERF was to my mother recently, and I was so proud of her when she was instantly like “What?? How dare they consider themselves feminist then?!”

      14. Rachel in NYC*

        because menstruation is the definition of being a woman…

        well that’s news.

      15. Curmudgeon in California*

        Oooooh, hey, since I had a hist does that make me male now? Because if it did I could be making $50K more a year! (I’m actually enby and bi – ace, and get erased pretty consistently in LGBTQ spaces.)

        1. The Leanansidhe*

          Fellow enby and bi-ace person here. I see you :) I was part of multiple LGBTQ+ organizations in college and still never met another ace person (at least one I knew about) which is a shame. Lots of so-called “safe spaces” aren’t made for us.

          1. Curmudgeon in California*

            Very true. I’m married to another enby ace, which helps me not get hit on. But between enby, bi and ace, I am definitely odd person out.

    10. PolarVortex*

      Pans unite!

      As someone who runs an LGBTQ ERG, I am so goshdarn sorry that kind of gatekeeping/bigotry is existent in your company. Is there a way around it? Or a way to create your own since clearly theirs is lacking in acceptance?

      (A way to continually share in some kind of diversity initiative all kinds of articles about bi/pan erasure and celebrating bi/pan awareness days/weeks, continual petty mosquito bites until said gatekeepers look like fools?)

    11. sadnotbad*

      Gosh this really gets me mad. On top of the bi/pan-phobia, there are just so many other assumptions there. That you’re cis, for example, or that your spouse is cis. Or that your current gender/orientation in public is how you feel deep down (some people join affinity groups before they’re ready to be fully public about their identity). That’s why I think queer spaces should take people at their word that they’re queer.

    12. Beautiful Bi+ Butterfly*

      I’m so sorry you’re dealing with this! That sounds like blatant discrimination. Wish I could say it was unusual for monosexual queer folx to disbelieve in the existence of bi+ people, but nope.

      Here’s a brochure you can print to help them be a better ally to bi+ people: https://biresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Ally-Brochure-2022.pdf

      specifically: “Believe that sexuality is a spectrum which allows for attraction across many variants, including gender. Just as a monosexual (gay or straight) person can fall for people of differing hair or eye colors or personalities, a bi+ person has the potential to fall for people of many different genders…. It doesn’t matter what our “count” is with any gender, whether we’re currently in monogamous relationships, or even whether we have no interest in dating. Accept that we know where our attractions lie and who we are.”

    13. SaffyTaffy*

      Our LGBT+ group in college decided that bisexual people weren’t welcome. Ultimately, looking back, I realize the impetus was the same old story of a college romance breaking up, but the dump-er was bisexual, so the dump-ee (LGBT+ Club vice-president) decided all bisexual people are toxic and secretly straight. Gotta love that sense of togetherness fostered by all being members of a marginalized group. o.O

        1. Another Queer Woman Married to a Man*

          I asked the same question a little up the thread. But I have to admit our university wasn’t much better. We had a separate Bisexual Union because the school’s GALA wouldn’t let us in.

          By the time I was attending, the two organizations were getting along pretty well, and did a lot of events together. But we were always a little irritated at them for leaving the rest of the queer community out. We compensated by being radically inclusive ourselves, and welcoming anybody who wanted to show up. We usually had a few straight folks who just liked the company — although some of those did end up coming out later.

          1. Tiny Soprano*

            And that’s the thing isn’t it! That sometimes people who thought they were straight/cis/whatever-the-opposite-of-ace-is just need a welcoming environment to figure themselves out in.

        4. Deejay*

          No doubt something other than bi, just as some groups which include the letter A exclude aces on the grounds that “It stands for Ally”.

    14. Bagpuss*

      Keymaster – that’s horrible, and also in direct violation of the Equalities Act as sexual orientation is protected characteristic and explicitly defined as
      “Sexual orientation means a person’s sexual orientation towards—
      (a)persons of the same sex,
      (b)persons of the opposite sex, or
      (c)persons of either sex.”
      So explicitly includes protection of Pan / Bi individuals.
      Of course I appreciate that you may not have the time/energy to address it but given that it’s a work forum it’s something that HR or your diversity /equality officer (if you have one) should be very concerned about.

      1. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

        Gets even funnier when you consider I have administrator rights to the server their main chat channel is on….

        1. Dragon_Dreamer*

          Ooh, please do report on the fallout after that conversation with HR, AND the realization that you hold the keys to their little clubhouse. ;)

          1. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

            It’s one of those ‘if I get the energy sometime I’ll raise it as an issue but right now I’m knackered’ things unfortunately. Just don’t have the spoons to do it :(

            1. Salymander*

              May your spoon count rise swiftly and may your days not require their use. :)

              I will still imagine you chuckling ominously and tapping your fingers together like Mr. Burns from the Simpsons, before leaning toward your keyboard to unleash a can of internet whoop ass.

            2. OhNo*

              Understandable! We shall simply have to live in anticipation of the day when you do have the spoons for it, and can report back to us on the fallout. I can already picture it, and it is absolutely making my day.

              1. Another Queer Woman Married to a Man*

                Mine too!! Totally understand if you aren’t up to tackling it for a while, Keymaster, but I hope you do someday, and please tell us how it went if so!

                Meantime, I hope your spoons recover s(p)oon!

    15. YetAnotherNerd42*

      As a bi guy whose primary partner is a bi woman, this kind of gatekeeping is repugnant.

    16. This is a name, I guess*

      I founded an ERG, and I’m bi and in a relationship with a woman. However, I make sure to make non-visible queer people are super welcome!

      The major issue – and this is such a queer issues hah – is that a lot of bi/pan staff in relationships with the opposite gender are actually in polyamorous and nonmonogamous relationships. So, we’ve had to grapple with how to talk about nonmonogamy, which normal in our community but less normal in the workplace.

      1. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

        Oh goddess, that reminds me f an ex coworker who proudly proclaimed that all bi folk must be in polyamory relationships or ‘it’s not valid’.

        Only to state a few minutes later that he didn’t believe bisexuality existed at all. Man he was annoying (one of those types who’ll mansplain everything and keep talking for hours never letting anyone else speak).

        1. Salymander*

          Wow.

          I guess I will have to tell my husband that we are required to bring in some more partners to our marriage. We don’t want them, but if those are the rules I guess we have no choice unless we don’t want our relationship to be valid. Especially because my bisexuality doesn’t exist. FFS

          What a tool that guy is. Not the sharpest tool in the shed, but a tool nonetheless.

      2. NeutralJanet*

        I feel like that’s the eternal queer issue! Yes, bi/pan people CAN be in monogamous relationships, despite being attracted to multiple genders, and the implication that we can’t is feeding into the offensive “slutty bisexual” stereotype…but also, some of us aren’t in monogamous relationships, and that’s also good and fine (sluttiness is also good and fine, though perhaps not something that should be discussed in the workplace). All queer people CAN exist in normative relationships that are virtually identical to normy cishet relationships with the exception that both partners are men, both partners are women, or one or both partners is trans and binary, and we should have the right to do so…but also, that lifestyle is not inherently superior to any others.

        I had to define what a gay trans man was for half the members of my workplace LGBT+ group, so I really don’t have faith in us to get into any of these types of discussions.

        1. This is a name, I guess*

          My company is pretty young and has an informal work culture, so it’s been really easy to integrate discussions of nonmonogamy into our social events. This has been a blessing for several bi/pan staff in relationships that appear to be in straight relationships, but who actually have queer partners they can’t discuss more openly at work. It’s also been great for bi/pan staff who have never been “out” at work because they been in relationships with opposite sex partners. I’m hoping full acceptance of their queerness at work helps encourage coworkers to explore queer relationships if that’s what they want (no pressure, obvi). So many bi/pan people – myself included – don’t explore or even claim their queerness because of larger systemic issues. I wish I had had that implicit encouragement when I was younger.

      3. Dina*

        Yeah as a fellow married to a woman, read as female queer, I try to be especially open about my bisexuality to normalise it for the ones who are always read as straight. And I’m the first to start yelling when people treat them as not queer.

    17. UKDancer*

      Oh yuck. That’s just wrong.

      Affinity groups should be inclusive of those who want to belong to them and not pressgang those who don’t. I’m straight and white and I belong to the LGBTQ group and the BAME group as an ally so I can be a better colleague and ally to my BAME and LGBTQ staff.

    19. Queer in all the flavors*

      *stares in trans and bi in a straight facing relationship with a pansexual at your colleague*

    20. Cat Mouse*

      Ugh. I gave up on trying to be out as a cis-ace. If the community is open to allies, I’ll participate, but apparently being married to a man means I can’t be asexual. Half the time it’s cis-het people claiming I can’t be a member even. So frustrating

      1. Squeebird*

        Oh man, this kind of thing is why my husband is the only person who knows I’m asexual. I’m afraid of getting this exact kind of response.

      2. lesbian opinion*

        If you’re an asexual woman and not romantically attracted to women, gay spaces really aren’t for you. You will never know what I experience as a lesbian. Sometimes it’s not gatekeeping, it’s just wanting to be around people who share your experiences…

        1. Aroace Opinion*

          Honestly, why gatekeep like that? If you want to only hang out with other lesbians, that’s up to you. No one’s saying that having an inclusive LGBTQIAP community means you have to be best friends with every person from every letter of the acronym. But a lesbian doesn’t know firsthand what it’s like to be a gay man or experience biphobia, either. Do you want to exclude the G and the B as well?

          My point is, as an aro-ace woman, I gravitate towards queer people and queer spaces because of the common experience of being not-straight. I’ll never be attracted to the people that society expects me to be into. Isn’t that enough common ground for you?

        2. Tali*

          Gross. Doubt most gay men, bi people, trans people, and nonbinary people would know what you experience as a lesbian either, but only aro/ace are excluded? That is the definition of gatekeeping…

        3. Curmudgeon in California*

          Ewwww. Just ewwww.

          What a nasty bit of gatekeeping – which is what it is. Your personal circle of friends is where it’s okay to gatekeep like that. Not an ERG or other public org.

          I’m enby, bi, and ace. I’m married to another person who is also enby and ace.

          Why do you think that aces are not familiar with attraction to women, men, or both?

          I’ve had relationships with both men and woman. I’ve even had sex. But it didn’t do anything for me, which is why I’m ace.

          I am not so shallow and petty that I require others in LBTQIA spaces to have shared all my same experiences in order to be considered valid.

          After all, the idea is to celebrate non-cis-het-allo lifestyles, not to decide who is legitimate LGBTQIA.

        4. Fushi*

          If you want a solely “gay space” then make one yourself and label it as such, cause the LGBTQ community ain’t that and never has been.

        6. Nell*

          Actually, as a panromantic asexual, I share those frustrations with Cat Mouse. No matter whom I’m dating (straight cis man, lesbian trans woman, panromantic asexual ciswoman, etc.) the LGBTQ spaces can sometimes be less friendly to me, even the ones that insist I call the group LGBTQIQA. Asexuality does belong, as a sexual minority, and I find it extremely frustrating that people, especially cis-het allies, exclude us. People are becoming more willing to accept people who aren’t straight and cis, but they are nearly always taken aback by the idea of someone who has no interest in sex. (Please do not take this as claiming asexuals have it worse, as gay or trans panic is still sometimes accepted as a legal defense while asexual panic is not a legal defense.) I am simply tired of my acceptance in LGBTQ spaces having gatekeepers that may or may not exclude me depending on whom I happen to be dating or claim that I don’t count because I don’t want to have sex with women, regardless of the fact I don’t want to have sex with men. All of us who are not cis and straight have difficulties with acceptance and dating. It is churlish to argue otherwise. If you do not want to accept asexual, cis, heteroromantic women or men, I recommend groups focused specifically on your sexual orientation. Asexuals are supposed to be included in LGBTQ spaces, which is emphasized in the recent LGBTQIQA name emphasis. We are the Asexuals at the end, after all.

        7. Food For Thought*

          I have a strong suspicion most of these commenters replying aren’t lesbian or gay. No one likes to be excluded so it’s very hard for people to recognize (or accept) when their inclusion is harmful to others. As a lesbian, I agree with you completely.

        8. TrixM*

          I’m queer, a lez, and I think your attitude is disgusting and embarrassing. Sorry, I can’t be more polite than that
          There are het-aligned asexual people and there are queer-aligned asexual people, and like bi/pan people, being in an opposite-sex relationship has absolutely zip to do whether or not they’re queer.
          If being queer is about having sex with people, do I no longer qualify after not having had sex for two years, despite being out for 35 years? If you think that sounds ridiculous, well, that’s how your assertion sounds to me. (Apols, ace people, I know it’s not the same, just making a point.)
          I suppose the better way to express it is whether you accept bi/pan people in opposite-sex relationships as queer. If so, ace people that ID as queer/have an affinity with queer community seem pretty similar to me, just without the wrestling body parts/romantic inclinations/whatever ace-spectrum they are.
          You need to learn more about queer-identified ace people and asexuality in general. For example, a pretty fundamental thing is that being asexual is not the same as aromantic (someone can be both, of course). And a multitude of ways they live their lives and how their sexuality might be experienced within them. Like the rest of us.

      3. This is a name, I guess*

        I started an ERG at work, and we try to be super open to the aro-ace community. My partner is trans, lesbian, and on the ace spectrum. However, I think it’s harder to be out as ace at work because talking about asexuality – especially when you’re partnered – encourages outsiders to think about and even ask questions about sex life. This is also why I primarily use “queer” in more generic work settings and “bisexual” only when necessary at work. I have no problem being bi, but it invites people to ruminate on my sexual history in a way I find frustrating. I don’t think it’s right that we have to do this, but alas, I definitely feel the pressure.

    21. Panda (she/her)*

      That is awful! There is already so much bi/pan erasure in LGBTQ communities because apparently we need to “pick a side” (as if this is…soccer? Or something?).

      Also pan and married to a straight cis man.

    23. Michelle Smith*

      Seems like inappropriate discrimination. Maybe HR can step in? I get not wanting to be involved in a group with a bigot like that though.

    24. Unkempt Flatware*

      “That’s not what your wife told me last night” or something equally gross to match his gross.

    25. Lirael*

      I’m so sorry. Of all the places that should accept pansexuality the LGBTQ forum should be top of the list!

    26. Elle*

      I’m shocked they’re allowed to operate it that way. My work LGBTQ group would never even want to behave that way- I think we have a ton of bi women (unfortunately no out bi men but that’s a larger issue)- but we’d (rightfully) get shut down immediately if someone started pulling that.

      On the other hand, we have a mandatory ally leadership position (every group has this rule-eg the group for Black employees has to have a white person in leadership ) which unfortunately is not working out *great* at the moment but you do what you can do

      1. Zelda*

        “the group for Black employees has to have a white person in leadership”

        What?! I’ve read that four times now and I still can’t wrap my brain around it.

    27. Nanani*

      That’s not how anything works AAAAAAA

      Does this person get confused by pull-out couches (“it’s a BED so it doesn’t count as a couch!”)

    28. theythemtheirs*

      My ex-boss said that people “shouldn’t have to use my pronouns if they weren’t comfortable with them.” (There’s pending EEOC litigation so I can’t go into the other details…)

    29. LadyJ*

      That sort of gatekeeping is not cool and as a Bi woman who was married to a man I would be having a fit

    30. Caaan Do!*

      What the actual f?!
      I’m bi but not out at work. I am also married to a cis man. One Bisexual Visibility day, a manager who I shared an office with at the time asked why BV is a thing because why do people need to state what they are up front, no one who is reasonable cares who is what etc etc

      I gently said “because bi erasure is a thing that happens” and she shrugged it off with a lame joke about the band Erasure and reiterated her point about ppl defining themselves by their sexuality. She is someone with usually inclusive views, so i was pretty shocked she didn’t see that straight ppl get to be their sexuality by default and LGBT+ folk are more often than not seen as their sexuality and nothing else

    31. Pigeon*

      I’m asexual… our LGBTQA ERG thinks the A stands for ally. You can guess how welcome I feel lol.

  10. WomensRea*

    My very first job out of undergrad was at a super dysfunctional, super small law firm. A partner’s wife worked in the same office space as a “travel agent.” In reality, she mostly did nothing and monitored the office for things large and small she could grieve. There were many little gems on that front – but my favorite is when she confronted me about having “too much joy” in the workplace because I was laughing at something a coworker had said. The workplace was indeed joyless though so perhaps she didn’t want to change the status quo.

    3. TimeTravlR*

      Same experience! I was pretty new to the office and I was joking around one day, as one does, and my colleague who had been there a while said, “Mr. Waters doesn’t like levity in the workplace.” I laughed and said, “the day I can’t enjoy myself at work is the day I quit.” BTW, Mr. Waters and I got along quite well, TYVM!

    4. nonprofit llama groomer*

      I love your username.

      I’ve never worked in a law firm where the significant other was that involved but I’ve heard of many law firms and doctor’s offices where it happens.

  11. SheLooksFamiliar*

    A long-ago office manager at a long-ago office was distinctly odd about office supplies. For instance, I couldn’t have a whole box of staples, but I could take several bars to my desk. She was especially odd about pads of paper. If I asked for a pad of paper – memo pad, legal pad, whatever – she asked how many sheets of paper I expected to use. She wouldn’t hand out the whole pad of paper, just the required sheets.

    We were a profitable Fortune 100 company and there were no complaints from management about supply costs. There were complaints about her, but she was ‘such a dear’ that no one talked to her about her behavior. Or if they did, the message wasn’t received.

    1. Lurker*

      I worked with someone like that! The office manager at a for-profit college. (It was my first job after college and I didn’t know there even such a thing as proprietary schools. I hated it.) Anyway, if I asked the office supply guy for paperclips he would ask how many I needed — I couldn’t get a full box. Petty, petty, petty.

        2. Lurker*

          Ha — I should have asked for the quantity in a box minus 1 or 2!

          I also had to fill in for the receptionist when she took her lunch break and a lot of the students would come flirt with me. (I was basically the same age as them, as I had just graduated myself.) I couldn’t leave the desk, and I didn’t want to be rude so I would talk to them. (Also some were cute!) The owner’s lady friend, who was also the VP of the school, told me I wasn’t allowed to talk to students. Also not allowed: open toed shoes and bare legs for women. Everyone was called by their first name except the owner, who was called Mr. [Last Name]. Ugh, that place.

          1. Art teacher*

            You: I need 500 sheets.
            Her (suspiciously): Oh a full ream? Isn’t that convenient?
            You: Okay, you got me. I just need 498.

      2. EPLawyer*

        that’s when you learn how many paperclips are in a box and ask for that many. or how many sheets are in a notepad.

        But honestly the WHOLE POINT of a notepad is the sheets are stuck together. So you don’t have to keep track of loose sheets of paper. By breaking up the pad, you are defeating the purpose.

        1. LCH*

          nah, with someone like that, you could ask for the exact number in the box, but if they try to hand you the whole box, no way. they need to count them out. their rules, you’re just following them.

        2. Jaydee*

          No, you always ask for a number that’s an annoying percentage of a whole box/ream/whatever. The box contains 100 paper clips? You don’t need 98 – it’s too easy to count out 2 and give you the rest. You need 48 paper clips. Or 65 paper clips. Some number that requires a lot of tedious work for them to count out that exact number. Ideally, you might determine that you use, for example, 100 paper clips per quarter, which translates to 33-34 paper clips per month or about 8-9 paper clips per week or 1-3 paper clips per day. You figure out the most annoying interval at which to request paper clips and do that. Every time, it’s “Morning Fergus! May I have my daily/weekly paper clip ration today? I will be needing 3/9 today because that’s how many new llama protection referrals I have today/this week. Thank you.”

          2. Salymander*

            No, you ask for a number that is not dividable by anything easy to count. So, not dividable by 2, 5 or 10. That way the Supplies Sergeant can’t make little piles of 5 that can be counted at a glance. They will need to make little piles of 13, and have to count out each one. Because counting each one is super important, and you are just trying to be helpful.

        3. SheLooksFamiliar*

          I was tempted to mess with her and ask for 4 1/2 pages, but that would’ve meant spending more time with her.

    2. Dust Bunny*

      We just, you know, keep partial pads? You use what you need and then either keep the pad and use the rest later or tear off what you needed and put the pad back on the supply shelves. Yes, some of the pads are ridiculously old but we’re not wasting them or anything.

        1. Dust Bunny*

          It goes back on the supply shelf for the next person. I literally have a pad on my desk right now that belonged to guy who died six years ago after being retired for about 15 years. The paper’s still good, right?

          1. Retired (but not really)*

            I recently used a notepad with the logo of the company we bought out ~ 10 years ago that had been out of business for a few years before we bought the stuff that had been in storage. It was a little discolored from age but worked just fine for listing what I needed to print.

      2. Antilles*

        Anybody who was smart enough to understand that you can re-use legal pads would *also* be smart enough to realize that a notebook or legal pad is such a trivial cost (seriously, they’re like a buck each!) that it isn’t remotely relevant in the context of business expenses.

        1. SheLooksFamiliar*

          This lady wasn’t stupid by any means. But today’s topic is about abuse of power over silly stuff and she made sure to wield as much control as she could over those pads of paper!

          1. Antilles*

            True, a better term might have been “reasonable” or “logical” – and again, anybody who would be willing to accept re-using legal pads as an acceptable outcome probably would also just shrug at losing a few here or there.

      3. Cat Tree*

        One of the biggest changes in mindset to work on my hoarding was to understand that there are other kinds of “waste” besides the material objects. Keeping an ancient half a notepad *is* a waste because it’s wasting storage space. It’s better to put it in the recycling bin and move on.

        1. Turtlewings*

          Hoarding is a hard thing to overcome, so good for you! My whole family has tendencies in that direction and have to fight to keep it bay.

          1. Cat Tree*

            I wouldn’t say that I have overcome it, but I have at least changed my thought patterns quite a lot. Another example is that I realized buying two incredibly cheap thing that are each only 80% of what I want doesn’t add up to having what I want. So now I generally only buy one thing that is 95% of what I want.

            But a small part of me dramatically protests every time I throw away an empty bottle that could be theoretically used to sort or store something someday.

            1. Curmudgeon in California*

              It was an achievement for me when I finally started just throwing out socks with holes in them, since I hadn’t darned a single one of those 12 pair to a pack socks in the past 20 years. Same with underwear – yes, I “could” repair them, but realistically I wouldn’t, I now made enough money to just buy new ones.

              1. Gumby*

                I do throw away holey socks, but usually after I have used them to dust/clean something. They fit so well over my hands and make corners, odd-shaped areas easier to reach. I have never had the pile o’ dusting socks get too large but would probably throw some out unused if I had more than 5 or so waiting around.

        2. Bryce*

          The other day something in the back of my closet was actually useful and all I could think was “well there’s years of hoarding therapy undone.”

          1. Bryce*

            Mostly tongue in cheek, it was an old graduation gift from 20 years ago that I wouldn’t have thrown out anyway, but I could feel the hoarder tingle.

        3. Elizabeth Bennett*

          OMG THIS. I’m all for keeping what you need at your desk, but it seems that everyone with whom I’ve ever worked keeps whole boxes of pens in three colors, highlighters in five colors, regular pencils, mechanical pencils, a box of staples, a box of paperclips, three or four white-out tapes, tons of binder clips, sticky notes… and we literally do not write anything out or store much of anything with paper. It is all electronic, and if a hardcopy comes in the mail, we scan it and recycle the hardcopy. Of course their desk drawer is crammed so full of this stuff that it’s hard for them to use it at all, as is the pen cup on their desktop. SMH

    3. Formerly Frustrated Optimist*

      In my first professional job, I needed to take phone messages off my voicemail all day long. I would keep track of them on a scratch pad – one little square for each message. Then the organization started refusing to buy scratch pads. They would, however, buy legal pads.

      We were not allowed to touch the copier, so I was unable to access blank pieces of copier paper. So I took the legal pads, cut them up, and made them into scratch pads.

    4. Pointy Stix*

      The office manager at the first CPA firm I worked for was like that with the blue & red pencil lead refills. This was a national firm & back in the old days, so tick marks were made in red or blue pencil. She did the same with erasers. She’d hand out one at a time if you asked for any. One of the senior accountants asked her if she though we were hoarding them & selling them on the black market. Office manager wasn’t amused, but she never did change her ways.

      1. EPLawyer*

        I love your senior accountant. BTW, IS there a black market for erasers? And possible one for pencil sharpeners (yes I still use pencils that need to be sharpended I LIKE them, mechanical ones bust at the worst possible time)

    5. Momma Bear*

      I would think that just a few sheets of paper would get lost/be harder to keep together/look unprofessional. It’s like doling out three sheets of toilet paper.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        “So you need to go number one AND number two? At the same time? Alright, but remember these five squares come straight out of your weekly allotment.”

    6. Lucy P*

      Ummmm. I’ve been that person, and I’m sorry for it. The manager above me gets made at what they deem as waste, particularly people who grab a paper pad, use a few pages of it, lose the pad and then grab another. That’s why tablets are now hidden and only get taken out for clients and executives. They also won’t let me buy new folders. That’s why we’re reusing the ones with labels from 1994.

    7. Hamburke*

      I’d be explaining that the point of the pad is to not have loose sheets of paper so that my desk doesn’t look disheveled. And if that didn’t work, I’d say 3, and then take the pad out of her hand instead of the 3 sheets.

    8. Jess*

      I have to admit, *I* was the person who took back a box of staples!

      Working for a charitable org, so not a huge stationery budget anyway, and we didn’t go through huge amounts of staples so I tended to just have a box in the stationery cupboard at a time and people would come and just take a row when they needed them (and a small office, so it wasn’t like asking someone to traipse to a different floor or anything like that). We had someone new start and as always I set up their desk with some basics, showed them the stationery cupboard and told them to let me know if they needed anything else, or were taking the last of something.

      Week or so later I went to get more staples for myself and couldn’t find any anywhere in the cupboard. Ended up taking the box back from new staff member’s desk – I’m afraid she seemed quite put out, but TBH a box would last the whole office a year, I can’t imagine she was doing enough stapling to need to have a whole box to hand! It was just a culture/expectations clash.

    9. GK1*

      A friend of mine had thee opposite problem with ordering supplies once. He needed more padded envelopes, and discovering they came in boxes of 250, instructed the ordering manager to “get him one.” Two weeks later, the ordering manager handed him one single envelope. My friend then said no, he actually needs 250. Two weeks later he got an angry call from the loading dock asking what he wanted them to do with his 250 boxes of 250 envelopes as they barely had room for them. He never did figure out if the ordering manager was petty or just clueless.

  12. Anonymous Graduate*

    A few years before my time, a professor took up the position of Safety Coordinator for the engineering school. Usually this person is just responsible for filling out some paperwork, making sure all the labs are properly stocked, maybe running a training for staff, etc. Except this professor decided that he could do more! This was following a period of (non-violent) student protests. This professor decided that all the security guards needed to carry guns. In case of more student protests.

    You can imagine the student protests this proposal caused, and he was removed from the position. He retired the year before I graduated and the rumor is that he still thinks they should have let him arm the security guards.

    1. Anonym*

      What?!?!?! I’m flabbergasted. Also there are typically best practices and policies in place – the job is to ensure they’re followed, not become Independent Safety Overlord and use your imagination to decide what’s best. Yikes.

    2. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

      Back during my newspaper career, we got a new safety coordinator who decided each department needed people to be fire marshals and get everyone out of the building in case of disaster. They also ordered special hats to be worn by the fire marshals.

      There were a great many editors available, but this person did not check with them before ordering the hats. The editors who had been dragged into fire-marshal duty grudgingly agreed to help with the evacuation process if needed, but flat refused to wear a hat that said FIRE MARSHALL.

      3. pandop*

        We had new hi-vis vests ordered for our Fire Wardens.

        One size fit all. In that the one size would fit all the fire wardens at once. Anyone smaller than a sumo wrestler looked like they were wearing a tent!

        Thankfully someone somewhere authorised their replacement with ones that weren’t a H&S hazard in themselves

      4. Journalist Wife*

        I am an editor and I love this so hard. In my last campus position before now, I was “volun-told” I would be the new building safety coordinator (largest building on campus). The next time my annual performance review rolled around, I noticed there was a ridiculous caveat in the template for Safety Duties that described the nearly-unattainable “Outstanding” rating for that column as involving correctly wearing and managing all use of appropriate safety attire. We were literally an academic dean’s office. There was no safety attire. So, in order to be smarmy about getting the regular “E” for “Expecations Met or Exceeded,” instead of that hardly-ever-used “O,” I dug out an ancient carton of orange Velcro arm bands–all of them covered in dust and dead spider legs–that read “B.E.R.T.” (the safety abbreviation for our campus), and marched around the office each day with them securely wrapped around both biceps and both ankles for eight hours at a time. I normally wore pants more often than skirts, so I went out of my way to noticeably wear skirts every day so these were on display across bare legs just above high-heeled pumps. After three straight days, the Dean finally picked up on my objective, rolled his eyes, and brought me an amended copy of my review with my “E” changed to an “O” in concession, so I would take the damn things off and stop embarrassing him with my suddenly-very-conspicuous nice legs. Hahaha. God, I miss that office.

    3. BugHuntress*

      Ah yes, Safety Coordinator… which everyone knows is synonymous with building your own armed militia (!)

    4. lyonite*

      What?! I’ve known some overzealous safety coordinators in my time, but it’s usually been things like, “you need to put on all your PPE even if you’re just walking through the lab to get to the stairs.” (The lab does not handle anything particularly dangerous.) That said, I was just voluntold for the role at my work, and now I have an idea of how to get out of it. . .

  13. ComplicatedIsAlright*

    My company president doesn’t want us to tip over 20% and really only tip 20% when you get great service. I tipped $7 on a lunch tab where a 20% tip would have been $6.86 – a $0.14 difference. I had to pull back my expense report and reduce the amount I was asking to be reimbursed by $0.14. Lunch was with a buyer where we were celebrating an increase in his orders to my company by $200K/month!

    1. Hills to Die On*

      I worked at a place like this! The company would only reimburse tips at 15% or lower so I would tip the 15% on the credit card and leave cash for the rest.

      1. PivotPivot*

        I work for a place where previous employees tipped extravagantly, (their words), so company wasn’t going to reimburse for ANY tipping. At all. Ever.

          1. Fitz*

            I INTELLECTUALLY know that this is nickel and diming, but I also sympathize with these accountants because I approve a lot of expense reports and it’s common to see people here tipping 30% or 40%. Or 20% on a delivery order. It’s hard for me to believe these employees would be tipping 40% if it were their personal funds.

            I guess that’s how some of us get this crazy about things like allowed tipping percentages.

            1. TipTop*

              I’m curious why talking directly to the over-tippers doesn’t work? Are there too many of them?

                1. TipTop*

                  Ah, I see.

                  Sometimes I’ll leave a huge tip when I’m taking a table and haven’t ordered much. Like I’ve had business meetings with a client at a restaurant and the client decides to only get beverages. I’m not going to tip 20% on two beverages when we have taken a table for an hour or more.

              1. Curmudgeon in California*

                Yeah, we do 20% at my house – people are shopping/picking up orders, driving, then schlepping stuff up our stairs. I figure that they don’t get paid well enough by the apps/restaurants, and some people don’t tip at all, so I will tip well to make up for the crap they go through.

              2. Alpacas Are Not Dairy Animals*

                20% has been the bare minimum for years and during the pandemic I’ve been trying to do at least 25% – these are people doing one of the most dangerous jobs in our society right now. I get that not everyone can go higher and it’s ridiculous that we have to because of the lack of a proper living wage in the restaurant industry, but I would be deeply unimpressed by an employer who tried to go lower.

            3. recovering admission counselor*

              Wait, why shouldn’t people be tipping 20% on a delivery order? Delivery apps often take huge cuts of the fees and people who drive for those apps are spending their own gas money to bring you your meal.

              And even if it’s not through an app, again, the person is literally coming to you with food. That’s a huge convenience for the person ordering. 20% seems reasonable.

              1. Fitz*

                OK, I’m willing to hear I’m wrong on this one! I haven’t seen this since the pandemic started, but a $20 tip on $100 of delivered food always seemed like a lot to me.

                1. Fitz*

                  This is really good for me to hear from the other side, thanks everyone. I’m much more relaxed about this since earlier in my career, and I’m now even MORE retroactively embarrassed that I asked people to pay back a few bucks.

                2. MsChanandlerBong*

                  I don’t even think $20 is enough for that big of an order. These drivers are out there rushing from place to place, trying to make a living, so the least I can do is tip well when it’s their work that allows me to not have to deal with traffic, standing in line, etc. I make it a personal rule to never tip less than $7.25 on a small order; so even if the order is $15, I’ll tip $7.25 so that the driver ends up getting at least $10 when the tip and base pay from DoorDash/Uber Eats/etc. are added together. On larger orders, I usually tip 25-30%.

                  We often get the same driver if we order pizza, so we tend to give him extra because he is nice, he’s coming to our house in the dark, and he does a good job.

                  tl;dr IMO, 20% is pretty much the bare minimum tip.

            4. TOD*

              Re: Delivery Tips: Someone has to pack up the food in a way that makes sense (hot food stays hot, cold food stays cold), makes sure it’s correct, make sure you have all of the utensils and incidentals that you need, and then they have to navigate the city, find the office building, find the one out of 100 identical rooms, all within a certain time frame. They don’t get paid the delivery fee, and their wages are offensively low. 20% tips on delivery are deserved.

            5. Michelle Smith*

              I never tip less than 20% on a delivery order and routinely tip 30% for great service at restaurants and bars. And I don’t get “company reimbursement” for anything, ever.

            6. Hawk or Handsaw*

              Is 20% on a delivery order not normal? That definitely the standard here in chicago

            7. JB (not in Houston)*

              I don’t know what the people you work with are like, but I routinely tip a lot. 20%, even on delivery orders, is the bare minimum for me. So maybe the people you work with wouldn’t do that with their own money, but I sure would.

            8. Nanani*

              But like, when it’s a small amount, rounding it up can easily produce a big percentage without being a lot of money. It’s also less hassle to drop a bill and let them take the change as tip, even if it ends up being a lot more than the standard percentage.

            9. Stazya*

              I mean, I tend to tip 30 – 40% when I’m traveling for work, because I’m only buying for myself. If a 20% tip is only going to end up being about $3-4, then I’m going to bump it up to make it worthwhile for the person serving me (I would do that personally as well, but I don’t tend to eat alone frequently on my own time). I like to make sure that with my tip, I’m at least getting someone somewhat close to a living wage. For delivery, that means I want to give them at least $50 for a 20 minute drive.

                1. MigraineMonth*

                  When we were overseas, my dad once he paid for our lunch and the waitress seemed surprised. She asked if he was sure, so he checked the number and said yes, that was correct. Two minutes later he realized he’d done the currency conversion incorrectly and left her the equivalent of a $50 tip on a $45 lunch bill. He shrugged and didn’t ask for the money back.

      2. The Hero of Canton*

        I worked at a place that was so intense about this that my coworkers and I all had checkbooks at our office to reimburse the accounting department that HAD to have the receipt match the expense report and couldn’t take cash. Every single person had a story of having to write a check for less than $1 because they tipped over 20%.

    3. PT*

      I worked somewhere where we *weren’t allowed to tip at all.*

      I had to apologize to each and every one of our tip-based service vendors.

        1. Beezus*

          Not everyone can afford to tip in cash and not get paid back. I had this same experience working for a producer. I the unpaid student intern had to order delivery lunch but wasn’t allowed to tip on the company card but I also had no money personally. It sucks.

          2. A Feast of Fools*

            Yep. If, back in the days when I was first starting out as an outside B2B software salesperson, my company wouldn’t reimburse for tips, then the waitstaff or delivery people just weren’t going to get tipped. That $20-$50 was the difference between me eating sandwiches with real meat or instant ramen and beans.

      2. Off My Lawn, You Must Get*

        Ayup. Worked for a “won’t reimburse tips” place. But they also paid me per diem, so I took the tip money out of that.

      3. Zee*

        My job is one of those. My boss’s justification is that we’re a non-profit. As if servers should be forced to donate their time/wages to us!

    4. The Cosmic Avenger*

      I think this wins the “petty” category. Also, if I was your client and saw you tipping 20% or less, I would judge you. (Or, maybe more appropriately, your company.) I start at 25% now, since the tipped minimum wage hasn’t budged in over 30 years.

      2. GammaGirl1908*

        This is a plot point in an episode of Sex and the City! Samantha is meeting with the actress Lucy Liu over lunch in an bid to represent her. She wins the deal because Lucy suddenly reaches over and checks the bill folio, and notes that she used to be a server and is pleased that Samantha tipped 25%.

        (It all falls apart later, but that’s neither here nor there.)

      3. Gumby*

        the tipped minimum wage hasn’t budged in over 30 years

        That is not true in all areas. The state of California specifically says “No. An employer may not use an employee’s tips as a credit toward its obligation to pay the minimum wage.” And it changes annually (for now). Plus several individual cities have higher minimum wages.

        1. Hex Symbol*

          California doesn’t have a tipped wage at all, it’s just the one minimum wage. The federal tipped wage is still $2.13/hr, the same as it’s been since 1991. Some states (less than 10) don’t have a separate tipped wage, because it’s a bullshit and exploitative system, even for America, and that’s kind of our whole deal here.

      4. LB6*

        The tipped wage depends on the state you’re in. Seven states have the min tipped wage equal to regular minimum wage ($8 – $10 an hour) and 23 other states have their tipped wage higher than the federal minimum tipped wage.

        So, depending on where you live, it may not be true that tipped wages haven’t increased in the last 30 years.

        Additionally, the standard percentage to tip has also increased over the last 30 years. The “normal” tipping percentage was more like 15%.

        Tip 25% or more if you want, but I don’t think your reasoning supports being judgemental of someone who lands on 20% instead of 25% or 40%. Ideally, individual customers wouldn’t have to determine a “fair wage” for a worker when they really don’t have the information to do so.

    6. layniek*

      This reminds me of a former boss I had. We went to Chili’s for a team lunch for someone’s birthday. He always paid for himself and the birthday person, and everyone else paid for themselves. When the bill came, it had that “suggested tip” line printed on it that many restaurants use. He got so offended by that that he decided not to tip at all! I was super intimidated by this guy and usually wouldn’t argue with him (I was a young woman in one of my first professional jobs and he was my dad’s age and could be mean and petty at the slightest thing), but not tipping is one of the worst things you can do in my world. So I meekly pointed out to him that the server wasn’t the one who put that on the bill, but he didn’t care and still left no tip. I ended up leaving a bigger tip on my own bill to try to make up for it, even though I made practically nothing compared to my boss.

      1. Cat Tree*

        I was once out with a group of “friends” where only one of the others was my actual friend. We went to a cheap restaurant and our waiter was a bit inattentive but honestly not that bad. The other two in the group that I never liked to begin with complained about to the group (not to the manager who might have been able to do something) all evening long, along with bizarre and petty complaints about the food, which they ate anyway and had nothing to do with the server. We split our checks and they left no tip. I left a generous cash tip for my part that didn’t fully make up for them leaving nothing. But they were so mad that I left any tip that the one guy actually reached to grab my money off the table. We had a tense moment and he eventually left the money there, but what an ass!

        2. EPLawyer*

          Guy would have had a fork over his hand and me hissing “touch that money and your hand will be permanently stuck to the table.” I would have meant it to.

        3. MigraineMonth*

          This reminds me of the Christmas Party Date From Hell that gets reprinted here every year. The letter writer left a tip for the coat checker, Date From Hell takes the money out of the tip jar because “coat check is free”. Letter writer says, “I know that” and puts the money back in the tip jar.

    7. Lies, damn lies, and…*

      Federal reimbursements don’t allow for tipping on taxi rides, which is kind of non-sensical, since everyone whose every ridden in a cab knows that you too.

      1. I edit everything*

        I still feel terrible about the time in high school when I got separated from my group on a trip to D.C. and had to take a cab from the metro station to our hotel. The cab fare literally took my last dime, and the look on that cabbie’s face haunts me decades later.

        1. I try to tip*

          I got ambushed by a cash only place the other day and scuttled out wreathed in embarrassment and apologies, leaving a 50p tip scavenged from the bottom of my bag.

        2. Mr. Shark*

          You could have just explained. I mean, I understand they feel ripped off if they don’t get a tip, but in your case, there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.

      2. zinzarin*

        Never assume that everyone knows what you know.

        I didn’t know that you’re supposed to tip a cabbie.

        2. Karl Havoc*

          I think it’s pretty safe to assume that the federal government knows national tipping customs.

        4. GK1*

          It depends on where you are. I once flew from the New York City area to Louisville, Kentucky for an interview. When I ordered the ride to the airport in NY, the first thing they asked me before even dispatching it was if I wanted to tip 15% or 20%. Not how much I wanted to tip or if I wanted to tip. Those were my options. I landed in Louisville and got a taxi to the hotel and the guy had to get his manager/dispatch on the phone to figure out how I could leave a tip on the card (since I needed a receipt for reimbursement) since nobody had ever done that before in all his years of driving!

      3. CatCat*

        Yep, other government entities do this as well. I got dinged for this once by my government employer. So instead of taking a cheap taxi ride to go to/from some meetings I had to fly into that were being held less than 2 miles from the airport, I rented a car. Fully reimbursable.

        1. rita*

          Back in the days of yore, if you were paying in cash and just got a blank receipt, you could lump the tip in with the cost of the ride. We used to keep blank cab receipts on hand all the time to cover expense report items that we knew wouldn’t be reimbursed…

        2. calonkat*

          Our state lets employees tip $3 (if I remember correctly) on a cab ride. $75 cab ride? $3 tip. $10 cab ride? $3 tip.

          You can tip anything you want, but you’ll only get reimbursed for $3. We’ve also not gotten cost of living increases in 10 years so you can imagine how “well” our state comes off when attending federal meetings.

    8. FwdFwd*

      This is a law in my state — only 15% on the pre-tax total only will be reimbursed, so our accounting department had to develop special spreadsheets to figure the difference on every single meal reimbursement for any state employee that both the employee has to complete and the accounting department must double check. Going to bet that it saving the state a whole bunch of money. Doh.

    9. T-totaler*

      We are allowed 15%, maybe 18% if it was “exceptional” service (which you will be called on to describe).

      BUT NO TIPS ON ALCOHOL!!!

      No idea where that comes from. Alcohol is not banned. The CEO just read an article that suggested tipping on the alcohol “portion” of the bill at a restaurant was up for debate and not settled standard. So he will pull out his phone app and re-calculate the entire bill….while the rest of us turn red with embarrassment and try to slip the server a decent tip without getting caught.

      1. Fushi*

        He won’t even let you tip the server *yourselves*?? Ew.

        My grandfather was like this but at least I didn’t have to worry about consequences for ignoring him. =/

    10. bean counter*

      The irony is that the amount of billable employee time it took to reject & process this $0.14 change was significantly more than $0.14.

  14. LadyByTheLake*

    Many years ago I was a senior executive at a Fortune 100 company. I learned that the mother of a professional colleague — a colleague who was also a vendor to the company and someone with whom we worked closely — had died. I wrote a condolence note to the colleague and put it in outgoing mail. The admin for the department refused to send it unless I personally paid for the postage because it was handwritten, so it couldn’t be business correspondence. When I explained that it was business-related because it was to a vendor, she demanded that I “prove” that sending the note furthered the business interests of the company before she would send it.

    2. Me (I think)*

      Whoa. This one is my favorite (least favorite?) so far.

      A hand written note can’t possibly be business related? Huh, I wonder about all those handwritten thank you notes we’re supposed to send.

      Also, a senior exec at a Fortune 100 company wants to mail a note, I am having a hard time with the idea that there is pushback on this. Wow.

      1. LadyByTheLake*

        I seem to recall that her direct supervisor caught wind of it and shut it down. I do recall that I offered to take it to the post office myself, which would have meant a senior executive would be out of the office running an administrative errand — a cost of far more than a stamp. I was pretty annoyed.

    5. Just Your Everyday Crone*

      Damn. “It furthers the interests of the company because I am senior executive and I decide what furthers the interests of the company.”

    7. Amaranth*

      I’m all for admin power, but you were…a senior exec? And she was policing your postage?

      1. Valkyrie*

        Also don’t stamps cost, like $0.89? I could see it being an issue if you were using the companies stamps to mail 150 invitations to your wedding, write letters to your grandma, and pay a bill, but why would you come down on SENIOR EXEC for mailing something to a vendor?

        1. Midwest Teacher*

          Stamps are 58¢ now, and this happened “many years ago” so it would have been an even smaller expense then.

    8. Mr. Shark*

      Wow, this is just…too much. It’s a perfect example. The obvious power imbalance here, and the fact that it was a legitimate use of company resources, it’s just astounding that she wouldn’t send it.

    9. Hamburke*

      I had our admin mail a condolence note to one of our clients just this week on the company dime…and last year I sent a pet sympathy card to another client when their dog died (this dog came into the office with them frequently). And I’m just a worker bee. I can’t imagine the admin refusing to pay postage for personal-business correspondence.

    10. Hepzibutt Smith*

      I genuinely love that this department admin treated you (a senior exec!!) with the exact same petty bs she treated all your reports.

  15. Salty Pup*

    I had to get approval from the VP of IT procurement to get an $8 privacy screen for my work laptop. The ill will that it created is at this point worth so much more than that $8.

    1. Salty Pup*

      Oh! Probably worth mentioning that I work in healthcare and regularly have to look at PHI.

    2. GoodGuyIT*

      This comes from the “you give an inch, they take a mile” mentality.
      Of course, I’ve seen folks try to buy department-level multi-thousand-dollar networked printers as “office supplies” to skirt the procurement rules for IT. And that’s how you end up with “no exceptions” policies.

    3. Msnotmrs*

      I work for a big government dept (like, second-biggest in my state) and I’m frequently surprised at the absolutely petty things the higher-ups will deny to save, like, $50. One of my colleagues had vacation pay mistakenly taken out of her PTO bank, and it took weeks and had to be escalated all the way up to the director before it was rectified. For TWO HOURS of vacation. It basically destroyed any semblance of goodwill she had towards the organization. She used to work a ton of overtime etc. but not anymore.

    4. OrigCassandra*

      At Toxic Ex-Job we had to sign out every single thing we took from the supply closet (which was only open four to eight hours a week, for extra added fun).

      Every pen. Every box of staples. Every square of sticky notes. Everything.

      That place was a mess on a lot of levels, but I sure do remember specifically this as being incredibly petty and power-trippy.

      1. noncommital pseudonym*

        It always amused me when I worked at a Federal agency that the staples and paperclips were locked up, but there were shelves filled with binders full of grant proposals, which listed the SSNs of every single applicant lining all of the halls.

        I hear they’ve finally digitized everything, and that no longer happens!

      2. geek5508*

        When I was an IT Contractor for a County agency, we had to sign out pens and post-its, but could just grab PC hardware (drives, video cards, RAM) without any documentation

      3. MigraineMonth*

        My Toxic Ex-Job had an open supply closet with company-branded pens in various colors. In front of thousands of employees, the CEO got up and ranted for fifteen minutes about how she went to a local restaurant and the pen they gave them to sign the check with was a company-branded pen, and this showed we were all careless and wasteful of company resources. We should all emulate them and only take pens home if they were already broken or leaky.

        Our CEO was a billionaire.

        1. Curmudgeon in California*

          I can think of two people who that could fit, one of whom was the CEO at $job-4. The one I’m thinking of also said that she “didn’t believe in feminism”, even though feminism was why she could be a CEO and bring her baby to the office.

          1. Zweisatz*

            But don’t you understand? Rich people always got there on their own merit. Only poor people are responsible for everything that got them there.

        2. Buttersucker*

          It’s embarrassing that a CEO would view this as an issue of property rather than marketing.

  16. Teacher, Here*

    I worked with an Accounts Payable person who would only accept disbursements on their form that was printed on neon green paper. Fine, fine. But she would only give out ONE FORM PER DAY, so if you thought you might ever need to submit two requests for a payment in a day, you’d have to go by on another day to get your single form and save it for that day.

    And then the second year, we discovered that she’d scanned the green form and then printed it IN COLOR onto green paper when she ran out of the original forms, meaning she was using green ink to cover green paper, and also that regular pens would no longer work on the now very shiny form.

    The third year I bought my own green paper and started printing my own forms. She was furious, because of course the “you can only get one form per day” policy was to ensure she never had to actually pay anyone. But since it would be very hard to explain that to her boss, she just huffed a lot about “where I was getting all these forms” when I’d turn them in.

    Good times.

    1. Bibliothecarial*

      I am cackling at your second paragraph! Funny how these penny pinchers are so expensive.

      1. Teacher, Here*

        It was honestly amazing — the first thought was “wait, why is this paper so shiny on one side but not the other?” and then the second thought was “oh no, she couldn’t have? She did!”

        The best part is that teachers didn’t have access to a color printer. So all that green ink was just quietly mocking us.

        1. Bibliothecarial*

          Nooo that’s the worst! Why didn’t she just cover it in diamond dust while she was at it?

      2. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Yeah, that would require a LOT more colored ink (yellow AND blue, right?) and would cost a heckuva lot more than just buying green paper, wouldn’t it?

        And I love Teacher’s hack of getting their own green paper. Brilliant!

        1. KateM*

          She bought green paper as well, as I understand. Scanned green form, bought green paper, and printed that colorful form, complete with green background, on green paper. So yeah, printing full colorful pages on green paper would come more expensive than just printing the text on green paper.

        2. EchoGirl*

          If I’m understanding the top comment correctly, it was worse than that — she was printing the full-color green forms onto paper of the same shade of green, making the excessive amount of color ink completely redundant.

    3. Robin Ellacott*

      Good LORD. I am trying to imagine writing on a printed picture, smears, pen dying…..

    4. Regular Human Accountant*

      I wonder if on the day she ran out of green paper, she had already used her Daily Form and couldn’t fill out a second one to buy more paper.

      1. Hex Symbol*

        She tried printing another form on the back of her used Daily Form but the paper got too shiny and it broke her pen! o_o

    5. Mr. Shark*

      That’s so incredibly odd. The one form per day is definitely excessive, but the green paper part, and then printing green onto a paper…what the heck was this woman thinking?
      I love that you just bought your own paper to throw off her whole system!

    7. Ash*

      This one is my favorite. The amount of money she wasted on ink is just *chef’s kiss*. And buying your own green paper and just printing off your own forms is brilliant. I love all of this.

  17. Plastic forks rule the world.*

    The darn student staff at my higher education institution were using plastic forks (paid for by the department) to eat their lunches when a meal time occurred during their working hours. At first, signs were taped up on the kitchen cupboards that plastic utensils were for full-time staff only. But this wouldn’t stop those students — how dare they. Next step was clearly to lock up those plastic forks in an office that only full-time staff had access to. That showed those students. Fork-gate ceased.

    1. DisneyChannelThis*

      WTF. That’s the most ridiculous thing. Department can afford forks. Students make wayyyy less.

    2. Me (I think)*

      I bet those darn students were using department-purchased toilet paper when they went to the bathroom. Clearly the only way to solve that is to keep all bathrooms locked and only full time staff have keys.

        3. Mr. Shark*

          What? No…just no.
          I would walk out the first day at the job.
          And that would be my first question at my next interview, “Before we start, does the company supply TP for all of its employees at the office?”

          1. it's-a-me*

            Interviewer: And why did you leave your previous employer?

            Me: Allow me to counter your question with a question of my own…

        4. Salymander*

          I went to one of those scary religious boarding school that abuse students. It was eventually shut down by the state after a student died. When they were raided, I think at least one helicopter was involved. This school did terrible things. They also did ridiculous, petty things. They would ration toilet paper for students, but not for staff. We started out by getting 5 squares. Over time, they whittled us down to 1 square. No matter what. They would hand you one square, and you would go into the bathroom with it. One square. So petty. Such an abuse of power.

            1. Salymander*

              Well, at least they were eventually rounded up and deported by the Mexican Army because they had an abusive school on that side of the border too. That was pretty satisfying to hear about.

      2. The Rafters*

        Eons ago, the man who was in charge of purchasing TP for our very large building had decided to purchase TB that was like sandpaper. After receiving the first e-mail claiming gynecological problems as a result of using said TP, he blushingly replaced it with our usual not quite as crappy brand. The revolt started at 10 AM and was over by noon the same day.

    3. NHNonprofitDirector*

      I worked for a small publishing company back in the 90s. Every month the owner had the HR person shake everyone down for a few dollars to pay for their share of expenses related to the water dispenser. When they started asking the (unpaid) interns to contribute, we protested. The ownership insisted so some of us paid staff chipped in on the interns’ behalf.

      1. Guin*

        That’s when I would refuse to pay and start drinking tap water, or bringing a water bottle from home. Insanity!

    4. Eeyore's Missing Tail*

      This happened in my old department, except it was staff using up the extra forks from events. Our dean’s assistant started keeping all of the plates, forks, spoons, everything locked up in her office. I never understood why we could just let someone sign up to bring those for an event, but nope, we couldn’t do that.

      1. La Triviata*

        At terrible old job, there was one person who got a little, confused to be kind, about what was a saving. We’d have catered lunches, meetings, etc., and she would grab plates, flatware, napkins, etc. She’d put them in a closet and guard them. Then, one year we were having a Christmas party and she was put in charge of getting the plates, flatware, napkins, etc. She blew the entire party budget on buying new plates, flatware, napkins, etc. Someone had the nerve to ask her why she bought new and didn’t use the old ones she’d hoarded … her response was that we couldn’t use the old ones because we might need them someday.

        2. EPLawyer*

          “saving for a rainy day.” Honey, Noah is building an ark, time to break out the saved stuff.

      2. Cold Fish*

        We had a lady that worked here that would go thru the trash after we had an company sponsored employee lunch and pull out all the plastic forks/knives, then wash them for the next company lunch. I understand the environmental impact but dollar store plastic utensils don’t hold up to BBQ lunches (our company go-to), they especially don’t hold up when they are re-used.

    5. NotAnotherManager!*

      A former admin in my department started policing use of the disposable plates/bowls/silverware provided by the organization. She locked the cabinets that contained this stuff and kept the key at her desk. She counted said items daily to monitor usage and compared it to her key log. She also claimed that the C-level person in charge of the department had asked her to do this.

      I knew the C-level department head, and they were not petty or unreasonable. They also had plenty of things the admin could do other than count forks daily. I clued them in to what was going on, and they were livid that this sort of crap was being done in their name and shut it down stat. I think they were upset that the staff who’d put up with the admin’s power trip actually believed they’d do such a thing.

  18. Mary*

    After finishing all my work one day, I left 10 minutes early. My boss chased be down to the elevator – said he had something for me to do. He needed me to make a PDF file.

    1. Anonym*

      My level of patience with people who won’t just look the thing up on the internet is so far below zero I’ve lost sight of it. Good grief!

      1. Cold Fish*

        Hee Hee…. read as I sit here reading AAM for 3 more minutes until I can clock out!

    3. NoMoreOffice*

      I worked for an absolute monster of a CEO several years ago. He called me, irate, one evening well after business hours because I didn’t email him a file he wanted to work on right that second. He made make a 40-mile round trip to print the three-page document out and hand it to him after dark in the very not nice neighborhood where our office was. Potentially understandable if I was the only one with access to said document and it was an emergency. But, the reason I hadn’t emailed it to him in the first place was that I had saved the damn thing to the company server, in the folder with his name on it. He literally made me make an hour-round trip because he didn’t want to look for it.

    4. Anony*

      I had a boss in a small company (4 people total, she founded it) who wouldn’t let us leave for the day until she decided it was time. We all worked in the same WeWork office room and ended work at 6pm; it was understood we could not leave until she said “well, I think it’s time to pack up for the day”. I tried to leave on time on my first day, not knowing this was the unwritten rule, and got reamed out. The boss would often close up her work before 6 and then watch to see that we were working right up until whenever random time she decided we were done (6:03, for example).

      1. Journalist Wife*

        That last sentence alone upgrades this story from “medium” petty to “wicked-stupid” petty, in my opinion.

    5. Brienne the Blue*

      Reminds me of my first job out of college. I had concert tickets one night and a couple of days prior, I asked the boss if I could leave at 5 instead of 5:30 if I came in early. He granted the request, and then at 4:55 decided to call a meeting where he proceeded to spend 45 minutes pondering whether a program should be called “Teapot Handles for Coffee Drinkers,” “Teapot Handles, for Coffee Drinkers,” or “Teapot Handles—for Coffee Drinkers.”

  19. Janet*

    Worked at a federal agency in a job that required a lot of travel. The person who processed our travel mapped out the mileage from every person’s address to the airport parking lot that she felt we should use, then required that everyone use that mileage for reimbursement.

    1. ladonnapietra*

      I worked at a university whose travel department required employees to do more or less the same thing via Mapquest (which then needed to be printed out and attached to all travel claims).

      1. fposte*

        It’s a state requirement for us to map, and it may have been a federal requirement for Janet, but I doubt the feds insisted on the travel processor’s choice of parking lot.

        1. ophelia*

          Yep, this. I (contractor) need to document mileage, but it needs to be, like, “house to airport” not “specific spot I have parked on the street to space in Lot B.”

        2. fposte*

          Actually, I take it back; the text printout was sufficient without the map, but we did have to have the external information about the miles.

      3. Dr. Doll*

        Yes, and if you used google maps instead of mapquest, your travel reimbursement request was tossed back. 10 cent difference in mileage reimbursement.

      4. Steph*

        I worked for nonprofit that required we use the shortest distance from place to place as outlined in Google Maps, or to explain in writing why we took a different route. A copy of all directions had to be added to our mileage reimbursement form.

      5. After 33 years ...*

        I know someone who applied that requirement in reviewing claims for taxi fares for conference travel in other cities.
        That person also objected to my claiming reimbursements for repeated monitoring visits to the same coastal field site. “You went there last year – why do you have to go again?”

      6. WFH is all I Want*

        Same! I had to enter mileage reimbursement to the second decimal place and attach the print out from whichever mapping tool that showed the lowest mileage…and they checked!

        One of the directors was 14.23 miles on one app and 14.22 on another. I claimed 14.23 without checking the other app and got dressed down by the admin in charge. It didn’t even change the reimbursement amount.

    2. Mr. Cajun2core*

      The university I work for states that the mileage must be from the university to the airport regardless of where you live even if you drive from your house to the airport. For some people it actually works out better.

      1. Guin*

        This is pretty common. My company does that also. They won’t reimburse you for a cab from your house to the airport, only the distance from work to the airport. I think it’s petty, but on the other hand, some people live more than an hour away from the airport, so that would be a $150 cab fare these days.

      2. *daha**

        I worked doing travel reimbursement for a University and that’s what we were taught was correct. Daily travel from home to work and back is not reimbursable – it’s personal. Business travel to someplace other than your usual worksite is reimbursable. So the journey from the worksite to the airport is the part we reimburse. And that was based on what the IRS found acceptable for business expenses.

        1. Random Bystander*

          At one time, I was being asked to train to potentially fill in at a site other than my normal work place. There was a substantial difference in commute distance, and I asked about reimbursement and was told that I could not be reimbursed because I was traveling from home in both instances. I pleaded not to be sent, as I could not afford this other commute. At the time, gas was *very* high, and I was a single mother with four minor children whose ex was not paying child support, *and* the lowest paid person in the particular office. Well, after I got to other location, the person training me for the alternate job caught me not eating lunch so that I could afford the hit in gas–this was going to cost me around $75/week more than my normal commute, and the only place that I could cut my expenses was to drop to one meal per day–it was, in those days, rather routine for me to get down to less than a dime in my bank account on the day before payday, and I really had no expenses that could have been cut. Trainer went nuts, pulled out the $5 cafeteria vouchers that were normally given to visitors and made me go get lunch. While I was at lunch, she called up a friend of hers in the finance office. Friend in finance office stated that under these circumstances, I was to be reimbursed at the IRS rates for the difference of [commute to alternate work site from home] less [commute to normal work site from home]–that difference was 48.8 miles for a round trip. Suddenly, it was decided that I didn’t need to be trained for this job, that the other people in the office could do it when needed–the other people had a max of 14 mile difference between the two commutes, and two of them had either no difference or were actually closer to alternate site. At least I did get reimbursement for the two days that I had gone to alternate site.

      3. Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain*

        Same at my org — campus to off-campus site; finance gives us the miles to fill in on our report rather than leave it up to us to map out. My coworker lived within a mile of an Annual Event off-campus site, but had to commute 40 miles to get to work… she loved volunteering to work the event because she was paid to “travel” to and from campus.

    3. Mona Lisa*

      My state university’s travel department did the same thing. We had to attach a Google Maps screenshot of the exact route we took with the mileage on it as justification, and it got kicked back if you forgot to include it.

      Actually that travel department might be the power-trippiest group I’ve ever worked with. They denied my expense request for and $11 BART fare once because the time stamp on my ticket was before the conference officially began. Never mind that I needed to take the train into the city to actually check-in for the conference at the appointed time.

    4. Can’tAdultToday*

      I’m federal, and we have to claim the mileage from our office to the destination. Makes sense.

      I turned in a claim for, say, 36 miles round trip for a week. It was returned to me because it wasn’t calculated correctly. I’d calculated home directly to new destination and deducted the home to work miles.

      I was told I have to map home to work to new site. Added 4 miles per day to the trip. Thanks for the extra cash!!

    5. Seven hobbits are highly effective, people*

      My mother worked for the federal government in Anchorage, Alaska back in the ’70s. Her job would mean she’d need to travel to various other places in Alaska. Every time she had to buy a plane ticket, she’d have to fill out a form explaining why she couldn’t take, say, the train instead. The most common reason would be that she was flying into a place that was only accessible by bush plane, but the forms were apparently designed back in D.C. where it made sense to justify why every single individual trip on the taxpayers’ dime could not be accomplished by a specific hierarchy of methods, which definitely thought flying was only for fancy people and not government employees.

  20. Claudia Lamb*

    A mierable Assistant News Director, in San Francisco, who made reporters and producers BEG for pads of legal paper and pens.

    A power-mad Admin Asst, in Denver, who took away the traffic reporter’s microwave because a colleague burned popcorn in the microwave.

    1. Claudia Lamb*

      There was a miserable Assistant News Director, at a radio in San Francisco, who made reporters and producers BEG for pads of legal paper and pens, which she kept locked in a drawer.

      Then there was a power-mad Administrative Assistant, who worked for Clear Channel in Denver, who took away the traffic reporter’s microwave because a colleague burned popcorn in the microwave. We had no way to heat up our meals after that. That was the same woman who refused to buy Kleenex because we could use the hard, brown paper towel for drying your hands if we had a need.

      1. WFH is all I Want*

        I feel like I’ve crossed paths with that admin. I worked with someone (in Denver) who would police the fridge and announce a fridge clean out if she thought someone’s food was going to be “too smelly”. I’m talking about food that had only been in the fridge for an hour but looked “too ethnic” (her exact words). The glass plates in the microwave started to disappear too and I caught her stashing them in the supply closet when we’d have our CEO visiting (his lunch was always catered so he’d never know).

        1. Liz*

          That sounds like one of our old building services people. She would take it upon herself to “police” and clean out the fridge. If something was one day past the “best buy” date, say a yogurt, or mustard, or something that was perfectly fine, she’d toss it, no questions asked. She was about to toss a small bottle of milk I had, which for some reason HAD no date, but I had bought like 2 days prior. Thankfully the EA who knew it was mine caught her and told her to leave it alone!

        2. Jinni*

          OMG my ex’s office had a manager who prohibited the microwaving of ‘ethnic’ food in the microwave. I’m in LA and that *meant* Mexican. He said the smell of burritos upset him.

          1. Machine Ghost*

            I once worked in a very small customer-facing department. We were allowed to drink tea at the customer counter. Once my cowoker brought instant-coffee instead. Boss came out of the office and told us, coffee wasn’t allowed. Why, asked coworker. Boss claimed, because a customer with a coffee-allergy could come in. An allergy to the *smell* of coffee. We laughed for months about that. He just didn’t like the smell.

      2. It's Growing!*

        My mom showed me that one when I was little. You take the brown paper towel or a napkin and scrub it between your knuckles of both hands like when you’re trying to rub out a stain on your clothes. It softens the paper enough to not take the skin off your nose when used as a tissue. As a person who currently has a runny nose (ah, Spring), I can attest to the fact that this is good only in an emergency. Bet that AA has her own stash of real tissue.

    2. Valkyrie*

      The microwave thing happened to my spouse! They worked at a large, internationally recognized entertainment company. Someone on their floor burned popcorn so it was removed. The other floor of the building got to keep theirs. Thus beginning the hatred towards the “floories” and their microwave.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        At my ex-job, we had free juice, snacks and microwavable popcorn. We also hosted a large conference once a year, with lots of customers and vendors visiting. The week before the conference, the microwavable popcorn would disappear out of all the break rooms to avoid having the fire department called during the big conference. Of course, that meant that 2 weeks before the conference, people stashed microwavable popcorn bags in their desks so they could continue to make popcorn.

        1. EchoGirl*

          I’m going to guess you had one of those smoke detectors that automatically calls the fire department? I understand why those exist but they can also be a real pain when something innocuous sets them off. (Something I learned during a certain synagogue Hanukkah party in my youth where we got paid a visit by the fire department because someone burned a couple of latkes.)

    3. Mystik Spiral*

      To be fair, burnt popcorn is a very good reason to remove someone’s microwave. ;)

    4. asteramella*

      A previous CEO of a company I worked for, before my time, banned popcorn from being made *anywhere* in the 5-floor building because someone had burned a bag of popcorn *once*. This edict was in place for years.

      I was told that when she finally got fired, my department popped a bottle of champagne and popped a bunch of microwave popcorn while singing “ding dong, the witch is dead.”

    5. catsamillion*

      once had a full newsroom, hourlong debate spurred by budget cuts–EIC asked us to choose the long pads or the short ones, no more having both. Staff of five were split on it and we annoyed the EIC into keeping both.

      1. Becca Rosselin-Metadi*

        Oh man-this reminds of my old company where we had to have four different kinds of pads of paper. Yellow legal, yellow regular, white legal, white regular because everyone there had a preference for a different type of pad.

  21. ScruffyInternHerder*

    Someone was in charge of reducing the office supply budget at a long ago former job.

    My job requires multiple colors of writing implements to be effective. Yes, it sounds a bit odd, but it truly is a thing, I just can’t really explain the ins and outs of it here. But suffice it to say that every iteration of this position that I’ve held, at every company I’ve held it, a first visit to the supply closet has involved snagging one of every color highlighter and pen, with early roles being at the behest of my manager to do so.

    Honest question because it sure seemed ridiculous: How much money would be saved by eliminating multiple colors of writing implements and highlighters? This was not a huge office…we’re talking maybe 10 people in my role altogether.

    1. Popinki*

      I also need different colored pens in my job, and I’ve been basically buying my own because the office manager will either blow me off or else buy the world’s worst pens that only work if you scribble them a million times before each use.

      2. HE Admin*

        I can see a couple of things there this would be very, very useful and you’d possibly have to do thing over again, or explain things unnecessarily, if it was all done in one color. Edits on documents going back from different people. Signatures that need to be in different colors–my husband is in accounting, and it’s apparently standard in a lot of offices (though I would guess not all?) that the person preparing a document signs off in one color, and the person reviewing it signs off in another. Contracts where multiple people need to sign in multiple places; Kate signs in all the green-highlighted spots, Mary signs in all of the blue-highlighted ones. Stuff like that.

        1. Nina*

          I used to work in a lab that had some pretty stringent analytical accreditation – bench techs used blue pens, results recorders used red, results checkers used green, and SMEs who signed off the reports used purple. Nobody, ever, used black. All the photocopiers had color printing locked to make it obvious at a glance whether a document was original or photocopied.

        1. ScruffyInternHerder*

          Further elaboration – I deal with both electronic and physical paper formats. Manual color coding on physical paperwork is essential to doing things quickly and accurately.

            2. MigraineMonth*

              The majority of colorblind people are red/green colorblind, so you could either not use one of those colors or make sure the shades were very different (e.g. dark red vs light green). Yellow-blue colorblindness is rarer, but could be approached the same way.

              If the individual cannot see any colors, you would probably want to use a different indicator, such as shapes, letters or icons. A lot of web pages will pop up a red error that also has a (!) or stop sign icon so it can be interpreted correctly by the colorblind.

            3. ScruffyInternHerder*

              There is no set “system” that I’m aware of for the color coding and everyone uses what works for them, in most cases.

              I have had this issue come up before and the solution was “what colors CAN you see since we’re both working on this and I’ll only use those ones”.

      4. Bagpuss*

        I’m a lawyer, and while it is less common now to have to do it by hand, because color photocopies exist, there are some things such as marking boundaries on a title map where you have to be able to identify different boundaries / pieces of land in different colours.

        Technically if you amend a court pleading after it has been submitted, you are supposed to mark that with different colours, and when first started we still if have to do that sometimes. Red for the initial amendment, then other colours – green, purple then yellow, I think , in that order although I don’t recall ever having had to go past green. (These days, you can use footnotes to identify any changes instead if need be)

      5. Off My Lawn, You Must Get*

        Speaking for my former role, different org levels used different colored ink for approvals that needed to go up the chain of command. No one could read the signatures but if it had a black, blue, green, and red squiggles, you knew it had been routed through the team, department, division, and command level, respectively.

      6. Dust Bunny*

        My dad was a geologist and in his field-work days he lived by those four-color click pens, for mapping and a bunch of other things. My brother and I still consider them icons of our childhood.

      7. Awesome Sauce*

        One more example. Going over chemical processing plant diagrams line by line to make sure that all the possible disasters have been identified and safeguarded against. This is done as a group workshop with one engineer from each design team, plus some reps from maintenance and control room. You cover the walls with 22×34 printouts of all the plant diagrams, colour-coded so that everyone knows what portion of the plant you’re analyzing, and then go through the plant one coloured portion at a time, listing out all the ways it could blow up!

      8. tinygorgon*

        It was also essential when I worked tax prep at an accounting firm – each item in a file was hand numbered and indexed to a cover sheet, color coded by type of document. Handling that volume of documents we’d take any hack to reduce the mental load when filing, plus it made life *much* easier if, heaven forfend, someone dropped a file while it was open and papers went everywhere.

    3. Kiwiii*

      They’re probably all about the same cost and/or come in a variety pack anyway, maybe the volume of pens/highlighters any one person has is a little higher, but probably not significantly.

    4. knitcrazybooknut*

      “But…but…more than one color of pen is EXTRAVANGANT!”

      I’m willing to bet this isn’t about the actual cost of pens, just power and control. Also, it’s one of those ideas that takes hold in any capitalist spendthrift puritan country. Anything that makes your life easier — soft toilet paper, kleenex that doesn’t destroy your face, highlighters — You’re too soft and you’re ruining the company!

  22. Kaiko*

    I once had a manager that would tell at her subordinates (me and one other person) for not stapling reports correctly. It had to be on a 45 degree angle! Not up and down! Not side to side! If I have to talk to you about this again, you might be fired!

    When I quit that job, I made a ‘zine about how to staple “correctly” and printed it on the work printers. It was very cathartic.

        1. Bagpuss*

          I would have done it with 4 or five stables down the spine, each at a different angle and none at the correct and approved angle, but I’m petty.

    3. R*

      Urgh, my Dad was this guy. He would bring the reports home, remove the staples and restaple them to his satisfaction complaining the entire time. As a kid, I thought it made sense. As an adult, I seriously wonder how he ever held a job when he was willing to be that petty and waste that much time.

      1. Web of Pies*

        I hope that zine was stapled RIGHT in the center of the page (not the fold) for optimum chaos.

      2. JB in NC*

        At my first accounting job, we had paper receipts & payouts for a restaurant chain which we had to staple each day’s work together. I had a clerk who constantly just stapled stuff randomly and used multiple staples for each batch. I would literally unstaple all the staples and restaple them in the correct place (along with tearing off the little adding machine tape that she hit clear on 4 or 5 times before she actually did the calculation). I honestly don’t think it was that petty – I just liked everything to be clean, neat and consistent, and really it didn’t even take that long.

        1. knitcrazybooknut*

          I just straightened some personnel files like this. Random shorthand (that I can’t read) from little notepads, sticky notes, and all stapled singularly to center, side, and top of other 8.5 by 11 pieces of paper. Since it’s a file that’s no longer used, at a certain point I gave up and filed it forever!

    4. WantonSeedStitch*

      This reminds me of the old boss I had who, whenever we had a supply shipment that included binder clips, made me go through a container of each size of binder clips and open them up so he just had to pinch them to use them, rather than having to fold back the handles first, then put them on his desk.

      1. La Triviata*

        At a job at a law firm many, many years ago, one lawyer required his secretary to come in early every morning and sharpen his pencils to needle-sharp points. At one point (heh), she didn’t get them sharp enough and he was very angry. After she’d gotten them sharp enough (and heroically resisted stabbing him), she was able to laugh about it, but did not resist making comments that his need for really sharp pencils was related to his inadequacy in his “male organ” size.

        1. Corporate Lawyer*

          Either we worked for the same law firm, or there are at least two lawyers like this. LOL!

          1. HMS Cupcake*

            Wow, I didn’t work for a law firm, but the CEO at a place I worked at 5 years ago required his secretary to do that. She didn’t have to come in early but she did have to sharpen all the pencils!

              1. MigraineMonth*

                I would be tempted to comply maliciously and sharpen every pencil in the holder to exactly 3″ long.

    5. Lurker*

      I do prefer a 45 degree angle for stapling, but I would never force anyone else to staple documents that way.

    6. Paris Geller*

      I completely forgot about this until just this moment, but I had a teacher in high school who would dock points for this!! Not a boss but still quite petty. I had managed to block that out until just now. . .

      1. Christmas Cactus*

        The sixth grade teacher at daughter’s school in the ’90s required that the written part of a major social studies project be typed and submitted in one of those covers that were thick paper (like a file folder) with a cutout for the title and author. The title information had to be perfectly centered within the cutout or points would be deducted. By the time we heard all the talk about the project from other parents, that kind of report cover had just about gone the way of the dinosaur. Even a locally-owned office supply place had a nearly impossible time getting them and then was unable to get more since everyone was using the plastic cover with the slide-on binding. The new principal finally had to intervene with the teacher about the cover requirement when besieged by the parents of numerous twelve year-olds who were melting down when the could not get a cover. The next school year the teacher suddenly “retired” and the project was discontinued.

        I heard that, besides the angst about the covers, the parents who went to the new principal also brought to her attention that much of the grading for the project was based not on content but on appearances. The grading criteria were well beyond what your average sixth grader was able to do; is was more like upper level college stuff. The kids who were getting good grades on it were submitting work that had heavy parental involvement, if not actually done by parents. We knew a girl, Janet, whose grade was reduced for “appearances” on a map she produced entirely on her own. It included all the required data and looked very nice for the work of a 12 year-old. (I saw it and was impressed.) She was unable to get help from her parents since her mom had a baby a couple of days before the map was due; Janet was the eldest (an amazing and responsible kid) and had to help her dad with the other children.

        1. It's Growing!*

          If my grandson was graded on appearance vs content, he would be failing middle school. He couldn’t draw a good looking map to save his life. His math papers frequently have all the problems crunched into the upper left hand corner of the page. He’s doing cube roots at the moment and doesn’t see why the rest of the world has problems figuring out cube roots. Appearance is nice, but content is so much more important.

        2. AFac*

          I had an elementary school teacher once who only gave As to reports with images that had been photocopied in color. It didn’t matter the quality of the writing; if there was an image in black and white, it got a B at most.

          This was the age before home color printers, or even color copiers at the library. You had to go to a separate store to get color images. My parents were very, very resentful of the $0.25 each color copy cost, and I can’t really blame them. I offered to pay out of my allowance, but they decided I shouldn’t be punished for the teacher being ridiculous.

        3. knitcrazybooknut*

          One of my elementary school teachers graded on appearance. I was abysmally bored in class and on the first homework assignment, I had 100%, but had entertained myself by doodling and turning the 100% (after we self-graded in class) into a smiley face with a wig, etc. etc. He showed the whole class my paper and said, “This paper gets an F.” There are better ways to teach neatness, and perhaps addressing the boredom factor is your real problem?

          1. SavedFromLorna*

            This happened to me once. I doodled a flower on my eighth grade HOME EC exam and received an F for doodling. One f-ing flower. Because I finished early and my draconian teacher refused to let me read a book or do anything while I waited for the others.

            Worst teacher I ever had. I hope she chokes (nonfatally) on a dry muffin.

        4. alienor*

          This gave me a flashback to the sixth-grade social studies fair where two girls’ mothers came in and constructed a 12-foot-high replica of a Korean temple, with columns, in the school multipurpose room. My project partner and I had a nice booth for our assigned country (her dad built the basic structure out of plywood and we decorated it) but it didn’t come close to that.

        5. Meri*

          Heh. In 5th grade, we had to do a report on one of the states. One of the requirements was a copy of the state seal. I lost a couple of points because my copy was “obviously traced” – apparently, I was supposed to have tried to just draw a copy of Montana’s state seal.

        6. Salymander*

          Wow. My kid’s second grade class was like that. I volunteered every day, and I was helping the kids get everything ready for back to school night where trivia from their historical biography reports was put on cards for their parents to guess the answers. All of these kids turned in really advanced, incredibly well researched and beautifully written reports, so the teacher felt like this was a fun, easy assignment. I gave each kid 3 cards to write basic facts on, like the name of the person their project was about, what country that person was from, and the approximate time period in which they lived. None of these kids knew any of this info, and when I asked why they all said that their parents did their reports. When I sent them to find their reports on the display wall, they took a long time to find them because they didn’t even know what the cover art looked like. The parents did that, too. The teacher just kept raving about how awesome all their work was, even though she knew it was not the real deal. The few kids who did their own were pushed aside. Including my kid who worked on their report for days, and did an amazing job. Most of the kids who did their own work were either from less affluent families or families with parents who were still learning English and relied on their kids to communicate with the school. I protested it, and talked to the principal, but they were really unhelpful. We were moving away anyway soon after that, and this just made it easier to say goodbye.

        7. Seven hobbits are highly effective, people*

          My sixth grade teacher required that all reports be handwritten. In ink. In cursive, but not that cursive italic that you learned in [same school district] in elementary school, but instead in REAL cursive, which she would devote an hour a week to teaching us instead of whatever we were supposed to be learning in 6th grade.

          I’d been typing all of my school reports for years, because my handwriting was terrible and my family had a computer, but apparently that was not good enough for her since typed things could be copied. (This was before widespread internet access, so I had no idea what she thought I’d be copying from, and even then I was well aware that I could re-write something by hand to copy it if I really wanted to.)

          Apparently, this was going to be an important skill in high school and/or my job. While my boss may have many failings, she has never required me to turn in ANYTHING written in ink in my finest cursive, presumably because she would like to be able to read anything I send her.

      2. Dasein9*

        I had one in junior high who gave me a detention for writing my name on the wrong side of a piece of paper I submitted.

      3. Caffeinated Panda*

        I had a college professor who preferred paper clips, no staples. I always totally forgot about this, until the very last take home test where there was a question on the one book I never read (this was a reading-intensive class with many short books). Suddenly it was to my advantage to make it appear that there was a missing page smack in the middle of my paper, which was easier to sell with a paper clip.

        No, it wasn’t ethical or honest. And we were pretty sure he never read all the papers anyway – he was an odd sort. But I walked away from my final semester with an A, for whatever it was worth.

    7. CanYallShutUp*

      This was my high school chemistry teacher with our homework! Only, he and that manager would have had to fight it out, because it was not acceptable for your staple to be askew. (askew was the word he used.) And lord help you if it was partially through the hole in the notebook paper! It had to be parallel to the top edge. OMG.

      1. College Career Counselor*

        I had a high school German teacher who was a control freak. One week, she was out for some reason or other, and we had a substitute. When the regular teacher got back, she re-collected all our homework for the entire week and RE-GRADED it. My work for that period went from an A to a C because she claimed not be able to decipher my handwriting. On vocabulary words that were spelled correctly, but with admittedly crappy penmanship. Uh huh, okay.

        And I was one of her *favorite* students–I know she did worse to other students in the class. We got her back, though. A couple of us were adept enough to catch her in the occasional grammatical mistake and would call her out on it in front of the class.

    8. DisneyChannelThis*

      I used to get paid a nickel a paper to fix papers that were handed in without a staple for my mother. Also to remove any of those ripped notebook edges. Win-win mom got no annoying loose essays, I got easy pocket money and motivation to sit quietly while she taught, students didn’t have to track down a stapler. Most were just folding one corner down like that could keep all their papers together somehow. Some had paperclips. One student had a really cool cut and fold technique – basically a paperless staple.

      1. ferrina*

        I had a college prof who told us that we were responsible for stapling our own essays, and if we turned in an unstapled essay, it wasn’t her fault if pages got lost. That was pretty reasonable though- she gave us a week to write a 2-5 hour essay and staple it.

        1. AFac*

          I finally just started carrying a stapler.

          Now, of course, online submission makes my life a lot easier. No papers to haul around! No worries about losing one! No getting pages that smell like Axe!

          1. GammaGirl1908*

            heeeeeeeee “smell like Axe.” I was not expecting that, and giggled and choked on a tortilla chip.

          2. KateM*

            Yeah. I used to staple student tests together, too, if I found the missing halves. Online submission does make life a lot easier!

    9. Beth*

      Oh, man — I had a boss who dictated the EXACT MANNER in which report packets must be stapled.

      1. Beth*

        * Specifically, he required a single perfectly even horizontal staple in the upper left corner, just under 1/4″ from the edge.

      2. Can’tAdultToday*

        My boss has a list of how our daily paperwork must be collated-main office papers a, b, c..sub office 1 a, b, c…etc. Half inch thick stack daily. No one ever looks at them again.

        A couple months ago something came up and she needed to check something for a specific sub office. She went online and pulled up the report. I stepped in her office as she was signing off and asked why she hadn’t just pulled that day’s paperwork. She looked at me blankly and said she never thought of it.

    10. SaffyTaffy*

      Zines using the materials of terrible jobs are holy. It has been written… In my zine, printed on Sallie Mae printers. :)

    11. Rose*

      Out of college, I worked for a very fancy nonprofit that often hosted very fancy people for very fancy meetings. Getting leftovers was a weirdly huge job perk as all the underlings were very underpaid. For good/obvious reasons, we had to wait until meetings were done before we vultured some food.

      One day, I was walking meeting to meeting, holding my tea, which I had made way too bitter. There was a tea/coffee/pastry set up in the hall for a meeting that was several hours in and almost over. Only about half of what was out had been taken. I grabbed a single sugar packet from a huge bowl of sugar packets.

      The woman whose job it was to coordinate these meetings was notoriously extremely difficult. She ran after me started berating me for taking a tea bag before the meeting was over. I told her I didn’t take a tea bag, and she insisted she had seen me and she knew I took one of the very few remaining chai (these were very coveted and always went the fastest). I explained that I had grabbed a single sugar packet, this was my own tea, and I had a meeting to get to. She continued to try to detain me, berating me for lying. I told her I took a sugar packet from the bowl, and I had to go. She continued to follow me, calling me a liar and telling me she was going to talk to my boss, who is notoriously pretty scary.

      Before I could even bring it up with my boss she approached me, saying “Jesus, Lucine came up earlier to tell me that she accused you of stealing a teabag and chased you down in the hallway. Don’t worry – I wanted her to stop harassing my you, or else.”

      At the time I was so relieved and a little embarrassed but looking back it is all SO bananas.

    12. Cold Fish*

      When I first started working at Company, it was very important to manager that our department staple in the upper right corner (not left – US company/English speaking). There actually was a logical reason for this and it was a very hard habit to break. Now we are an almost paperless company so it no longer matters.

      On a side note, I did an archive project that involved several decades of invoices. This required removing all staples so paperwork could be scanned. There is a certain level of frustrated rage that develops after taking out 4 staples from a single piece of paper for the nth time that hour. I think the record was 14 staples for two pieces of paper.

      1. NoMoreOffice*

        Ugh, this reminds me of the time that I was tasked with scanning 20+ years of paper title files. Why it’s necessary to use 15 staples in 8 different locations on three pieces of paper is beyond me.

      2. JustaTech*

        Oh, pulling out staples so it goes through the scanner! I wouldn’t have minded that in the last set I did except that I was taking pages out of a bound folder – there was no reason for anything to be stapled because it was 2-hole punched!

    13. Fabulous*

      I prefer stapling on a 45 degree angle (because it’s best for flipping pages – no ripping the paper, you can fold the pages back further, etc.) but I had a boss once who only let us staple straight across the top. He made us take out staples and redo them, even if they came in that way from a client. He was also insane about a few (a lot of) other things, but this was the one that got me every time…

    14. Slovenly Braid Cultist*

      I’ll admit to occasionally being neurotic about this for myself, but wouldn’t insist other people adopt the obsession unless there was a specific reason. Like we used to do a set of ~40 page reports on heavy oversize paper, and those tended to tear more easily if they were up and down just due to weight.

    15. Sivvy*

      OMG There are two of them!!!
      I got a very loud dressing down at past job because I wasn’t correctly stapling coversheets onto invoices correctly. We are talking the full on red-faced anger because I had the audacity to staple horizontally. All pages were to be stapled vertically.

      1. Mr. Shark*

        Staple horizontally? What kind of monster are you! :)
        (No, but really, why would you do that?)

    16. Empress Matilda*

      Oh! I had a boss who would lose her mind if I used landscape formatting. Even if it was a table with 7 columns and 4 rows and the only way to make it legible was landscape – nope. Portrait all the way!

    17. Danniella Bee*

      I had a boss who once berated me at the top of her lungs for moving the stapler from one end of the table to the other end as I stapled hundred of packets for clients. I quit the next day.

    18. Mona Lisa Vito*

      ME. TOO. Had to redo a whole mess of packets once when I first started because I didn’t know about the rule, so just stapled them without too much thought. Ugh, I don’t miss that boss!

    19. Staple Queen*

      In college I had a part-time job where I was the assistant to the admin…any time she saw papers with more than one staple, we had to remove the extras because “otherwise it won’t look nice.” I would sometimes come back from lunch to a pile of papers that were stapled twice that I had to remove staples from. No one else in the office ever mentioned or cared about multiple staples.

      1. Sweary Librarian*

        My mom worked in a college as an admin assistant and one of the deans had a similar issue with staples. He actually made her a little cardboard template with a small slot cut out to show exactly where the staple needed to go. She complied, but got back at him by not telling him that autocorrect on his letter to college donors did not catch the fact that the word “public” was missing the “l”.

      2. JB in NC*

        I care about multiple staples! I take them out of all my invoices when I batch them up with the checks. But I’m pretty picky about my paperwork in general anyway.

    20. AdequateArchaeologist*

      My highschool English teacher chewed us out multiple times for stapling our reports on the left hand corner because she was left handed. To this day I paperclip paperwork instead of stapling it because of her.

    21. Some Old Goat*

      My first week at a new job, I took a cup of water at the water cooler every afternoon. On the third or fourth day a voice screamed from a nearby cubicle “that is our personal water, please stop drinking it!” Turns out that they took a monthly contribution of less than a dollar per person to cover this service. But someone had failed to mention this and the screamer was never again pleasant to me, even after I started contributing to the dumb fund. I was a shady thief in her eyes forevermore.

    22. Frustration Plantation*

      To this day I staple parallel to the top of the page only because it annoyed the heck out of a manager I despised at a job I had years and years ago.

    23. Dragonfly7*

      I got this about how I was paperclipping things once. I never encountered an office that cared how things were paperclipped before, and haven’t again in the 20 years since.

    24. TootsNYC*

      I actually do insist that things not be stapled up and down.
      There’s an incredibly important practical reason.
      If you staple up and down, and people fold the paper back to read the pages below, the paper will rip and the staples will be ineffective.

      Side to side isn’t bad, but 45 degrees has a serious practical advantage.

    26. Joanna*

      Once had a customer send us hate mail because they were convinced how we stapled her letters and that her name was once very slightly misspelt was evidence of the company’s contempt for her

    27. Mavis Mae*

      As a very junior lawyer, you learned quickly never, ever to restaple a court document that had to be filed, because if there was more than one set of holes the prothonotary would reject it. Their reasoning was that they could not tell whether any pages had been removed from the exhibit or whatever since it was sworn. One of my more enterprising colleagues once tried to swear an affidavit of his own that he hadn’t interfered with the document beyond restapling it, but this was rejected. So we all learned to staple exceptionally neatly and accurately.

  23. Ismonie*

    We had an IT guy who was . . . Extra. For example, during the 2007- recession, we had tons of empty offices with huge flat screen monitors. And a bunch of lawyers who sometimes needed two monitors for document review. One of the younger lawyers simply took a monitor from an empty office, and plugged it into his existing setup. The IT guy went ballistic. Now, should the jr. lawyer have asked first? Sure. But he was made to go through some kind of requisition process after the IT guy took away the purloined monitor.

    And what was he given at the end of this? One of those tan CRT monitors from the 1990s. I kid you not. I’m shocked it even worked with our computers. The young lawyer took his lumps and used it without complaint. You also have to understand, during this same time period, I came in at least twice to find my old, perfectly functional flat screen monitor replaced by a newer bigger better one. We all did. So it wasn’t like there was a dearth of flat screen monitors.

    1. Lab Boss*

      I’ve been tasked with connecting elderly tech to a modern computer at work before (not a monitor, a piece of science equipment). I think my record was 4 separate converters to make it from whatever godforsaken proprietary data jack was on the thing through to a nice normal USB.

      1. Lady_Lessa*

        We actually have something similar in our lab, because certain large expensive test equipment doesn’t have upgraded software available.

        I can appreciate the challenges (and those of the users, especially the newer ones)

      3. Sarcastic Fringehead*

        Yeah, I feel like maybe the IT guy played himself, because then he had to maintain the CRT one

      4. Cedrus Libani*

        As a former lab tech, I always enjoyed those projects. My favorite was the scintillation counter from the late 1970s that was connected to the outside world via a similarly ancient dot-matrix printer. It fortunately had a data export function, I called in a favor with an old-school computer guy / known e-waste hoarder to collect supplies, and thus I managed to get the data onto a computer modern enough to support a floppy drive. From there, I put floppy drive #2 on a computer modern enough to connect to the intranet.

        The fun part was actually opening that exported file on a then-modern (~2010 vintage) computer. Tried all sorts of things, but the one that worked? Microsoft Word compatibility mode.

        1. Lab Boss*

          Notepad I would have believed, but my mind wasn’t ready to be blown by MS Word compatibility mode!

          In my own quest to connect a near-obsolete microwell plate reader to a modern computer I had to call up a friend (and e-waste hoarder) and barter him a bottle of whiskey for a specific converter that we couldn’t track down anywhere else. I probably should have been reimbursed for that one, but since I helped him drink it I suppose I came out even :)

      5. Merrie*

        We have something like that on the computer running our inventory software, which is older than almost all of our staff members (our staff tend to skew young and I think this stuff dates to 1980).

    2. Dragon_Dreamer*

      Your IT guy thought he was a BOfH. Some of those stories are some. Many are just pathetic.

      1. Silence Will Fall*

        Having worked at a law firm in a previous life, it would not surprise me to learn that the IT guy had nothing to do with it. The lengths some senior attorneys would go to, to make a junior attorney’s life miserable were mind bending.

        1. Ismonie*

          That’s not crazy, but in this case, we just realized the other IT guy was the person to ask for stuff.

  24. Ari*

    A former director who I spent hours training because she had no idea what we did. Who told me during everyone 1v1 that she didn’t know how I was able to manage so much work and how I was doing way more than my peers, with promises to offload things which never happened. Who always told me I was doing a great job and she couldn’t be successful without my knowledge and expertise. Who then at end of year gave me a middle of the road rating, noted in my end of year review that I needed to learn how to manage better, and gave me only 0.5% raise. I took a lateral move within the company asap.

    1. Me (I think)*

      They needed to leave you room to grow the following year. If they gave you a high rating, you would have no incentive to do better.

      (I actually had a boss once who gave me all 5’s on the annual review form, then the overall was a 4, and she explained that she couldn’t give me a 5 because then there was no room for a higher rating next year.)

      1. GlitsyGus*

        I had a manager who would ever give anyone a 5 because, “that’s basically perfect and no one is perfect.” This resulted in our pay increases being lowered because other managers were more than happy to give good employees 5s and so our overall average “score” was lower than that of folks under other managers. It was such BS.

        1. ferrina*

          I had this manager. It was bananas. I was actually working in a 2-person team at the time, and my coworker was reviewed by a different manager. When I told her about my lack any 5s across the 20 criteria, she was appalled.

          1. La Triviata*

            I once worked for a man – head of a small non-profit, 8 staff at the time – who was proud that he never gave anyone a top score (make it a 5, exceeds expectations, whatever the top rating was).

        2. Mr. Shark*

          Yup, I faced this. We were in a smaller office, and our manager was a much tougher rater than the other manager, and then they had to get together and compare the ratings of the people, and determine raises from that. Of course, our team ratings were lower and that mean lower raises.
          Also, if you got a high score one year, you couldn’t just achieve the same level the next year and still get a high score. If you got a 4 out of 5, then you sort of reset to a 3 since that meant 4 was your regular level. You had to do more and be better than the previous year in order to get a 4. If you were just as good as last year, even if it was better than anyone else, then you still got a 3.

      2. European*

        This happened to me as well. My first year in the company, I received a top rating. I was new in the industry and my performance was definitely much better the second year. My supervisor acknowledged this, but gave me a worse rating. The company incentive structure was built so, that if an employee received top ratings several years in a row, they needed to be promoted. It was a local affiliate of a large US company in a small European country and there were no realistic promotion possibilities locally. So my boss solved the problem by giving me a worse rating. You can imagine how motivating that felt.

      3. Dasein9*

        I was told to do this once. But it was specifically with a student employee at a university library, with the aim that we could demonstrate steady growth and increase in responsibility and talk about that specifically in our letters of recommendation.
        Never for a non-student job!
        (And I’m still not sure it’s legit in that case, but it is how it was done.)

      4. alienor*

        I was a manager at a company where if you gave someone a 5, you would have to go in front of a tribunal of more senior managers and justify your reasons for doing it, and sometimes the score would get busted back down to a 3 or 4 anyway. We had approved talking points about why a 3 was really a great score (because you were “meeting expectations”) and nothing to get upset about, but I doubt anyone bought it.

    2. Mavis Mae*

      At the start of my career I worked for the local subsidiary of a large USA tech company. I made budget, hit my KPIs but got my rating downgraded because the company expected each work unit to fit the normal curve, my manager actually told me that.

  25. Rebecca*

    I had a manager who sent the secretary to the doctor with me when I had swine flu to tell him he had to give me some medication to make it so I could teach that day. He laughed at her until he realized that she was serious, and then he had to tell her that I was in no way healthy enough to stand up and teach for 6 hours and also if they didn’t send me home to quarantine he’d report them. They took the sick days out of my last month’s salary when I ended my contract.

    And I worked in a school where we showed up one Monday to find all the plants in all the classrooms dead – it turns out they’d been fumigating the classrooms over the weekends without telling us but this time they forgot to take the plants out of the room so we all found out. When I asked for the name of the chemicals they were using so I could determine if it was something I was allergic to, they threatened to fire me for ‘insinuating they were doing something illegal’ and then all year held over my head that I had been ‘rude’ to the organization.

    1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

      I had a pet fish in my cubicle (with permission) who got flea-bombed to death — one dude who had a private office had somehow managed to get the okay to bring in his large, mangy, untrained dog, who infested half the floor with fleas, bad enough that they flea bombed over the weekend three times. They told us about the first two so we could take stuff home etc, and for those two I took Cody home for the weekend in Tupperware, but the third time was a surprise. :( After that, they finally stopped letting Fergus bring in his dog :P

      The purchasing department, who sat across the walkway from me (and did not have ANY interactions with me or my department on a work-related basis), all got together and made me a condolence card and had a funeral to bury my fish in their potted ficus tree, complete with a popsicle stick grave marker. I wasn’t entirely sure that was a great plan, but they were insistent and it’s not like I had any other ideas of what to do with him, so I pretty much just put my hands up and told them whatever made them happy.

        1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

          IT WAS A HOSPITAL. I don’t even know how Fergus got his dog okayed the first time, let alone after multiple flea bombs.

      2. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

        I think that was very kind of the purchasing people! So often we don’t honor our work-related dead.

    2. JustaTech*

      For years my work banned person plants because our plants might give some plant disease or other to the company plants that were cared for by an outside company. Then the company plants went away in one downsizing or other and folks asked to be allowed to bring in plants. “No, you might damage the company plants.” Uh, ok, whatever.

      So several people get beta fish instead.

  26. PT*

    Years ago, my boss’s manager sent an employee home and shut his area to our customers, because he went into the first aid kit to get someone a bandaid for their cut.

    His duties included first aid, but this manager decided that the first aid kit was permanently mounted to the wall too far from his workstation, and thus his retrieval of a bandaid considered an “abandonment of post” and he should be sent home and terminated.

    My boss was at a half-day training, and came back around 2 pm having to deal with the nonsense of the department being closed and our customers being angry, and also having to diffuse the situation that no, using the first aid kit is not an abandonment of duties it is part of his job, and no, you’re not firing this employee who covers 25 hours a week because he did his job correctly but in a way you don’t like it. I think she may have gotten written up over it, too. It was absurd.

    1. Working Hypothesis*

      Wait, he wrote up his own boss? That’s what it sounds like from the way you’re describing it; you said that your boss’ manager did this, right? I’m confused. But I’m glad she didn’t get away with it, whoever she was. If he wasn’t supposed to leave his station, then for heaven’s sake, put the first aid kit at his station!

      1. PT*

        No, my boss may have been written up by her boss over not “preventing an employee from abandoning his post and allowing him to misbehave that way.”

        It was stupid. The first aid kit had been there for years and years continued to be there for years and we never had another problem with it. It had been off to the side because we did not want customers stealing from it, which was a problem in areas where the first aid kit was easily accessible. They’d clean out the bandaids and gauze as if they were complimentary hotel shampoos, then when someone needed it for an actual emergency, the kit would be empty.

        1. La Triviata*

          I was once sent out to buy new bandaids for the office first aid kit and I had to pay for them myself. Which is why people were wearing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle bandaids for the next few months.

    2. CatBookMom*

      At my last job, the first aid kits were locked in file cabinets, said cabinets being room dividers, hallway items, etc. Locked in file cabinets, with stickers on the drawer to say “Here’s a first aid kit”. Given the way people came and went from that employer, it was always a problem to figure out who had most recently been given charge of the key to the nearest file cabinet with the first aid kit. It wasn’t anyone logical, like the dept secretary. So, for those little job boo-boos like paper cuts, most of us just brought in some bandaids and so forth for minor injuries.
      When I tripped and fell in the parking garage, banging up my knee, and needed more than a bandaid, it took a long time to get bandages, cold compress, etc. Nothing ever seemed to be changed about the holy locking-up of the first aid kits.

  27. HelloHello*

    I had a high school teacher once who came into class the day after a paper was due and lectured us all for 10+ minutes about how badly we had stapled our assignments. At one point he claimed his eight year old daughter had said “daddy why do your high schoolers not know how to staple correctly,” which, obviously, we all believed a child was super interested in how close a staple was to the edge of a piece of paper. (His primary complaint was that we were stapling too close to the edge?? I’m still unsure how that affected anything but boy did we get an earful over it.)

    1. MicroManagered*

      This one made me laugh for a few reasons:

      #1 I can’t tell you the last time I stapled something

      #2 Back when I was stapling and handling stapled papers regularly, I could totally see how the sloppy stapling of a bunch of high schoolers would be aggravating

      #3 His kid definitely never said those words

      1. HelloHello*

        Absolutely :P Honestly if it had just been this one thing I probably would have written it off as a bizarre quirk, but he was deeply petty in many, many ways and also vocally very conservative so he and I… did not get along.

      2. Jaydee*

        Or his kid totally did say that…because she has heard her dad complain about how papers are supposed to be stapled so many times that she truly believes that there is One Right Way and cannot fathom how these much older and presumably much wiser high schoolers don’t know the One Right Way to staple papers.

        2. knitcrazybooknut*

          Gods help the poor employees who work for her in the future! Now the circle is complete…..

    2. Rock Prof*

      This is a thing I can’t even wrap my head around caring about. I almost always have students (college) turn stuff in that’s just dog-eared and not stapled, which does annoy me a bit since it’s easy for the pages to get separated. But my solution is just that I carry a small stapler with me and just staple it when I notice it. Oddly, I’ve never needed to bring my kid into it (I have given him the task of stapling things when we’ve been stuck home together, though, which he enjoys because he’s 5).

    3. Putting the Dys in Dysfunction*

      Reminds me of the English teacher who subtracted points from an assignment because I’d used a green pen.

      I think there’s a lot of OCD on exhibit in these stories…

      1. Kate in Colorado*

        I do have to admit that once or twice when I taught high school I had students turn in assignments written in highlighter yellow and I said I wasn’t going to grade them until they redid it, so technically I also subtracted points (a 0 was the placeholder grade in the gradebook until they were done in ink that wouldn’t give me a headache) based on the color of their writing utensil. To be fair, my syllabus specifically said blue or black ink or pencil only, but I regularly graded papers with other colors that were easy enough on the eyes.

        1. JustaTech*

          I was once reprimanded by my 10th grade history teacher 2 hours into a 3 hour final exam because I was using a mechanical pencil to write my essay and not a pen. Even though she had not said anything about needing to use a pen *and* had regularly complained about my terrible spelling, which is obviously harder to fix in pen.

          I could see her considering making me re-write the whole thing right then (or holding me back late from the exam) but decided it wasn’t worth the very high probability of me bursting into tears.

      2. not a doctor*

        Late, but please don’t use “OCD” when you really mean “picky” or “anal.” The lived experience of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is nothing like its quirky portrayal, and treating it that way only serves to alienate people who actually have it.

        1. Person who actually has OCD*

          I agree. I was just thinking about whether I should make the comment you did.

        2. Putting the Dys in Dysfunction*

          I’m OCD myself. It can manifest in literally compulsive insistence upon something (which can include a process) because it just HAS to be done that way or else [specified or unspecified consequences] will occur.

    4. Sally O'Malley*

      I teach high school seniors, and several of my students staple smack-dab in the middle of the page. You can’t even flip the pages. LOL! I don’t say anything about it–certainly not going to waste any time lecturing about it–but I do wonder to myself if they’ve ever use a stapler before. Or if they’ve ever seen or held a stapled document.

      1. Lexi Lynn*

        I had a high school teacher who gave you an “F” on the assignment if you wrote “alot” instead of “a lot.” Given that this was pre-computer and pre-correction tapes on typewriters, it was very annoying because hitting space didn’t always move you forward.

      2. GlitsyGus*

        I only did this one time, because it’s really very obnoxious, but for a super nit picky teacher that was really riding me over nonsense I once stapled my paper on the upper right corner instead of the left. When you do this and make sure your paper is mid-stack there is a 98% probability that the reader will not notice and try to flip right to left. This will cause the entire document to flip over, usually taking several of the papers underneath it along for the ride to the floor. It’s pretty diabolical in a very petty way.

      3. Insert Clever Name Here*

        I sometimes help my husband grade tests for his high school students (multiple choice, so he makes me a key) and SO MANY of them do this it drives me crazy. He shrugs. This is why he is a teacher and I am not!

      4. TrixM*

        I would say it’s worth correcting your students about it. Not docking marks or yelling, but since they apparently know they have to staple the thing, demonstrating where it should be stapled and flipping a few pages to show why might help reduce some of the problem.
        I say this because I never used a stapler until my first office job. I had seen stapled documents before, so I at least got the basic position right. Nuances like horizontal vs vertical vs diagonal alignment would have been completely lost on me.
        Not that alignment would matter in this instance, but I kind of feel like the basics of document handling is one of those secondary skills imparted at school. Explaining the general convention to your students (some of whom may well have not used one before) may well help them in other situations in future, not just for your marking routine.

    5. Elenna*

      The only way I can imagine the kid actually saying that is if he’s ranted about staple placement so much at home that he’s convinced his daughter that it’s actually an Important Issue. And/or if he prompted her until she said something vaguely similar to that, which he then paraphrased. Both say way more about his pettiness than about your stapling!

    6. Emi*

      I once took a class where I kept forgetting to staple my homework. I would fold down the corners together and sign/number each page, but I guess this didn’t cut it because the grader started threatening to take points off. I’ve been a grader and I can easily see how loose pages can get out of hand, but also, jeez.

    7. LegalEagle*

      These are other staple stories are really making me feel bad about all the papers I turned in during high school and college that weren’t stapled at all! None of my teachers had staplers in class, we didn’t have a stapler at home, so I would just fold the corners over and hope for the best. Same thing in college, if the library stapler was out of staples, that paper was getting turned in unstapled. I see now how annoying that must have been for all my teachers!

      1. Cold Fish*

        I have a very vivid memory of a substitute teacher in the 4th grade explaining to the class how to keep papers together without a stapler. It involved dog earing the pages and then creating two parallel rips in the fold that results in a little square that is then folded back onto the paper opposite of the dog ear fold. Seriously it was like a one hour lecture on how this is done. (FYI – It does work great for 3 pages or less but more than that there is just too much paper to work effectively)

        1. GlitsyGus*

          Having been an elementary school substitute teacher I can pretty solidly state that this was a teacher that had used up everything in the lesson plan and was vamping until the bell rang. I had a bunch of those little, “ok kids, let me show ya somethin’ neat!” that I would default to when there was 20 minutes left before lunch and I was all out of lesson plan. Learning how to juggle never served me as well in life as it did in first grade classrooms.

        2. GlitsyGus*

          I was an elementary school substitute for several years. I can pretty surely state this was a teacher that had used up everything in the lesson plan and was vamping until the bell rang. You never want dead air in a room full of under 10-year-olds, chaos ensues.

          I had a bunch of those little, “ok kids, let me show ya somethin’ neat!” that I would default to when there was 20 minutes left before lunch and I was all out of lesson plan. Learning how to juggle never served me as well in life as it did in first grade classrooms.

    8. Mona Lisa*

      My best high school teacher story was the geography teacher who would take -.49 or -.51 off assignments and test question answers to let us know if it was worth rounding up or not. He took -.51 off my diagram of Earth’s orbit around the sun because I didn’t deserve a round up since “the sun does not have enough orange in it.” He was not impressed when I pointed out it was a near exact copy of the textbook’s diagram, which also depicted the sun as entirely yellow.

    9. Jam on Toast*

      In defense of frustrated teachers, when I taught at college, plagiarism was an never-ending battle and end-of-term essays were a particular hotbed. One term, I had an especially bad bunch and was at the end of my patience because of how much time documenting, scheduling student meetings and paperwork were taking. Jam Jr., who was 7 or 8 at the time, asked me what was wrong and I explained. He looked at me in consternation and proclaimed “They can’t do that! That’s dizz-honist!” When I relayed his reaction, my department wanted to adopt my kid as their mascot and joked they were going to print t-shirts in his honor with his pronouncement on them. The next time I came in with him to campus, everyone kept stopping him and high-fiving him.

      1. Essess*

        At the university where I used to work (and took classes), the university sent out an email to all students about the definition of copyrights and plagiarism and made a big fuss about not using work without proper citations and copyright permissions. This included a link to a webpage with rules and penalties for violating these rules.

        I sent an email back to the department that sent it out, asking them if they had gotten copyright permission to use the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon that they were using on the webpage. Less than an hour later, that cartoon was gone!

      2. ADHSquirrelWhat*

        my mother – a college prof – had an online class which had .. I think four students? First week, two of them were busted for plagarism. She does a huge “do not do this”. The week after, she gets a direct copy/paste – from the Canadian version of the assigned text book! (Mom is in US). From a different student!

        Plagarism is bad – plagarism of the textbook is just DUMB!

    10. PunkRock Product Owner*

      Reminds me of my 3rd grade teacher who threatened us with having her husband come in and tell us “how much stress she was under because we weren’t behaving”.

      I asked “cool, when is he coming in”?

      Yes, I was that GenX kid.

      He never did come in. :(

    11. Y'all Come Back Now, Ya Hear?*

      I am slightly guilty – I am a middle school teacher who literally just taught a 90 second lesson in each of my classes on how to appropriately use a stapler and not to break it and where to staple on a stack of papers.

      1. Salymander*

        Hey, for what it’s worth, teaching a 90 second basic life skills lesson is not a terrible idea. 90 minutes might be pushing it, but at 90 seconds you are just fine. My mom told me about her college professor who would keep a box of sharpened pencils on his desk. If a student did anything he didn’t like, such as stapling incorrectly (straight across. He wanted straight across. The monster), he would yell and throw pencils at them. So at least you were teaching useful information and not trying to stake them with pencils like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

    12. Lucy P*

      We had a grade school science teacher (7th grade) who made the entire class (with the exception of one person) redo a homework assignment that involved coloring a pre-made coloring page with flora. Her gripe was that we all colored in different directions and that all of our coloring strokes should go the same way. This same teacher, at a time they were not my teacher, made me redo my homework during aftercare because she felt my handwriting slanted too far in one direction.

      1. Salymander*

        My elementary school tried to pull me out of the gifted program because my handwriting is messy. My mom was abusive and neglectful, but even she was livid about that. I got to be there when she told off the school administrator who decided to pull me out of the program (over the teacher’s objections). My mom was scary, and for once it wasn’t directed at me so I just sat back and smiled.

    13. N C Kiddle*

      Teachers invoking their kids reminds me of our HS science teacher. We were an annoying class, and whenever he asked us to read something in the textbook, we’d start talking amongst ourselves. So he took to insisting that his daughter was only four and could read silently so why couldn’t we.

  28. Ally*

    Our high school would give students paper to write notes on. Our German teacher in senior year was ridiculously tight about handing out paper, saying he didn’t want to “subsidize the Physics Department”. I assume the paper came from subject/department budgets rather than the overall school budget, however, it was only ever the Physics Department he viewed as moochers!

      2. Margaretmary*

        Either this or they are friends and tease each other about their respective subjects.

    2. Richard Hershberger*

      Old joke: A college president was complaining to a colleague about how the physics department was always asking for expensive equipment. “Why can’t they be like the mathematics department? All they ask for is paper, pencils, and erasers. Or better yet, the philosophy department. They don’t even ask for erasers!”

      1. No Tribble At All*

        You joke, but my alma mater increased tuition on the business and engineering schools, supposedly because the business school requires expensive guest speakers, and the engineering school requires expensive lab equipment. Their further justification was business and engineer are both likely to be high earners, so they won’t have a problem with higher tuition. (So by that logic the art classes should be free? /s)

        1. Richard Hershberger*

          Business school guest speakers: This strains the meaning of “requires” past the breaking point.

        2. Richard Hershberger*

          Meant to add: Those majors both lead, at least in the popular mind, to high salaries. I expect the actual calculation is that students (and their parents) are willing to pay more.

      2. knitcrazybooknut*

        We continue to run up against the idea that nobody should have their own printers in their offices, or even really have high volume printers for our department.

        We’re the English Department. Sorry, IT folks, we’re gonna have printers. There’s a lot of online stuff you can do, but writers are gonna write and love paper for the most part.

      3. PhysicsTech*

        That’s a good joke, I might steal that thank you.

        We have had our budget slashed “due to covid” for 2 years in a row, and you better believe I mention to students that admin slashed our budget every time an instrument breaks.

    3. Making up names is hard*

      Probably paid for the paper himself! Mostly supplies like that isn’t covered by the budget the teachers get for their classrooms.

    4. PhysicsTech*

      As a physics person I will confirm that we do mooch.

      One department I worked in was very proud that we spent the most per capita on food. Honestly moral was high in that department, partially for that reason and I was very sad to leave (no promotion paths, but that’s an academia problem, not really a that college problem).

  29. TheAnxiousManager*

    The head of maintenance threatened to take away our garbage can “privileges” if we threw away food wrappers in them. He also threatened to take away our microwave because he had to wipe the inside of it once.

    1. WhateverNext*

      Omg you’ve reminded me we all had our desk bins removed because we kept putting rubbish in them.

      4. Orange You Glad*

        A few years ago our office’s building management removed all individual trash cans and set up a few centrally located ones. We can only put recyclable paper in the bins near our desks now and get up and walk to a large trash can for anything else.

    3. Guin*

      There’s no directive, but in my building if you don’t throw away your food trash in the central hallway bins, you’re going to get mice in your office. It’s a big incentive not to drop a Twinkie wrapper into your personal trash can.

    4. commonsensesometimesmakessense*

      Well, if he takes away the garbage can “privileges,” then time to leave the garbage all over the floor for him!

      Also, where did he think you were supposed to throw away food wrappers?

    6. Curmudgeon in California*

      At my last academia job, when they moved us all out of offices into an open plan building off of campus, they:
      1) Would not allow us to have real trash or recycling bins at our desks
      2) Did not allow the janitors to empty the tiny trash receptacles they allowed us, but did require the janitors to “clean” our desks
      3) Gave us dire warnings about “clutter” on our desks because they were supposed to be “uniform” and “professional”
      4) Insisted that we had to discard our own trash, composting and recycling every day, separated of course.
      5) Pretended not to find people’s ergonomic assessments so they could deny us the ergo chairs we been bought so we had to sit in chairs that were identical to every other desk chair because it was literally more important that the chairs be identical than avoiding ergo injuries
      6) Did not permit individual white boards
      7) Tried to take away our Linux desktops and replace them with slow, crappy Windows thin clients
      8) Would not allow any bookshelves, so my books sat in a pile on my desk
      9) When we’d complain about the idea of working in a noisy open plan, accused us of being “change averse” and “not resilient” and then sent us to “resiliency” classes.
      10) Tried to gaslight us by telling us that “most” of the people “loved” the new office, and were excited about the collaboration. The actual fact was that it was hard to work closely with anyone due to trying to be quiet
      11) Had bar height tables and stools in half of the conference rooms, but it wasn’t an accessibility issue because there were others at normal height. Most of the normal height conference rooms had very uncomfortable, but “stylish” chairs.

      They laid me off due to covid, and part of me wasn’t sad at all. I now work remotely full time.

      1. JustSomeone*

        This isn’t my story, but it reminds me so much of something my former roommate went through that I have to share. We had just graduated from college in the worst depths of the recession, and the only job she could find was as a temp doing data entry for a big bank.
        -temps had to park in the overflow parking lot across the street and next to a different building. Never mind that there was tons and tons of unused parking space in the attached ramp; that was employee parking and they weren’t real employees
        -they weren’t allowed to personalize their workspace in any way. After all, they’re just temps.
        -they also weren’t allowed to leave any personal property in their desks. The desks that were assigned and not shared. But it wasn’t really HER desk, so her fork and her water bottle, etc. had to come home every evening.
        -eventually someone decided it looked “messy” to have papers on the desks, and it would be more “uniform” if nobody had notebooks/binders/etc. Not after the day was over. Oh, no. It was a sin to have papers out during the workday when you were actively working on those papers. She had to open a tab with the data she needed to enter in a form, memorize strings of numbers, switch to another program, and enter them in. Because printing them or having a notepad to jot them down on would be too individualistic.
        -the rule from legal was that “temp” meant under 2 years, so everyone was let go after 1 year and 364 days. No exceptions.

    7. Butterfly Counter*

      Oof! This sounds like my university right now.

      Because of Covid, cleaning staff are refusing to pick up trash from offices because there might be used tissues in the bins. Okay. Fine. But that was the one thing they actually did in our building. They only vacuum individual offidces when requested (and usually a week or 2 after the request) and most in my department don’t put in a request because we don’t want to seem high maintenance. They never vacuum hallways. There is no dusting or cleaning of windows.

      Bathroom toilets are cleaned once a day, but that is the entire extent of the work they do. I understand they work an often thankless and underappreciated job, but our entire university was shut down to EVERYONE but them for over a year and we came back to the same messy classrooms and buildings we left with another .5 inch of dust on everything. I am still finding cigarette butts in one of my classrooms that I’m guessing have been there for years, maybe decades.

    8. Pigeon*

      Flashbacks to when I worked in an office whose solution to a major pest problem (mice, cockroaches) was to put out special garbage containers with lids and forbid anyone to throw away even a wrapper in any other container. As far as I’m aware, this was the only measure taken to address the problem.

      (Side note… I walked past the same dead roach in a well-traveled hallway every morning on the way to my cubicle. I was morbidly curious how long it would take for our janitorial staff to clean up such an obvious roach when I’d seen plenty of other dead ones elsewhere in the office. It remained until they literally tore down the front of the building during a renovation… which only sent a giant wave of pests into the remaining structure. Some time after that, I mentioned it to a colleague and discovered he was doing the same thing!)

  30. I WORKED on a Hellmouth*

    When I worked at a Lush many, many, many moons ago, the manager assigned me “scrub the entire floor with your hands” as a work task that had to be completed before I was allowed to leave for the day. Because I had some knee injuries from roller derby I couldn’t kneel, so I was sitting on the floor as best as I could manage–until she saw me and flipped out, stating that it was unprofessional to sit–whether straight legged, cross legged, or anywhere in between–or crouch, and therefor it was against the rules to do anything but kneel.

    1. WantonSeedStitch*

      Wow, sounds like someone needed to pop a bath bomb in the tub and chill TF out.

      1. Esmeralda*

        Sadly, this is something housekeepers have to deal with. Instructed not just to clean the kitchen floor, but to do it on their hands and knees and scrub.

        1. Working Hypothesis*

          Honestly, the unprofessional thing is to officially notice or comment on what position anybody uses to do their work. Whether someone kneels or not is… kind of the ultimate in “Not Your Business.”

        2. LittleMarshmallow*

          I used to work for a cleaning service and absolutely preferred to do floors on my hands and knees. It was easier for me (mopping is hard on your back) and it definitely does get the floor cleaner than mopping. Now, granted, I was still in college so very young so I didn’t have too much issue with my knees, but even as an adult, I bought roofing kneepads and still prefer hands and knees over mopping.

      2. TrixM*

        Hard not to think of some kind of fetish-type thing, subconscious or not. Humiliation, insistence on hands-and-knees position… I’m kinky, and I’ve witnessed these exact scenarios.
        Anyway, I’m hoping it was just “routine” gratuitous bullying?

    3. commonsensesometimesmakessense*

      “Sorry, boss, but I cannot do this task then without an ADA accommodation!”

    4. Staja*

      Oh gosh, this reminds me of the one job I ever walked out of.

      I “managed” an upscale mall card store about 20 years ago, with a RSM who didn’t even let me do my schedules or hire my own people. One day, she left me a list of chores to complete, including changing the lightbulbs.

      I also had a colleague from another store working a few hours that day (I was short staffed, because I wasn’t allowed to hire). I am short and afraid of heights. My colleague was a good 8 inches taller than me and offered to change the lights.

      The next day, I came into to a nasty note that my RSM had happened to walk by the store and saw that I wasn’t doing all the “chores” myself. I called her, told her I’d finish my shift, and that I’d leave my keys in back office.

      2. Just Me*

        I sincerely believe it’s these retail managers who have the worst power trips. When I worked in a mall store in college my manager was mad at me for some minor crime and made me work late to clean *behind* the display cases. Like, the ones that touched the wall.

  31. Hills to Die On*

    An admin who refused to let me use tech support. I had put in about 30 hours over 5 days and had to send a request to the CEO that keeping up with my regular job plus this computer issue was coming at the detriment of my relationship with my husband and kids, my ability to sleep, and my overall peace of mind before it was finally approved for me to make ONE call to tech support. I had to beg them to call me back because I was ‘not allowed’ to call them twice.
    Same admin also asked to borrow my laptop cord because she lost hers and then when I took it back after 2 days (she originally needed it for 3 hours), freaked out screaming because I ‘made’ her miss processing payroll. She was awful. Jamie, you suck.

    1. Fushi*

      This is so baffling I’m fascinated. Was there some reason in particular that you weren’t allowed to use tech support? Did they charge per incoming phone call or something? Why was the admin even involved in this??

  32. PJ*

    Have had these sort of bean-counter abuses of power beyond reason at several workplaces, and they always seem to come up around time tracking and time management.

    At one company had three very efficient, productive employees, all with 20+ years at the company, all leave within a 30 day period because of the new team leader’s hyper-vigilance at watching them come and go. Any efficiency gains he hoped to achieve were decimated by the amount of knowledge we lost and the year(s) we spent training and learning what those employees already knew.

    But the kicker was at another company, where a top-down command to increase our numbers led to limits for our….biology breaks. (Yes, that’s exactly what you think it is.) And not only did that policy suck, in general, but it turned employees against one another, with some narcs emerging from the ranks. I’m sure there’s some sort of psychological experiment that mirrored all this. And all of it to find out if someone took two minutes longer to pee than they should have……

    1. Frickety frack*

      I spent my late teens/early 20s working in call centers, and they’re hotbeds of that kind of time micromanagement. They monitored every single second we were off the phones, and god help you if you took too long in the bathroom or clocked in one minute late from lunch. If I ever had that happen at any job now, I’d be out the door before they could finish explaining the policy to me. I swear I have P(ee)TSD from that time – it took me years to stop flinching whenever my office phone rings or getting nervous to do things like go get a snack or a cup of coffee outside of “set” break times.

      Plus, the narcs get promoted in call centers. I think if Dante had known about those places, they definitely would’ve been added as another circle of hell.

    2. Miss V*

      This is pretty gross, so be warned-

      Years ago I worked in a call center, which are notorious for this kind of things to begin with, and my department head was a tyrant who took it even further. We had specific times we were allowed to take out bathroom breaks.

      It was exhausting, humiliating, and dehumanizing. I once saw a pregnant coworker crying because she wasn’t allowed to go at not her scheduled time and she peed her pants.

      I had enough. We found out some of the higher ups were going to be doing a walk through. The date just so happened to coincide with a day I was on my period. So during lunch I removed whatever menstrual product I was using and didn’t replace it, knowing I would be a mess by the time my scheduled afternoon bathroom break came around.

      When the higher ups came through they walked right past me and I timed that exact moment with standing up to stretch. And they caught an eyeful of my very obviously stained pants (I should mention I specifically wore khakis that day).

      One of them kindly suggested I might need to run to the ladies room to which I, confused, replied that of course I was aware, but I couldn’t go before my schedule bathroom break, could I?

      The higher ups all turned to look at our department head while he tried his best to fall through the floor.

      I was told to take the rest of the day off while someone else called for the chair I had been sitting in to be thrown away (it was unsalvageable) and the department head taken behind a closed door for a meeting.

      I walked out with my pants soaked in blood and my head held high.

      When I came back the next day we had a new department head.

      A couple coworkers chipped in and bought me a box of pads with a thank you balloon tied around it.

      2. commonsensesometimesmakessense*

        Ok, this is an awesome tale of malicious compliance!!! Way to go! This story made my day!

      3. Kimmy Schmidt*

        This is the best example of “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” I’ve ever seen. I applaud you.

      12. PJ*

        There are no words….for their policy, or for your FLAWLESS handling of the situation!

        Brava!

    3. Leela*

      I once worked at a call center where they forced us to put our computers in a special code for bathroom time (there were other codes that would have stopped the auto-dialer). Once data was taken across a few months, it was decided that we were all using too much bathroom time, even though it fell within the limits the company said we could have, so they halved the amount we were allowed to use the bathroom. This led to 1) employees putting their computer in a different, false code so they could use the bathroom, 2) employees who didn’t do this because they felt ethically uncomfortable with lying got yelled at because employees in category 1 “didn’t need to use that much time!”

  33. Hen in a Windstorm*

    I was an admin at a nonprofit back in the day and had the task of taking our mass mailings to the special counter at the post office. The envelopes were already sorted by zip code into different boxes.

    The mass mailings guy was such a petty tyrant. The first time: you need to bundle each set of envelopes with a rubber band. Ok, fine. Come back the next month with all the envelopes sorted and banded: why did you put rubber bands on these? We can’t process them like this! EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. It was always the opposite of whatever I had done. God, I hated that guy.

    1. Jessica*

      I had to do this several times at an old job and it was always terrifying. It seemed like the rules changed every year, every time you visited, who you talked to, etc.

    2. GRA*

      Did … I write this comment? Reading it gave me anxiety from when I had to drop off the bulk mailings, too. I was sad to leave that job, but not sad to no longer have to deal with mean bulk mailman.

    3. just another bureaucrat*

      Mass mailings guy! We have one of those but he recently got moved so his entire shop now reports up through my boss as well.

      He broke down and cried when I sat him down to make a plan and pull together the resources that he needed to get an upgrade to a piece of equipment because he was wildly behind schedule. He’d been just trying to do it all himself harrumphily without asking for help. He’s been much less snitty to other people since. But he was 100% Mass Mailings Petty Tyrant down to the rubber bands!

    4. Wendy City*

      GOD this gave me flashbacks to college – I worked in the alumni department where we often got pulled into mass-mailing-collation-duties, where a stressed-out senior would be dictatorial about mass mailings *because* the dude at the post office was a petty tyrant.

      I did not work for the alumni department all 4 years, partly because I never wanted to deal with that guy.

    5. 40 Years in the Nonprofit Trenches*

      I had this job also — omg the minutiae, the rubber bands, the little labels, the flats.

    6. BookMom*

      I can 100% confirm I had this same experience dropping bulk mail at the business mail unit. Same guy, mailings twice a month, always a new and often contradictory reason to reject the mailing and make me repack it on the floor of the BMU.

    7. Gal Friday*

      This must be in the training manual the post office for anyone handling bulk mail. I had the very same experience!

    8. Joielle*

      Ha! Not mass mailings in my case, but we have a couple of admins who are constantly reshuffling duties, not telling anyone, and then snipping at people for not intuiting that things have changed. Email a document to the person that you’ve been emailing it to several times a week for a year and get an irritated response, CCed to all five admins and your boss – “You need to send this type of filing to Jessica, not Nancy. Only Jessica handles this type of filing. It is VERY IMPORTANT to route these documents correctly or we cannot ensure that your request will be processed on time. Please make sure you do not forget this in the future.” Well this is the first I’m hearing of it, so it has clearly changed since the last time we did this, three days ago!! It annoys me so much but it’s not my hill to die on so I just laugh.

      1. kitryan*

        I have the opposite problem – I’ve been monitoring compliance with continuing education requirements at my office for about 8 years, yet every month or 2, someone asks me or one of the managers ‘who handles continuing ed?’ or ‘do you still handle continuing ed?’. Yes, I do. Still.
        Memorably, I sent one person a reminder of his due date and then received a submission from him a week later, asking if I still handled this, with seemingly no memory of last week’s reminder email. I confirmed that I did and then 3 weeks later, he submitted again, while asking if I still handled this (with seemingly no memory of either prior interaction).
        Sometimes I feel like it’s Groundhog Day all over again in my office.

    9. Salymander*

      During college I had a job working from home, preparing mass mailings for a real estate broker. She was a mean, nitpicky tyrant, and when I went in to the office to hand over her mailings she went through every one to find fault. She docked my pay so that I wasn’t even making minimum wage, and then just put all the mail in the outgoing mail box without fixing any of my so called mistakes. She told me that if I quit she would tank my reputation in any way she could. I took one more month of mailings home, waited until the last day, and dumped them on her desk with a note telling her I was quitting and why. A copy of the note went on the desk of the agent in charge of the office. Some of her coworkers and I went out later, and they said she was still at the office trying to get all the mailers ready to go. It felt a little mean, but she was such a jerk!

      1. Salymander*

        Oh and I didn’t prepare any of the mailings before I dumped them. Forgot that part.

      2. Hex Symbol*

        PSA: Docking your pay below minimum wage is illegal in all states, docking your pay at all is illegal in some states and has to meet specific conditions in others. Check your state laws, report labor law violations.

        (I know it’s probably past the statute of limitations for you but I have a serious hate-boner for this kind of thing.)

        1. Salymander*

          Yeah, I hear you. And I live in California, so she would have been in huge trouble. I was really young, and had been raised to always be compliant and never make a fuss. I had been loaned out to use as free labor as a teenager, and told that I had to always respect “my betters” because that is part of God’s plan. I didn’t want to report her because it never occurred to me that I could. I’m a whole lot more assertive now that I am an adult with years of therapy behind me. Leaving her in the lurch the way I did was the best I could do at the time, but it was pretty funny.

    10. Bosshater*

      I had a boss like that. He wanted to control absolutely everything, and then complained about how he is forced to be a micromanager.
      Some examples:
      I had to prepare a handover file for a customer. It’s all project documentation printed, folded, signed and filed. He had me change the index 3 times, for stupid reasons. E.g. I didn’t use the font that he preferred. So I changed it. Still not good enough. Change it again. No, now I need to add some horizontal lines between sections, or the numbering is not according to his standards. Eventually he was satisfied, but the next day I saw that he changed everything himself, and made a ton of mistakes. Of course he blamed me.
      I created these documents detailing test procedures for some equipment. He had some legit comments, that I absolutely agreed with. But he had all these nitpicky complaints. Basically “change this, because I said so.” In the end he changed the documents himself, and made a mess of it. When we were at the workshop with our customer, working through these documents testing the equipment, the customer noticed all these mistakes and said “Your documentation is terrible.” And he pointed out all the mistakes. And of course it was all my fault.
      I was so relieved when this guy resigned.

    11. Just Me*

      I wonder what would have happened if you rubber banded one bundle and left the other unbanded.

    12. Dragon*

      I had to do that once a month, at a location where apparently only one postal employee knew how to handle bulk mailings. If I got there when s/he was at lunch, i’d have to come back.

      I quickly learned to make that trip early in the morning.

  34. H*

    The reception desk were also responsible for refilling the office supplies, which where freely available at each print location through-out the office. They decided they thought people were using too many batteries (meant for every keyboard and mouse + remotes and other tools we used as most were wireless), and decided that you had to sign for each and every battery you needed in the reception desk and hand back the same amount of batteries as you checked out. No spares allowed ever. And only during opening hours.

    Perfect for an office where a large portion of people is travelling a lot, working late hours and rarely is present when the reception staff is. (Not even the IT support-persons were allowed to keep spare batteries at the desk, even though they needed them to figure out if a keyboard was out of batteries or had something else going on, and where responsible for keeping all the keyboards functioning. And were on a different floor).

    1. LadyByTheLake*

      I think I worked at that company (or one that had the same rules)! It was a real problem when the batteries died in the evening, on the weekend, or while on a business trip.

    2. The Rafters*

      I have a coworker like that. I get it though because people go through certain supplies, don’t say anything about using the last whatever, then melt down when we don’t have whatever. No one cares how much of whatever you use, she just needs to know that we need more of that item. We’ve also had people from other offices help themselves to our supplies because for whatever reason, we just get nicer stuff.

      1. CatBookMom*

        Back in the days of copiers but not computers, maybe just barely into the PostIt era, I was a CPA. All the IRS/state tax forms were in printed forms, in an IRS (Package X) or equivalent state forms publication. Our admins dutifully made lots of copies, filed them in the Forms Drawers, and the “master/original” was clearly marked at the top “MASTER” in that non-photocopy blue pencil. The wrath of all the clerical ghods descended on whomever took that MASTER and wrote on it, which of course was evident when he/she produced the return to be further copied. Not many were so dim-witted as to do that more than once. After twice, they mostly found other places to be employed.

  35. SomebodyElse*

    Safety glasses-

    We had an office manager who freaked out on me because I was having the small warehouse team try out a few different styles of safety glasses. She bought the crappy rigid ones that distorted your vision, were made for larger heads, wouldn’t fit over prescription glasses, etc. Basically she was forcing our full time employees to wear the cheap ones you hand out to visitors who only have to wear them for short periods of time. I found a good online source for safety glasses and the styles we were testing were under $2/pair with bulk order discounts to bring them to less than $1, the styles included smaller head size, over prescription glasses, light weight, flexible, etc. We were a small warehouse with less than 10 employees at any given time.

    I really hate wearing safety glasses, mainly because the damn things never fit and usually you get stuck with the crappy cheap ones. My philosophy is that if you want people to wear safety gear, you make it as comfortable as possible and keep it accessible. I put my foot down that mine weren’t any more expensive than the ones that she bought from an overpriced ‘tool supply’ company. Then I reminded her that she doesn’t have to wear them for 8 hours a day, so her vote counted the least.

    I was actually sort of surprised that she backed down. I’m all for being cost conscious, but it was silly.

    1. Wintermute*

      you’re 100% right about safety equipment. If you want compliance you have to make compliance easy and comfortable. Penny pinching has no place in safety supplies whatsoever, they should be in overabundance and of sufficient quality that people never complain.

      The cost of one OSHA fine, or, God forbid, one worker’s comp claim with a worker partially disabled for life because they lost an eye, will pay for decades of good-quality glasses.

      1. JustaTech*

        My group put me in charge of finding us all decent/nice safety glasses, so I searched around and came up with a list of acceptable glasses and everyone got to pick what they wanted. (My boss chose his pair because they had a cool name.)
        I bought my safety glasses with my own money because I want take them when I leave; they’re “shooting” glasses and surprisingly cute for safety gear.

    2. Pigeon*

      I’m still shocked by how poorly stocked many plants are with safety gear that fits smaller people, particularly women. I learned early on to buy and bring my own gear wherever I went.

  36. soontoberetired*

    The administrative aide for a department I was IT support for kept the supplies for the division under lock and key. If you worked in that division, you had to get her permission for a new pencil, pen or a notebook or legal pad. No where else in the company did this happen. The people in that division would come over to my area and help themselves to our supplies. We thought it was funny.

    When we finally moved offices, she couldn’t lock the supply door – someone wouldn’t approve of her having the keys! She still tried to exercise power in other ways, but most people ignored it. She’s otherwise a great admin aide!

    1. Zephy*

      The EA here is a similar office-supply tyrant. I don’t even know where the supply closet IS, it’s apparently Top F***ing Secret information, and even if I did know, on NO account would I, a mere peon, be allowed to go in there and get *checks notes* a box of tissues, or perhaps a pen. At one point I was responsible for putting in supply requests. The only procedure I had ever been shown for requisitioning supplies was a form that asked for item numbers per Office Depot’s website, since we apparently had some kind of deal with them. My approach to forms is to fill them out as completely as possible unless otherwise instructed, so I would dutifully go to officedepot dot com and get item numbers for the things we were asking for, even common stuff that we probably kept a stock of, like pens and tissues. I was careful to find the exact replacements, I wasn’t trying to be sneaky and get the ~fancy~ pens or whatever, but I still got my hand smacked for asking them to order supplies we already have (not that I’m allowed to know what exactly we already have). Now all my requests need manager approval, so I just ask my boss to go ask the EA for pens and tissues as needed.

  37. CreepyPaper*

    Being the sole employee under a manager who was in management training meant I got micromanaged for everything but the one that really stands out was the time I was told that I wasn’t allowed to talk to the lorry drivers anymore because it was ‘distracting’ for them and apparently I was ‘wasting time’.

    I was saying hello to them as I walked through the yard on my way from the car park to my office, I wasn’t stopping for a detailed conversation about current events. So basically I was told don’t be friendly to people I saw every day.

    I got written up for waving at one of them as he was pulling out of the yard one morning (he waved, I waved back, because that’s POLITE). That awful manager was soon fired because it turned out she’d been falsifying load sheets but the fact she stopped me from trying to say hi to my colleagues really got to me.

    1. Robin Ellacott*

      (bat emoji) (poop emoji)

      This just confirms the theory that when someone is being massively unreasonable about one thing, they are probably… flawed in other areas too.

    2. Neurodivergentsaurus Rex*

      ok, this is definitely one of the weirdest, pettiest ones on the thread! Written up for waving!

  38. Curious Oranj*

    I had a temp assignment back in the mid-90s where I was required to do desktop publishing on a Mac. The pre-retirement woman I was working under hated computer noises like pings and dings, so every night she would disable the sounds on the computer I was working on. This, on top of her refusing any help, even though I’d been brought on board to help her clear her backlog.
    I didn’t last too long at that job, but I did finally learn how to use a Mac.

    1. Lady H*

      I’m curious about this one because I genuinely feel like it’s so rude when people don’t mute or turn off their computer or phone alert or other interface noises. Is there a reason why you didn’t just keep them off since it was clearly driving her nuts? (These kind of sounds are hell on a lot of people.)

      I totally get that it’s petty that she turned them off without simply asking you about it, but it seems like once you knew she wanted them off, why keep turning them back on without talking to her? That’s as petty, as far as I can tell!

  39. Lab Boss*

    – We had to go to the receptionist to get one purchase request form at a time. The supposed reason was that the forms were individually numbered and the purchasing department didn’t want people stockpiling old forms which would lead to them getting really out-of-order, but we couldn’t even get 3 or 4 at once to get us through a few days.

    – At a summer camp job one of the low-tier managers “fixed” the problem of staff running late for breakfast by cutting off the hot water to the staff showers in the morning, so we couldn’t linger.

    – A previous boss was very small-statured and insecure, so he bought himself a very large and tall office chair and put in an incredibly short chair beside his desk. I was about a foot taller than him standing, but when I sat in the “chair of shame” I was staring him in the chest.

      1. Lab Boss*

        You got it- although we honestly all assumed he was just kind of a doofus and didn’t think that far ahead. Most of us just stood when we were talking to him anyway, partly to short-circuit his power move and partly because we all just wanted to get in and out of his office as fast as possible.

      1. Lab Boss*

        It’s like he read a management tip that you can use subtle differences in height and positioning to give yourself an aura of authority, then forgot that the word “subtle” was in there.

    3. Американка (Amerikanka)*

      Haha the small-statured boss reminds me of the insurance boss in the Incredibles 1!!

      1. Journalist Wife*

        His antics immediately made me imagine Lord Farquaad sitting behind an office desk.

  40. Meghan*

    I have one, I have one! I worked at a place that was 24/7 for factory work and 8-9 hour days for the admin work. The admin held all the supplies and if you started to use too much, they’d start to question you about it.

    Well, the people “in the back” (factory folks) drank a lot of coffee, which is to be expected when you work 12 hour shifts, and swing from days to nights every month. Admin determined that they were using too much coffee and started hiding it.

    I dont drink coffee, but I felt for these guys. The front office had a nice Keurig that they’d purchase coffee for. One of the guys in the back brought their own Keurig in, so I’d take boxes from the front for them to use. Then, once they got wind, they started hiding the K-cups. Eventually, I found the hiding spot for the Folgers (for the original 12-cup machine) and just started bringing it back for them again. I dont think they realized I was the thief, since I dont drink coffee!

    5. dasmb*

      We had an office manager who randomly and without warning cancelled all coffee service for a 120 person software company.

      It seems some employees would take the last gulp from a glass coffee pot and then return it to the warmer plate — without shutting the warmer down. She was convinced this would overheat the pots and cause them to explode. Though no explosions did occur, pots were apparently warmed empty one time too many and she threw out all the remaining coffee and made an X with masking tape to block off the 6 empty industrial coffee makers.

      At the time I was sleeping about 5-6 hours per night and working 10 hour days. I lived on coffee, more than 40 ounces a day. Granted I was in the extreme, but most of the engineers at this company, as in most software companies, took a lot of caffeine. Indeed: if you are the office manager of a software company, the main thing you should expect to manage is caffeine delivery. Cancelling coffee service, therefore, is tantamount to refusing to do a large portion of your job.

      When I got the email announcing this, I immediately stormed out of the office. I drove to Sears, bought their most expensive personal coffee maker, then drove to a favorite local roasters and bought many pounds of single origin coffee. I then announced to my corner of the office that coffee was once again served. I began making 5 pots per day and sharing them with whoever asked, with a voluntary tip jar to help cover costs.

      This service became mildly popular, because my coffee was a) very good and b) available. People who weren’t part of our club were instead driving off site to Starbucks or Dunkin’, in some cases twice a day. It was common to have multiple people per day to go desk to desk taking drinks orders. Dozens of person hours sunk into procuring coffee every day.

      Several weeks into the coffee drought the same office manager stopped by my cubicle to complain that personal ceramic heaters were forbidden by building management and that in her opinion this should extend to my coffee maker as well. I told her I would need to hear this from building management directly as she wasn’t an electrician, and then went back to work while she stood there awkwardly, slowly realizing I wasn’t about to give her an ounce of undeserved power in this situation.

      Weeks later coffee service returned (after I’m sure many meetings in which drowsy executives pointed out the office manager’s job description includes managing the freaking office and didn’t include unilaterally cancelling perks). Unmolested by building management, I continued my private coffee club until I left the company five years later.

  41. MicroManagered*

    Before we all started working remotely due to Covid, our admin kept AA batteries (which we all used for our wireless keyboard/mouse) in her desk rather than the supply closet because she thought people would steal them to use at home.

    1. irene adler*

      Stationery supplies and kitchen supplies are doled out that way where I work. Same explanation- put out too many and folks will just take them home.
      I’ve not seen any evidence to this effect.
      But it’s a pain to have to ask for these things.

      1. Trillian Astra*

        Honestly, the people who think “put too many out and people will steal them” are 100% thinking about stealing the supplies themselves.

        1. Long time lurker*

          My best friend was checking the cameras at work to see what time a third party vendor arrived over the weekend to do some work. Just as an FYI – no one was in trouble. They were crushed to discover an employee coming in and blatantly stealing equipment. And now they limit supplies because people will steal them. Not because they ever thought of doing it themselves. (Obviously that employee was immediately terminated)

        2. Hepzibutt Smith*

          “Honestly, the people who think ‘put too many out and people will steal them’ are 100% thinking about stealing the supplies themselves.”

          This is a pretty wild line of reasoning. I’ve been in charge of a supply closet where people kept stealing the batteries, and that problem did not stop until we locked up the batteries. (We did not, say, lock up pens and post-it notes, because those are high volume, low value items that people go through quickly.) I think it’s a lot more common for people to be reacting to events out of lived experience than id-based projection.

          1. Dragon*

            I wasn’t there then, but I heard that a past employer had to switch from cases of canned sodas to vending machines because people were taking the former home for their own use.

        3. SeenItAll*

          I was awestruck once when I went to the supply closet and found another employee in there loading up her arms with tons of stuff. She gleefully started sharing with me her plans for this stuff. At home.

          When I told her that the items in the supply closet weren’t meant for taking home, she honestly replied, “Well why not? Nobody’s using it and it’s just sitting here.”

          I explained to her that it was sitting there so it would be available when needed *at the company*. She didn’t seem to comprehend.

          Anyway, she was let go 6 months later for inappropriate use of her company credit card. Apparently she was just as confused when the business office told her that neither her morning coffee nor random bags of jelly beans for her personal consumption qualified as a legitimate business expense.

      2. Curmudgeon in California*

        One placed I worked my cube was right outside of a high traffic conference room. I wasn’t a secretary, just stationed near a conference room.

        I didn’t dare leave pencils, pens, note pads or sticky notes out, because I any time I left my desk they would all walk off. They actually swiped several high quality, personal writing implements. So I started putting them in my center drawer. Then people started going into my drawers for supplies. So I literally started locking my drawers when away from my desk. I had people try to jimmy my drawers, then complain, loudly, that they couldn’t find any writing supplies in my cube.

        The office supply cabinet was three rows over.

        I finally started bringing in broken or cheap pens and nearly used up post-it pads.

        The level of entitlement those people had was wild.

    2. Rose*

      This is kind of hilarious because I worked a job where we were super underpaid and management nickel and dimed us in a variety of insane ways and we would 100% take home copious amounts of batteries, Advil, and other expensive office supplies rather than buy our own as petty revenge.

      So what Im tying to say is this is totally my fault. Sorry.

      1. Journalist Wife*

        It’s not just you. That’s pretty much what I’ve seen at every job I’ve ever had. Back-to-school month is kind of hilarious to watch; suddenly the rows of surplus binders in ugly colors, manually-sharpened Ticonderoga pencils, and other crap that no one grabs all year long is suddenly flying off of shelves en masse, never to be seen again…

        You can push civil servants only so far, and no further.

    3. Bagpuss*

      We had an admin who got like this over branded stuff. She was policing staff taking our cotton tote bags to use when they went shopping.

      We pointed out to her that that’s literally why we have them – someone walking around with our logo on their bag is just as handy as advertising whether they’re a client or a member of staff , and that she has absolutely zero authority over any other member of staff and that if there is something pf that kind she is concerned about she needs to speak to her line manager, who will address the issue if necessary.

      She also tried to stop staff members putting person letters into the franked post. We have a ‘fair use’ policy – the occasional person letter is fine. Try to send all your Christmas cards, or a 7 kg parcel to Outer Mongolia, or run your new mail order business through our system, , and we will have to have a word, but the odd letter? We’re really not that bothered.

    4. Khatul Madame*

      I detest wireless keyboards and mice because they run out of juice at the most inconvenient times, and ask for the cabled ones everywhere I work (not relevant for the past 2 years, of course). I guess I am the ideal subject for the Battery Police

      1. La Triviata*

        My current office’s first experience with wireless devices was different. We had a higher-up assign our intern to connect wireless mice/mouses to people in our office. It was an open office with people very close together and the intern was only given the most basic information on how to install them. Well, she started and got about five people connected when the screaming started. People were at their stations, working, but suddenly their mouse would start moving without their moving it. Or they’d move their mouse but it wouldn’t move. Turned out she hadn’t gotten the information about channels for the devices, so one they were all on the same channel and one person moving their mouse would move someone else’s. Took longer to get it straightened out than it would have to allow the intern to read the instructions and change channels.

  42. Joyce To the World*

    There was a very brief limit on paper towels to 2 at the coffee station on the 3rd floor of our 4 story office building. Implemented by the Manager in charge of purchasing the supplies for that floor. There was mass rebellion and the limit was gone by the end of the week.

  43. Jake*

    To this day my wife orders Pilot G-2 pens at her office out of her own pocket because her boss thinks anything above a bic is too expensive.

    It is $6 for two pens and $3 for two refills. She gets refills once or twice a year.

    Bics are $6 for 60 pens and the other two people in her office goes through about a box a year.

    1. Siege*

      Bics make my hand hurt. I would honestly pursue that as a workplace accommodation because I guess I’m just waiting to have a tiny amount of power to go mad with.

    2. SallyForth*

      I don’t think these petty supply closet guards realize how great it is for office morale to have nice stuff. The fancy post-it colours instead of yellow, pens with comfortable grips instead of stick pens, highlighters that don’t dry out…

    3. Snarky Snarkerson*

      Because they’re crap! I’m in charge of supplies in my office now. I’ve been here 3 years and still have to force people doing trainings to take a box of those crappy pens and they better not bring ANY back. Don’t know why anyone thought buying thousands of junk pens was a good idea…..

      1. Retired (but not really)*

        When I worked at an office supply store, we also sold the logo pens. One of the school districts chose a particular pen that wouldn’t write. Of course we had to replace them and ended up with the faulty pens. After that we advised customers to buy the one we knew would work well.

    4. Ama*

      When I worked at a grad school and I was the primary person in charge of ordering supplies, the Dean would regularly throw a snit fit about “how much we were spending on pens” (despite the fact that when the new conference room needed a rug to dampen the echo, he rejected my proposal for a $300 all purpose rug to purchase an authentic Persian rug that cost 20 times that much). So I’d buy the cheapest pens for the all staff supply cabinets and then once a year I’d buy a dozen G-2 pens for the administrative staff that I kept in my desk (I’d also slip one to faculty and postdocs if I found out they were doing a lot of handwriting). As long as the Dean never saw the G-2s in the actual supply cabinet he never gave a second thought to why that was the only pen the admins ever used, and funnily enough on the purchase order a dozen G-2 pens looks like a tiny line item (I always made sure not to order cheap pens and G-2s at the same time so he wouldn’t do a comparison).

      I suppose that was my tiny little power play, as there wasn’t much I could control about that job and if I was going to do the jobs of three people (they hired two full time and one part time employee to replace me when I left), I was at least going to have a nice pen.

    5. TimeTravlR*

      Having a decent pen is everything! I couldn’t believe when I onboarded to a new job and my office asked me what kind of pens I like! I was used to “here’s the Bic, take it or leave it” crowd.

    6. Michelle Smith*

      Same here, I buy the same pens. Our office supplies are all locked up, and there are times where we can’t print or copy anything because we can’t get to the paper.

    7. Bridget*

      I actually buy my own pens for work too because I started out in nonprofits and no one was going to order me the nice pens that I like (papermate inkjoy gel pens). I don’t work in nonprofits anymore but the mindset persists and I feel bad asking anyone to order anything for me.

      1. Sorcyress*

        Oh the inkjoys are _so_ nice. And they come in SO MANY colours, which means I can grade different assignments in different colours *heart*

  44. Essun*

    Not me, but former colleague at former job. Small-ish department in a very large corporation, headquartered at the time across the country from where Colleague and I sat. Every other year, the company paid for the entire department to gather for an offsite that was a couple days long, basically just so we could get together in person (this was way before pandemic). The offsites were held nearer to headquarters, and folks convened from around the country, all responsible for our own travel plans.

    I booked a direct flight on my non-budget airline of choice (not difficult in my city), and when the day came, parked at the airport in the daily parking lot- not the spendy short term but not economy either. When I saw Colleague at the offsite, he told me his manager had pressured her team to fly very early or very late, book connecting flights, park off the airport and use the park and ride, and generally not spend one dime of the company’s travel budget more than necessary to sustain life functions. (So, layovers- fast food only, no extraneous bottles of water, etc.). She had to approve the expenses, so her team was just stuck.

    This was 1000% a function of this manager (she was a petty tyrant in many other ways as well). The company always paid my expenses without any pushback whatsoever. I felt so bad for Colleague and his team.

  45. The Wizard Rincewind*

    My first job out of college, my boss was an extreme micromanager and overly cautious. We needed refill on some random office supply–staples, maybe? Office staff usually ordered from a wholesaler but I guess we used an inordinate amount of staples before the monthly order. Anyway, in order for me to take the company card to run to Office Depot and pick up five boxes of staples, she practically had me sign away my first born and produce my original birth certificate. She scrutinized the receipt and the card and the staples upon my return like they held the answer to resurrection. I was too amused to be insulted.

    The punchline is that toward the end of my time there, she trusted me enough to watch her house and pets, be a nanny, and plan/execute her husband’s 50th birthday party. (For the record, these were all paid separately from my office job, no tax dodging shenanigans at play.) But man, that first staple run…

    2. SpEd Teacher*

      You proved yourself with the staples. If you can order staples, you can watch all that I love and hold dear.

  46. Jamie*

    At a previous job, I used to travel a bit, and then would submit expenses for reimbursement.

    Our company had a “no room service” policy when staying in hotels. At one particular hotel, there was a restaurant where I’d been eating breakfast each morning, which had wait times for food that were too long, and of course, it was overpriced. After peeking at the room service menu in my room, I saw that the breakfast I’d been ordering (a couple of eggs and some bacon for like $15) was the same price on the room service menu. So, on the last day at the hotel, I ordered the meal to my room. It made my prep time in the morning considerably shorter!

    Well, when it was time to submit my travel expenses, my boss saw the room service charge and I got raked over the coals. I explained that the price of the breakfast on the last day was the same as all the other days, as evidenced in my expense report. The only difference was that I ate it in my room instead of the restaurant. He didn’t care. “We have this policy… blah blah blah”.

    To this day, I still don’t understand. Totally bizarre.

    1. Nora*

      My office has this policy too, but it’s for billing reasons, not for cost reasons (I’ve worked on the billing side and it really is a pain when someone charges food to their room). The trick is to ask the hotel for a separate bill for my room service, and just submit it as a regular food receipt.

    2. SLibrarian*

      We had this policy at my old job too! I really wanted my dinner in my room one night so I just stopped by the restaurant and asked if I could get my food to go and a separate bill.

  47. Someone*

    It isn’t “extra guacamole”. It’s just guacamole. Chipotle doesn’t automatically include guac, but it’s inedible without.

    2. JimmyJab*

      NO one cares, but a veggie burrito/bowl, etc. does include guac. The more you know.

  48. Princess Deviant*

    Our then manager used to refuse us the use of Post-Its (or any sticky note paper). To save money. Eye roll.

    1. Mitford*

      When Post-Its first came out, our supply person also refused to buy them for that reason. We all bought our own. She finally caved in.

    2. Cera*

      I got in the habit of buying my own post its during my 1st position at a company because it was “against company policy” to provide them”. 2nd position, my manager sees me brining in post its and is all confused. Sure enough, not company policy and as it turns out there was a lot of cool stuff I could order and nobody cares.

      1. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

        I realize you meant to type “bringing,” but I am kind of enjoying the mental picture of you marinating in a salty stew of Post-Its.

  49. irene adler*

    I have to buy my own jumbo-sized paper clips. They are just the right size for using with the lab paperwork, hence I use a fair amount. Smaller-sized ones don’t hold up.

    Reason: CFO (who orders stationery supplies) forbids this. They only come in boxes of 12-at least where we purchase them. And that’s way too many paperclips to be purchasing, per CFO.

    (it’s not like they are going to spoil if the boxes sit for a few months!)

      1. Neurodivergentsaurus Rex*

        Right? I was trying to figure out if this should say they only come in a case of 12 boxes, or if the CFO just never uses them? I am able to do my current role paperless, but have had jobs where I could easily use 12 jumbo paper clips in a busy week where I was printing lots of paperwork.

    2. Beth*

      I thought unused paper clips hatched and flew away if left unattended for too long. Gawsh!!

      1. *daha**

        Their second stage in life (at least, it was in the 50s) is as wire coat hangers. Third and final stage is abandoned bicycles.

        1. Working Hypothesis*

          I’ve heard this before but never knew where it came from! Can you tell me?

          1. *daha**

            It’s from a short story by Avram Davidson. The title is “Or All The Seas With Oysters”. (He actually used safety pins and not paper clips.)

            1. JustaTech*

              It’s also a thing in the Dreamland Series by Jody Lyn Nye, where people carefully raise bicycles from paperclips.

  50. Neurodivergentsaurus Rex*

    I had a very toxic coworker (Lisa) who was in fact my peer but was trying very hard to be my boss. We had the same role, just had different clients; she loved to tell me what to do and tell people working with my clients what to do. We had a support staff member, Steve, who worked with everyone’s clients, but very frequently supported one of my most complex clients. Lisa really loved to tell Steve how to work with this client (my client). Steve would come into the office I shared with Lisa and another coworker to drop off paperwork, give updates, etc. My desk was closest to the door and Lisa’s was facing the door but on the opposite wall. Steve would come in and stand by the doorway and start talking about (my) Client X, and Lisa would start telling him how to deal with whatever issue, and I would interject and say actually we’re going to do it this way, I’ve got this Lisa but thanks!

    I later learned that Lisa then told Steve to stop standing by the doorway and stand between the three of us (with his back to me) “so ND Rex doesn’t interrupt me when I’m talking to you”. I’m not sure why she thought that I would stop objecting to her trying to undermine me if he stood in a different spot. It did not work.

    1. Neurodivergentsaurus Rex*

      Oh, also, he didn’t stand with his back to me, but he did move to the center of the room more. But Lisa definitely wanted him to keep his back to me.

  51. Anna*

    I do a lot of event planning for my office, and had been doing so for over 10 years when we had a new director at my office. I work in higher ed, and our director was a professor in the humanities. I very decorated and competent woman, of course, but NOT someone who knew anything about event planning. She had this absolute fixation on how much food I was ordering for events and I had an email exchange of 33 emails about what number between 1lb and 2lbs of grapes I was ordering for an event. It. was. madness.

    1. All the coffee*

      I absolutely hate having to explain event planning to people who don’t do it. Yes, a gallon of coffee costs $90 dollars at a hotel, and no I can’t just run to Starbucks and get it myself.

      1. Dragon*

        Some bosses don’t get that you cannot expect lunch for 10+ people delivered on 30 minutes’ notice.

  52. Mitford*

    In college, I worked in a back office job at a savings and loan. Our team was set up in a bullpen-style environment, and our manager was apparently unhappy that she had to share a room with her four direct reports.

    So, to distinguish her space in that open environment, she decreed that only she could have personal items on her desk. The four of us could not have any of the following: framed photos of our families or our pets, potted plants, tchotkes of any sort, children’s art, personalized coffee mugs (we were required to drink from the Styrofoam cups provided in the break room), no water bottles (again, Styrofoam cups)…. nothing but the black plastic pen cup and stacking trays provided by the savings and loan.

    I was in school and just passing through, but one of my coworkers was a veteran employee who’d been transferred to that team and was justifiably pissed.

    2. Robin Ellacott*

      The is like the manager in The House in the Cerulean Sea. Who was definitely not someone to aspire to be!

    3. SarahKay*

      Oh, gosh, that reminds me or a previous job where I was manager of a small team of four, and we shared an office in the same way. My desk was set up so I could see out into the room, while the other desks all faced the wall, all open plan with no dividers or anything like that. I inherited this set up and it never occurred to me to change it.
      Then I was asked to spend a couple of days on another site as their manager was off sick and they needed support on stock checks. They gave me her desk to sit at while I was there. The desk set up was the same as for my office, with one major difference: apparently the manager here felt so strongly that she needed… her own office? more privacy? honestly, I don’t know… that she got a set of six-foot-high dividers and used them to create a wall around her desk. I mean, directly around her desk. She created this tiny dark claustrophobic cubicle effect against the wall, just big enough for her desk and chair (so long as you didn’t push the chair back too far!) and space to sidle in at one side.
      Thankfully I was only there two days, and didn’t spend much time at that desk but I can tell you this; if that’d been the set-up I’d inherited permanently it’d have taken me at most an hour before the dividers were gone.

  53. Mockingjay*

    The very micromanaging supervisor at ExToxicJob who demanded that all Outlook calendars be shared (not unreasonable for work), but who also refused to allow any appointments to be set to private. Like most people, I also throw personal and family appointments on my work calendar so I can coordinate things. One day she demanded to know whether I was taking leave for several appointments. “Umm, my high school daughter has a dentist appointment and my husband has a doctor appointment. I’m not going to either.”

    Same supervisor asked me to create a quick reference guide to load a VPN client on laptops so you could connect to the new project system. Sure, no problem. Wrote a few steps (it installs via wizard and does everything for you), grabbed a few screenshots and was done in 2 1/2 pages. She sent me about 80 pages of separate emails instructing me how to do this guide. (I printed them out one day for the hell of it.) Turns out what she really wanted to know was how the project system worked. “The manufacturer is giving us a week course and workbooks.”

    1. Jake*

      We have a guy in our office like that. Everything starts as, “hey can you help me with this menial but pretty short task” and ends with you being responsible for everything that has ever or will ever have anything to do with anything remotely related.

  54. Popinki*

    My coworker “Fred,” who upon using up his vacation time last December:

    A) took all of his business cards home with him so no one could give out his contact info, in spite of the fact that we all have it and it’s on the website anyway, and; B) hid the key to his company vehicle in his desk drawer, and; B 1/2) saved up at least a year’s worth of fingernail clippings and dumped them in the tray in front of the drawer (where sane people put their pens and stuff) so everyone would be too grossed out to look for the keys.

    Turned out someone needed the keys, and I was the only one with a strong enough stomach to brave the fingernail trap. I cleaned those nasty things out while I was at it. Like, what the actual fluffballs, dude :X

    1. Robin Ellacott*

      So he was planning this all year!? Or he just saves his fingernail clippings routinely like Howard Hughes??

      Either way, critical high yikes.

      1. Popinki*

        He’d periodically open up the drawer and take his clippers out, and just let the clippings fall wherever, onto the floor or into the drawer. This grosses the heck out of our coworkers Velma and Daphne so I think Fred just decided to exploit an existing “ewwwwwww”. Both of them had to leave the room when I cleaned the drawer and I seriously thought Velma was going to lose her lunch.

      2. Popinki*

        I think the system ate my last reply; apologies if this posts twice.

        He takes the clippers out of the drawer and lets the clippings land wherever, either in the drawer or on the floor. This grosses out our coworkers Velma and Daphne so I think Fred was just taking advantage of the existing situation. Both of them had to leave the room when I was cleaning it out and I seriously thought Velma was going to lose her lunch.

    3. Elenna*

      Joke’s on Fred, I am not in the least grossed out by nail clippings (didn’t even realize it was a thing people were grossed out by until reading AAM) and would have just tossed them out or moved them aside, probably without even realizing what he was trying to do.

      1. Popinki*

        I did put a pack of manicure strips in there (pink leopard print) with a note that said “next time at least make them pretty” which he had a good belly laugh over.

    6. TrixM*

      Wtf is it about those men – and I’m sorry, it’s always men – who insist on clipping their toenails AT WORK?
      Why do they think of that kind of grooming in the middle of the day? Don’t they shower at home and maybe look at their toenails then? Taking off their shoes and socks and sharing their stinky feet with their colleagues? Bugging colleagues with the really, really annoying clip-clip-clip sound? Then leaving their detritus in a place where someone else has to deal with it – they almost always seem to leave them on a floor, on their DESK, or the small desk bin that the poor cleaners have to empty every night.
      I used to be a cleaner, and I never, ever got used to personal grooming “products” in the desk bin – used tissues and napkins, hair from a brush, used makeup wipes, cotton buds, etc. All disgusting. But fine in a restroom bin (a more “appropriate” place and which I didn’t have to deal with).
      Many years later, I worked in a tech team, and knew there was toenail clipper somewhere on our floor due to the unmistakable sounds at random intervals. After some years, when a couple of teams merged, he (unknowingly) became a member of the team that I led. I suppose it was the best outcome when he began his clipping at the desk right behind me one day, and without thinking, I swivelled around and said, unintentionally loudly, “What ARE you doing?!”
      Everyone in the vicinity heard, but admirably kept facing their work. He stammered out something, and I simply said, somewhat more politely, “Please do that kind of grooming at home in future.” I left it at that, and to his credit, it never happened again. (Although he was fired not too long after for general incompetence after many years of warnings, so who knows, maybe his toenails hadn’t grown long again yet.)

      1. Curmudgeon in California*

        Used tissues in the desk bin tweak you out? Sorry, but when people blow their nose at their desk they aren’t going to walk the tissue to the bathroom. Yes, nail clippings, hair and makeup stuff belongs in the bathroom, but used tissue belongs at the desk, because that’s where you blow your nose – you don’t run to the bathroom to blow your nose.

        OTOH, all the cleaners I ever saw wore gloves while emptying waste bins, since there were often lunch remains in there too, in an office where a lot of people at at their desks.

      2. Mannequin*

        Wow I had NO idea people were so picky about *what kind of trash goes in a trash can*.

        Maybe cleaning really wasn’t the job for you.

  55. AM*

    I once worked as a coat room attendant at a fancy museum. We had to wear blazers issued by the museum. One day, my co-worker pointed out that the employee manual says the museum is supposed to clean any required uniform. We brought it up with our manager and he told us that they’re not going to be washed because there’s no opportunity to get them washed and returned on time. This wasn’t a problem for the museum guards’ uniforms. The museum was only open for 6 days a week. What about the day we are closed? You really can’t find a laundry that will do it same day? You expect employees to bring home a uniform they don’t own and wash it? You want us to smell?

    1. AM*

      They also tried to say they had to have “special” cleaning. But employees had been using a regular washing machine to clean the coats. So…a lot of cheapskates.

  56. MeganE*

    Nearly a decade ago, when I was fresh out of college and working temp jobs to pay the bills until something permanent came along, I was working as an admin assistant for the local office of a nationally known nonprofit. I was specifically assigned to help the fundraising department with any low-level admin work, such as stuffing envelopes, doing some data entry, etc. They had a big block of mailbox cubbies, with way more cubbies than there were employees, and when I started I was given a mailbox cubby like everyone else, about five feet off the ground. This is important because I’m a pretty short woman. In fact, I’m exactly 5’1, so this cubby worked great for my height.

    The office manager was … not a nice woman. I think she may have been a lovely woman at some point in her life, but between some difficult life events and a tendency to micromanage turned her into a petty, passive aggressive tyrant. She also didn’t like me for reasons I’m not clear on. So about a week after being assigned my mailbox cubby, I walked in one day to find that she had done several things: 1. She emptied out my mailbox cubby and placed tape over it (like in the style of crime scene tape) so it couldn’t be used. 2. She placed tape over every single other empty mailbox cubby in the same fashion. 3. She moved the contents of my mailbox to an old cardboard box, scribbled my name on the box, and placed the box on the top of the block of cubbies so it was about 6 1/2 feet off the ground. I couldn’t even get my own mail without having to get a stepladder (which was behind her desk). It was so quietly embarrassing, and I was new and naive and didn’t have the courage to say anything, even though I knew perfectly well how petty she was being. Fortunately, I was only there about 6 months, at which point I moved on to a much better job.

    2. Curmudgeon in California*

      Wow, what a petty person. Didn’t she realize that if you’d fallen and been injured while trying to navigate her little power play over your mail she would have been blamed?

  57. Lana Kane*

    I worked in an office with a very strict refrigerator policy in the break room. You had to label your food with your name and the date it would expire. Every Friday Moira would empty and clean the fridge. I’m not sure why it was always her – I think it’sd because she was the only one who would do it.

    Moira didn’t like me because when I first started in that department, she said she heard me say nasty things about people in the department through the break room door (so she was outside, not in). She complained to her boss, Annie. Annie called me in, I categorically denied it, and Annie said she believed me. I don’t know if she spoke to Moira after that.

    One week, I brought in a bag from home with sandwich-making items (so brand new bread, meat, cheese, etc). However, while my name was on it, I forgot the date. The bag was an open tote, so you could see that everything in there was brand spanking new – cheese still in its unopened wrapper, etc. She threw it ALL away. I found it in the trash along with my tote. I went to my own manager and complained. She spoke with Annie, who apologized on Moira’s behalf. After that, they put in a fridge cleaning rotation.

    A few days later, there was a note from Annie with a $5 bill to help cover the loss. Moira never apologized and I’m pretty sure she won the I Hate You battle against me because literally over 10 years later, she’s still there and is back to wielding fridge power over her enemies. Fortunately I left ages ago!

  58. MI Dawn*

    First – let me say I really like my employer, and don’t necessarily blame HR for the events. I’ve now been with my employer for 25+ years.

    Many years ago, my trainer (new position within the company) and also the manager required me to type up what I had done every day and present it to them at the end of each day. No matter that the trainer had BEEN IN THE ROOM with me the entire day, I still had to type the day’s activities. By the hour (at least it wasn’t more frequent intervals!) I also was spending 4/7 nights away from my family, and missed several events of my eldest’s senior year due to them not letting me go home at a reasonable time.

    Things got so stressful that I ended up in HR, under threats of a PIP and termination unless I transferred out.
    I ended up transferring out of that job as soon as I could, working for a friend within the company. The improvement was over night. Before, I was under so much stress I was throwing up every night. After, I could attend events without fights.

    The manager was later fired when it was discovered they had lied about their credentials. My trainer and I are on much friendlier (say hello in the halls type of friendly) terms these 15 years later.

    1. MI Dawn*

      Oops…and can’t edit.

      I don’t blame HR because it turned out that my manager was lying left, right, and sideways about me. When I turned up for the meeting with STACKS of emails proving I was doing what I had been given permission to so (i.e. leave early 1 evening a week for an ongoing appointment but making up that time during the week), submitting the daily reports, etc.

      I think my proofs are what saved me from being terminated on the spot, and also may have lead to the investigation which lead to their termination.

      CYA, people, when dealing with a toxic work situation (I was printing the emails daily and taking them home so they wouldn’t be “oopsies, destroyed in error”)

  59. Amber Rose*

    I am forced to endure an external program audit every three years. Last time our auditor docked me points because, even though my documentation says we do monthly meetings, I dared to have two meetings one month.

    Years ago, a different auditor forced me to submit to a 10 minute lecture on how to properly bolt shelving units, even though that was out of the scope of his role.

    Auditors are the worst for petty abuses of power.

    1. SomebodyElse*

      Oh maybe I was the petty one, but you’ll appreciate it.

      In one role I was in, I was subjected to monthly external inventory audits for a period of time (I had the largest $ inventory at the time and my company was in the long process of being sold/acquired from a private equity firm to new owners. So as you can imagine my tolerance for every junior auditor they would send to me became pretty low.

      Mostly they were fine, some would argue with me on what to count, (remember I was an expert by this time) so I would point out items that weren’t obvious, but would require an extra visit if they didn’t get it the first time. Like I know there is only one of that item, but the value is $50K and is the most expensive item on my floor. Count the damn thing. Anyway, I had one that was just on a weird power trip and was more aggressive than was called for. He argued with me on the big item, but dove head first to count an open box of hundreds $0.02 connectors.

      It also turned out they forgot their calculator. When they asked if they could borrow one, I gave them the novelty calculator somebody had brought in as a joke. It was the size of an 11×17 piece of paper. When I handed it to him the look on his face was priceless. He asked me for a different one, “Nope, sorry that’s the only one we have available” Let’s just say their attitude lightened up as they were forced to carry around a comically large calculator that day.

      Yes, I was petty, yes it was worth it.

    2. zinzarin*

      *Some* auditors are the worst. I’m going to note that error here on the report and we’ll need a corrective action response submitted within 30 days.

      1. Amber Rose*

        I don’t know. I’m also an auditor and I’m probably also petty and ridiculous, which would seem to suggest we all get there eventually.

    3. Gumby*

      I have stories of things that some of our auditor-adjacent people have said that are hopefully too identifying to include here. Because if more than one person made the particular argument then I fear I must give up on humanity entirely.

      OTOH, we have also had reasonable auditors who were lovely to work with. (We have government contracts. Outside audits are frequent.) What is actually most baffling is that something that raised no eyebrows in the 2019 audit is suddenly completely unacceptable as of the 2020 audit.

    4. TrixM*

      That’s a first time I’ve heard an auditor ping someone for being OVER-compliant (unless it was an obvious gratuitous misuse of time or resources).
      Maybe like one of those bosses where you have to include at least one thing for them to correct in anything you submit to them, or else they’ll end up finding fault with something that’s incredibly inconvenient to do differently.
      I was able to figure out one boss like that had a thing about sans-serif fonts and so-called split infinitives, so it was easy enough to give them something to “fix” and very kindly lecture me about. They were a great boss otherwise, so I didn’t even resent the lectures.

  60. Andrea*

    I used to teach in a school with a very old building. One of the students groups offered to paint classrooms as a fundraiser, and got paint donated from a local hardware store. The paint was a gorgeous turquoise, and I was so excited for the spruce up. Three walls in, my principal noticed the color, and absolutely blew his lid. Our cross town rival’s color was blue, and he started screaming and cussing about how his school was not going to be painted blue. Didn’t care that their blue was a different shade, or that blue is a calming color, or that the paint was donated, or that other teachers had taught in rooms painted a similar color for years. He made us repaint and the room ended up poop brown.

    1. singularity*

      I used to work in a school in a very old building, too, and this reminds me of that time. I wanted to have my classroom walls repainted because it was chipping and peeling in a lot of places. I asked admin and was told a very emphatic NO. I offered to do the painting and buy the paint out of my own pocket. The Vice Principal, who for some reason was the person I had to get permission from, still said NO.

      Jokes on them –they got into trouble because that peeling paint was lead based and some parents found out and they were *rightfully* upset. There was a whole KERFUFFLE about it and they ended up having to get the lead paint removed at their expense and the walls repainted anyway.

      1. lost academic*

        In their defense (hindsight) – painting over chipping or peeling paint when it might be lead based is not a good idea. Lead abatement especially in a school is a pretty prescribed activity and if you’d just had someone go in and sand/scrape like it was regular nonlead paint it would be been much much worse.

    2. Seven hobbits are highly effective, people*

      Back in high school, the school district had a rule that only District Facilities could paint walls, except for mural projects, which could be done by students and volunteers. Well, Facilities seemed to always have better things to do than paint walls at my particular school, so one year we suddenly had a lot of “murals” that we were “going to get around to finishing eventually” but right now were mostly solid colors for the backgrounds…

  61. Allergic to Smokers*

    Our admin assistant declined my expense report, and docked my paycheck, because I bought a two pack of Advil sinus along with my breakfast at a smoky Vegas casino hotel they put me in for a conference. “Advil is not a meal – you misappropriated company funds!” She told me.

  62. The Prettiest Curse*

    One of the speakers at our annual conference was a great volunteer for us, donated a lot of his time and was generally a lovely guy. So my boss really couldn’t say no to him when he rolled in with a whole new version of his presentation 10 minutes before it was due to start. The reason for the new version? The conference venue was an air crew hotel and he wanted to drop in a new slide with a cheesy photo of himself and some female Emirates cabin crew.
    My boss’s computer was a Mac and not super compatible with the hotel AV system to start with. The presentation was not fast to load. It would have been fine if he’d had to add in slides with updated data, but to show people a random photo? It just caused her a lot of stress for no good reason.
    Presenters, I’m begging you – please don’t do this unless there’s a really good reason!

  63. SallyForth*

    The great comma war.
    A junior employee sent an email to her manager with a greeting line that said Suzie: and then went on to describe a fairly urgent issue.
    Rather than respond to the issue, the manager replied with a screenshot and a red circle around the colon and said that our office style is to use a comma in the greeting line.

  64. Sweater-over-oxford*

    I requested a floor lamp from the office manager. OM took a lamp from someone else’s area and gave it to me. Other person demanded to know why this was happening, and OM told them it was because I always said good morning to her when I arrived, and used my pleases and thank yous.

    Granted, it was an abuse of petty power that worked out in my favor, and I totally get the impulse to take a lamp away from someone who acts like a jerk, but it still blows me away.

  65. Snaffanie*

    At a former place of employment, we had a mandatory expectation that all of us would work the major annual fundraiser. It required formal dress (out of pocket, so I immediately loathed it). The volunteer coordinator made the women sit through a lengthy presentation each year on appropriate dresses. New staff, old staff that has seen it many times before – didn’t matter! You were going to sit through the same, kinda misogynistic presentation time and time again.

      1. Snaffanie*

        She would visit your office and give you a printed copy of the presentation and “report you” to the event lead. I made every effort to find out what day the training would be so that I could schedule a doctor’s appointment or be sick on that day. Unfortunately, the CEO was always on board with this silliness, so the presentation, in addition to the event, was mandatory!

  66. MissM*

    Paper clips.

    The HR generalist put in a supply order request for a box of paper clips. Not a case, a box, I’d say around $1.48. The HR VP denied it saying that there were plenty of paper clips floating around the office, and forced this young woman to go begging from desk to desk for paper clips.

    1. Eye roll*

      I cannot comprehend how someone becomes a VP if they think paying someone $15 or whatever to waste time begging for paperclips is “cheaper” than buying the box for $1.48.

  67. KoiFeeder*

    My fifth grade teacher’s second-favorite hobby, as far as I could tell, was to take the “worst” assignment/quiz/whatever she’d received and read it out in front of the class while pointing out every flaw and mistake. If the student started crying, she’d castigate them as a crybaby and tell them that they should go back to kindergarten since they clearly were too stupid and weak for “real” school.

    1. JohannaCabal*

      I hate to say it but those types of teachers are the ones that deserve classrooms full of children with helicopter parents…

      1. KoiFeeder*

        Would not have helped. She ascribed to the Trunchbull school of child abuse- going so far over the line that it sounded like we were making things up if we complained about her. After all, even if one of the non-targeted kids told their parents, how many people would actually believe that a teacher said “the world would be better off if you were dead” out loud to a fifth grader in front of the entire class?

      2. never mind where I work*

        One of my teachers read out my paper as bad example. The difference was that I was a senior in high school, this was an AP English class, and she didn’t say whose paper it was. And the paper was a bad example. (BTW, she was one of my favorite teachers–one of those you remember all your life, and in a positive.)

        2. Working Hypothesis*

          Yeah. I have had my paper used as a bad example (and also occasionally as a good example) but without any names, and it was true. And this was in college, in an advanced academic writing class.

          I didn’t mind. He showed me what I was doing wrong, and how to do it better. But nobody should be doing that to fifth graders, especially by name.

        3. KoiFeeder*

          Yeah, the issue was not with the idea of bad examples versus good examples it was:

          1) No student could ever be “good” for or at anything. If she couldn’t find anything to complain about, you were “finally meeting standards” at best.
          2) “What sort of idiot doesn’t know how to spell connected?” is not constructive criticism. Everything she did was destructive criticism, honestly- I would be willing to say that she was trying to hurt students.
          3) The goalposts were constantly changing, as per point one. We weren’t meant or allowed to succeed in her class.

    3. Not So NewReader*

      In years to come nursing home staff will be puzzled as to why no one comes to see her.

      smh. She’s every kid’s nightmare.

      1. KoiFeeder*

        I hope her kids (I know she had at least the one) are still alive to choose not to visit her in the nursing home. I was actually a little afraid for them when I had her as a teacher, and over the years it has not gotten better. After all, if this is how she was willing to treat students…

        May their therapy always be covered by insurance and their phones come with automatic caller screening, I guess.

    5. I’m screaming inside too*

      Oh my gosh, I had a 7th grade teacher who would do the same thing. I don’t recall anyone ever crying, but I had such anxiety about going to school that I routinely had meltdowns in the morning before arriving there. At least once I lost it enough that my mother let me stay home from school that day. That experience taught me that some teacher shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near children.

      1. KoiFeeder*

        Yeah, I think there were maybe ten total days where I wasn’t basically in shutdown and dissociating the entire school day. A small and petty abuse of power, large and impactful psychological consequences.

    6. Slow Gin Lizz*

      JFC, that’s AWFUL. And yes, I also want to know what her favorite hobby was, or maybe I don’t?

      1. KoiFeeder*

        Ableism with eugenicist logic.

        I’ve touched on the long version, but because of my specific diagnosis which she knew and targeted me for, any long version would have to go through moderation and I am trying to be considerate of the fact that Alison probably doesn’t need or want to see All Of That.

  68. Meow*

    This is more of a petty abuse of power than an abuse of small power, but I got a contractor position with a company and when I showed up on my first day, I did not have a chair. I was told that the company only provided chairs for employees. It was not a joke. Other contractors confirmed the same thing happened to them on their first day.

    The issue was quickly resolved when my coworkers just found a spare chair from an empty desk somewhere. But I had to think they were trying to send a message or something – surely whoever sat at my desk before me had a chair, which they then removed just to make sure I knew that I wasn’t eligible for all their nice employee perks, like sitting?

    1. Tau*

      Oh my god. And I thought my contractor-coworker’s stories were bad.

      (Me showing him around the office was punctuated by, like… yes, you’re allowed to drink the coffee. And the tea. And the juice. And the water cooler. And eat the snacks in the office kitchen. No, this company will not force you to drink tap water from the bathroom using your own mug because everything in the kitchen is for actual employees. Also, are you OK?)

    2. I was told there would be llamas*

      Did you have to bring your own tp?! And wow, that’s odd…we’ll let you use one of our desks, but we draw the line at giving you a chair!

    3. Casey*

      This brings to mind a professor I worked for. I was his teaching assistant while in graduate school. His office was just big enough for his desk, chair, bookcases, and one visitor’s chair. He called me in to meet with him about some routine stuff, and I had to stand in his presence the entire time. Reason: his 5-year-old daughter was in the visitor’s chair, and it apparently didn’t occur to him to ask her to make way for an adult to sit down and do business.

      Another professor in the same department announced as I was passing back essay exams that my approach to grading was “quite draconian” and that he had personally reviewed and raised many of the grades I assigned. In private–OK; out loud, with no warning, in front of 110 students–not OK.

  69. Crystal*

    Went to a conference held on a college campus. Cab from airport would have been $20, but since it was a campus there was a city bus that was $1, so I took the bus. Got grief because the bus didn’t give me a receipt. The bus route map and fare schedule was considered insufficient evidence that I didn’t flap my arms and fly I guess?

    Bonus – I work IN THE ACCOUNTING DEPARTMENT.

    1. After 33 years ...*

      Our university would allow that claim, but you would have to sign an affidavit and have it countersigned by our Notary Public.

    3. Off My Lawn, You Must Get*

      Stuff like this gives me hives.
      My co-worker and I were supposed to go to New York City for a vendor meeting. We both flew in the day before. He took a car service from JFK ($50). I took the A train ($7). I forget the exact logistics, but I bought a return ticket for another $7. We attend the meeting and, because reasons, they send us both back to JFK in another car. They wanted to balk over my second $7 ticket, because I had “wasted” it.

    4. Em*

      On a government work trip, I once took the local metro from the airport to my hotel as the fare was $1.50 each way. That measly $3 got denied because my travel orders listed taxi trips, not public transport. They would have reimbursed me whatever amount the taxis charged (they were placeholdered at $100 each way and likely would have been closer to $300 in the end), but heaven forfend I save the taxpayers money.

  70. Jake*

    My office staff has set up all computers to default to black and white printing unless you change settings on your computer, in the printer set up AND in the software. This results in me printing things 4 times until it finally comes out in color.

    I print maybe 200 pages a year with 30 needed in color. So instead of just letting me accidentally print an extra 20 pages a year in color instead of black and white on accident, I now print an extra 90 pages of black and white that immediately get recycled.

    This is because collectively, as a company with millions of dollars in revenue a year was spending almost $1,000 a year in colored printing so our accounting folks took it into their own hands.

    1. Bean Counter Extraordinaire*

      As an accountant, this makes me so sad! We’re not all haters of color and fun, I promise lol. I have a report that produce every day in Excel, that COULD be in black and white all the time. But it’s not, because that’s boring.

      Sometimes the text is purple. Sometimes it’s blue. Sometimes the cells are colored in. Take that, colored-printing-fun-haters.

    2. I was told there would be llamas*

      At least you had access to color (with a little work), hahaha! In my billion dollar company, only certain people were allowed access to the color printers!

  71. Not really a Waitress*

    Between jobs I worked at as a server at a place not called Pancake Home. One of our things is the servers call the orders to the cook as the cook marks the plate. 99.9999% of the time where you call from isn’t a huge deal as long as you are in the general area of where you need to call from, that way you can be packing up togos, or getting drinks, etc. In a lot of stores there is an odd colored tile identifying where to stand. One day we had an “Acting” shift manager who was known for her pickiness “running” the store. WE were busy and the three servers working (including me) were working our butts off. She picked that day to FREAK OUT if we weren’t standing exactly on the tile when we called our order. Both feet had to be on the tile. She even told the other cook it was okay to mess up our orders because it would be our fault for not standing on the tile.

    1. Not really a Waitress*

      PS the next day, I was the first server there and she started in on me about the tile. I gave her back the drawer she gave me to count and walked out. Leaving her stranded evidently because the other two servers were late. I called the district manager and she was never allowed to “run” a store again.

    3. bunniferous*

      I am VERY familiar with that place -back when dinosaurs roamed the earth I worked there third shift. My husband ran one about three decades ago-he got in trouble with the district managers for selling whole pies on the side, lol.

  72. Hailrobonia*

    I was administering a faculty search and had to print out every application to give to the committee members. I proactively added colored cover sheets with the applicants’ names and some relevant “at-a-glance” info from their application (current position, their degree info, etc.).

    3 of the committee members appreciated it. One other, however took GREAT UMBRAGE that I used pink paper for the cover sheets. He didn’t like pink, evidently.

    (and why pink? because we had SO MUCH pink paper from who knows when).

    1. Panicked*

      I never understood the hangup people have with colored paper. I mean, I wouldn’t want an entire handbook printed on neon yellow, but a one sheeter? People just want to complain at that point.

      Also, I love your screenname! “Hail, hail, Robonia; a land I didn’t make up!”

      1. Elenna*

        But but but it’s PINK PAPER! Guys can’t touch PINK PAPER! What if they get GIRL COOTIES??? /s

        *rolls eyes at toxic masculinity*

      2. Rolly*

        What Hailrobonia is cool, – colored paper as a cover. But if someone randomly used colored paper it would annoy me – we should use colored paper for a reason – to signify something is special. Not just because it is available.

    2. Resident Catholicville, USA*

      One job, I took it upon myself to use up all the weird, random colored paper that had somehow accumulated over years of sign making at a non-profit. For awhile, all forms and hand outs used internally were a myriad of colors. There was a little bit of grumbling, but we eventually got down to just plain white paper.

  73. Lynnerd*

    Years ago I interned for a small recruitment business. Job duties included Starbucks runs and when I asked my boss one day if he wanted anything, he declined. Upon my return he asked, “Where’s mine?” I was then informed by this forty-eight year old business owner that when he says “no” he always means “yes” and to “understand that going forward.”

    1. Not So NewReader*

      So when he said “No you can’t have a raise!”, that actually meant yes you could have a raise????
      Inquiring minds want to know….

  74. londonedit*

    I once worked for a proper Devil-Wears-Prada sort of boss who went through PAs like most people go through toothbrushes. One of us lowly staff members had to go and get the boss’s lunch every day, and there were only two possible sandwich options that would be acceptable – and the sell-by date had to be at least two days ahead, or you’d get an earful. Fond memories of standing forlornly in M&S trying to work out whether buying a rogue sandwich instead of one of the regulation ones would be better or worse than coming back empty-handed. There was also an incident where the latest PA was made go out and buy a brand new kettle because the boss ‘couldn’t work’ the one in their office – the PA said ‘Oh, you just need to make sure it’s sitting properly on the base when you switch it on, like this…’ and the boss literally yelled that they didn’t have time to bother with trivial things like that.

    2. never mind where I work*

      I worked at one place where the temp agency refused to send workers because the manager was so horrible.

      1. Dragon*

        A recruiter told us about the time a small firm called and demanded three temps before 9 AM.

        The first one to arrive reported back that the office’s three regular secretaries had staged a sickout against the office manager.

    3. glt on wry*

      Your DWP reference jogs my memory. I worked as a typist/ office assistant to a writer but also covered a lot of household jobs for her, including going to the post office. One day picked her up a 10-pack of stamps whose artwork illustrated various aircraft of the country’s history. She made me take it back to exchange for something prettier, because she was anti-military.

  75. Nesprin*

    I work in a lab where the thermostat is nominally set to 72- I know it’s colder because a chemical I use regularly freezes (66f). Getting the temperature raised a few degrees has taken a year and a half.

    1. Mockingjay*

      Worked in a creaky old government building with many weird additions. One winter, our assigned cube farm area was freezing. Cold air blew every day. We asked Facilities to increase the temp. They said no, everything’s fine. We said our fingers are blue. Brought in thermometers – it’s only 60 or 62 degrees. On Mondays even colder (thermostats turned down on weekends). Facilities still said no to more heat. Ping-ponged for weeks.

      Finally Facilities realized that the boiler for our section was broken.

      1. BasketcaseNZ*

        It took my entire floor 6months to persuade facilities that our floor was cold. Even the blokes on the floor complained of it.
        Eventually they discovered that the thermostat for the floor was positioned immediately behind the vent from the printer – so the thermostat thought the room was a good 15-20 degrees (Celsius) warmer than it should have been.
        Moved the printer and the problem resolved over the weekend.

    2. Scarlet Magnolias*

      We had at one time a building supervisor who firmly believed that the thermostat should be a placebo, with no real temperature setting power. Also that the Library Staff was a bunch of foolish old women who were probably menopausal. No one sang any laments when he finally left

  76. PT*

    Also this isn’t petty per se, because I think it’s a pretty serious breach, but I had a boss who was fired for keeping the building’s security cameras up on her second monitor and watching what everyone was doing.

    If she didn’t like it, she’d call down to the nearest phone and tell you to cut it out.

    Now this would make sense if she was catching people making actual infractions, but she was just micromanaging everyone. She’d see Fergus chat with Tangerina for three minutes, when they should only have a justified work reason to chat for one minute, and call Tangerina’s desk to complain, because she didn’t want Fergus and Tangerina comparing notes on what she’d told both of them (usually, contradictory lies, because she was the queen of triangulation.)

    1. Zephy*

      The only job I was ever fired from had a boss like that – it was medical-adjacent, private practice, and the offender was the owner’s wife, so literally nothing could be done about it. She wasn’t even there onsite, she would do this from home and then either send emails or call you to chew you out for whatever. I don’t know what her title was, probably something HR-flavored because she also built the schedule, which she sent out at 3 PM on Friday to cover the next seven days, making it basically impossible for the front-desk staff to make any kind of outside-of-work plans, ever. They had limited weekend hours with rotating staff that would work a half-day Saturday mornings, and if you were on the schedule for Saturday you would work a different half-day at another point in the week. No one could tell me if there was any kind of pattern and I didn’t work there long enough to suss it out for myself.

  77. The Other Katie*

    I used to work at McDonalds. We got a free meal (typically a value meal) while on-shift, but it had to be approved by a shift supervisor. Most of them didn’t really care what people wanted to eat, but this one guy…
    He’d refuse to approve an “add tomato”.
    He’d reject a “large” upsize (which at the time cost 39 cents).
    One time he tried to refuse another worker’s meal because they got it after their shift. That was because the shift was too busy for them to take a break!

    So yeah. That was definitely the most egregious abuse of a tiny amount of power I’ve ever seen.

    1. BookMom*

      I worked at Burger King a million years ago. Each shift the employee received a hamburger or cheeseburger and small fries. Handy for me since I was coming directly from another job. I liked lettuce on my hamburger but no cheese. The manager refused my unauthorized lettuce. I pointed out that adding lettuce was 10 cents but adding cheese was 25 cents. He didn’t care, the back line people just added lettuce to my hamburger anyway.

  78. Turanga Leela*

    I worked for a local government agency where the IT department was out of control. The IT director installed internet blocking software and turned it up to its highest settings, so almost everything was blocked, including Sudoku (because it blocked “games”), webmail, and, for reasons I never figured out, banking websites. If you tried to access a blocked site, you got a picture of a giant eyeball watching you. If you wanted a site unblocked, you had to submit a work order with a several-day lead time.

    I once asked the IT director why this was necessary, and she said it was because we had to be “super-compliant” with federal law. I was curious and asked for the name of the law. Her response: “Are you taking notes on this? Are you checking up on me?!”

    Another time, I got a notification in Microsoft Office that I needed to install a free patch for Word. I submitted a work order to IT with an explanation of the issue and a link to the file on the actual Microsoft website, so it was clear this wasn’t a scam. I received a note saying they were “researching” it. I have no idea what there was to research. It took them a week to install it.

    Eventually, the IT director was fired. It turned out that she had no background in computers at all and had been trying to hide it by micromanaging everyone’s computer use.

    1. Lana Kane*

      Banking was probably blocked because “bAnkInG iS A peRsOnAl AcTiViTy!” (This is how I still hear it in my head when I remember my boss at my first job out of college, where I was salaried, saying this to me when she saw me checking my balance 5 minutes before the end of my shift.)

    2. Tau*

      Bad flashbacks to IT at a previous job. They weren’t this bad, but we were software developers and they were clearly not set up to deal with this. Still remember the hours upon hours of calls when the sandboxing software they forced us to install broke pretty much everything about our development workflow. Or my team lead trying to figure out how to install our software (as in, the one we were actively developing) and being told to please go onto our internal procurement website and select it for download. We also couldn’t get machines with decent specs for love or money, meaning I was stuck developing software with a minimum requirement of 8GB RAM on a computer with 4GB RAM. At one point my boss resorted to buying us RAM sticks from his private money.

      My favourite, though, was when they managed to block StackOverflow’s CSS file. Not StackOverflow itself. The stylesheet, so that it rendered in unstyled HTML.

    3. PT*

      When I worked at a pool, our facility wifi blocked all of the websites you needed to purchase pool supplies and staff uniforms (Swim Outlet, Kiefer, The Lifeguard Store, etc.) because “this site contains pictures of people in swimsuits.” You had to use a computer plugged into the ethernet to shop or order anything from those sites.

      At. A. Pool.

      1. Nesprin*

        I once worked at a research institute at a hospital, where the blocking software would trigger on “uterus”, “pelvis” and, my favorite, “anatomy”

    4. Rolly*

      ” If you tried to access a blocked site, you got a picture of a giant eyeball watching you. ”

      That’s kind of cool. In a demented way.

  79. Chowhound*

    At my long-ago publishing job, the all-important typesetters were their own small department, run like a fiefdom by “Bev.” You had to deal with typesetting every day … and if they liked you, they’d prioritize your work over other peoples. Let’s just say I brought a lot of brownies and did a lot of friendly chit-chat with Bev and the ladies to be sure I got my work turned around on time!

  80. MansplainerHater*

    I work in a male-dominated industry. The head of our regional office wanted to female leadership, and started a women’s group. We got together with the leadership of the office, discussed issues (including a mother’s room that was illegal) and mapped out how we could lift ourselves up, encourage a better workplace for women, etc. The manager built a new, beautiful mother’s room as a good faith effort. We were all feeling very jazzed about the changes that were coming. Then… I got a call from the head of the women’s group at our home office. I don’t know why she called me, since our women’s group had decided to rule by committee, but that was her first issue! How DARE we not have an elected President. She also insisted that women’s groups were for fashion advice and for learning how to pack healthy lunches. She made us disband.

    1. Robin Ellacott*

      “She also insisted that women’s groups were for fashion advice and for learning how to pack healthy lunches”
      …

      Wow.

    2. Subject_Clause_Predicate*

      This is the first one that has truly left me speechless and mouth agape. How long ago was this??

      1. MansplainerHater*

        I shit you not, 2017. Other notable sexist experiences? Being told to take 18 years off for maternity leave, being told to change the name for “pump breaks” noted on my Outlook calendar because it was “disgusting” to use that word, being required to wear panty hose (this was rescinded at some point, along with the requirement for men to wear ties), and receiving lower marks than a colleague in my annual review (despite exemplary performance, acknowledged by my manager) because I had a baby and didn’t work as much as the single, childless man in my department.

    3. Lirael*

      She also insisted that women’s groups were for fashion advice and for learning how to pack healthy lunches. She made us disband.

      She WHAT?!

  81. Meaghan*

    Years ago at a temp job, I called in sick (unpaid) to take the GRE for grad school because I wasn’t sure my boss would approve a day off (still unpaid) for it. A young co-worker who hated the job but liked me came into the office that morning and seeing I wasn’t in, left and called in a sick day of her own.

    Our boss decided we must have taken the day off together to play hookie and goof off MOVED OUR DESKS while we were out to be right in front of her office so she could “keep an eye on us.” I gave my two weeks notice on the spot the next morning as she explained the new set up.

    1. Dragon*

      I worked at a small 12-person office for about a year, during which I took only one scheduled vacation day.

      I came back to find out that the two people who would’ve been expected to back the other office assistant, both called in sick while I was out.

  82. smol potat*

    Accountant, not reimbursing an expense in the hundreds for being off by $1.50 due to tax. (And this wasn’t the only instance, but was the straw due to the small amount.) Instead of just correcting the form itself and reimbursing the correct amount, she sent it back to the staff with a passive aggressive, multi-paragraph email about how to properly do expenses. I’m all for teaching people how to correct their mistakes or learning procedures, and generally discourage enabling behaviours, but this was super excessive and petty. The amount of staff time both on her part in sending that email and on the staff’s part to make corrections were way over $1.50. She was so notorious for being petty and rude about mistakes that a lot of staff chose to not submit expenses. : /

  83. Re'lar Fela*

    At a former job, I was required to attend a conference in a city about an hour away. No big deal, right? The conference started at 8:30am, but my boss insisted that I first go in to the office (which opened at 8; the doors were literally locked until then with no way in) to prove that I was working that day. I explained that doing so would make me late to the conference (that my boss had paid for and required me to attend), but to no avail. Prior to that job, I had successfully worked remotely with little to no oversight for 5+ years and I was a director at the agency. The butts in seats culture was SO strong *eye roll*

  84. ArtK*

    Years ago, I flew with my boss (a VP) and another colleague to the East coast. We got there late and stopped at a Burger King to grab some dinner. Total cost <$20. My boss lost the receipt and the accounting department went back-and-forth with him about the reimbursement. At his pay scale, they wasted an order of magnitude more money arguing about it than just paying it.

  85. PolarVortex*

    Issue: Toilet clogged in the restroom of the diner at I worked at and flooded the bathroom in the mens room (I was pre trans tiny teenage girl at the time) Coworker in charge was a line cook when the owners weren’t there and the Major issues and Mens Room were Mr Line Cook’s job when the owners weren’t there. He instead made me put a bread bag on my hand and reach into the toilet to unclog it.

    He got away with it because the battled-in-the-trenches old waitresses were not on the shift to tell the dude to go take a long walk off a short pier for the suggestion waitresses do such a thing and he knew I had zero ability to say no at the time.

    (Honestly that’s the lowest key story of the place, I have many, many more.)

      1. PolarVortex*

        Worst: Where the owner made tiny teenage girl me take a random adult male I didn’t know home at night because he rode a bicycle to a diner and she wanted him to get home safely. (Summer night, no storms, still don’t understand what the safety part of this was but honestly I was terrified every second of that drive.)

        Weirdest: When a customer said the meatloaf he had didn’t taste like meatloaf, Owner made me try his half eaten piece off his plate to determine if it tasted like meatloaf. (Didn’t taste like the meatloaf my mom made, which is why I’m not dumb enough to order meatloaf at a restaurant and complain it doesn’t taste like how I expect it to.)

        Most Illegal: Other owner having me try all the different kinds of Old Fashioneds one can make so I understood the differences (at 16 yo) because quite frankly I couldn’t understand all these dang kind of Old Fashioned variations that I had to clarify if a customer ordered an Old Fashioned. Granted it was a sip of each and it wasn’t like I hadn’t had alcohol before that but definitely wasn’t legal, and as an adult I can recognize now they definitely had zero talent for mixed drinks.

  86. Pinkie Pie*

    I worked for a state agency. We were closely aligned with the goals of another agency and the decision was made in our region to have our department move in with this agency when they opened a new building. Among the new rules was one that we could only have gray trashcans. The new building is opened, and we moved in. They had not ordered gray trashcans or trashbages. At the time, I went through a lot of paperwork and the stress of being in a new building meant more trash. Out of frustration on the first day after 4 trips to the dumpster, I stop by the old office and pick up trashbags and a few other things that didn’t make it over. I take everything in a black trashcan. (I put several trashcans in my car to take home since these were going to be tossed out.) I walk in with ahte black trashcan and get threatened with a write-up for insubordition. That was August, I was gone in October.

  87. Annie*

    I used to have a part-time admin job in a company’s HR department, and I frequently worked in the same office as the woman responsible for completing employment verification requests for the company’s employees. Whenever she got a call asking for a verification, she would answer “I only complete verifications between 1:30 and 2:30 PM, please call back later”.

    I thought this was a bit odd but didn’t realize just how strange it was until one day she had someone on the phone who must have been insisting on having the verification completed right then at 4 PM. She grumbled and kept saying that she would have to start up special software and that it would take a long time. When I looked up, I saw that she was playing solitaire which she then minimized while opening another window and inputting the employee’s name. She had the requested information within 2 minutes but kept the person on hold for 15 while she continued to play her computer games. When she eventually got back on the phone, she made sure to explain what a burden it was to have to do a verification outside of the hour set aside for it and that they should make sure not to ask her to again.

  88. calicojack*

    I worked at a very very small, non profit type place. My brother was the the office assist, they realized there was too much work for him, so looked to hire another office assistant who would have more overlap with the office manager to free up my brother to do double duty with graphic design ect. I applied and they hired me…Granted, I had worked with family before at other jobs and had really always maintained professional boundaries while at work. We were paid, maybe 20 cents above minimum wage at that time.

    Well when I was training I took over many of my brother’s duties, which he created to streamline the chaos of the office manager…think using excel to track data instead of writing things on scraps of paper. Whenever I had a question in our open floor plan about a process he created, I would just say, hey what do you do when this piece of random data shows up? You know, like a normal person learning a skill?

    Well she didn’t like that. Waited till we were alone and cornered me, telling me I shouldn’t ask him anything and all questions about everything should go to her because he wasn’t in charge and I needed to respect her.

    There was more of this over the 4 months I was there…I couldn’t talk to anyone else without running it by her. Even the boss, if he asked me a question or just random chit chat, I was either intensely questioned or cornered when alone and told I was doing things wrong, behind her back, ect. I was so demoralized after working there that short time. Luckily I was smart enough to keep my old job (retail) on the side and I quit the office job and just upped my hours at my old job till I could find something else.

    I had never felt more stupid or lacking confidence in my entire life. It took almost a full year at a new job for me to feel confident in any of the abilities I had built previous.

    1. calicojack*

      Also she saved all paper, even used and written on and would ask that I used this paper to take notes or save literal scraps and show me how to file these uneven scraps to be reused ect to save money on paper.

      1. Neurodivergentsaurus Rex*

        I’m not an accountant or anything but it seems like tracking data in excel instead of uneven scraps of paper might save money on paper.

      2. RebelwithMouseyHair*

        erm, why shouldn’t you try to save on paper? I keep all my print fails to scribble my to-do lists on the other side, no need to use a fresh sheet of paper.
        I no longer print very much at all, so now I’m using the empty pages from my 2020 diary instead.

  89. Formerly in HR*

    The new manager who, very proud of themselves, announced they plan to make us all align to an 8-4 schedule. Why? Because that’s how it was done in their previous team, because they found a document where it states our support hours are 8-4 (even though we kept 9-5 for the last years), because other support teams do 8-4. I tried to point out that our users aren’t even online at 8, or that there were no operational impacts from us being 9-5, but it seems to fall on deaf ears. They already seem overly rigid and not even spending the time to first understand how things work, or why they’re done a certain way, rather forcing us into a mold.

  90. Lynn*

    I was working for a large department that was really focused on their intern-to-college-hire pipeline. There was a cross-departmental committee stood up with its own funding for college recruiting for interns and new hires, and then supporting both groups once they started. The committee had 3 ICs, 2 managers, and an HR person.

    I was the IC working with interns. I had submitted my plan & budget for program and got it approved by the leaders in the spring in advance of summer internship starting.

    The IC managing the budget then refused to give me access to our committee’s p card, and also to purchase supplies or meals themselves. The first time this happened, they said they got confused and it was an error. The second time I followed up in advance to remind of the request and specifications, and they straight up said they couldn’t spend money on interns, because they weren’t real employees. I got our leaders to reiterate that this money was approved, and so she did provide food for a happy hour — except the intern happy hour was the day after a college hire event, so she ordered extra for the college hires with the intern budget and then gave the interns all the leftovers. The used cheese is what tipped me over the edge.

    I ended up conspiring with the other IC and we decided our program should add an IC to support activities we had been doing without formal assignment, and that with that shuffle of responsibilities, well hmm it looks like the budget should land with this other person too because of how it dovetails with those duties. Whoops :)

  91. MustardPillow*

    I get very occasional migraines (which would cause me to miss maybe one or two days a year) so I would turn the brightness on my computer screens all the way down since I found that helped if I felt one coming on or to avoid one. I was told not to do it (it wasn’t a shared desk) unless I could get a health assessment and written confirmation I required accomodation or I could apply to work from home. This was coming from my manager. She continually “threatened” me if I kept turning it down she’d set up a meeting with me and her manager to discuss my “insubordination”. Everytime, I said “yes, please” and everytime she’d change the subject. I continued turning the brightness down. Never got that meeting!

    3. sadnotbad*

      I wonder if she was upset that she couldn’t read your screen over your shoulder to see what you were doing.

  92. Chauncy Gardener*

    After I had been at old Toxic Job a few months I found out that the office manager had charged a field employee $100 to get extra memory on his work cell phone SO HE COULD DO HIS JOB FASTER.
    I was so embarrassed when I found out I walked him right down to A/P and had them cut him a check on the spot for $100.

  93. bluesteel*

    Oldjob had a standing meeting that started at 8:15am on Thursday mornings. At 8:15am, the head of the department (who ran the meeting) would lock the conference room door from the inside. If you weren’t inside, you missed the meeting — and paid the price. Understandable that she wanted us to be prompt, but there was no excuse — a late train, a traffic accident on the highway, a sick child — that would melt her steely heart. You were in … or you were OUT.

      1. Margaretmary*

        The ridiculous thing is that at high school, that’s punishing the people who HAD a genuine issue and not those that want to miss class. The ones that are coming late deliberately…yay, we get out of the entire class and can blame the teacher if anybody calls home and tells our parents! The ones who care about their education but had an issue that delayed them are disadvantaged.

        1. Guin*

          The only times I was ever late, was because the flaky mom who drove the carpool that day was ALWAYS late. I’m OCD about being on time, and when I was 15, I would be in tears every Wednesday because I knew I would be locked out of my first class. Finally I refused to go with her and my mother ended up taking me to school on Wednesdays – on time.

      2. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Funny how the teachers and managers who do this type of thing aren’t the ones who everyone loves, huh?

      3. F.M.*

        My last semester of undergrad, I discovered needed a particular type of course for one last gen ed requirement, and thus signed up very late for some intro anthropology course. I had to get the prof to sign off on that, for some reason… and thereby discovered his rules about not allowing late entry into lecture, and seven thousand other tiny fiddly controlling “I don’t trust you” rules detailed at length on his website.

        I went “I am not a child!” and swapped immediately to another class with a far less interesting topic and a far more reasonable instructor. I have never regretted that choice.

    2. Spicy Tuna*

      I had a boss that would do that. Office doors were locked at 8:15 and if you weren’t there, you had to go home without pay. This was a salaried job also!

  94. Barb*

    I worked for a charity that insisted any piece of paper with a blank side had to be reused for internal purposes. I once received a document from a colleague in 2017 – the other side had been used to print an email in 2004.

    That piece of scrap paper was boxed up and moved to no less than three different offices. I’m certain we paid several times more to move it and store it than we saved in reusing it.

    1. Barb*

      This practice also led to people accidentally putting scrap paper with staples or paper clips into a printer for re-use. We destroyed at least 4 $500 printers this way. To save the fraction of a penny on paper.

      1. thrifty*

        this is also how you get information leaks – from reusing one sided confidential printouts

  95. ErinLizbet*

    I worked as a supervisor at a movie theatre all through nursing school. One time, a young employee came back from her break with a badly banged-up forearm—she’d slipped on the curb. It wasn’t serious enough to need stitches or anything, but she was upset and some other employees radioed me to look after her. The floor manager heard the radio call and followed us into the lost-and-found/first aid room. She insisted that because she had first aid training, she was the most qualified to handle this (at this point I was in my final year of practicum, months away from becoming an RN). She hovered over me, telling me that what I was doing was wrong, and eventually budged me out of the way to “demonstrate” how it should be done. (I didn’t know there was a wrong way to bandage a minor wound, but I guess she found it.) She was always condescending and rude to everyone, so she was telling this poor employee how careless she was the whole time. I had to stay back and comfort the employee after the manager left. Ugh!

  96. Foreversleepymom*

    I work at a large professional services firm. A few years ago, it was decided that the employees were eating too many biscuits (!). This is although we had been told when we joined that cups of tea and coffee and biscuits were freely available. And although we worked regularly till 3AM with limited food breaks. And thus began a period forever enshrined in the collective mind. When those who asked for biscuits with evening tea were given ONE biscuit in a small plate (or sometimes just placed in our hands directly like a pet treat). If we insisted on more, we had to WRITE OUR NAME ON A SLIP OF SHAME and place it in a box. The senior management apparently checked the contents of the box each and every day to find out who were the serial offenders of biscuit-eating. This thankfully stopped after about 8 months when it was realised that: (a) the canteen staff wasn’t checking what name had been written and you could get away with writing anything at all; and (b) this was a pointless exercise anyway since biscuits were hardly a great contributor to the organisation expenses.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      I desperately want to know what names (or other things) people wrote on the Slips of Shame.

    2. I heart Paul Buchman*

      I once had a job with plain biscuits in the break room. On Fridays they had chocolate biscuits. The higher ups were concerned people would take more than their share so every Friday admin wheeled a trolley around doling out one chocolate biscuit per person.

  97. KayDeeAye*

    In most organizations, the executive assistant to the president is a person with some power, both official and unofficial, as is only proper, and that is definitely the case here. But even though it wasn’t part of her job description, either officially or unofficially, a now-retired executive assistant was, for some reason, OBSESSED with MAKING SURE the employee FLOWER & GIFT COMMITTEE didn’t abuse its “POWER” by giving out flowers at INAPPROPRIATE TIMES.

    What is an “inappropriate time,” you ask? Why, if the employee was only in the hospital for two days instead of three! The horror! Or, God forbid, wasn’t in the hospital at all but underwent outpatient radiation treatment and stayed home for three days! Or the committee spent $81 instead of the specified “$80 or less.” Or ordered flowers instead of a plant.

    And on and on and on, more and more rules – and more and more rules lawyering. At one time, the “guidelines” for the Flower & Gift Committee were more than three pages long. (They have become somewhat simplified since her retirement.) Everyone put up with it because it wasn’t worth getting into an argument with her – it usually isn’t, with executive assistants to the president – but it was ridiculous. And shallow. And ungenerous, not to mention stingy. What we’d do instead if we wanted to send flowers at “inappropriate times” was just take up a collection among ourselves so we didn’t have to go through the poor, downtrodden Flower & Gift Committee.

    1. Leenie*

      The Flower & Gift Committee was forbidden from ever ordering actual flowers? That is a little extra.

  98. Secret Identity*

    We had a finance director once who went to a conference about a five hour drive away from the office. A couple of coworkers and her assistant went as well in the company vehicle. On the way there, her assistant fell asleep while riding in the back seat. When they returned to the office later that week, the FD insisted the assistant take personal leave for the time she spent sleeping in the car. The assistant went to the ED who said she didn’t have to use PTO but kind of poo-pooed the whole thing with a laugh and a, “well, that’s just how she is…” attitude. She did things like that all the time. Oh the stories I could tell.

  99. Marianne*

    Our department in a big bank shared a supply and file room with the legal department. Those lawyers had all kinds of fancy supplies- post-its in every color and size, all kinds of fancy pens, notepads and binders, the works. Our supplies were less fancy but perfectly adequate, however the legal department’s admin was constantly concerned that we might help ourselves to something from their shelves. Every time I’d come out of the supply room she would race up to me to check that I hadn’t taken anything of theirs. Once I had a box of staples and she was convinced they were her team’s, but both of our groups used the same company approved supplier, so they were the same “office supplier” brand. After arguing with her my manager heard the fuss and came over, marched us into the supply room and took a box of staples from our shelf and put it on hers. She then told me privately that she was sorry this admin was such an idiot but she couldn’t do anything about it and not to worry.

  100. Springtime*

    Someone I know used to routinely move rude customers’ orders farther back in the queue, I guess to “show them.” This was not a teenager, and this was not an “I just got so fed up this one time” occurrence. This was their normal practice, which they told other people about, as if it were perfectly OK to make the employers’ overall performance worse just to be petty. Not to mention giving the not-so-great customers more time and legitimate grounds to make their life even more miserable.

  101. Young Business*

    My current company is very hierarchical and policies are enforced to keep everyone reminded of this. Our expense policy is a joke, I understand providing a daily stipend but they actually enforce a limit you can spend PER MEAL. Who cares how I choose to spend the money in a day if I stay within the overall limit? And on top of this, I’m remote and I traveled to company headquarters which is in a city with a very high-cost of living, so even covering 3 meals a day within the allotted amount was a struggle. Accounting actually emailed me to let me know that I had gone over the amount for one meal, meanwhile, I had breakfast at the office, so it all balanced out in the end.

    Company is profitable, has outside funding, lots of many to splurge on wining and dining clients, yet I have to justify needing a cable shipped to me.

    2. ThursdaysGeek*

      Ah yes, I remember that conference (decades ago) I attended where I was stuck in the hotel for breakfast and lunch. The conference provided a breakfast (sweet rolls and coffee) so I wasn’t allowed to order breakfast, and since I could only spend $6 for lunch, it limited me to soup. But I was allowed $15 for dinner, when I could finally get into town and find a cheaper place to eat. (I wasn’t smart enough then to order something that was good eaten cold, to go, to use for food for the next day.)

    3. MAC*

      This was how it worked when I was at a county agency. If the allowance was $8 for lunch and $10 for dinner and you spent $9 for lunch and $7 for dinner, you had to turn in the $3 and “eat” the $1. (It’s been 20+ years so I feel safe sharing this – one trip, we ate a fancy lunch but then got hot dogs for dinner because we went to a baseball game. My co-worker taught me the trick of snipping off the time stamp on the receipt and swapping them on the form).
      .
      I also worked for a state agency where I did a lot of “day trips” (12 hours or less) where we’d get NO per diem – fly out at 6am for a meeting at HQ on the other side of the state, land back in my city at 6pm, no reimbursement for lunch. I was supposed to brown bag it apparently. And for a federal contractor where you’d only get per diem for the “full” days away. If you were in your home city for even a minute, it didn’t count, so there was no meal allotment for the day traveling to the location or the return day, regardless of what time travel began or ended. So a 6am flight out of WA state to WA DC on Tuesday and a return landing at 11pm on Thursday = 1 day/3 meals total reimbursed. Good thing I’ve never been much for eating breakfast!

      1. Gumby*

        And for a federal contractor where you’d only get per diem for the “full” days away. If you were in your home city for even a minute, it didn’t count, so there was no meal allotment for the day traveling to the location or the return day, regardless of what time travel began or ended. So a 6am flight out of WA state to WA DC on Tuesday and a return landing at 11pm on Thursday = 1 day/3 meals total reimbursed.

        Pretty sure this has changed. First and last day of travel you now get 75% of the per diem at least according to the GSA.

  102. Suzy Q*

    I had a boss, decades ago, who thought the three admins were stealing scotch tape, so he then kept it in his desk drawer, locked up. He was an asshole in many other ways, too.

  103. Reality Check*

    I had my first ever vertigo attack at work one night. It was a violent attack and I was vomiting uncontrollably. Two of my coworkers had to literally carry me out, pour me into a car, and drive me home (with a wastebasket on my lap so I could keep barfing). When I returned to work, I found I had been written up (by what passed for an office manager) for being sick at work. I quit.

  104. IEanon*

    Boss: “I will take this suggestion to MY VP.”

    Me: “You mean Janet, who was in my office chatting five minutes ago and works one floor away? I’ll run it up if you want.”

    Boss: “No, only I am permitted to speak with Janet. You’re not high enough level to bring your suggestions.”

    We did not work in a hierarchical workplace, and Janet was only part-time acting in the role. She was still performing her other role (which required that she speak to me to get anything developed), and I could only speak to her when she had that hat on. When she was wearing her “VP hat,” I was to stay silent. So weird.

  105. Marie*

    My former boss held all of the computer mouse batteries hostage. Every time my wireless mouse died (which was every 6 months or so), I had to go to her office, beg for a new battery, and answer all her questions about whether or not I turned my mouse off EVERY day before leaving to ensure maximum battery life. Only then would she give me a new battery, but she always reminded me that they weren’t free. I stayed in that job for several years, but eventually found another job where I’m not required to beg for batteries.

    2. Neurodivergentsaurus Rex*

      I’m imagining her grilling you on if you ever clicked multiple times out of impatience if something was loading slowly. Running down the battery with excessive clicks!!!

    3. Elenna*

      So if you said, no, in fact you didn’t turn it off every day, what would she have done, not given you a battery and made you not do any work?

  106. Librarian of SHIELD*

    My previous job had very strict rules about when people were and were not allowed to wear jeans. We had casual friday, and charity drive where if you donated 1$ of every paycheck, you could get one extra jeans day per week. When you signed up for the donation, you were given a colored card to put in your lanyard with your badge to prove you were allowed to have the extra jeans day.

    The director’s assistant would visit every cubicle every morning, purportedly to say hello, but mostly to find out who was wearing jeans so she could report people for abusing the jeans policy. She also wore denim skirts to work most days, which was apparently fine. I guess denim is only against the rules if your legs are enclosed.

  107. Falcongirl*

    At the time that Sarbanes-Oxley went into effect, I was working at one of the companies that necessitated the law. It was a fine law and accounts payable at that company was an epic mess, so I wasn’t upset about it. I, as the person who processed accounts payable for three local offices, got some training on how this would change our record keeping and the way that invoices and receipts would be submitted to the corporate office. My portion of it was all fairly straight forward.

    Unfortunately, the general manager for those three offices was a couple years away from retirement and completely checked out. To fill the power void, the head of a department completely unrelated to admin or accounts payable (think Manager of Teapot Design) was basically running the offices. She decided that it was really important that someone be keeping a close eye on me and the accounts payable situation (mind you, there had been absolutely no complaints about the job I was doing and I was as fully prepared as possible to make the switch), so she appointed someone from Teapot Design to “double check” all of my work. This person, who had received no training on Sarbanes Oxley or accounts payable, started out wanting me to explain every single invoice to her and why it would be fine for the company to pay out (“Because this is an invoice submitted to us by a company with whom we have a written contract for work performed in accordance with that contract” was not good enough). She developed her own convoluted form and process for submitting invoices to corporate. Several times, I got confused calls from the corporate accounts payable that went like this: “What is this form you sent with this invoice and why did you send it?” “You’ll have to talk to Sheila in Teapot Design. She developed it.” “…Why is Sheila in Teapot Design developing forms to send to accounts payable?”

    Accounts payable in our offices ground practically to a halt, and it wasn’t until a vendor threatened to sue us because their payments were coming so late (because I had to go through eleventy million steps and get Sheila’s sign off before I could forward the invoice to corporate) that the real general manager finally took an interest and put a stop to it. By that point I was on my way out, and I left for another job shortly after. It took them a really long time to permanently fill the position after I left because they tried to just train the new people to do things the way that Sheila from Teapot Design thought they ought to be (again with no training or expertise). So glad to be out of there.

  108. part time frustration*

    Following a major restructure I formally requested an increase in hours (say 20h to 30h) to accommodate my increased responsibilities.

    I had to make the request through “Edith”. Edith’s original job had largely been centralised in the restructure, but she retained some HR tasks in our satellite. She told me there was no business case for the increase, so it had been rejected by C-suite.

    For that and other reasons, I shortly resigned. C-suite requested an exit interview, and went a funny colour when I explained, because the request had never been escalated. It took a full-timer to replace me, and they lost a major client in the kerfuffle.

    To this day I believe Edith refused my request just to prove (to herself, I guess?) that she could. It was all so pointless.

    1. DisneyChannelThis*

      Did Edith face any repercussions? Did you want to leave anyway or was escalating it to someone else just not possible?

      1. part time frustration*

        I had other problems with her in particular (including a really terrible miscarriage earlier that year that she refused to authorise sick leave for without the detailed hospital discharge paperwork, even though my time off fell entirely within our “self certification” allowance). This episode showed me that she would be a thorn in my side as long as we worked in the same place.

        It was all just so stupid. I think ultimately she was a bit worried about the viability of her own job, so took pains to expand it to fit the working week.

        Oh and she was sleeping with the FD (both married to other people). That probably helped.

  109. Nusuth*

    My first office job postgrad was as an unpaid intern at a tiny little nonprofit that was so slow and unproductive I often wondered if it mostly existed as a tax write-off for the main donors. Despite being unpaid and too slow for words, the gig was okay (lots of flexibility to do personal development/work a part time job that actually paid me money for food), but there was one behavior that struck me as insanely stingy. Occasionally we would have office-wide lunches (all seven of us, three of them unpaid interns), for which the office manager would dip into petty cash to give everyone $20 to buy lunch and bring it back to the office. The first time this happened, I figured (privately) that I should make the most of the only compensation this place was giving me, and got a little more than I would have if I was paying myself (like, a drink, chips and a cookie instead of just a sandwich). The change I returned was probably $1.50 instead of $4 like the other interns. The office manager was PERTURBED, but didn’t say anything, and the next time we did lunch the allowance was down to $15 (which, at that point, was honestly barely enough to get an entree in the major urban core where we were located). I was baffled – I’m already literally free labor, and you’re begrudging me chips and a drink?? Luckily, I was out of there for a paid internship within two months, but I’ve never forgotten that they regretted giving me three extra dollars over the course of a whole summer.

  110. Not really a Waitress*

    Forgot about the time I had a boss. She was director of our very small department (5 of us plus her) in administration as a small university. We were not high maintenance nor were we a high profile stressed out or over burdened department. She let us know that all communication needed to be in email form and to not expect a response for 5 business days.

    I lasted exactly 51 weeks at that job. When I was asked what they could do to convince me to stay, I laughed in her face.

    1. Just Me*

      5 business days?!?! Was she doing some other kind of work that kept her away from her desk? (Actually, never mind–it wouldn’t make a difference.)

  111. Abusing exempt employees*

    I worked 12-hour overnight shifts for a travel company. That was fine, that was what I was hired for… but then I started getting morning and afternoon shifts tacked onto either the beginning or end of my 8p-8a shifts. Some weeks, I’d be working upwards of 70 hours with no overtime because I was considered an exempt employee. This caused me to look at everyone’s schedule in my department and it was evident that the person in charge of scheduling was abusing the hell out of me and the other two people who worked there. She would schedule herself for morning shifts only, thus avoiding any emergencies that would pop up in the afternoons and evenings that would require her to stay late; she would only schedule herself for weekdays, leaving the rest of us to cover every weekend; and she would skate by with 36-40 hours per week while everyone else was working at least 50-60 hours. When this was brought to her attention, she said that a higher-up told her to schedule me that much. Said higher-up claimed they’d never said anything like that and was astonished when I showed her the math of how much everyone else was working compared to the scheduler. On top of that, in addition to my nightly workload, I’m pretty sure she left me tasks that she didn’t feel like doing during the day. She left the company shortly after I brought this to upper management’s attention.

    Interesting postscript: I remained friends with the other two employees mentioned earlier; one of them hired me a few years ago at a totally different company and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.

  112. Carm*

    I used to supervise someone who shared a heavy medical data workload with me. I did program monitoring, planning, and evaluation based on this data, and some data entry. She did the bulk of the data entry and was VERY particular about it. Sometimes she would decide she did not like how I had entered data for a case (think: comments in a chart), and she would delete my entire entry, re-enter it exactly the same, but without the comment, and then email my boss and people outside the organization to complain about my shoddy data work.

    I put her on a work plan with metrics for better team work, and she stopped cc’ing me on the complaint emails. Because she was technically good at her job, my org was no help and sent us to HR for counseling, where we were told to act like a happily married couple (yes, really).

    I quit her as much as I did that job. I’m doing the same thing, but for more pay and have three happy collaborative team members now. When differences in data entry style arise, we just….. talk about it and find a solution. It’s amazing.

  113. KB*

    I used to work for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the Canadian equivalent to the USDA.

    There was a organizational shuffle at the top one year, and the new Associate Deputy Minister decided that he needed to approve each and every purchase order for the entire organization.

    Just as the spring planting season was gearing up.

    Rumor has it that his fax machine lasted less than half a day.

  114. JohannaCabal*

    At my first post-undergrad job (into which I unknowingly walked into a giant dumpster fire), I was promised my own business cards from Day 1 as my role occasionally involved interfacing with external partners/vendors. To get the business cards, I had to go through the CEO’s executive assistant who hated most everyone in the firm, especially anyone new (there was a history there).

    She kept saying she was in the process of ordering them for the next three years I worked there. I never received them. Later, every other company I worked at, including a bad fit role that fired me after three months, provided me with business cards within a week of my joining the organization.

  115. LHOI*

    At an old job, I had a coworker who would leave work at 4:25 (five minutes early) to catch an express train that would get her home something like 45 minutes earlier than the next train. She regularly arrived at work 5-15 minutes early.

    Our manager started regularly calling her into his office JUST as she was stirring to leave to do things like go over copyedits he could have emailed her, or just to chat about seemingly nothing, until exactly 4:30. Because he didn’t want her to leave “early” but couldn’t think of a good enough reason to force her to stay and didn’t want to seem like “that kind of boss.”

  116. Fired for doing too much*

    In summers and breaks from college, I was a hostess at a chain diner establishment that was open 24/7. When it was very busy, like Saturday and Sunday breakfast shifts, we had two hostesses on. The other hostess was a lifer and resented the waitresses because of their tips. The waitresses were supposed to bus their own tables, but when it got very busy, they’d fall behind. I always found out awkward to have an hour-long wait list and tables that just needed to be bussed and wiped down, so I’d help the waitresses out by bussing their tables.
    My co-hostess hated that I did this and would complain to the manager, who would tell me to stop. But it was SO dumb to have two hostesses standing at the hostess stand doing nothing when all the waiting customers could see the vacant unbussed tables. And I really didn’t enjoy having customers complain to me.
    So on my last weekends of winter break my senior year of college, I kept bussing tables and she kept complaining to the manager to the point where he told me if I bussed another table, I wouldn’t be put on the schedule again. Fine by me.

  117. LANY*

    My first job after graduating was for a consulting firm. My first project at this first job was working at a client under this “very very” senior associate who had just graduated with his “very very impressive MBA.” He was SEASONED at this company, though, because of his time as a summer intern.

    We were at the client site together for a couple months, and I received a review from him. This review included such gems as I “answered the phone unprofessionally” because I said “hello?” Instead of “hello, this is LANY” — the ONE time my desk phone rang. It was a wrong number. It also said that I was unprofessional because, as the most junior person on the team, I had to be the first to arrive and the last to leave. So even though I had finished my work and had zero responsibilities, I was required to hang out and watch him until he had decided he was leaving, and therefore I could leave also. Ugh. Getting angry just thinking about him.

    1. Sloan Kittering*

      Yikes – no companies should let interns be supervised or reviewed by someone in their first job out of school – not without someone who has more professional context overseeing!

    2. Margaretmary*

      This reminds me of when I worked retail between my degree and post-grad. Our branch was a training centre for managers and at one point, we had these four managers training, one guy in maybe his 3rd or 4th week of training? and the other three just starting. Anyway, this guy kept acting the big man, telling them what they were doing wrong, being very condescending to them and telling them what to do. The problem was…he hadn’t fully learnt the procedures himself (which was fine, he was still training) and kept having to stop mid-lecture to ask me (not a manager and with no plans to become one, as I was planning to return to college in a few months) the next step in whatever procedure he was pontificating about. It WOULD have been perfectly fine had he not been so arrogantly acting the expert and treating them like they were stupid for not knowing stuff their first week.

  118. Wait, what?*

    I teach French and Spanish and for most of my 15 year career, the French / Spanish “department” is tacked onto the much bigger English department. There might be one other part-time French teacher and I’ve never had another Spanish teacher to work with. Usually, my department head is an English teacher who doesn’t speak the languages I teach and they mostly let me carry on with my curriculum as I see fit. This suits me just fine. When they forget to invite me to department meetings, I’m like “Yay, I don’t have to go to a department meeting”.

    Except there was one year when my department head was this woman who acted like her leadership role was worthy of Succession-level drama. She insisted on proofreading (scrutinizing) my exams even though – and I cannot stress this enough – she did not speak either of the languages I taught. She would create random vendettas against other people for no discernable reason. One time, I casually mentioned that I was thinking about getting an additional qualification so that I could also teach English, just to spice up my career a bit. She interpreted this as me trying to usurp her position as department head. She told one of my colleagues that she thought I was “out to destroy her”.

    This is a leadership role that earns you an extra $20 a week and a whole bunch of extra meetings. I’m not about to Littlefinger my way into that kind headache.

    1. Tau*

      …she proofread your exams. In languages she didn’t speak. I am trying to imagine what on earth must have been going through her head to think this was a reasonable use of her time and coming up blank.

    2. I don't mean to be rude, I'm just good at it*

      I always enjoyed an administrator with an English or History Certification telling me how I was teaching Typing incorrectly. I miss teaching so much

    3. BookMom*

      My kid’s school offers 3 foreign languages. One language teacher as out for her parent’s funeral on the night 8th grade families came to learn about electives, so the department chair had to cover her language and the absent colleague’s. She spent at least half the time telling people why her language was better.

  119. Generic Name*

    I’m dealing with one of these petty situations now. I’m the project manager for a small portion of a project to support doing some maintenance work for a city government. Part of the work I’m overseeing involved taking environmental samples and getting them analyzed at a lab. The city (rightly) compared the lab invoice to our proposal, and found a couple of discrepancies. One item they called out is a $6 laboratory disposal fee that we did not include in our proposal. Another discrepancy is that the actual lab rates are LOWER than the rates we quoted in the proposal. The overall difference between proposed and actual is $37 IN THEIR FAVOR. Ultimately, they are asking us to refund the $6 disposal fee, which we will happily accommodate, because its $6. The real kicker is that hundreds of dollars in staff time (at my company, our client’s company, and the city) has been spent sorting out this issue. I get that the city wants to be responsible in spending it’s citizen’s tax dollars, but come on.

  120. Sloan Kittering*

    This is a story that doesn’t make me look particularly good. When I first started a new job that was pretty entry-level, one of my roles was to approve expense reports on behalf of my boss, the executive director. There was a whole long system of rules to follow provided by the central office. I had never been in a position where I had expense reports to file myself, so I didn’t quite understand that most regular staff people were not going to have these complicated rules memorized and that wasn’t really their jobs. I don’t remember if my manager (not the Ex Dir) gave me this impression, or if I took it on myself after approving one or two expense reports that had issues and being scolded, but I began to feel that every expense report had an error somewhere and it was my job to find it. Unfortunately, you couldn’t really edit expense reports as an approver, just make a note and send it back for correction. I’m sure I was NOT beloved by staff for requesting a correction to basically every expense report filed. I’m cringing now in retrospect. Solidarity to all the petty tyrants being called out in the comments!!

  121. This is a name, I guess*

    I had to fight to get my previous org to cover at $10 lunch!

    My old nonprofit had a bougie gala that was so expensive to attend ($150/ticket) that most staff couldn’t go. They had a steering committee for the gala full of rich women with no jobs (or decorative jobs) who undermined the staff constantly. They treated planning the gala like their wedding.

    Our Director of Development (a horrible man who punished me simply because he didn’t like me because I wasn’t a “cool kid” who flirted with him) would pay for these expensive lunches to “thank” the already wealthy volunteers. We also paid lots of money to make these absolutely useless event boxes to give to our corporate sponsors, who barely even attended. I asked if we could mail some sponsor boxes, and my boss responded with disgust that it was ungrateful and inelegant to mail them. I had to hand deliver them unscheduled to the workplaces where no one was available to meet me. People who were in the office there were annoyed because of the disruption.

    I spent an entire day hand-delivering sponsor boxes in our downtown the week before the Superbowl was held in that same downtown. I had to carry about 20 small pizza box sized sponsor kits around on foot and walk building to building. I stopped to get a quick lunch in the middle of this 6 hour delivery shift on foot. It was under $10.

    I had to fight my boss and accounting to approve the $10 expense because it wasn’t necessary. Apparently, I was supposed to pack lunch, put in my car, return halfway through my shift to the parking garage on the edge of downtown, eat lunch, and then walk back into the city center.

    And then we bought multiple $250-750 catered lunches for our wealthy volunteers.

    I was paid $46,000/yr. I was also in a knowledge job with a technical job function, and this was – of course – “other duties as assigned.”

  122. Dancin Fool*

    Where I worked we had multiple departments with overlapping duties. It was very common for staff from one area to contact the manager or staff from another area with a question or request. Cue power hungry new manager who demanded all questions for other departments to go through him first, except he would never do anything with our requests. So we got used to quietly sneaking around him so we could get our jobs done. He caught my colleague not following his rule and reprimanded her. When she then asked him to contact the other manager and request the info she needed he immediately said no.

  123. Lindsay*

    I was a volunteer at a library and the librarian in charge of me was an absolute witch. I wore jean and a nice top when I volunteered but apparently my shirt rode up exposing like an inch of abdomen when I shelved books on a higher shelf so I had to wear “more appopriate” clothes. Keep in mind I was the most sheltered, innocent, nerdy teen of all time and I was mortified that she thought my clothes were inappropriate. I also was in charge of throwing out old issues of newspapers and she thought I didn’t stack the remaining newspapers neatly enough so she showed me how to stack newspapers. Keep in mind this was about 2 floors below where they worked, so she really had to make a conscious effort to look at the newspapers. I also had a principal who told me I decorated my classroom “too high school” and not bright/fun enough for middle school??? This was 8th graders, not babies. And the decorations I used were ones the former teacher had left for me.

      1. Lindsay*

        Haha yes. This story takes place around 2004 or so so I probably was wearing lowcut jeans.

        1. This is a name, I guess*

          I feel like a lot of young women in the early 2000s dealt with the problem of “I CAN’T HELP THAT MY LOWER BACK IS SHOWING. NONE OF THE PANTS INTENDED FOR ME HAVE ENOUGH COVERAGE.” I remember constantly having to fidget with my clothing as a young, curvy woman in the early 2000s. The clothing was not made for curvy bodies at all. And there really weren’t other options because high-waisted pants were coded as “mom jeans but in a bad way” and you would get socially punished for wearing them. Love being a woman in the workplace. /s

          I’m currently struggling with new pants trends because I have super muscular compact thighs (#thankssquats) and I’ve cannot find a cut of jeans that’s not SKIN TIGHT on my thighs. Even wide cut jeans! So, all intentionally loose jeans (even just straight leg) look so silly on me because they are skinny jeans on the thighs and flared on the bottom.

          You can pry high cut pants out of my cold, dead hands, btw.

          1. IndustriousLabRat*

            Oh do I ever remember those days… That’s about the moment in time that I decided I REALLY like those Carhartt carpenter pants with the super high waist and double-canvas fronts, and gave up on trying to wear “fashionable” denim entirely. Like, how are you supposed to weed the garden if your inseam is so short that the neighbors might mistake you for the plumber?! I still consider low rise jeans to be a supremely not-funny joke played upon all but the slightest of wearers. AARGH.

            1. The Other Katie*

              And the wide-hipped among us, condemned to wearing two sizes up just so they button! It’s a ridiculous trend.

  124. Goldenrod*

    My former horrid boss, the President of Human Resources at the large university where I work, once submitted a reimbursement request for a $3 scone. She made close to $400,000 a year – and we aren’t even supposed to use our budget for food.

    I just could never get over that. Since working for the state is all about bureaucracy, there was a form that needed to be filled out and signed and approved by our Finance Director. When I gave her the form to sign, her eyes got really big and we exchanged a look.

    She signed it, though, because no one ever wanted to cross Madame Horrible!

    This one really stuck with me because….a three dollar scone? Really??? She abused her power in all kinds of ways, but this one was so stupid that it really stuck with me.

      1. Goldenrod*

        Oh, hahahhaha, I loved that part! I loved how they spent the rest of the movie puzzling over that, and could never get over it.

        I see the connection! :D

  125. Avril Ludgateau*

    Early in my career, a supervisor set up my workspace at not-a-desk so she could literally watch over my shoulder as I worked. When I say “not-a-desk,” I mean it was a row of cabinets against a wall, with about 2 feet of space between the forward edge of my “desk” and the far end of her desk. It was actually a walkway and my workspace was arranged in a way that I just barely had somewhere to put my legs when my belly was up against the “table” and people were always bumping me to get past (in the <1 foot of space between the back of my chair and my supervisor's desk). I'm 100% sure it was a fire hazard (obstructed walkway).

    Anyway, one time I finished all my duties, didn't have any busy work, check my email and documents a few times over and still didn't find a smidge of work to do. So I switched from my work e-mail to check my personal e-mail. The moment I did – when I tell you it was the moment the page loaded – she stomped over and in an ominous and frantic whisper told me I was committing time theft. She didn’t actually have any work to give me, either, when I asked if there was something I should be doing at that moment.

    What I learned in that moment was that she literally spent her day peering over my shoulder to catch me slippin’. Guess she took “supervision” too literally.

    Surprisingly she wasn’t generally a mean person or a “power hungry” one. I think she was a little naive for her station. I have a feeling she may have been scolded once in her career and fed lines about how the employer owns 100% of your time when you are on the clock, and it stuck with her.

  126. mac n cheese*

    I had a summer job just out of high school working in an office building. One day I was tasked with creating a poster to display in the hallway, the old-school kind where you glued paper onto foamboard. The admin in charge of the supply closet flat out refused to give me a jar of rubber cement, saying that “I would just sniff it”.

  127. Stella*

    A PI once tried to refuse covering her AA’s (and ONLY her AA’s, none of the research students) per diem and demanded to see her food receipts because “I know you’re on a diet plan and I don’t believe your calorie limit cost that much per day.”

    The department head heard about it and pointed out that 1.) that was discriminatory and sexist (the AA was the only woman on the trip) and 2.) per diem is designed so that no one needs to show receipts for their meals; if you don’t want to cover high per diems (the trip had been to Australia) you don’t send people on a trip, you can’t just choose to change the reimbursement plan after the fact.

  128. Clefairy*

    I’ve shared this story here before, but we had a new Regional Manager (so, my boss’s boss) show up to our site, pull me and my peer (we were the two assistant managers for the location, and were both women about 25 years younger than him) away from our busy operation for “an important meeting”. We cram into our tiny office (with him in the computer chair, and the two of us sitting on the floor because he insisted we sit but we didn’t have additional chairs), and then proceeded to show off his Tumi bag. He told us it was genuine leather, explained the other bells and whistles, blah blah, and then asked us how much we thought a bag like that would cost. We didn’t know. He made us PULL UP THE TUMI WEBSITE AND FIND HIS BAG. It cost more than we made in a two week period, combined. That was it. That was the point of the meeting. Instead of letting us do our jobs and support our front line team, he pulled us both away for a 20 minute “meeting” during a peak time of the day just so he could LITERALLY, because we were on the floor, lord over us, and brag about his expensive bag. He was horrendous.

  129. QA Mini*

    My boss when I was an office admin at a children’s medical clinic came on on the weekend and got rid of several things that I used to make my job faster and easier (ex. a step stool). He told me he would rather have my job take longer than have “clutter”. He also removed several items that staff had loaned to the clinic because he didn’t think we needed them year round (ex. a Christmas tree that the kids loved to do things with in their sessions year round). He then got huffy when staff told him that he needed to return our things and buy new ones for the office if we weren’t allowed to loan them to the clinic as the kids would be upset. He ended up spending $300 replacing the things we all took home.
    The same boss once lectured me for spending $2 more on an item for the clinic than last time and canceled my company card and decided to do all the errands himself. It took him 3 hours longer than me.
    The last straw was when he started to use the front door alarm being unset as a way to monitor when I arrived at work and lectured me for arriving 15 mins “late” when I was doing an errand for the office on my way to work. I quit not long after.

    1. This is a name, I guess*

      Honestly, this is like the story of my personal life. I know too many minimalists and extremely rigid people. I am 5’1″ and I feel like I constantly have to fight roommates, family members, lovers, etc to just STOP MESSING WITH STUFF IN THE KITCHEN/CLOSET/ETC! Yes, it’s annoying to you that X thing is on the counter and it would look so much cleaner if it were “put in its home.”

      But when you put it in the cabinet, I have to get out the step stool and climb on the counter to access it. And I use it everyday!

      Also, those same people – like your admin – fight with me about having a stepstool. They always get so annoyed that I leave the stepstool out, but I use it 10x/day. At least 3 separate clutter freaks have bought me foldable step ladders so that I can neatly fold them and stash them in a kitchen crevice. Except now, 10x/day I have this long tedious process of getting out a stepstool.

      Life is already hard enough for short people. Please let me have a slightly accessible house, Marie Kondo devotees.

      1. NeutralJanet*

        The thing is that Marie would hate this for you! If having your things on the counter and having a stepstool out sparks joy for you, because it means you are able to access the things you need without trouble, Marie would 5000% be on your side!

        1. Louise B*

          Exactly! The object’s “home” is wherever the object is best kept. The object is not best kept somewhere inconvenient! If you start putting them somewhere inconveniently low, like in the drawer under the stove or in the back of the shelf closest to the floor, I bet they’ll understand that the inconvenience of having to kneel is not worth the clear counter.

  130. Alexis Rosay*

    I was a teacher at a summer program where our boss insisted that we cut off the margin or any white space from all student handouts before giving them to students. He would only go through the official procurement process to buy a paper cutter, which took weeks, so for most of the summer we had to individually trim each handout with scissors.

    (This was based on an educational theory that students would connect better with handouts if they were small enough to be glued into their notebooks.)

    1. urguncle*

      That really ignores the time and energy you can have students waste to cut them out. It’s a craft AND a learning experience!

  131. honeygrim*

    I used to work in higher education, in a department that typically hired student employees to staff the front desk and help with other clerical-type duties. I was not the supervisor for the student workers, but all of the staff in the office frequently assigned students work if the students had finished their other duties and weren’t otherwise occupied.

    One day I asked a student worker who was not busy to help me by putting labels on some items. The student worker supervisor came to me later, very upset that I asked a student to do something without her permission. She said that the students had enough to do and I was giving them too much work.

    I was astounded that she was 1) so angry that I asked a student to help me and 2) that she thought the students were too incompetent to stick labels on things.

    1. Schuyler*

      Honestly I’m wondering if this is one of my prior coworkers, lol. I spoke to one of my coworkers about that once when I supervised our student staff. My coworker would do the same—ask them to do work without talking to me about it first—but just like any other job, I might have had tasks for them to do that might have been more universally helpful or higher priority, and she wouldn’t have known. But that was my prerogative as their supervisor—and my job.

  132. Triple Toe*

    A couple stand out

    – having to write a detailed request/justification for a stapler to the EA (I was running finance and HR)

    -always having to ask in the form of a question for time off. You would be corrected for saying “I’m going to a funeral on Friday” – it had to be in the form of a question for it to be considered

    -a boss worth >$75m screaming at an employee multiple times over an $80 bank error on his account

    1. Daisy Gamgee*

      always having to ask in the form of a question for time off. You would be corrected for saying “I’m going to a funeral on Friday” – it had to be in the form of a question for it to be considered

      Good grief, did they model the process after _Jeopardy_? . We know you didn’t work for Alex Trebek because he was much kinder than this.

    2. Curmudgeon in California*

      Ugh. The people who expect you to come to them, hat in hand, and begask them to graciously allow you to take time off that you are entitled to from your company. While I can see it if you are one of two people in a public facing coverage job, it’s abusive to demand it from other positions. After all, if you got hit by a bus you wouldn’t be “asking” for time off, you would just not be there.

  133. ceiswyn*

    At the first place I worked, we had some employees who regularly completed a sporting event for charity. Our admin staff used to announce this on the main staff mailing list, and then go around the office strongarming people into donations.

    This all seemed fine until the year I had a bit of a snit fit and declined to contribute – publicly, via Reply All. The inevitable mailing list meltdown didn’t cast anyone (and especially not me) in a terribly good or professional light, but during the course of it the CEO did some digging and discovered that the admins had been telling junior employees that if they didn’t donate, they wouldn’t be allowed to come to the work Christmas party.

    The charity event never did get another big announcement on the staff mailing list. I got a lot of grumpy looks, though.

  134. Coffee and Excel*

    The IT guy in charge of equipment return at my last job made sure to collect my $5 backpack the company gave me as a laptop bag leaving me with a grocery bag to take my stuff home in on my last day. The bag was ripped and definitely not in shape to give to a new employee.

  135. Beth*

    In a super-toxic volunteer group back about 20 years ago, I was one of the first to start using online communications – in this case, Yahoo groups — to coordinate information within the various sub-groups and event staff, etc. The Total Glassbowl head of the organization, on learning about it, thought it was a good idea (although he didn’t understand it) — and, since no idea was great unless he controlled it, he issued a mandate that we had to rename ALL the groups so that they started with the organization’s name.

    Imagine having a group called, say, ‘Annex organizing’, and being told “You MUST rename this ‘Llama-Woo Foundation Annex organizing’ because it’s important for our public profile!”

    I ignored him at first, and got reprimanded. Then I created a group with the exact name he wanted, while continuing to use the original group. He then assigned a young guy as my co-organizer, who was tasked with scolding me and reporting my failure to behave.

    Not long after that, his #1 lackey rewrote a key document to change one line, because she liked the new line better. Then she found out that I hadn’t bother to change that line in my copy, and started in on official reprimands about it. How dare I refuse to implement her Very Important Change?

    At that point, I gave up and left the group.

  136. Let's Bagel*

    At my old job, the office supply manager insisted that not only every single office supply request come to her, but that it was manager approved. Also new hires were not automatically given office supplies. So on my first day, I had to get an office supply request sheet, literally write on it “1 pad of paper, 1 pen,” get my new manager to sign it and drop it in the interoffice supply mail system. The next day, exactly 1 pad of paper and 1 pen showed up at my desk. Absolutely bonkers.

    1. General von Klinkerhoffen*

      … how did you fill out the form? Surely you didn’t use someone else’s pen?!!

      This stuff is so infuriating. I’m comparing the job where I was able to order super fancy “sign here” post it notes in different colours, and my client called my boss to say how much easier they found it when they got documents with sticky notes on. Sometimes a tiny expense can buy a whole load of goodwill (and forgoing it, lose it).

      2. Curmudgeon in California*

        One job I worked for had very nice “new employee kit” boxes with standard office supplies in it, waiting for you at your new desk. Of course, I hadn’t gotten one because the receptionist/office admin was a petty jerk, and she didn’t like any AFAB in a technical role. She finally got canned after being nasty and abusive to one of the nicest guys in the office who had been out on medical leave, and I saw it. It was the last straw when I and the guy involved mentioned it to our manager, who was also her manager.

  137. Unionize*

    Oh boy… I worked for a major record label in the early 2010’s, which was all but ran by their Finance department and their exec assistant. This person controlled EVERYTHING from who got samples of work product to office bagels, all the way down to parking space assignments. He mandated the use of Microsoft Lync (precursor to Teams) for “simplification of communication” (i.e., tracking whether or not you were at your desk), and once alerted my boss that I’d gone into negative balance on vacation days – which was allowed by company policy – and asked my boss to ban me from taking vacations for 6 months (against company policy), and led me to quit several months later.

    When I did leave (got a better job at a sister label), since he controlled all “work product” (copies of albums that we worked on), he insisted that I return my copies of every album I worked on for the 5 years I was there. Literally hundreds of LPs, CDs, and box sets, since they were “work product” and property of the company, which was completely false. Needless to say, I did not do this.

    Oh, and he also may have orchestrated a delay in my transfer to the sister label, costing me thousands of dollars in salary. I can’t prove that though…

  138. Liz L.*

    I was a mid-level employee at a government entity, and volunteered as a Girl Scout leader one afternoon a week for a number of years. Managers rotated through our office every year or two. Every previous manager allowed me to work part of my lunch hour so I could leave work 20 min early for the after-school troop meeting. My new boss insisted I submit a written leave slip each week for his approval for .3 of an hour, so I could leave 18 min early. This is the same guy who snuck out early every week for his golf league without using any leave at all.

  139. LMB*

    Many years ago I worked for a midsized fancy consulting firm that would have this big round robin event for interviewing college seniors. These were all college seniors who met a ridiculously high bar for screening—4.0 GPAs, difficult majors, mostly Ivy League schools. HR would put together a team from all levels in the company to do the interviews and decide who to move forward (actually I think these were second round interviews, it may have been to decide who to hire). The candidates all traveled to be there, some of them from across the country. We would each interview like a group of five candidates then convene to choose the best from that round, then do another round, etc. There were like four junior employees in my group who were just out of college themselves and they were on the most obnoxious power trip ever imagined. The comments on the candidates ranged from “yeah she’s a triple major and has a 4.0, but it’s from Princeton” to “her outfit makes it look like she’s not very business savvy” to “omg he’s such an idiot,” to “I don’t know he seems ok but like maybe too nerdy?” I kept looking at the senior employees on the panel (I was the only mid level person) to be like dear god, say something, but they were mostly just looking down at their blackberries (yes it was a while ago) and genuinely just didn’t seem to care. I tried to push back like on why the woman with the suit that wasn’t “savvy” enough would actually be a fantastic hire, and they all ganged up on ME and started telling me they didn’t think I seemed like a good fit for the company. This group of 24 year old JERKS were randomly given this tiny bit of power to ostensibly *help* interview people and the senior employees just sat there and let them abuse it. I left that company soon after.

  140. Mileage thief*

    A previous boss declined my expenses because the mileage I’d entered was higher than when she checked the route online. I’d taken the quickest route on google maps at the time of travel because all travel was during my working hours. The difference in journey length was about 1.5 miles – costing about £0.68 at the time.
    When I asked her if I should take the shorter but slower route in future she never replied.

  141. Pangolin*

    Our office used to use way too much paper. holidays were calculated and recorded by hand on a bright orange sheet of paper (because otherwise they would fall into the black hole of clutter that was the CEO’s office never to be seen again). Only the operations manager was allowed to print the holiday sheets, no one else. And no one was allowed to have holiday approved if it wasn’t on the sheets. The start of every financial year was an absolute nightmare if you needed annual leave before the ops manager decided to get them printed and distributed – and she would add a day on to the wait every time she was asked about it

  142. Empress Matilda*

    My daughter’s teacher takes off points for handwriting. If she can’t clearly tell whether the student meant to write 5 or S, she docks a mark.

    Note: this is in MATH class. So the only place either a 5 or an S would appear is in the middle of an equation. And they’re in grade 8, so they’re not doing algebra. So in that case it’s not going to be anything other than a 5, right? SMH.

    1. K*

      There should be a whole post for petty teachers. There are ones I remember after 25 years, like:

      1. The 6th grade teacher who gleefully yelled at me in front of the whole class for turning in an essay (which I thought was quite good) where I struck out words instead of using whiteout. It was my first year writing with pens rather than pencils and it never occurred to me. Worst part was that I liked her a lot until then and she kind of knew it.

      2. The teacher who made me spend the whole day barefoot, walking on dirt and hot concrete, and being laughed at by everyone, because my shoes weren’t polished. (This was at a traditional Christian school, so it was par for the course that unpolished shoes got you into trouble, but the punishment was still a bit much.)

      1. JustSomeone*

        My horrid social studies teacher actively tried to derail my academic career at the end of my senior year of high school because I had the *absolute gall* to be a better student than a couple of her favorites. (For a bit of backstory, she was just barely out of college, she was the cheerleading coach, and she was VERY invested in being seen as a “cool kid.” She designed an award that she intended for one of her oh-so-cool cheer team members, but I won it instead.)

        My school had a rule that you absolutely, positively could not miss more than X days of school for any reason or you would automatically fail that semester. I got into a bunch of colleges and visited about 1/3 of them, and I also got pneumonia that semester. I got a special dispensation from the principle for going over my allotted days out, and she actually fought to have it revoked. The “compromise” was that I had to sit in detention and fill out extra worksheets for every hour of class I missed above the threshold. Each of my teachers had to actively make up extra work for me to do just to satisfy her petty desire to make me suffer. At least she didn’t succeed in making my repeat my senior year!

    2. Elenna*

      I think I started algebra in 8th grade? (in Ontario, Canada) But anyways a) who the heck uses S as a variable, and b) you should be able to tell by context anyways.

      1. Nina*

        a) Laplace, apparently, and s is also the unit symbol for seconds.
        But no, not really relevant for eighth graders.

    3. Dark Macadamia*

      I had a middle school teacher who measured the margins of our essays with a ruler and docked points if they were over one inch (the default on Word is 1.25″). She also once gave me a B on an assignment where we had to include a visual with a poem we wrote because she didn’t like how I formatted the visual. She made a very big deal of having detailed rubrics for “transparency” and nothing about my visual violated the requirements on the rubric.

      She also charged students for tissues (either a penny or a dime, I think). I know teachers often buy supplies for their classes out of pocket but this was an affluent district so I doubt she bought them herself! Still can’t stand her 20 years later lol

    4. Alex (they/them)*

      I had a middle school algebra teacher like that. The final straw was when I realized I had done some work on graph paper incorrectly, so I printed some new graph paper at home and redid the assignment. She docked points because I didn’t use HER graph paper.

      My mom had me moved to a different class.

    5. Merrie*

      I live in the Midwest, but was born in California and my parents went to college in Oregon. We moved to this area when I was in middle school. My 7th grade social studies teacher referred to Oregon and pronounced it “Ore-uh-gone”. Well, people who have lived there, like my parents, pronounce it Ore-uh-gun. So I raised my hand, politely corrected the teacher, and explained how I knew this. Her response–“Well, I’m going to pronounce it Ore-uh-gone.”

    6. Sorcyress*

      I teach math to English learners, including Algebra. Do you know how much global variation there is in writing certain numbers? It’s much more important to me to get my students to understand HOW to solve the equations then spend endless time and pettiness trying to get them to adhere to a certain “approved” way of writing 7 (or god forbid 1, which I swear I’ve seen at least four different and distinct versions of in the same class)

  143. Lizzy Lou*

    I worked for an association that provided CPE classes through Zoom. Part of my job was running tech for the classes. The organization purchased new computers and a giant smart TV so the instructors could more easily see the students. Prior to the smart TV we’d used another tv as a monitor. So the morning of I go downstairs to find the new set up with the instructor account running through the Smart tv and not through a computer like before. I do the class. Everything goes fine. I mention to my manager how much easier it is to use the Smart TV and she freaks out. “You’re not authorized to make equipment changes without permission! Why didn’t you ask? Why would you assume just because it was set up that was ok to use?!”

    I’m still like wwhhhaaaa?! About the whole thing. Gaslighting was rampant in that organization. I think I still have PTSD from it.

  144. Stay at home dog mom*

    Paperclips.
    I don’t know if this is about power, but it was definitely a quagmire.
    The business units were required to send paperwork to an imaging department for scanning and retention. Imaging department required all documents be separated with a paperclip. But the imaging department would not return the papers with the clips, or return the clips. We weren’t allowed to order more because there were thousands and thousands of paperclips, but the imaging department refused to give them back. Then business units would get reprimanded for not being on top of imaging – because they couldn’t find any paperclips. Round and round it went. This was over 20 years ago, and I still sometimes think I need to horde the darn things.

  145. Caz*

    The manager who would only authorise a stationery order once a month – and then later updated this to she would only authorise a stationery order in the first week of the month. After having too many instances of someone being on leave in that week and coming back to q printer with and empty cartridge (let’s face it, once was too many) everyone ordered a spare cartridge, at which point she wanted to know why there were so many cartridge orders (but did approve them to be fair.) Then of course the printers were replaced and we were left with a lot of useless cartridges and a lot of wasted money…but at least she hadn’t had to authorise any extra orders!

  146. CCC*

    If you needed new gloves, t-shirt, safety vest, etc. you had to bring the old ones back in where they would be scrutinized for if they really needed to be replaced or not. If you claimed to lose them, then you needed to get a form filled out by your boss saying you lost them and need new ones.

  147. a*

    My last boss had the security access panel to the entry door that was next to his office turned off so no one could use it. He didn’t want people walking by his window and staring at him all day. I’m the only one who has ever used that door.

    (He retired and the new boss has turned it back on. I’m still the only one who uses that door.)

  148. Phony Genius*

    We had an office manager who made you prove you had no working pens to get a new one. Most of the pens in storage dried up before they could ever be used since it was rare anybody could get a new one. So exactly what was saved by letting the extra pens become useless?

  149. Leelee*

    Oh my goodness, I have so many stories about the self-appointed Office Manager at my last job, we’ll call him Gary.
    We worked for a very well to do company, so money wasn’t an issue there. Nevertheless, if you wanted a cardboard box you had to ask Gary. Not so bad, right? Well you had to give Gary your reasons, and if he approved he would unlock his special cupboard and allow you one box. If you wanted a second box you had to bring the first one to him to show it had been filled up to his satisfaction.

    This was the same for *everything*. Pens, folders, tippex – anything that was small but necessary for an office you had to beg Gary for. Oh, and this included the First Aid Box. That’s right, if there was a medical emergency you had to convince Gary to give you the First Aid Box. He wasn’t even the First Aider, but clearly she (an ex-nurse) couldn’t be trusted with the box.

    One day I innocently asked my boss if she had access to Gary’s cupboard, if we ever needed something and he was away. She realised she did not – so asked him for a copy. He said no, he couldn’t ensure the security of the cupboard if anyone else could get in.
    She was the owner of the company. And the building. And the cupboard!

    Took her six months to get a key to the cupboard, and we snooped in it one day when he was out.
    He had emptied it. All contents gone, except for one pair of steel handcuffs that we didn’t dare touch.

    I left that job, but I do wonder about Gary sometimes and if his house is just piled high with small office items so no one else could ever have them.

  150. SQL Coder Cat*

    Oh, I have one. Fresh out of undergrad I was accepted into a PhD fellowship that involved rotating through several labs in my first term. The first lab on the rotation was very large, and one of the postdocs was in charge of checking everyone’s schedules to set up when our monthly lab meeting would be. When she got to me, I gave her my class schedule and mentioned that on the third Wednesday of the month, I needed to be done by 5pm so I could attend a club meeting. I got a fifteen minute lecture on how unprofessional that was, and when the meeting time was announced, it was the third Wednesday of the month- at 5pm.

    That was the first sign that this lab was banana crackers, but it definitely wasn’t the last.

  151. Alice*

    One of my old jobs spent over a million on a new and fancy office building, designed by a famous architect. This building had many issues but the biggest one was that, aside from the floor with the executives’ offices, it had no blinds and no curtains.

    For reasons unknown, the person in charge of ordering furniture and supplies was the head of marketing. A couple of days after we moved in, she stopped by my desk and I took the chance to ask about getting some curtains for the office. She said absolutely not, because they would ruin the “design look” of the office; besides, the architect had drawn the plans especially so that the sun would never shine directly inside the rooms and cause a problem. I don’t remember what I replied, I think I kind of motioned vaguely towards the window where the late summer sun was blazing in and preventing everyone from seeing their screens. It was no use, she refused to buy the curtains.

    Multiple people went to her in the next days, as really between 10am and 3pm it was impossible to get any work done if your office was on the sunny side of the building. Head of Marketing (whose office faced of course the other way) said it would be winter soon and then the problem would solve itself as the sun wouldn’t glare as much when it was lower on the horizon. I’m not sure she realized that seasons kind of repeat in a cyclic pattern.

    We made plans to buy curtains ourselves from Ikea, I think someone worked out it was 15€ per office for a total of 300€, but marketing found out and put a veto on bringing decor or furniture from home. We asked her to buy the curtains but she said they had no budget. This for a building that cost over a million in the first place!

    Eventually I lost my patience entirely and talked my office mate into breaking several health and safety regulations. He climbed onto a rolling chair, which I held as steady as I could, and we taped newspaper sheets all over the windows of our office. We had blessed shade and could see our screens again. People in other offices quickly took notice and covered their windows as well. Place looked like crap with all the windows covered like that. Marketing did… nothing. So much for caring about the look of the space. I left that job very shortly after (it was a mess for several reasons) so I don’t know if they have been allowed to have curtains now.

    1. Siege*

      I worked at a place that had been built in the 70s. It was a ring of offices around the outer perimeter of the floor, and then there was an aisle, and then everything else – kitchen, bathrooms, elevator shafts, cubicle farms, supply closets, etc. One woman (who had WAY outsized power) really wanted light through the building which the offices appeared to prevent.

      So we moved to another floor of the building, since demoing the offices would be insane with the org in place, and the new space was open-office. She did a lot of crappy things in that move, like deliberately putting the orgs that weren’t hers (there were like six spin-off arms of the org, some legally separate, others not, all small) in the worst parts of the building, like by the heavy door with the mag lock that thunked every time it closed, but the biggest and best was realizing part way through the buildout that actually, it sucked to get direct sunlight because of exactly the issue you mentioned (but because the worker was facing the sun – the new cubes only had one workable orientation so if you were against a window you faced that window). She immediately relocated everyone she liked to the north and south sides, and got those terrible semi-opaque blinds that look kind of like a roll of cling film for the windows, which sort of cut the light but not the heat. We went from moderately too little light to much too much light and heat, but everything about that job was awful and I have never been happier than when they fired me.

  152. Save Bandit*

    In a previous job, I supported two directors. There was one other director working in our office supported by a different admin. Our very small office consisted of a total of 7 people (a field office for a larger organization). Technically, each field office was required to have an “office manager,” but in actuality, there was little-to-no managing required. One of my directors designated himself the office manager, and proceeded to prey on my just-out-of-college naivete.

    As office director, he attempted to rescind long-standing, previously-approved time off when he learned that the other assistant would be out for one day during the course of my week-long vacation because, “Office managers are required to ensure phone coverage at all times.” (Thankfully my other director squashed that ridiculousness.) He also requested that I police the parking spots closest to the door because they were meant for visitors, and he did not like that the other directors would occasionally park there. He was constantly on me about making sure the office was neat and tidy, then got upset when I washed his coffee cup (which he’d left in the kitchen sink) because he “prefers to just rinse it and not wash with soap.” (nasty) He was bonkers in about a million different ways, but the office manager crap was typically the pettiest.

  153. Nellie*

    I worked at a place with an office manager who, during the time of economic belt tightening just after 9/11, decreed that the office wouldn’t pay for Tylenol or Motrin (as they always had before). He insisted that whoever needed it should go out and buy it. The closest pharmacy was a 5-10 minute walk each way. Add in time to make the purchase, and you were looking at 30 minutes of staff salary all to save $10 for a box of Tylenol. Never mind that if you’re suffering with menstrual cramps the last thing you’d want to do is go for a stroll.

  154. Lurker*

    Back in the late 90s I worked at a museum. Every month the receptionist would circulate the phone bill and each employee was supposed to look through and reimburse the museum for any personal long distance calls. (We each had a calling code, so it was fairly easy to tell which calls were whose — just not if they were business or personal.) I was the accounts receivable person so the reimbursements would come to me. Everyone would write a check except the Director of Marketing, who would pay in coins every month. It was so obnoxious. I don’t know if it was a passive aggressive form of protest or him just being a jerk.

    1. Anomallama*

      This reminds me of a sort-of work story. As a part of one of my jobs, we lived in apartments with other employees of the same non-profit. A majority of the employees came from another country (including myself), and so of course dealt with a lot of homesickness when arriving. This was back when internet was a dial-up thing through the phone, and we got charged by the phone company for the number of minutes the line was used. Two of us lived in that apartment for a number of years & watched many new people come in from another country & stay with us. Like clockwork, every time someone moved to the country our phone bill went up significantly for the next 2-3 months, until the new person a) got over homesickness a bit & b) learned the wisdom of using money-saving tricks (like signing off the internet when you wrote long emails & then signing back in just long enough to send). We both understood the feeling (as I mentioned, I was from another country as well, and the other person had lived abroad previously and knew what it was like), so we just shrugged & knew that we’d be paying a higher phone bill when we had someone newly in the country.

      So once we had a new roomie that decided we were spending too much money on the phone bill. I believe that someone had looked at our financial reports (on which we had to put living expenses, and from which they could see how much we spent from our salaries for this, that, & the other) & told her that we were spending too much because we had so little left at the end of the month. (The actual explanation was that we had less money than the other sites but similar expenses, but they didn’t want to believe that even though they could clearly see how much money we received compared to everyone else.) She decided that instead of us dividing the phone bill into 3 equal parts & everyone kicking in 1/3 (the way we’d always done it), we should each keep track of how much time we spent on the phone and each of us would pay for our use only. The two of us who’d been around for awhile shrugged & agreed that she’d only pay for her amt of phone usage (we preferred to just split the rest in half between the two of us rather than nickel & diming each other; she didn’t care about that as long as she didn’t pay a single penny more than what she owed).

      Well, this played out exactly how we expected. The two of us who’d been around for awhile had a tiny phone bill, & hers was… 2/3 of the full bill? 4/5? Whatever it was, it was a LOT more than our portion. She was kind of embarrassed, & no longer insisted on dividing it up. Which conveniently meant that we were continuing to subsidize her increased phone usage, but we didn’t care that much so it worked out.

  155. Allison Butler*

    Not really a story of petty power, but I love it so much. Our company had just installed a new keypad lock for the main entrance. It had 5 buttons where each button represented 2 different numbers…like how the number 3 on your phone represents D, E and F.

    Anyway, our office admin sent around an email with the new 4-digit code for the door. One of our nerd analysts then responded with all the other number combinations that would also open the door in case one of them was a number that was easier for you to remember.

    The office admin then sent a second email in ALL CAPS telling us NOT to use those other codes because we could break the lock and then we would be responsible to replace it.

    It’s been 20 years and I still laugh about it. Bless her heart, I’m not sure that she ever understood the issue.

  156. Ann O'Nemity*

    When revenue took a hit, the president created a Fiscal Committee to review ALL company expenses for approval. It started with the head of accounting plus three managers that represented the various other departments who would take about 45 minutes to review the weekly list of purchase requests. After a few months, it had ballooned to three hours a week with at least 10 people. And it wasn’t FOMO; employees realized the only way to get anything approved was to go in person and fight for it.

    My favorite battle was the $6 cookies. One of our preferred vendors had invoiced us for a $6 box of cookies, but no one had put in the required purchase approval form ahead of time. This egregious act of process circumvention was on the weekly agenda for weeks! At some point, I started estimating how much we were spending in salary to figure out who had purchased the cookies without getting approval. Turns out, an employee had actually paid the $6 himself; he was just trying to use the company’s negotiated discount and the cookie company had inadvertently invoiced the company.

    TLDR; we spent thousands in company salaries to investigate and get out of a $6 invoice.

  157. aunttora*

    The person who ordered supplies shook my mechanical pencil to confirm there were no additional leads in it, before she would order refills.

    1. Caz*

      You were allowed mechanical pencils? *le gasp* no lie, my organisation restricted the stationery ordering options so much that you could order one kind of pencil only…but could not order a pencil sharpener. (I went out and bought myself a set of mechanical pencils, and then guarded them fiercely.)

  158. Girasol*

    When I got married I dropped my middle name. I got screamed at by a furious HR rep when I returned from my just three days “or you’re FIRED!” honeymoon because “MIDDLE NAMES ARE A COMPANY POLICY!” That’s when Dad told me why his middle initial was “R” that sometimes stood for Robert and sometimes Richard but it really wasn’t any name at all. He had no middle name. He made up a middle initial when ordered by an employer to do so, and later, when just an initial wasn’t acceptable to some other employer, he just popped off with whatever name came to mind first.

    1. Alex (they/them)*

      my partner doesn’t have a middle name at all. wonder what they’d do with him.

    3. smilingswan*

      My mom legitimately has no middle name, and never has. Her parents never gave her one at birth. I wonder how that HR rep would react to her.

      1. Good Enough For Government Work*

        My nana didn’t either. She was the twelfth child (out of an eventual thirteen) and apparebtly her parents just… couldn’t think of any more girls’ names. So she was just Doris.

    4. Kayem*

      My grandfather had no middle name. At one point, some institution required he have one. I think it might have been his university required it for his diploma. So he just gave them the initial A and later kept having to come up with a name to match, which is why there’s a bunch of different spellings of it.

  159. Lady Blerd*

    I used to order the office supplies and because we were HR, we needed red pens in bulk to make corrections on paperwork as per our own regulations. So one day I send an order that included boxes of red pens and it was shut down by our office manager who didn’t think we needed them in a penny pinching measure. Luckily my boss took time from his busy day to respond. Ordering supplies where always an uphill battle. When I changed employment, I was handed the catalogue and told to get what I wanted and honestly, over a decade later I’m still not used to this.

  160. Siege*

    This is ongoing: one of the staff at my workplace was promoted last year to a new role that entails staffing an external committee. He’s started scheduling an agenda planning meeting for this external committee, which now has five staff (out of 12 total) on that meeting. (And we’re talking a one hour meeting twice a month, not our six-hour monthly board meetings.) Also, if he doesn’t like you he won’t really let you talk, but he also won’t really let you leave the meeting either. He wants to look VERY important.

  161. FORMERHigherEdPerson*

    I worked with collegiate student government for years, and OH the stories.
    1) Student gov president and friends were using funds set aside for leadership training to go get steak dinners at Ruths Chris. These were 20 year old yahoos who thought they were above policy because they were “leaders” and when I tried to hold them accountable, I was told that I had no say in how they spent university funds because they were in charge. Dudebro, you’re 20 and living in a dump frat house. Best of luck to ya.

    2) Student gov president FREAKED out when someone wrote her name and title as “Name, Student Government President” because “OMG, I’m not just President of this, like, club. I’m PRESIDENT OF THE WHOLE STUDENT BODY, and they are like totally disrespecting my leadership.” She insisted that we email every single department and remind them that she was like totally a legit president.

    3) Student gov leader (not the president this time) demanded that I set a meeting with the university president so that she could make a case for holding an in-person concert (3,000+ people) in May 2020. Yes, dear, the university president will totally make time to meet with you during the middle of a world pandemic to talk about why you should be allowed to have a drunken super-spreader festival on campus. When I told her “absolutely not”, she tried to go over my head and email my boss and my boss’s boss and they just laughed at her and redirected her back to me.

    1. Liane*

      Oh, I have a student government one. This is from the early 1980s in a public university in the States. That year Student Government Administration (SGA) had a lot of feuds going on in the Student Senate, within the Executive branch, and probably between the two. Please don’t ask me for the feud details after all these decades.

      All I can recall is one particular detail: There were several incidents – as reported in the university and city newspapers – of **SUGAR (yes, table sugar) being poured into the GAS TANKS of cars** belonging to several of these so-called “Student Leaders,” allegedly by either other SGA members or their supporters. As best I recall, no perpetrators were ever identified, much less punished.

      We non-SGA students joked – for that & many other good & bad reasons – that “SGA stands for STUPID Government Administration.”

      1. FORMERHigherEdPerson*

        LOL I can totally see this happening today. The level of drama that would happen for elections or in-group gossip was mind blowing.

  162. Salymander*

    In my family, we call people like this Disappointing Sausage.

    Someone who makes poor decisions that hurt others, is aggressive with anyone they think is smaller or weaker than they are, is simultaneously arrogant and mediocre, and gets really upset and offended by any consequences to their actions are a whole mix of unpleasant traits. When combined, these traits are so much worse than the sum of their parts. Like bad sausage. And so, Disappointing Sausage.

    That is the nickname of our cat, because she is a huge pain. We love her, but she is very annoying in the most adorable way possible. In cats, it is forgivable. In people, not so much.

    1. Salymander*

      Oh, I forgot what I was going to say!

      My former boss who had a fit because the toilet paper roll had to be started when you put on a new roll is one of these petty tyrant types. I wrote a few days ago about him. He would use the rest of the TP, then bring out the new roll and put it on my desk. I then had to go around to all our bathrooms and find the one with missing TP. Then, I had to unstick the first sheet of TP and fold it over to start the roll before putting it on the holder. We couldn’t keep extra TP in the bathroom where he could see it because he thought that was evidence that I was trying to get out of my very important TP duties. That is not what I was hired for, but whatever. I kept waiting for him to run out of TP before he was ready to… ahem… leave the bathroom… but sadly he never did.

      The other doctor I worked for didn’t want me to bring my school backpack in to the office. I was taking night classes, and had to go to class right after work. My backpack fit easily under my desk with room to spare, so it wasn’t in anyone’s way. He wanted me to leave my backpack full of textbooks and my laptop in the trunk of my car in the parking lot because he thought that if someone saw my backpack they would think of school. If they thought of school they might think I was taking classes. If they thought I was taking classes, they might think I would eventually graduate. If they thought that I might graduate, they might think that I could look for a new job. If they thought I might look for a new job someday, they might think that the medical practice could someday experience upheaval. Therefore, I was supposed to hide my backpack lest anyone think that the medical practice was going out of business.

      I actually loved that job. The people were so weird that it was constantly entertaining.

    2. Marieke Otten-van Eijk*

      I don’t know what it is about your phrasing but I’ve just realised that Mr. Collins, the preacher cousin from Pride and Prejudice, is a Disappointing Sausage!

      And it fits, he would totally hold off on giving your sticky notes because ‘His esteemed Patroness Lady Catherine deBourgh’ had warned him not to misappropriate company (parish?) funds.

      Anyway, sorry about the detour, thank you for the cat anecdote!

      1. Salymander*

        SHELVES IN THE CLOSET

        Yes, you are so right!!! Mr. Collins is the very embodiment of Disappointing Sausage. In the book, on tv adaptions, in the film adaptions. It is all Disappointing Sausage.

  163. Pumpkin215*

    I put in a request to purchase a mouse pad with kittens on it.

    My boss denied it because the “plain blue mouse pad is cheaper”.

  164. Alice in Pettyland*

    As a nonprofit, frontline fundraiser at a large organization, we were required to circulate an itinerary listing the details (location, time, attendees, purpose) of any donor/prospect meeting to a strictly internal distribution list of around 20 people – the thought being anyone with “background info” could chime in, and also for budget reimbursement justification. I had set up a day of meetings, the most important of which was a lunch with myself, one of our most important donors, and the head of our organization. My admin dutifully listed out my series of meetings for the day, and noted “head of organization will be joining for lunch with VIP donor” – the same wording we had used regularly over the years I had worked there.

    Less than 10 minutes later, my admin and myself received voicemail and emails from the head’s assistant, who was known to be extremely territorial and difficult to work with. The assistant insisted it was “disrespectful” that I had written the the head would be joining the lunch. Since the head was the most important, shouldn’t it read, rather, that I was joining the head of the organization’s lunch? The assistant was so frustrated that within an hour – before my admin or I responded – they also elevated the “issue” to my boss and insisted the internal-use-only itinerary be revised and resent with the wording change. And my boss agreed!!

  165. DNDL*

    In my first Library Assistant job on a ref desk, I was tasked with making things like trifold brochures, bookmarks, and flyers in Microsoft Publisher. The assistant branch manager had just gotten passed over for a promotion to branch manager (again), and was on a bit of a power trip. She wanted me to make a trifold flyer that contained book recommendations for some topical subject or another, and she wanted to approve every aspect of this thing before printing. Not just book selections, but every single little thing from how the book title, author, and call number were formatted to the size of each book cover image and its placement next to the one sentence blurb about the book. Most ridiculously was the font. I always tried to use fonts and sizes that were friendly to low-vision consumers (most of our readers were seniors), but she thought those were too boring and she kept demanding I would change the font.

    Here is the kicker: she wouldn’t approve a font unless the entire document was formatting to her liking, meaning no words hyphenated across lines. This meant I had to choose a font for approval, format the entire document, and then present the product for approval. Then she would decide she didn’t like the font, demand I change it, and give no input to what that font must be. So I would need to pick a new font, but not all fonts are sized the same. Which meant I had to go back through, reformat the entire document again (making sure there were no hyphenated words or extra spaces), and then present the document again for approval. And again she would dislike the font.

    She made me work on the same trifold brochure, presenting 10 different versions with 10 different fonts, for something like three hours. Finally I went over her head to the branch manager and said this micromanaging needed to stop. The branch manager agreed this was a waste of staff time, picked a font, and had some words with the assistant manager.

  166. Beancat*

    I worked at a local arcade-type place and we had a family pay to have a party at our establishment. They paid for everything, brought their own cake (as we didn’t offer them), and asked if we happened to have any candles as they’d forgotten them. I checked and apologetically reported we had none. They said that was fine and had their party.

    Later I mentioned to my boss it might be nice to keep a small box of candles in case someone forgets theirs, and explained the situation. He whipped around and turned on me, “you would have GIVEN them those candles for FREE?!” Reminder that we did not have candles for me to provide – it was the mere idea of giving candles to a family who had already paid hundreds to host their child’s birthday party at our place.

  167. H*

    Coworker put in a vacation request. Requests required a “reason” (already a red flag). Coworker put down training as she was taking a work relevant course (and paying out of pocket for it). Admin denied the request. Coworker crossed out training, put “having lots of sex with my husband” and resubmitted. It was approved.

    1. H*

      Forgot to add that there was some weird policy about not using vacation days for training, which is why it wasn’t originally approved.

  168. Grrrr*

    I worked at a tea house that was usually staffed by two people. One would make the tea & deal with payments, and the other one was a server. Making the tea was the “higher” job – easier and more popular. However, it was quite casual and everybody knew both parts of the job. Usually, people would take turns during the shift so each person would get to sit down (while making the teas) and stretch (while serving). I was feeling really bad one day with my period and was already several hours into a shift serving, and I asked to switch. The new employee refused to switch even for an hour because it was below him to be a server. Have I mentioned that he was the brother-in-law of the owner? Have I mentioned I still had to be helping him with some of the teas since he was new (we had 100+ kinds)? [Older me is like: I should have just walked out saying I am too sick to work – but younger me suffered physically and emotionally over this the rest of the shift.] Grrrr.

  169. irene adler*

    Our lab did not have enough chairs for each person in the lab. At times I had to sit on my knees to perform my lab work. Getting chairs was not hard; we used task chairs with wheels that can be purchased at most office furniture stores.
    We put in a request for more chairs.
    Denied. No money.
    One day, I came across a church that was selling office furniture. Very reasonable prices too. Apparently, one of their members repossessed office furniture and he donated a lot of good-quality, lightly used furniture for the church to sell to raise funds.

    I purchased four task chairs that looked new and would fit our needs. $50 total. A steal!
    Brought them to the lab and put them to use. Everybody happy!

    When my boss saw the new chairs, he asked where they were from. I explained.

    He then made me put all four chairs into the dumpster out back. He flat-out refused to let us use these chairs.

    Reason: the chairs did not come with any warranty so he didn’t want the liability of anyone injuring themselves on these chairs.
    (Never mind that the chairs we were using in the lab were 40 years old and the backs would come off if you tugged too hard on the chair to roll it. )

    1. betty f*

      You bought them, so how does he have the right to make you throw them away? I’d have taken them back and donated them at least.

  170. Thistle & Rose*

    I was a contractor for a social service agency. I didn’t report to the director or the assistant director, I reported to the county executive who was like the assistant director’s great-great-great-grand boss. The director was my go-to person for on the ground questions but fundamentally I did not report to any of them. The AD did NOT like that. I was there to install and train staff on security software. And I was only in the office three days a week anyway. When I was there she’d leave heaps of filing on my desk and transfer calls to the phone on my desk. I asked her why she did those things because my contract prevented me from engaging in their daily duties and she said I needed to be useful and do “more than play in an iPad all day”. I ignored her.

    One day it snowed badly and our driveway at the time was a private dirt road that was made impassable by snow until our landlord cleared it, about a full mile (old farm). I notified the office that I’d be working from home because of the storm, my landlord said he’d get to us when he could. There was a tree down covered in snow across the dirt road that wasn’t visible so he said to be cautious and not drive until he cleared it. The director was snowed in at their home as well and the AD was in charge for the day at the office.

    An hour after I called, the AD shows up at my door, looking like she walked (in heels and office attire) a mile in 18 inches of snow and ice. Her car was caught on the downed tree. Apparently after I called the office to notify I was WFH, AD had a hissy fit and said (to the other staff, not me) if I wasn’t there in an hour I was fired (she can’t do that) and then decided to “go get” me (can’t do that). She did and totaled her car on the downed tree, broke the axel and damaged the chassis. She was hysterical by the time she got to my house and soaked through. I had to give her dry clothes and warm her up and put up with her for two hours before the road was cleared and her husband could come get her.

    The next day she tried to tell the director and the county executive I had called and asked her for a ride, that I had begged her to come get me. Don’t know where she is now, but I finished out the contract with her still on admin leave. I’ve had a great relationship with the county ever since and I don’t even think she lives in the same area anymore.

  171. Three Goblins in a Trench Coat*

    I worked at a medical library where we had to request even the smallest of office supplies using a purchasing request. I put in an order for a pack of two erasers one day (that maybe cost $2.50) and the pushback was immediate and out of proportion. I was told I didn’t need erasers because I managed databases and didn’t have to write anything down (yes, Jan, I just want the erasers to bounce of my desk for giggles). I stood my ground. It was the principal of the thing. Two meetings with my micromanaging department head later, I did finally get them but with the stern warning not to abuse my position to spend money frivolously. EVERY request was like this. Unsurprisingly I didn’t stay very long.

  172. KateDee*

    When I first started at a big company, I was an admin. One of my colleagues was one level above me, doing some basic analysis. Due to her rank, she decided she was my boss (she was not). One time, her printer became unplugged when the cleaners vacuumed, so she called me over to ‘assist her urgently’. She expected me to climb under her desk and plug her printer back in. I was eight months pregnant, she was a fit and healthy mid forties woman.

  173. Cheddaronrye*

    I work for the wealthiest university in the world, managing a multi-million dollar budget. A few months into the pandemic, after we were still being told that we needed to pay for our own office supplies while we worked from home, a bunch of my colleagues started pushing back, stating basic office needs like printing out visa paperwork on letterhead or payroll reports (which we are for some reason still required to physically print out for record-keeping). We were told we were saving money on our commutes so it really shouldn’t be a big deal for us to buy our own printers and paper, since if they were at our houses our family members would surely use the printer too for personal use. And then asked why we really needed to print at all.

    Also, as part of my job I make all the financial decisions for the department–if I wanted to buy a new $2000 laptop, for example, I could order one without asking permission and the purchase wouldn’t be scrutinized in any way. But if anyone (well, any STAFF member, faculty can do whatever the hell they want) wants to purchase the least expensive ipad, even if it’s in lieu of replacing a more expensive laptop, the request needs to go through four-levels of approval with a 3-week to a month turn-around. The bureaucracy shouldn’t surprise me at this point, but it seems like every week a new rule appears that forces me to jump through hoops for the most simple thing, while at the same time no one blinks at dropping $5000 in catering for a 90-min event.

  174. New Senior Mgr*

    Small start up nonprofit, our CEO assigned ordering office supplies to the small hospitality committee of 2 members. The most senior member started keeping the toilet paper at her desk and everyone would have to go to her directly to ask for a roll before heading to the restroom. *serious eye roll* I started bringing and keeping my own in my purse. And began looking for a new job.

  175. ElizabethJane*

    Our accountant will stick to the letter of the rules out of spite, even if it costs more money.

    I traveled for a customer meeting (pre Covid). I took the train rather than driving. I don’t especially like driving and it was cheaper than the mileage reimbursement. I also realized I could cut out a night of hotel stays by taking a late train back. But if I did that I wanted to park in the premium parking garage rather than the extended garage several blocks and a shuttle ride away. Something about arriving to the train station at 2 am and wanting my car close by….

    So I go to the accountant and say I want to park in the premium garage for $50 a night since it’s so close but I need pre approval. It will be $75 for the garage for 1.5 days, $80 for train tickets, and $130 for the hotel for one night. About $285 total.She says no, absolutely not, we don’t park in the premium garage.

    OK, fine, It’s now $75 for the garage for 2.5 days, $100 for the train ticket because I’m not getting a discount for the redeye, and $260 for the hotel since I need two nights. We’re now up to $450 ish, including the two extra meals I now need since I won’t be home for breakfast or lunch on my travel day.

    But it’s a good thing I didn’t park in the premium garage.

    1. ThursdaysGeek*

      My spouse works for a government contractor, and they are not allowed to extend a work trip to take advantage of cheaper rates, because it will look like the government is paying for them to have a vacation day.

      So, trip that needs to go from Monday to Friday? Fine. Extend it by one day where the savings in flight costs more than covers the extra cost of hotels and food? No. Even if we offer to pay the extra hotel and food costs, since we’re now on our own time? No. It’s better to LOOK like you’re being responsible with money than actually being responsible with money.

      1. Empress Matilda*

        Yep. I once saw a colleague drive for 6 hours instead of flying for 2 hours because the mileage was cheaper than the flight. She could have flown in and out the same day, but the long drive meant she needed a travel day on either end. So the trip cost two days driving instead of working, two nights in a hotel, and three sets of meals, when it could been one travel day plus meals, no hotel, and two days working in her office instead of driving.

        But, you know. The mileage!

        1. Alice*

          Yep, my brother’s company keeps sending him to a place that is one day’s driving away. (He’ll be with a coworker and they take turns driving.) It boggles my mind that they won’t buy plane tickets, just the cost of two extra nights at a hotel and two extra travel days per person is insane compared to flying.

    2. ArtK*

      I like to take the train, and there’s one that goes directly from near me (Los Angeles) to near work (San Francisco.) Our automated travel booking system insists that I take a different train that requires two legs by bus. Because that route is $20 cheaper and slightly faster. Whenever I book, I have to call the agents directly to get a reasonable ticket.

    3. Lisa N Morton*

      Accounting at my old job insisted that we get the cheapest available flights in our region, even if that meant I had to fly out of an airport 40 miles away instead of the one accessible by local transit. The fact that the cab & train fare to get to & from that airport cost twice as much as the savings on the flights just did not compute, no matter how many times I tried to argue with them about it.

  176. HR Exec Popping In*

    Years and years ago I had a manager who developed her own expense policy above and beyond the company’s official expense policy. The official policy was fairly liberal but gave some general guidance on things. For example, you would need a receipt for anything over $20. Bad-manager required it for everything and would not approve expenses that didn’t meet their “rules”. The most ridiculous one was that this cheap manager wouldn’t reimburse for tips in excess of 15% because they felt that anything more than that was excessive and wasteful. So they would do the math and my expenses would be rejected and I would have to submit a dollar or a few cents here and there to be under their randomly selected limit. The funny thing is this was a VP who had a ton of power. But they made the choice to use that power on this ridiculous expense stuff. A multi-million dollar contract with a vendor we don’t need? No problem. Over staffing on a stupid project? No problem. But sure, I’ll reimburse the company $1.18 for that “over-tip”. Shesh.

    1. Hedgehog O'Brien*

      I had a VP who was exactly like this. Spend $50K on advertising (over budget) we don’t need for a product that’s already selling very well? Sure. Spend a few hundred dollars on a piece of equipment our department desperately needs or professional development for longtime employees? Let’s see your business proposal.

  177. Some “dog” people give other dog people a bad name*

    Not workplace related, but so in line with this theme! I enrolled my rescue pup and myself in a series of training classes for dog-reactive dogs and the petty tyranny of the trainer was so ridiculous that I dropped out after two sessions. Trying to relay the incident that made me decide not to return will probably make me sound nuts, too, because it’s ridiculous, but I will try:

    As I was trying to move my dog from one place to the other at the trainer’s direction and already had treats in my hand to assist, she stopped me and spent 10 minutes lecturing me about using a plastic baggie inside my treat pouch because it would take me too long to get treats out and make it harder for me to control my dog…silly enough since she herself had recommended plastic baggies in the first session to keep things organized since we needed a variety of treats for class, but the kicker is that she stopped me and my (150 pound, new to me, formerly abused and untrained) dog a couple feet away from another person and their dog who was frantically trying to get to mine, both dogs snarling and barking, and the trainer snapped at me to “just hang on” when I tried to move away because I “needed to know the right way to store my training treats.”

    Longest ten minutes of my life as my giant dog was absolutely apoplectic and trying to tear my arms off to attack another dog who was doing the same. Thankfully the other person was able to get their dog far enough away but mine couldn’t calm down after it so class was miserable.

    When I told her at the end of that class that I didn’t think the class was for us (after seeing her give similar bizarrely irrelevant lectures to other students and generally waste our time, at one point she told us all we needed to be nicer to her), she refused to let me leave the building by blocking the door and putting her hand up in a “stop” motion and yelled at me about how I signed an agreement that I would attend every class so I wasn’t allowed (!) to drop out. It was so stressful it eventually made me cry because she was getting more belligerent and insisting my dog wasn’t going to be able to go to any training class anywhere else! (I had prepaid and wasn’t asking for a refund, so I’m still not sure why she was so angry that I wasn’t going to keep coming to class!) Thankfully, I escaped and we eventually enrolled in a series of classes elsewhere and had a blast and my pup made amazing progress!

    I have spent a lot of time volunteering for various animal related organizations so I recognize that dog (or cat!) people can occasionally just be really, really bad with people while being caring for the animals themselves, and I’ve heard lots of stories about petty tyrants working with animals in addition to my own, but there was something about this woman that still haunts me.

      1. Some “dog” people give other dog people a bad name*

        No, but I am weirdly comforted to know that other horrible trainers like this exist (but I and very sorry if you’ve experienced one like this yourself). I mean, I know it isn’t my fault, but she made me feel like I was never going to be able to help my dog even though I have a lot of experience with reactive and fearful dogs through my volunteer and foster work.

        Wish I could name and shame to help others avoid her but I wrote a fairly sedate but honest Yelp review and she replied with several paragraphs that contained a lot of lies and vitriol and it was almost enough to make me remove my review.

        1. Salymander*

          Oh goodness. I had one like this for my dog. He kept mansplaining things, even things unrelated to dogs. He asked me if I went to university, and berated me for “wasting taxpayer dollars” when I said I did. You know, because women don’t need to have an education. He kept telling me that my dog would disrespect me but not my husband or the instructor because “women are short and have higher voices than men.” I am taller than he is, and taller than husband. My voice is deeper than either of theirs. My dog was actually really well trained and calm, he was just head shy from abuse before I got him. That was the reason we were going to a trainer who was supposedly good with abused animals. He never even worked with the dog, he was too busy talking about himself and berating me for the faults of all women everywhere. We didn’t pay him, and we walked out.

          We ran into him a year or two later at a public event, and I had fun watching him behave like a jackass and get told off and moved along by what looked like a security guard.

    2. Respectfully, Pumat Sol*

      I had a somewhat similar experience with a feral cat rescuing lady – she berated me over the phone after we called her and told her that we didn’t need her services anymore since I had managed to capture the kitten she had been called about. She went ON AND ON about how no shelter would take her or help us since she had a severe leg injury and that it was going to be SOOOOOOO EXPENSIVE. I eventually just hung up on her because it was so ridiculous – we had already indicated to her that we were willing to take financial responsibility for the kitten’s care.

    3. Chauncy Gardener*

      OMG. As a person who has rescued multiple traumatized dogs, WTF???? Really, WT actual F????

  178. ArtK*

    “Pleasant it is for the Little Tin Gods
    When great Jove nods;
    But Little Tin Gods make their little mistakes
    In missing the hour when great Jove wakes.”

    A Germ-Destroyer (Rudyard Kipling)

  179. Rip*

    I might have the guac beat. The travel office (state government) got on me about not having an itemized receipt for a $1.12 donut.

    2. Panicked*

      “I bought a doughnut and they gave me a receipt for the doughnut; I don’t need a receipt for the doughnut. I’ll just give you the money, and you give me the doughnut, end of transaction. We don’t need to bring ink and paper into this. I just can’t imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut.” -Mitch Hedberg

  180. houseplant champion*

    I once had a big box retail boss who HATED me and would hide in adjacent aisles to listen to how I spoke to customers. I’d get disciplined for saying “No problem!” and “We don’t have it in store but I can place an order and have it shipped to you”. He demanded “my pleasure” because “no problem makes customers feel bad.” And I was supposed to “order it from the warehouse” so customers wouldn’t make the connection that I was just placing an order on the main company’s website… even though I’d walk them over to the kiosk and do exactly that right in front of them. Yes, corporate had had its thing… but I was one of the top-performing associates and my direct manager LOVED me.

    My first day working with him he made me do inventory for a department that was NOT mine and ONLY supposed to be performed by members of that department due to it being items that were high-risk for theft. I did not know how to do this inventory, spent my shift nearly crying from frustration, he tried to not let me leave at the end of my shift (I did anyway) and I learned my next shift from the boss who loved me that Bad Manager had to spend 2.5 hours late in the store that night doing the inventory himself. Serves him right.

  181. Alessia*

    I worked for a company that had a basically unlimited budget for office supplies. Despite being able to order whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, people went to battle over task chairs in their cubicles. It became a THING. People would create a hierarchy over chairs. Lower level employees didn’t get a second chair automatically- they had to acquire one through theft or promotion. As you climbed the ladder, the chairs got nicer. I was once given an old leather task chair from a VP and it was promptly stolen with the week. A stern warning was left on my desk that I was choosing a chair that didn’t fit my station. Again, this was a company where anyone could order any chair they wanted and it would be approved. It was absolutely bananas.

    1. Can’tAdultToday*

      I think I’d have picked a lovely expensive high-hierarchy chair and have my name embroidered on it.

      Not my chair??? Has to be, my names right on it!

  182. Liz*

    Current employer is great in many ways but VERY stingy on expenses.

    I recently bought some herbal tea for the office kitchen as a couple of our staff and one regular client drink it. I put in for £3.60 worth of expenses to cover 2 boxes, and it was refused. Turns out they don’t reimburse for herbal tea – just plain, bulk-bought builders tea, instant coffee, and sugar. Anything else, you buy it yourself. But that client still drinks my herbal tea.

    1. Curmudgeon in California*

      Instant coffee? Ewwwww.

      I worked one place where the coffee supplied was … awful. So my boss and I got our own coffee pot and good coffee. It was interesting watching the marketing people trying to cadge some of our coffee.

  183. Karon*

    Years ago in one of my first jobs, I had a conversation on the phone with a woman from another department. I was about the most junior level of the company as I could be, so she outranked me though she wasn’t a director or a manager. We had what I thought was a perfectly pleasant conversation until the department secretary pulled me aside afterward. She said the woman I spoke to had called her to complain because I said the word “yeah” at some point in our conversation. She wasn’t complaining about my tone or my attitude but that I used the word “yeah” instead of the word “yes”. She thought it was not appropriate for the workplace. After we hung up, she called the department secretary to complain.

    I was mortified. At work I usually speak very formally, and I have never had any complaints about the appropriateness of my speech before or since. I just got so comfortable during our conversation, the word “yeah” had slipped out.

    The department secretary was very kind and implied that the complainer tended to be rather nitpicky and told me to just be careful.

    I think I had a little cry in the bathroom afterward. In general I was probably pretty emotional at the time, and I was so horrified at being brought to task and at the fact that I would have to police my conversation so carefully in case someone pounced on any mistakes I made in the future.

    1. Salymander*

      Being that nitpicky is just mean. The Dickensian abusive cult boarding school I went to would police our language that way because saying yeah isn’t ladylike. They were kicked out of about 6 states that I know of, and raided and deported from Mexico by the friggin Mexican Army. Maybe this mean coworker was one of the vicious, terrifying ogres that worked for that school. What a jerk. I am so sorry this person was so mean.

      1. Karon*

        Awww thank you! I felt sorry looking back on long-ago-me feeling ambushed by nitpicky coworker.

        Your boarding school sounds horrific. I hope you weren’t there long. I wasn’t based in the US or Mexico, but in a totally different country so coworker wasn’t from there. Kinda crazy the small details some people feel need aggressive policing.

    2. N C Kiddle*

      My one and only office job was in debt management and we would often have clients who felt really bad about the financial trouble they were in. I felt like an important part of the job was reassuring them and building a rapport, so one day when a client said something about how horribly disorganised she was, I said that was nothing to feel bad about and she should see the state of my desk. No sooner was I off the phone when the team lead (a bone idle twit with no actual power) started ticking me off for being “unprofessional”. This same team lead used to tell clients he didn’t know why we’d called them because he couldn’t work out how to scroll down and see the thorough case note I’d left on the system the previous day, so you can imagine I wasn’t impressed with that claim.

      1. Karon*

        Ugh some people seem to equate “unprofessional” with “acting like a normal human being”. I can relate with you having to work with someone who is fixated on silly, minor details while letting major issues slide.

  184. WFH Corp Mom*

    I had a supervisor who once questioned my need for a calculator (literally a generic $2 solar calculator) and asked “can’t you share?” Keep in mind that the sales team had NO sample budget, and we would routinely have lunch purchased for meetings, travel budgets, etc. Just a weirdly crazy nitpicking of personal supplies.

  185. noncommital pseudonym*

    Along the lines of Guacamole Bob, I once led a month-long field trip to Hawaii for about 10 people, and had to provide all of the receipts for everything we purchased during the entire time. I got told off for buying about $10 worth of chocolate bars. I even pointed out that we were doing physically demanding work at high elevation, and a quick sugar source was important in case anyone felt faint, but no. I had to reimburse them from my own pocket. The same CFO once questioned me if I really *needed* to buy all of that sterile plastic stuff for the lab. Yes. Yes, I do.

    The CFO got let go about a month later for doing the same kind of nitpicking on the Director of Research, despite the fact that the DoR had backed the CFO when she was questioning me. I guess it’s OK to go line by line over a month’s worth of receipts for me, but now to question the DoR.

    1. Rainy*

      It’s amazing how often people are fine with it happening to you, but once it happens to them they’re not okay with it at all.

  186. Liz*

    A job I had one summer while in college. It was in the office of a distributor for air conditioning units and parts. This was back in the 80’s, when the I-9 form was brand new. I had lost my social security card, so, as stated on the form, I brought in my passport. Only to be told by whoever it was processing the form that no I MUST have my SS card as that was what mr. so and so, the president said. I nicely pointed out I didn’t have it, adn that the FORM said a passport was also official. she kept repeating herself as did I and she finally, begrudgingly, accepted it. Never heard a word from the president! My guess is he said that would be ok, but didn’t mandate that was the ONLY form of ID.

    same job, and one day I drank a lot of water, adn was asked by another woman, not my boss, and not that high up, if I was ok, as she had noticed my frequent trips to the ladies room, and cautioned me that it “didn’t look good” that I was going that often.

    And then my first job out of college, as which I only stayed for 6 months, which was about 5.5 months too long! no talking among the employees as we filed, at all. Not even, hi how are you? but the best part was, we ALL had to be at our desks in the morning, seated, when over the PA system you would hear “it is now 7 oclock” and then the same an hour later. if you were not at your desk, you were late. And at the end of the day, we would all be sitting at our desks, and couldn’t leave until it was announced “it is now 4 o’clock” absolutely ridiculous how we, as adults were treated.

  187. Murphy*

    A few of us in my department are responsible for reviewing and assigning work to other staff, but technically aren’t managers. We have a manager (who manages a program, not people) in our department who loves reminding us of this.

    I sent them some updates on staff work responsibilities so they could update the official document. I upgraded a few people’s permissions to “with manager”. There’s a key on this document defining “with manager” to include people in my position. What’s more is that this manager knows full well that reviewing this type of work is a task I’m currently doing 100% by myself. They responded what I meant by “with manager?” “Do you mean that [two unrelated managers who would never ever do this type of work] are reviewing all of those items?” As in, it couldn’t possibly be me because it said “with manager.” Because I’m not.

  188. Zellie*

    At my previous job, one person was tasked with managing keys. She was in security (for our department only) and took it very seriously. My group was moved to a new building. Staff had large cubicles that backed up to each other – think two cubicles with no walls, just the desk touching and you are back-to-back with your co-worker. Since we had a smaller staff, some were able to use both cubicles. For our work, the extra space was needed and they weren’t squished together. Faculty/team leads had offices.

    It was understandable that you would sign for an office key. But, we also had to sign for the desk keys. Yes, those little, bitty keys that lock desk drawers. And, the staff that got to use two cubicles couldn’t have the key to the second cubicle because it “wasn’t theirs.”

    They also refused to open the building before the official start time, so anyone who got there early to beat traffic had to wait in their car. The code for the alarm system was only given to the people who opened (early shift) and closed (late shift). So, when the opener was on vacation and my co-worker entered the building, she set off the alarms. The security person (the same one who controlled the keys) wasn’t available (and didn’t even work in the building), so she just sat in her office and waited for the campus police, because you know, she didn’t have the code to disarm the alarm system.

    1. La Triviata*

      oh, wow … this brings back some memories … at old terrible job, we had flextime (sort of) and some of us came in early. The nitpicking manager – second person in the hierarchy (and believe me, those hierarchies were rigid) didn’t come in early – more like 9:00am. We had a lock outside the front door for the security system, which only the top person and the nitpicking manager had. There was also a lock for the actual door, which everyone had the key for. One morning the early people came in and found that office management had replaced the wallpaper in the hallway; somehow, they had taken off the plate around the security lock and replaced it wrong. Those of us on the early shift couldn’t get into the office without setting off the alarm, since none of the early people were allowed to have keys to the security system. After waiting for about half an hour, a bunch of us said, basically, the hell with this – we’re not going to stand around in the hallway for however long it takes nitpicking manager to get in, so someone unlocked the door and we surged in. The alarm went off. The next person came in and the alarm went off again. Went on for quite a while, nitpicking manager got a bunch of calls from the security company – who’d been alerted when the alarm started going off. It ended up with after close to an hour of the alarm going off over and over and over and nitpicking manager having to field calls to his personal phone he turned up, turned off the alarm, told the security company it would never happen again … and gave all the early people keys to the security system.

  189. Sled dog mama*

    In my job I do a lot of quality control of products pre-delivery. Sometimes I get the product well in advance of the delivery date and sometimes I don’t get it until right before, due to Reasons so tasks can be billed on the same day and some cannot. We use a software that has a task pad for workflow. My taskpad shows client, due date, task and has a space for further comments (usually something like this one is priority per person X or client specified something out of the ordinary). There is one person on the delivery side who apparently takes great glee in pointing out when I haven’t gotten something done. She will send an email across the entire delivery chain stating that client Y’s product is not finalized on Monday (before I arrive at the office) when delivery isn’t scheduled until end of Tuesday or even Wednesday. Sometimes this is because I didn’t get the product in time to finish on Friday but most often it’s because I was finishing up work that would be delivered on Monday.
    I wouldn’t mind if she emailed just me but the emails to everyone are so unnecessary.

  190. PivotPivot*

    I once had a 1 cent discrepancy between my travel expenses submission and my receipts (software rounded up). I was called in to explain this. I couldn’t. But, I did say, I will give you a penny to make this go away.

    They conceded defeat and left me alone.

    2. UKDancer*

      In my previous company I put in an expenses claim for visiting an EU country which used the Euro. I used the exchange rate in effect at the time I submitted the claim (which was the day I got back, say a Tuesday). In the time between it going into her email inbox and my boss signing it off on the Thursday the rate changed very slightly and my boss told me I should have used the correct rate from the day she signed it off.

      I wasn’t sure how she expected me to know what the rate would be 2 days after I sent her the form and use this but never mind. Also the difference was so marginal it amazed me she’d bothered checking the rate.

      1. La Triviata*

        Seemingly, when 50 Cent had performed in Israel, his name was translated into shekels.

      2. Dragon*

        When my current firm got an online expense report system, people asked if it would automatically convert foreign currency using the exchange rate on the day of the transaction. It does.

        At one previous firm, we had to look up the daily exchange rate on a currency converter website when doing foreign travel expenses.

    3. Little Miss Sunshine*

      Finance rejected one of my expense reports because on my copy of a restaurant receipt I only wrote the total including tip. I had to write in the tip amount (to show my work on the math problem?) and rescan the receipts and resubmit.

  191. Purple Cat*

    Early 2000’s I worked in Finance for what is now a Fortune 100 company.
    When we submitted our monthly result “books” to Corporate they had to be printed in color and then spiral bound. The executive assistant would measure the margins to make sure they were correct.

  192. Lolo*

    Happened to a coworker, not me. I used to work in an office that was housed in a building where each office was independent, but used the same janitorial service. We had one of those top-loading water coolers with the giant 5-gallon jugs. My coworker would regularly fill his water bottle there and always assumed the janitorial staff put the new jug on, since he never saw anyone do it and it would regularly get replaced (if he ever thought about who replaced the jug in the first place). One late afternoon (right before closing), the water jug was extremely low but he had enough to refill his bottle and left the dispenser with the low water jug. Our old manager comes out of her office and yells at him for “not noticing the water was low” (of course he noticed, he just assumed it wasn’t his job to refill) and “how could he expect to succeed in [our field] if he couldn’t even pay close attention to the water cooler” and she replaced it herself. Him and I both never understood why she couldn’t just politely inform him that actually, we replace our own jug, and instead made it about his “lack of attention to detail.” Was par for the course for her but definitely a weird power trip.

  193. urguncle*

    A former boss was relieved of bosserly duties and reassigned because of a general inability to cope with having power over others. They were then asked to help another employee out on a training presentation, which the former boss then required multiple rounds of revision on, for absolutely no reason other than adding/removing the odd sentence or changing a comma.

    1. Curmudgeon in California*

      LOL. I have a coworker at my current gig who is like that on code reviews. I get tempted to deliberately leave a typo in the docs just to give him something to correct.

  194. Nobody’s Lackey*

    Started a new job as a Director in a small corporation. I knew my boss was intense, but was also brilliant and I wanted to rise to whatever levels were set before me and felt confident I would. About that time, the office manager sent around a memo about the waste of styro cups and asked us to bring in our own coffee mug. I brought in an old MENSA mug. It was on my desk every day all day for a couple of weeks until my boss noticed it, grabbed it, and said “Does this mean what I think it means?!?” I said it did and I had been a member for years. I was then asked if anyone else had noticed it to which I said I had no idea. I was instructed to remove it from my office immediately and bring in a different mug. SMH.

    1. NeutralJanet*

      Kind of wondering if maybe MENSA didn’t mean what he thought it meant? Is there something offensive that has a similar name? Or was he just angry that you were a member of MENSA?

      1. Nobody’s Lackey*

        Boss was female. She was upset that I was an actual member. You’d think she’d be pleased to have someone like that on her team, but no. Undermined me every chance she could in every possible way.

  195. LegalEagle*

    I had a boss who demanded to be cc’d on every single email I sent. She also refused to give me access to the main email so when we would send out email blasts, I’d write them out, send them to her, she would send out the blast and then forward me every single response to the email blast, which I would then respond to from my email. Wildly inefficient, but it just wouldn’t have worked to give me access to the main email, in her eyes. I collected the email addresses into a list and took it when I left, out of spite.

  196. sofar*

    Right after college, I was temping (admin work) at a small midwestern property management business that managed stripmall properties. I think thought it was a HUGE flex for them to be able to finally afford a temp admin.

    The President for some reason decided he was going to forward every email he received to me, and write in the message, “pls forward to so-and-so ASAP” (so-and-so often being someone AT the company of fewer than 10 employees). Why he didn’t just forward the email to so-and-so himself, I’ll never know. Whether delegating such task felt powerful to him, or he literally didn’t understand how email worked, who can say? In any case, I was to forward all emails within 30 minutes of receipt, whether I was at lunch, running an errand off-site or in the back room filing. At the 31-minute mark, he’d walk into the main office area, ask the intended recipient whether they had received the email and, if not, would lecture me.

    One time, at the 31-minute mark, this happened, but I knew I hadn’t received the email to forward (I’d been at my desk refreshing my inbox every five minutes for the past hour). When I told the President I had never received the email, he did not believe me. So I asked him to pull up his email so I could see the “sent” email. He did not know how to do this, so I showed him and, turns out, the email had bounced back, since there was a typo in the email address. He’d sent it to admn@stripmallpropertymanagement instead of admin@stripmallpropertymanagement

    Why he was typing out the recipient email address BY HAND, I’ll never know.

    He was also constantly confused by blatant spam, sending me spam messages he’d received (in general and via the “contact us” form on their website) with “Pls follow up with this.” If I responded, “I think that’s spam,” that was not deemed acceptable.

    After that temp job. I spent months signing up his email address for every single spammy newsletter and mailing list under the sun and sending absolute garbage through the form on their website. This was in the days before email spam filters were robust enough, and I know for a fact he didn’t understand how to unsubscribe, so I’m sure his email inbox stayed full. I feel bad for the future admins, though, who were getting forwarded newsletters about supplements with “pls follow up.”

    2. MAC*

      Hahaha – I have a similar one. It’s not quite a petty power display (he didn’t actually have authority over anyone), just ineptitude. He had no concept of how Outlook meeting requests worked – he would angrily accuse people of “breaking into his computer and putting meetings on his calendar without his permission.”

      1. La Triviata*

        One co-worker, in the heyday of the Nigerian spam, got just about hysterical because they couldn’t figure out how these guys in Nigeria knew her name and email address. I tried explaining to her that they just pulled them from the internet, but she KNEW that, somehow, they tracked her down and knew her name, her job, her email, everything.

    3. Dragon*

      I had a younger boss who asked me to forward certain emails she sent me, to another person. When I asked her why she didn’t just send it to both of us, she actually said that didn’t come naturally to her.

  197. Adams*

    A former boss sent me and a coworker a detailed email, complete with photographs, on how to properly insert and tie a garbage bag into a garbage can. She went step by step to explain how to properly do this.
    The necessary solution was to take the garbage out every night, but boss lady didn’t want to “waste” money on garbage bags. We were a coffee shop, and started finding critters near the garbage. She also refused to recycle anything (milk containers, plastics), because couldn’t I just take it home and stick it in my recycling bin?

    1. Adams*

      And just remembered another coffee shop experience where the A/C ducts got clogged and froze. My boss forced me to CLIMB INSIDE the ducts, thaw them out, and clean them. I refused after the second time, because I got stuck, and told her to hire someone to professionally clean them.

  198. Former Fed Archivist*

    Worked in a government archive (not in DC) where researchers had to sign in with their name and contact info. One patron refused. We insisted. He signed in. Then he wrote a complaint to his congressman to which my boss had to reply. The patron stated in his complaint that because the sign requesting patrons sign in said “Please sign in” it was a request and not a requirement and he shouldn’t have had to sign in. We had to order a new sign that didn’t say “please.”

  199. Foofoo*

    When I was 19, I took my first (and only) job as a waitress at the restaurant attached to the hotel in our small town. The owner of the business was known to be a raging abusive alcoholic, but I didn’t know this until I started. He would come in and work the kitchen to save money, which was fine, but the problem was he ran it on his own whim.

    One time two young teenagers came in for dinner and I put their order in right away for a plate of fries. The owner was the only cookstaff (the restaurant was never busy so it could easily get by on one waitress and one cook). Well, he was having a conversation with a friend and since the only people waiting for food were two teenagers, he refused to go do it until he was done his conversation. I kept going back to them to refill their drinks and apologizing to them that their food wasn’t coming until he got into the kitchen and there was *nothing* I could do about it. I felt so bad for them.

    Another time, someone called in and asked what the price of wings were. I asked him exactly “what’s the price of wings?” and he said “35 cents a wing”. I told the people over the phone, they placed an order, I sent it to the back for him to fulfill. 20 minutes later, the people show up to pick up their order of wings. When they leave, he loses his absolute SHIT at me that “WINGS ARE 45 CENTS FOR PICKUP, 35 CENTS IF THEY EAT IN!!!!” Holy shitsnacks, why didn’t he say that when I asked the original question?!?!? He called me stupid and every other name under the moon before stomping back into the kitchen. I’d been working there for maybe a month at the time.

    I lasted another month (for a total of two months). When school started back up, I just stopped showing up. From what I heard, that was super common with the young female waitresses that were hired there regularly.

  200. Marajade*

    At my first job we had a dress code that apparently included a rule that we had to wear black socks, which only mattered if you were wearing pants that didn’t hide your socks. None of the managers ever cared, except one woman who once saw me change my shoes in the breakrook before I started a shift and noticed I was wearing gray socks. From that day on she would make me lift my pants to show her my socks and write me up if they weren’t black. At least the head manager was cool and always ripped them up later so they didn’t stay on file.

  201. Lexi Lynn*

    Generally being left-handed isn’t a disability, but at one company, I got it approved as one. My new manager at the time insisted that it was unprofessional for team members to use different pens and notebooks so we had to use the cheap pens and a 3-ring binder to keep notes.

    If I used that pen, my notes would have not been readable because of the smear or I would have needed to contort my hand to try to write. My clothes were also constantly be in danger. (Sidenote I recommend Pentel Energel for pretty colors and quick drying) I also took that binder, placed my hand in it and then drew a line down each page and refused to use the “painful” half of the page. Drove the manager nuts until HR told him to let me buy my own office supplies (I also have asthma and certain highlighters are bad and do not make me sit anywhere near the whiteboard.)

    1. betty f*

      A family member was told she had to set up her chopping station for right handed people, despite her being left handed. She moved to another location rather than deal with the pettiness.

  202. I like stripes*

    Higher Ed person here. My former boss wouldn’t let me get a name tag for my grad assistant who worked directly with students. We could purchase 50-100 more shirts for our program, that would literally sit in offices in boxes for 1-5 years. But a name tag? No dice. It was wasteful. As the grad was “only there for a year, maybe two tops”. Major eye roll.

    1. alt ac*

      Ugh, your t-shirt comment made me remember one. I tried to order t-shirts for my student workers along with some extras since students are constantly, you know, graduating and moving on. I was told that I couldn’t order generic sizes because that would be sizeist of me, even though admissions and recruitment does the same all the time for generic giveaways. How is that any different?!

  203. Ann*

    Sat in cubicles that shared a window. Right next to me was my supervisor. I would lower the blinds a bit in the morning because of sun glare. We faced opposite directions, so she didn’t get the glare. I was told to NEVER lower the blinds again. If I needed a special accomodation, she would move me (to a less desirable and smaller cubicle). I told her the accomodation was already in place… the window blinds. I may have also used the word retaliation, which didn’t go over well. In the end, I had to buy those temporary shades from Home Depot and tape them to my side of the window. She also reacted poorly if I voiced my opinion about the office temperature, when asked by the maintenance team. I brought in a thermometer. She was only comfortable at 80 degrees and above. I’d be sweating and turning red, but she kept cranking the heat, claiming my thermometer was broken. No one was allowed to tough the heat controls, because adjusting it would probably break it.

  204. Rainy*

    I’ve written about this before, but there is one person in my office who is allowed to buy supplies, and she refuses to buy batteries for moral reasons. The problem is that most of our peripheral devices (mice, keyboards, trackpads, etc) run on batteries. Once enough people are mad about having to buy their own batteries for work, someone will lean hard enough on Captain Supply to get her to buy batteries. She will grudgingly buy a single pack of AAs and a single pack of AAAs, and once they arrive, they will be gone overnight, because everyone who’s been here a while knows that we may not see batteries again for 3-4 months, so everyone takes them to hoard. And so the cycle begins again.

          1. Rainy*

            Trust me, we were all equally stumped until she admitted why she didn’t want to buy us batteries.

  205. Worker Bee 83*

    Unfortunately, I regularly see little bits of “abuse of power” written off here on this site as the “boss gets to make the rules, so if you don’t like it look for another job”. The person a few weeks ago who was told she just had to stop muting herself during Zoom meetings because the boss wants it that way, the person who was told she should just not come into work 10-15 minutes early if she didn’t want her boss to start talking to her right away, the person who was told to go to the holiday party where the big boss insults staff while handing out bonuses and “just not let it get to you”, the list goes on. When you’re not a manager a lot of these little things feel like an unnecessary abuse of power.

    1. asteramella*

      “It’s ridiculous but you are unlikely to get this ridiculous person to change, so either try to reframe it in a way that doesn’t bother you as much or try your best to get another job” isn’t excusing the behavior. Letter-writers aren’t asking “is this behavior bad,” they’re asking “how do I try to change this bad behavior” and sometimes the realistic answer is “you can’t.”

  206. Angstrom*

    Purchasing dept: If you put “ASAP” on a requisition for “when needed”, they’d reject it because it wasn’t a date.
    They would reject requisitions for having the incorrect account number. Ok, but if you know this is the incorrect number, then you must know the correct number….
    This was all pre-email, so each instance like this would waste a couple of days in interoffice mail. They’d never make a 30-second call to get the requested information.
    I was shocked when I went to a different job where the purchasing department actually helped you buy what you needed.

  207. I don't mean to be rude, I'm just good at it*

    I was transferred to a very large and overcrowded urban high school. I was given a desk in an office and a cart and had to wander the building going to 7 different classrooms to teach my classes.

    One older curmudgeonly teacher at first would not let me enter his precious domain and then told me that I was not permitted to use his chalkboards for any reason.

    I suffered through this nonsense for a week before the union intervened and administration took pity on my and moved me to another room.

    In the end, I won because I was very tech savvy and helped most of the other teachers in the school; but even when administration begged; not him.

  208. Brett*

    This was a small abuse of power turned enormous, so bare with this somewhat lengthy story.

    When I worked for county police, our county executive got in a spat with the police chief; the exec wanted 14 more officers hired for a special program while the chief wanted the money to go to higher officer pay. The county exec wanted the chief fired for contradicting him in the press. But he didn’t have authority to fire him, as the county police department has an independent governing board.

    What he could do, though, was control travel requests for the police department because those requests went through his travel office. So, he used that power to require the police chief to come to his office in person and personally justify every single travel request made by a police employee. And when I say “every single request” that meant anything as simple as driving to another county to attend a meeting. For 1300 employees.

    When that wasn’t enough to make the chief resign, he started denying all the requests for overnight travel, since he had the authority to do that even for justified request. This resulted in our helicopter pilots losing their certification when he denied their travel requests for training.

    Our chief recognized the damage this was rapidly doing to our department and resigned, ending his career.

    1. ArtsyGirl*

      Sad that the chief had to resign because he was trying to advocate for his employees. Was the executive ever called out for his actions? Someone in power being abusive and intentionally endangering public safety all for pettiness is something the local press would love to report on.

      1. Brett*

        The specific abuse of the travel requests was never really called out, because there was a very public fight going on where the county exec was trying to replace the governing board for the police department (also to get the chief fired). But he did lose the next election, the only county executive to lose an election in the last 40 years.

  209. Burninator*

    Had a supervisor who micromanaged when and how people wrote “I’ll be out of office” message emails. You had to format them a certain way, and send them out for only specific reasons (absence for a certain amount of time, unless that time was a meeting/work related thing, except not all the time). It was extremely controlling, and she made me talk to my reports who sent “incorrect” emails to the department while simultaneously being angry if she didn’t know where they were. And somehow I didn’t realize how much of a toxic mess that place was for over two years!

  210. ObservantServant*

    My first office job was at a company that was new to the area. They had a mass hiring and once everyone in our group was trained, designated Denise as the team lead. It came with no real change in responsibility/pay (I was one eventually as well), she was just our go-to for answering questions before going to an actual manager.
    Just hours after getting this news, a group of us went on break. We came back to Denise, hands on hips, saying, “Not to be picky, but you’re a minute late.” Every day, every break, we would return to her standing in a central area watching us all return and tap her watch if we were a fraction of a minute late. This wasn’t a job that required phone/customer coverage and no one in management cared in the least but Denise sure did.

  211. Former Usher*

    A colleague once had his laptop computer stolen from his car, and our director wanted to replace it with a desktop computer to teach him a lesson. Fortunately, the colleague’s manager intervened and persuaded the director to relent. Desktop computers don’t travel well, so I’m glad that common sense eventually won out over vindictiveness.

  212. Nevermind*

    In my first full-time job back in 1993, I was the Admin Assistant in a tiny yet oppressive office. I was trying to get an article published in my local alt-weekly, so my boss agreed that I could stay late one day (unpaid, of course) to type up my article. (This was pre-email for me, the office and the alt-weekly, and before most people had home computers.) No problem (and the paper even ran it!).

    A few months later, I quit that job and gave notice. My last day was pretty uneventful until the very end, when I printed the 3-page draft of the article to take with me. Instead of a cordial goodbye, I left that company with my boss literally screaming down the stairwell that I was ‘stealing office supplies’! That certainly reinforced my decision to leave….

  213. ACA*

    My freshman year of college, I had a work-study job as an office assistant; my duties were making copies, filing, getting the mail, and occasionally answering the phone. One day a faculty member wanted me to proctor an exam for her, and I declined – I think I had a class during the exam time, but also, it seemed pretty inappropriate to have an 18-year-old supervising fellow students. She came back a few days later, raged at me for being entitled and not wanting to do my job, and (as I found out) subsequently forbade the department from hiring me back the next year.

  214. ArtsyGirl*

    Not me, but a few coworkers traveled out of state for a conference. They drove and submitted paperwork to be reimbursed for mileage and gas. The driver was then called into finance because there was a supposed discrepancy. Turns out that there was a roughly 4 mile difference between google maps route and the reported mileage because during the three hour drive they had gotten off the highway to grab drinks and use the restroom. Finance chastised them for deviating from the map and refused to pay for those “extra” miles despite it being only like a $2.

  215. Turingtested*

    I used to manage a check cashing place/ grocery store. An employee came to me nearly in tears and requested we speak privately. She confessed she’d been stealing. I was appalled and gently asked her what she took. It turned out that while slicing turkey she occasionally helped herself to a slice.

    I said that it was technically stealing but as long as she promised not to do it again we could move forward.

    She seemed very relieved.

    I’m confident this wasn’t some sort of cover up, we had good inventory control and cash handling practices.

  216. Jack Bruce*

    My former micromanaging boss never liked that I also had an office instead of a cubicle. She wanted to be the only one with an office so people KNEW she was in charge. Despite the position needing an office since it had direct reports and needed a place to hold confidential meetings. After I quit, she turned my former office into a storage closet. I pity the next person in that job!

    1. Jack Bruce*

      Oh this is the same boss that disabled the light dimmers for the entire office area, because she wanted them bright as possible so we “looked like we were working”- despite everyone in the area preferring dimmed lights since they were at their computers all day.

  217. Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss*

    Very old job: Post-its are too expensive. No one can have them. Except the executive suite of course. (A new exec sec snuck some down to me in a gleeful act of defiance!)

    Very old job: I’d like a wrist support (none of our desks were remotely ergonomic). “No, too expensive.” Someone went back to that person and said, “You now Sssssssssss was hit by a car and sustained injuries, right?” And suddenly I got my wrist support. I was hit by a car, it’s true. My wrists were not injured…but the support was needed.

    Not as old job: We were notorious for not paying bills for the smallest of reasons. I was helping out at one point because the owner had finally agreed to pay the vendor a very overdue bill and I was sent to fetch the signed cheque to deliver to the waiting courier. When I knocked on his door to fetch it, he slid it away from me and waved me away – he wasn’t going to sign it despite all the back and forth and arrangements made. To this day, I have no idea what power play was going on there. Glad I was not the person explaining this to the vendor.

    Newer job: The overhead light above my desk went out. Turns out it wasn’t the bulb but the ballast. The contractor for ballast work only came in once a month. “But I’m in the dark!” You have light coming in from the atrium behind you, I was told. It’s true, I had a window facing over the atrium. But this was winter, the window was east facing and by 3:30, it was getting dark in my corner and I worked until five. So, I ordered a desk lamp from the office supply catalog. The person who handled operations also handled office supplies at the time. “No desk lamp! Too expensive.” It was 40 bucks and even less since we can’t see the discounted prices when we order. She would send up the maintenance person to install a light under my desk cabinets. Except I had an older model that didn’t have an under cabinet light and there was nothing the maintenance fellow could install. I sat in the dark for two full weeks and borrowed a desk lamp from a coworker’s home. I was unimpressed.

  218. Sarah*

    I was told off for paying to use a toll road, despite an accident meaning I would have been stuck in traffic for a good couple of hours. Additionally, I would have missed the meeting I was travelling to and the reduction in mileage the toll road provided would result in paying me mileage at a lower rate (saving more than the toll fee)

  219. It’s all good…*

    In my first higher ed job, I travelled all over the country meeting with alumni and donors. After a trip to New York I got a call from the accounting office demanding to know why I submitted a charge from Chicago if the trip was to New York. My response? Because I had a layover at O’Hare, it was 7 pm and I was hungry!

    At another job – a state university – we had to mark our entertainments receipts with WHO ate WHAT and if we exceeded our per diem, we had to pay the difference. Including the university President…

  220. houblonchouffe*

    I worked for a small, family-run restaurant during the summer that I got my first IUD. It’s an unpleasant procedure, and my provider asked me to eat a meal before my appointment to reduce the chance that I’d pass out right after. The owner of the restaurant—who was the head chef’s mother; it is a Whole Thing—gave me grief about getting a personal pizza for lunch that day until one of the other servers shouted her down about it. The next day, I was back to work with just incredible cramps, and I asked the owner for a Tylenol to take the edge off. She looked me dead in the eye and said “Maybe your pain is a -sign-.” By which she was definitely inferring that an IUD was somehow a sinful thing to have and that I should certainly be suffering about it. She did give me a Tylenol at the end of shift, and expected me to be very grateful about it.

    One of the cooks and I became friends and thoroughly enjoyed skeeving out this woman by both being publicly affectionate with his wife (they were nonmonogamous and both pan) as often as possible after shift. We both quit very shortly thereafter.

  221. Not Today*

    I worked for a small company owned by two people, owner A who was super frugal, and owner B who was not. The super frugal owner hired the office manager, who he empowered to call us all out on our expense reports. I was in charge of tradeshows and as a result, had a lot of expenses.
    For our biggest tradeshow, they required us to drive 7 hours with the booth in a U-Haul trailer, to save on airfare and shipping. I loaded everything I could think we would need in the U-Haul, but didn’t think to pack a trash can for the booth. Looking at the cost to rent ($26 a day!), I decided to run to Walmart and pick one up. Owner B told me to get “good beer” while I was there. The office manager had a fit about the $1 trash can and the $10 six pack of beer (which I didn’t even drink). My boss just rolled his eyes and told her Owner B told me to buy the beer and to pay me back (this was on my personal credit card because they wouldn’t give us company cards). She still tried to refuse to pay me back for the $1 trash can.

  222. Clare*

    I use a web-based software that lets you get from Landing Page to Commonly Needed Page two different ways – click scroll click or scroll click click. They are, in every other way, identical. I happen to do click scroll click, and one time when I was screen sharing with my boss, I navigated to Commonly Needed Page only for him to walk me back and show me “his way” of scroll click click and insist I use that method going forward.

    When sharing this story with people they’re usually convinced there must be something materially different because it’s so nitpicky, but I really do promise that it’s completely irrelevant and makes no difference in timing or anything else.

  223. Toocold*

    I work in a creative team within a big company. One of my colleagues, who works as a photographer, offered to do a company photo shoot instead of the company having to hire outside help. He basically saved the company a couple thousand euros. He brought all his personal equipment by himself to the office. After a long day of photo shooting, he asked our team lead if the company could arrange a taxi ride for him so he doesn’t have to carry +10kg of equipment. The taxi ride would have been 12€. Team lead replied “Not included in our department’s budget”

  224. Anonymouse*

    Ooooh! I have one!

    I’m an EA reporting to a C-suite exec who is also the head of our department; my primary role is to support him and manage his calendar, although I also do a lot of ad hoc support for the department directors and various teams, and I often help set up meetings my boss is not involved in, both externally and internally, especially when calendars get tricky. Some folks need more calendaring assistance of this kind than others, but I’m good at it and I don’t mind being asked. Except…for one director, who started asking me to set up one-on-one meetings with external people she’d been in contact with that I’d never met. As in, she started cc’ing me on email threads where she’d been merrily corresponding with an external contact, but as soon as she wanted to set up a 30-minute call, she would announce “Anonymouse can help us find the time to talk!”

    Her calendar was NOT particularly busy, these were people I had no prior relationship with, bringing me into the chain only *slowed down* the process of setting up the call, and this was very emphatically NOT an expected part of my job; no other director in the department had ever asked me to do anything like this–it would be like asking me to do their expense reports for them (nope! your job title does not get you that!). It was 100% a power move to make herself look more important by creating the illusion that she had her own dedicated admin (and not just an admin, but an Executive Assistant!).

    I am a helpful and accommodating person, and I try to reserve “no, I can’t help you with that / that’s not my area” for times when I really can’t help someone (this has its upsides! I am well-liked by my co-workers and they respect “no, I can’t help you” when I do have to bust it out), so I was still grinding my teeth, trying to decide when it was time to go to my boss and ask him to tell her to knock it off, when one of her new hires (really high turnover on her team…gee, I wonder why…) politely wrote to me, asking me to set up a one-on-one call between *the new hire* – whose job title was something like “coordinator” – and an external contact I had never interacted with. She indicated that her boss, the director, had “pointed her in my direction” for help with calendaring issues.

    Sensing An Opportunity, I politely but firmly wrote back that I was always happy to *help out* any team in the department with more complex scheduling issues, but that I didn’t NEED to be looped in on any calendaring issues unless my boss, the C-suite exec and director of the department, was going to be involved, as his was the only calendar I managed. I was friendly, upbeat, and happy to reassure her that she was okay to coordinate directly with external people and she didn’t need to worry about going through me for these kinds of things!

    The new hire, no dummy, got the message, thanked me for the clarification, and presumably passed it along to her boss, who stopped asking me to set up her calls for her.

    (Yeah, yeah, maybe I could have pushed back sooner, but I’m glad I was able to find a way to do it that let everyone save face. I still have to work with this person, even if I don’t work FOR this person.)

    1. Goldenrod*

      This is the kind of thing that comes up a lot for us EAs! I think you handled it perfectly.

      As you pointed out, it’s better to be flexible with this stuff….but this director was taking it too far!

    2. Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss*

      Well done.

      It’s so easy to go from “I’m being helpful” to “I think I’m being used.” And it’s not uncommon for those well below the c-suite to think they can commandeer the same level of support.

      No, I’m not going to fill out your insurance forms.

      And, no, I’m not creating a meeting invite for you so you can remember when your training is. Surely you can create your own calendar reminder.

  225. Elle Woods*

    I worked with someone who would not read messages if he was cc’d rather than included in the “to” field of emails.

  226. Worked for a Jerk*

    I was told that I didn’t know how to lead and had no future career prospects because I did not highlight an empty cell in an Excel spreadsheet in yellow.

  227. Holey Hobby*

    Long ago summer temp job in the late 90s, the senior admin to the department executive had printed out every. single. last. email the man had sent or received for two years. My job was to file them. In folders. In a file cabinet. By sender and date.

    Well, it was money!

    1. Holey Hobby*

      I will add that the senior admin was very sweet, but decidedly an odd duck. It wasn’t a power play – She was so excited to have a junior admin working for her! It was so hard to keep up with the filing!

      She had also been in a motorcycle accident a couple of months before I started (she was in this MC that controlled a couple of bars on the north side of our town – I didn’t ask too many questions). One of her legs had been wired back together with pins and plates and was in a completely stiff, ankle-to-hip plastic brace. She didn’t like her crutches and went everywhere in the building in a rolling office chair, pushing herself around with her good leg. You’d be coming down a corridor back from the bathroom, you’d hear this squeaking rattle coming toward you, and there’d be Moira, scooting along backwards to take some papers down to finance….

    2. Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss*

      I also filed a copy of every fax/letter/telex (early 90s, man…) for the CEO at a very old job ago because he was sure to lose them. If he needed the copy, I made a new copy. As to why the receptionist did this instead of his own support, completely beyond me.

    3. londonedit*

      Oh yes…when I was an Editorial Assistant nearly 20 years ago I worked for one woman who would forward me emails that I had to print, then I had to walk over to the printer, pick up the print-out, and put it in her in-tray on her desk. I should point out that we worked together in the same small room, and the printer was at least as close to her desk as it was to mine, if not closer. It was literally about five steps across the room, but nope, she’d sit at her desk while I printed and delivered copies of her emails to her. If she hadn’t received an email for an hour or so, she’d start asking everyone else in the room whether they’d received any emails, and would then make me ring the IT department to ‘check that her emails were working properly’. Fun times.

  228. Willow*

    My organization had an accountant that refused to write down procedures for getting reimbursed for travel–so that she could feel important when she inevitably had to call you to tell you where you had messed up.

  229. DeeBeeDubz*

    A few years ago I worked for a small company where the CEO (who himself was an angry, petty person) had hired his wife to manage the warehouse. She had no business being a manager, she had neither relevant experience nor the people skills required. She lorded her title and relationship with the CEO over everyone.

    She micromanaged everything that went on in the warehouse and wasted enormous amounts of time making staff redo work that she hadn’t explained properly in the first place. She would give directions that made no sense and then double down when staff questioned it. She would always respond with “Sorry who’s the manager here?” Or,worse “When you start f***ing the CEO you can make the decisions”. But of course any time something went sideways she threw the staff under the bus immediately.

    She eventually left for maternity leave and never came back after that.

    2. t-vex*

      >>“When you start f***ing the CEO you can make the decisions”
      Please tell me someone took her up on that

  230. CAS*

    As an adjunct instructor, I was expected to step aside in the copy room when I was using the copier so the “real” faculty wouldn’t have to wait. Because, of course, as an adjunct who is showing up on campus to teach one class and who has no designated office space, I have all kinds of time before class and the personal resources to make copies for my job . I also wasn’t allowed in the faculty break room, and if I wanted coffee, I had to bring or buy my own. Nope, not allowed to drink the “faculty” coffee.

    2. iiii*

      My sister is tenured STEM faculty. The longstanding department chair finally got one too many harassment complaints and was made to step down as chair, though they didn’t fire him. Various parties inside and outside of the department wanted my sister to be the next chair. (Lots of publications, well-respected as an instructor, a Woman In STEM to take over from HarassmentGuy.) She told them she’d do it, but that her first move would be to revise the office assignment policy so that the size of the office and whether it was shared would be directly proportional to the number of students the instructor was teaching that semester. So, adjuncts with big classes would get their own offices, while senior professors who had gamed the system so they had no instructional duties while they waited out the last few years before retirement would share with each other.

      They stopped asking her to be chair.

  231. Just Here for the Free Lunch*

    Former boss who gave me a hard time for going to a “more expensive” gas station while refueling a rental. I chose the one I did because it was safer to exit (turning right instead of turning left and crossing 3 lanes at a busy intersection). The “cheaper” gas would have resulted in a $0.05 savings on the purchase.

    1. NeutralJanet*

      If the savings were that small, then the added distance of the left turn would probably eat it up anyway!

  232. quill*

    Worked at the college food service, the boss was… a lot.
    1) You medically can’t wear the stupid non-slip uniform shoes? You’re banished from the back. (Fine, whatever, I got to work register at the “convenience store.”)
    2) You have to restock from the back anyway.
    3) And clock in/out from the back.
    4) Without being away from your post at any time.
    5) Your badge will never let you in to the door closest to your post either. You have to walk around the whole building. Possibly because the reason that you don’t wear the uniform shoes is because walking would be painful if you did.

    How this lady expected me to magically teleport a single bottle of mountain dew from the basement storage room to the drinks cooler EVERY TIME someone bought one so that we would never be less than fully stocked I don’t know. Or why she waited until some freshman was hanging out in front of the register waiting for his personal pizza to cook, browsing the gum, to sneak up behind me while I’m getting a pizza out of a 400 degree oven with nothing but the box it was packaged in, and scream “WHY AREN’T YOU HELPING THIS CUSTOMER!!?”

    The burn healed, but not until after I quit.

    1. Salymander*

      Good grief. The combination of incompetence and meanness in that manager is horrifying. And who did she think you were getting the pizza for? Clearly you *were* helping the customer.

  233. Galadriel's Garden*

    I worked as an admin at a big consulting firm, on a whole team of admins with varying levels of seniority. One of the most senior admins was…a lot, and had a close friendship and direct ear to the office manager, who at the time managed the admin team – we’ll call senior admin Clarice and office manager Belinda. Clarice was a stickler for how everyone else spent their time – how long they talked to colleagues, how long they took lunch breaks, how often they went to the bathroom, when they arrived and left work. There were something like 12 of us and she only supported one executive, for what it’s worth, while we all supported something like 10-15 consultants/managers/principals ourselves, so she seemed to spend the bulk of her time monitoring other admins while we all, you know, worked. She’d send off multi-paragraph angry missives to Belinda multiple times a day for our many “infractions,” even though she had…no authority whatsoever, but it seemed to just fuel her soul. I think my favorite missive was when Clarice met another admin in the elevator as they were both coming up to the office at about 8:45 am, when we were supposed to arrive by 8:30 – so she went straight to her email to tattle on the late admin, *despite also being late herself,* but her lateness was blanket-excused by Belinda because reasons, which of course caused late admin to get called into Belinda’s office to be admonished (despite having been caught in traffic because of an accident…you know, normal commute stuff). It got so bad that the company finally had to bring in someone else to manage the admin team, because Clarice was trying to create a new position for herself as the like “day-to-day admin coordinator” and Belinda was blissfully indifferent to it, because she too loved to micromanage everyone’s time but just lacked the capacity to do so, and the whole admin staff was threatening to leave. Good times.

  234. Toothpaste*

    I worked someplace where food routinely disappeared from the fridge before the person who brought it could eat it. Eventually I worked out that another staff member had decided if there wasn’t a name attached to a lunch bag, it was abandoned and she was throwing it out before it could stink up the fridge.

  235. The Seven*

    I worked in a law firm where the AP person demanded that you come by her desk to pick up any checks you had requested. She refused to either send them interoffice or email you that they were ready. Hence, several wasted trips to her office to see if said checks were ready. Plus, when you stopped by, she would sometimes grumble about she was so “busy” and you were not the only person who requested a check. Yes, Chiquita, I hope you see this, I am calling you out and I don’t care if you know it.

    1. Delta Delta*

      I had that same person. Did yours also happen to listen to general office voicemail on speaker on the loudest setting?

  236. This might explain my boundary issues*

    At a previous job, my supervisor would edit meeting notes from what was actually discussed/decided to what she wanted the outcome to be. She was the boss, so I don’t know why she didn’t speak up in the meeting and clarify the expectations or decisions, but instead we’d have to wade through pages of meeting notes to find our alternate reality. I say pages of meeting notes because, other than her changes, she wanted them to be verbatim transcripts of the meeting, taken in real time on a google doc. Sometimes she would edit the notes as the notetaker was taking them, and it was absolutely infuriating. My digestive problems magically resolved themselves when I left that job.

  237. KC/DC*

    When I worked retail, the manager in charge of scheduling was frustrated with the number of people putting their names on the calendar for time off during Christmas week. So one day she took a black sharpie to the request calendar, blacking out the last two weeks of December entirely. That wouldn’t have been so awful by itself, but then she wrote “how do you like them apples” in the same sharpie. She was quite proud of doing this.

    I get feeling like people in retail should know better than to ask for time off at Christmas, but sheesh.

  238. Lisa N Morton*

    At a job I had about ten years ago, we had an office admin who was just a nightmare in all kinds of ways, but one of the things that took the cake was the way she ruled over the coffee station with an iron fist. Every morning, she’d count out around 30 individual coffee creamer cups. The rest stayed locked up in the supply closet, and she *would not* get more out when those were gone. There were about 100 people in the office, so they ran out every single morning. If you weren’t one of the first few to arrive, no creamer for you!

    We tried for months to get her to put out more creamer, but she refused. It was just so petty and shortsighted – the creamers couldn’t have cost more than a few cents apiece! Far less than the hit to morale everyone took from constantly having to play the Hunger Games just to have a cup of coffee.

  239. SomethingCleverHere*

    I’m thinking about that secretary in the comments here who made her entire office color hand turkeys and forced them all to attend her talent show.

  240. antiqueight*

    The girlfriend of the site manager was the receptionist and refused to give the spare key for the employee’s work desk when she’d left hers at home. The employee had left her laptop locked in her desk and was read the riot act for “leaving her laptop unattended”. The receptionist refused to give her the key until a more senior manager asked for it.

  241. Amber Rose*

    Oh, I forgot about a very silly one from my current company. A little over a year ago we switched to a different, online only phone system, which meant we all had to have cell phones purchased for us to use as handsets. IT bought us the cheapest, junkiest phones they could find… and then didn’t give us the chargers, instead insisting we give the phones to them to charge.

    Like we were gonna what, steal these $50 junkers? Good grief.

  242. Liz*

    From my current job, where thankfully I no longer work for any of these people. I had been hired to replace someone who had gotten promoted. Let’s call him Jack. he was in the “other half” of our combined department, think flowers and balloons. I reported to Jane, who reported to Mary.

    I committed two cardinal sins in the same week. I had the AUDACITY to ask Jack about something I wasn’t sure about, since well, he had my old job, and had done the task. Nope. wasn’t supposed to do that.
    The bigger sin was Mary had given Jane an assignment, which was passed down to me. As I was new, I needed clarification so, as I had done in EVERY OTHER JOB i’ve ever had, I went to Mary directly to ask her. Wow. I was only supposed to ask Jane, who would then ask Mary, and then pass the answer down to me. Seriously?

  243. Stalking Sarah*

    Post college and desperate for a job, I took a part-time temp position in an office at the local university. It was mind numbingly boring, involving a lot of things like filing, stocking supplies, answering the phones. But it was money, and I needed it!

    For reasons I still don’t understand to this day, there was one day each month where I had an hours long copying job. It was something like, “Pick up this huge printed report at this office, reorganize it, and make 3 copies of most pages, but 2 pages of some, sort them all into specific subfolders, and then deliver to the right people.” The most interesting part of the job was picking the color of the subfolders. (Never beige!)

    The job meant spending hours in front of the copier, which was in a little room off of the main area where I (and the office secretary who oversaw me) sat. To avoid melting into a pile of boredom, I brought in my ipod mini (it was 2005), plugged in my headphones, and turned the volume up with the headphones on the counter so I could hear the phone at my desk if it rang. No one could see the ipod or hear the music.

    One day, the office secretary came into the copier room, saw the ipod, and asked me to put it away. When I explained that it was only because I couldn’t bear to stand at the copier for hours without it, she bristled and said that it was unprofessional. The next day, the temp agency called to let me know I’d been terminated.

  244. In the corner*

    IT intern who was responsible for issuing equipment decided he was an approver for such requests. We already had an online form to fill out that was automatically routed for the appropriate approvals. Had to argue with him about getting a replacement for a monitor.

  245. Leela*

    I worked at a dining hall on campus and we had one non-student who was quite a bit older than everyone and HATED us. If I got a cart that had what I needed to prep food and set up at a table in the kitchen, she would roll the cart away and take items out of my hands as I was chopping them to toss them on to another table and claim that I had taken “her spot”. She didn’t have a spot and used a different table every time but she was constantly pulling stuff like this and management wouldn’t do anything because it was hard to find an full-time available non-student who wanted to work at the campus dining hall.

  246. Petty Patty*

    I’m going to tell on myself.

    I once worked at a big-box home improvement store at the customer service desk. We had one particularly… prickly… customer. She wasn’t a contractor or a Big Spender, but she wanted to be treated like one. She expected to be fawned over, given huge discounts, and given free merchandise. She would always come in with her whole family — literally down to the niece / nephew level — and have them help harangue the staff.

    She always insisted that we call our branded credit card company and fix it so they would give her 12 months with no interest, even if she was buying a $20 shower curtain.

    One day, she insisted that I call the credit card company and fix it so she “wouldn’t have to pay tax.”

    I knew she meant “interest” and not “tax” but I played dumb for as long as possible, saying that I couldn’t not charge her tax unless she had a Sales Tax Exemption form on file with us, and just kept repeating myself over and over.

    Eventually her family was making so much noise yelling and shouting that Security and the MOD came over. Once the MOD got everyone calmed down and she again demanded that the credit card company not charge her “tax”, the MOD said, “Do you mean ‘interest’? You want the interest-free promotion?” She said Yes.

    I made a big show of apologizing, “… because you kept saying ‘tax’ and I knew that the credit card company has no control over that.”

    Whenever she came in after that during one of my shifts, she would have someone on the floor go get the MOD and she’d make the manager do her bidding so she wouldn’t have to talk to me. Which was an awesome solution, as far as I was concerned.

  247. Stalking Sarah*

    Ooh, I have another one:

    I asked my company to sponsor the local LGBTQ-rights organization’s valentine’s day fundraiser, called The Red Party. She told me no, which I wasn’t surprised by — this was a pretty white and straight consulting company. What I did *not* expect was for her to say no because she was concerned people would think it was a communist party event. In 2007. In Massachusetts.

  248. OwMyLeg*

    The worst boss I’ve ever had was, among other things, totally controlling when it came to how we managed our time in the office (government-adjacent non-profit, total staff of 5, all professionals). The hours were 8 – 5. If we were going to be more than 5 minutes late, we had to call. Immediately upon arrival to the office, we had to send an email to all staff with when we would take our lunch break. We had to have 2 people in the office at all time to answer the phones (not that we were busy), so I frequently had to adjust. The best part is that we had to announce to the office when we were going to the restroom. So throughout the day, I had to yell, “Bathroom, back in 5.”

    We had to stay until 5 pm every day, regardless of circumstances. A coworker got up to leave at 4:55 and Boss told her, “Please sit back down. We leave at 5.” Coworker was so fed up she stood in Boss’ doorway for 5 minutes.

    I worked the day I gave birth. I had gone in early for an off-site meeting, returned to office, and then went to my doctor’s appointment for my “lunch.” So half a day. Discovered I had to give birth that day (surprise!) and never went back to the office. When determining my return to work after mat leave, Boss refused to consider that almost-half day as a full work day so I only got 89 days leave, not 90.

    This job involved a lot of events with government officials. I was still pumping about 1 month after coming back after mat leave. Came in at 8 am and, thanks to event, was still cleaning up at 9 pm at night for an event that began at 6 pm. Finally, she said, “Yeah, you can go home now. Because you need to get rest so you can be here by 8 am tomorrow.”

    I was able to find a much, much better job 4 months after that. 8 years later I’m still traumatized.

    These rules did not apply to Boss, natch.

  249. CASH ASH*

    I worked (briefly) at a salon and spa with an attached esthetician school.
    I worked as a receptionist, not a stylist.
    We were told we had to have our roots touched up weekly if our hair was dyed, brows waxed, makeup and hair done every day. EXCEPT it couldn’t be in the same style every day. 5 days a week, 5 styles. For a job that paid minimum wage. I learned how to do just about every braid under the sun and was wearing my hair in a different braid every day.
    My manager said braids counted as one style even if I did a different type of braid each day and didn;t have the same look. Like even if I wore my hair half-up in a crown braid one day, and then wore it down my back with a tiny snake braid in front the next day, THESE ALL COUNTED AS THE SAME STYLE.
    It was too much work for the money it paid, and I bounced.
    Also, if you weren’t thin enough, they made you take phone calls in an actual closet. Like a closet for real. It had windows and one door and was against fire codes. But they kept the “fat” girls back there.

  250. moona*

    I used to work for a fairly prestigious military-adjacent government facility that had some high security locations. The security guards were uniformly awful and loved to throw their weight around, particularly with foreigners like myself. I had to re-up my security pass after I’d been there 5 years, and security rejected my application because they said that you should be able to clearly read my name from my signature on the form, but that my signature on the form needed to match that on my passport (and like most people no longer bubble-dotting their i’s, my name is not legible from my signature). I went back multiple times to see if I could get a different officer who would be more reasonable, but they all insisted that these were the rules. In the end, with only a few days left on my old pass, I had to get the head of my division to call security and tell them to knock it off already. I surveyed my colleagues, and no one else had this issue and all had similarly illegible scrawls as their signature.

    1. NeutralJanet*

      My mother once got her signature rejected because her name is legible in her signature and she doesn’t include her middle initial. Her name is Lucinda Jane Warbleworth, her signature is pretty easily readable as Lucinda Warbleworth, and they made her sign Lucinda J Warbleworth, which is neither her real signature nor her real name.

      1. NopeNopeNope*

        My mom still gripes about a petty bureaucratic requirement of the state DMV when she changed her name after getting married fifty years ago. She had always been called Ellie Mae Clampett. After marriage, she was Ellie Mae Smith on all official documents, bills, financial statements, etc. The state DMV required that her name be stated and signed as Ellie Clampett Smith on her driver’s license. This was irritating of course because in the US a driver’s license is the de facto form of official ID.

    2. Kayem*

      At a former job, I kept getting paperwork bounced back to me from the certification department because my signature “wasn’t legible” as a name. My signature is my initials with a slight flourish, which is on my driver’s license, passport, notary stamp, etc. I have a long-ass name, so signing it in full over and over every day would have gotten old quick. But they insisted. So I just…wrote my first and last name. In my normal print handwriting as if I was writing any other word. Definitely not my signature. They bounced it all back, saying it wasn’t a legal signature because it didn’t include my whole name. Argh. Not true, but I dutifully wrote out the whole thing in print, but again paperwork was bounced back, this time because it wasn’t in cursive and “only real, legal signatures are in cursive.” Again, not true, but I was getting sick of this and just wanted the damn paperwork filed. So I (painfully) wrote out my full name in cursive, which took six times longer than my actual signature, slowing my productivity quite a bit.

      Paperwork got kicked back again because my signatures didn’t match my notary stamp. I gave up and went back to my real signature and just ignored them until they got tired of their pettiness being ignored by my pettiness.

  251. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

    My housemate’s supervisor at a previous job wrote him up for *checks notes* leaving in the middle of the day to go home so someone could drive him to the ED, where he ended up in surgery having his ruptured appendix removed before the end of the day.

    He had previously been pondering quitting the job anyway – in fact, I had told him to make sure he got all the use he could out of his health insurance before he quit, though when I picked him up from his hospital stay I did clarify that this wasn’t QUITE what I had in mind – and that was his last straw. She handed him the write-up, and he handed it back, turned on his heel and left.

  252. Cruciatus*

    Probably Denise in the dining hall. She sort of oversaw the cafeteria purchases but that’s also where everyone ate, whether you purchased lunch on site or not. But I remember her having a fit over me picking up a plastic fork because the one I had been bringing in broke. She pitched a fit since I was bringing in my own lunch and not buying. That place ended up eventually moving her somewhere less…visible (mine story is simply one of many). Never have I wanted more to tell someone to fork off.

  253. Smuckers*

    We had a program coordinator who apparently thought that she needed to justify her paycheck by making our travel expenses as cheap as possible. She’d book you in the cheapest hotel that she could get away with… even after we pointed out that it was more expensive to pay us to drive 45 minutes and pay for parking vs putting us up walking distance from the job site. She tried to book everyone in basic economy, which is not something that our company required. To save $17, she’d make you stay in a gross hotel in an office park instead of the nicer hotel downtown that was walking distance from everything.

    I went to the owners and told them that nobody wanted to travel anymore (a good chunk of our business at the time) if we were going to be sitting in the back of the plane by the bathrooms and then stay in crappy hotels and endure a commute while traveling. I said that if they’re going to take me away from my family for a week, the least they can do is give me some extra time to either sleep in or go to the gym. They ended up making a policy specifying a minimum level of comfort required on all business travel.

    We all celebrated when she quit.

  254. Me--mwahaha >:)*

    Guacamole Bob! Heh heh, an AAM legend.

    Most of the power plays I can think of at previous jobs were not small. They were things like bullying and gender-based harassment, particularly at ToxicOldExjob.

    I did what I could to subvert. For example, it was extremely difficult to get any sales reps to help customers. The worst offender—I’ll call him Dirk—left his phone on DND for hours at a time. I would write a message from Dirk’s customer on a Post-It and walk over to his desk and stick it on his monitor right in front of his face. I literally could not get in trouble for this, as it was my job.

    Bullyboss, the sales manager, would also send sample requests that came into his email for his favorite victim’s territory straight to me without looping him in. He was setting him up to look bad when there was no response (sales reps were supposed to reach out to the potential customer). Sometimes he would sit on them for a while. Instead of just sending the material, I would cc Victim and respond like this: “Good morning, Customer. Bullyboss has just forwarded me your request for alpaca wool samples and our product literature. I will send that out today via FedEx. Your sales rep is Victim McMeek—you can contact him with questions or RFQs at (***) 867-5309 and victimm@hellhole.com. Thank you so much for reaching out to us!” >:)

    Oh, and by the way, as of December 2021, ToxicOldExjob no longer exists. They were bought out a second time by a company that moved the whole operation to Canada. My supervisor escaped before I did and we are committed to giving each other positive references until the end of time.

  255. NYWeasel*

    I worked at a David’s Cookies franchise briefly in college, and the friendly owner I adored working for sold his share out to the other co-owner who I’d never met. This owner decided that his wife would take over running the store, only her management style was that she wouldn’t be AT the store. Instead she’d grab the security tapes from the day before and scan through them. If we weren’t working constantly on the tape, she’d reprimand us. We quickly figured out the 3’ x 5’ area of the store that wasn’t on view and suddenly had lots of important tasks that needed to be done in that part of the store.

  256. NylaW*

    A few years ago we had an Office Manager who was hired to do some very specific duties with a special partnership we had with another organization. She was also doing general accounting work, and was responsible for approving all the timecards. She was not the person who would approve our PTO or anything like that, she just made sure all the timecards were error free and that all the outstanding requests (like PTO) were approved within the pay period so that payroll could be processed on them. She knew she was on the way out because of the winding down of the special partnership, and had clearly started power tripping on random things like how much coffee was purchased, nickel and diming people on basic expense reports, etc., out of some weird attempt to make herself seem more valuable or more in charge? I’m really not sure. She had also started asking people what their PTO was for, even though she was not a supervisor and was not the one who had final say over time off.

    Fast forward to her last few months working with us, and my uncle dies very unexpectedly, on New Years Day. We had always been a very close family and this loss was devastating for everyone. I let my boss know, and cc’d the office manager on the email. I did this only so she would know to look out for the PTO hours that my boss had approved for the funeral and family time. (Uncles were not on the list of relatives that qualified for bereavement pay, but it was still standard for people to use PTO for funerals for other people.) She replied to the email, excluding my boss, to inform me, the literal day after my uncle died, to very snottily tell me that uncles were not a family member I could take bereavement for, and she would expect me not to put that on my timecard without approval! (Yes, she used an exclamation point.)

    I was so mad that forwarded it to my boss immediately, and got a text message from him within minutes that he would “deal with the issue.” The office manager went down to part time the very next week and worked from home for the remainder of her tenure.

  257. Order of the Banana*

    I used to have a coworker who always felt aggrieved that he was never given any developmental opportunities or leadership roles (because he…was the worst worker…on an entry-level team…) so the one time he was in charge of a team project, he:

    1) demanded to know how many hours a day we would be taking away from our regular workflow to work on the project assignments;
    2) assigned us a schedule when he decided that 30 minutes a day per person wasn’t good enough;
    3) unilaterally changed up the project design even though we had originally voted on the design together;
    4) tasked us with spying on other teams on our floors to see how they were handling the project, so we could one-up them;
    5) drafted up a list of materials we had to purchase for the project (out of pocket) and assigned the cheapest ones to himself;
    6) tried to kick someone off the team for “not being passionate enough”;
    7) sent a team-wide email that he was disappointed in us for how little progress we had made on the project (because we had an all-hands-on-deck emergency that occurred for our day-to-day work).

    The “team project” in question? Building a gingerbread house for the department’s annual Christmas party.

    1. quaint irene*

      Oh, well-told! This is so far down the list I’m worried others won’t appreciate its full splendor.

    3. Salymander*

      I guess it is important to be passionate about gingerbread. Sure. (I say as I snort/laugh all over myself)

      I agree with quaint Irene, I wish this were further up because it is really funny.

  258. Not a Medical Assistant Anymore*

    In my 20s I was a medical assistant at an office that didn’t have enough workspace for all back office staff when the conference room was in use. One afternoon there was a meeting in the conference room and all the other work spaces were full, so I was working at the front desk returning patient calls and doing prior auths (at the time, they were only done by phone). I called a patient and while their phone was ringing, I got a text message and checked my phone. The office manager FLIPPED OUT in front of the waiting room full of patients, yelled at me for “goofing off” (which got left on the patient’s voicemail), and the STOLE MY CHAIR because she decided I wasn’t allowed to have it until I “got back to work.”

  259. Margaretmary*

    I once had a supervisor get mad at me for arriving maybe 30 seconds late. In a thunderstorm. I’d left it to the last minute to leave because I’d been hoping the storm would stop. And she knew I didn’t drive. Now, admittedly, this was retail and I was on at the time the shop opened and it would take a minute or two to take off my coat and stuff, so might have been 5 minutes by the time I was on the checkout. I wouldn’t mind, but a couple of weeks later, this supervisor turned up 15 minutes late. And that was not a one-off (which mine was).

    She also yelled at me once for walking on the floor. It had just been mopped but…she’d told me to go and do something at the other side of the shop, so how she expected me to get there without walking on the floor (the entire shop had been mopped; it wasn’t like I just walked on the patch that had been; there was literally no way to do the job she asked me to WITHOUT walking somewhere that had been mopped – well, cleaned; we didn’t literally just take a mop to the entire shop, it was done by a machine thing) I have yet to figure out.

  260. The Rural Juror*

    I once had a manager that cornered me in a storage room to nitpick me about things I was doing, but everyone else in the company were also doing.

    I was the lowest rung on the ladder, so to speak. She used every opportunity to get into me for something. I assumed it was because she didn’t feel like she had enough pull to berate anyone else.

    One day I went into the storage/file room to grab something. She followed me there, blocked my exit, and told me I was talking entirely too much. Thing is, I talked to people when they engaged me in conversation, usually while still doing my tasks. I actively tried not to distract anyone else from their work. I guess she didn’t like that the company had a friendly atmosphere. She usually holed up in her workspace and didn’t talk to anyone else all day.

    I felt extremely uncomfortable being blocked in that room for 20 minutes. I quit a week later with no notice and told the owner she was targeting me (it was part of a pattern of behavior).

  261. Dezzi*

    I worked as a housekeeper in a nursing home. One day I was asked to essentially shadow a new housekeeping employee, because the person training her had reported to our boss that she was “completely incapable, she does everything wrong.”

    Among my coworker’s complaints about the newbie: she hung the toilet paper the wrong way, wiped the mirrors counter-clockwise instead of clockwise, and “she’s using the wrong hand for everything!”

    Yes, you read that right…my coworker lodged a complaint about the new staff being left-handed.

    1. Dezzi*

      (Needless to say, Newbie was doing the job just fine and didn’t need my help or supervision AT ALL. It was the most relaxing day I ever had at that job!)

  262. 40 Years in the Nonprofit Trenches*

    The board chair who would use my desk after I left work in the evening [shared office space with her employer], and left a post-it on my 10-key that I had the decimal set to the wrong place (I had floating, she felt .00 was the only True and Right setting).

  263. Storm in a teacup*

    Working for many years in the NHS and you come across plenty of these:
    GP receptionists who refuse to let you speak to the doctor (I would be calling as a fellow healthcare professional needing medication history on their patient we had just admitted).

    The finance directors who at the end of the year to save money wouldn’t let us order any more paper or printer ink. Trying to screen and print discharge prescriptions and letters for patients in the last 5”6 weeks of the year was a nightmare.

    Or the admin assistant who refused to recheck my annual leave record because he was sure he had entered my leave correctly and who was I, a lowly senior manager to question him. I ended up having to shorten some holiday plans and was irate. Eventually on return I proved that they owed me an extra 7 days’ holiday. I got an exemption to carry it all over to the following year and the entire process for annual leave recording was changed. Also I had spent 8 years always volunteering to cover Boxing Day bank holiday (Londoner so no skin off my nose, gave me a break from the fam and stopped me shopping in the sales) but the year following I refused as I was still salty.

  264. Stackson*

    I used to work for a manufacturing company where our customer would come in and do their own audits on various processes once a year under the guise of helping us improve–but really it was just a way for them to flex their muscles as the customer. They were all stick, no carrot.

    So one time this auditor, Bob, comes in and starts doing an audit on our shipping department. He asks about our record with shipping documentation, and our shipping manager told him that we met all of the requirements for this particular question and that we should get full marks. Bob says that there is NO WAY we met all of the requirements and makes the shipping manager pull up the customer web portal. Shipping manager shows him that we hadn’t had any documentation errors in probably four years at that point, according to the customer’s own data, putting us well over the threshold for full marks for that question.

    Bob stands up and says, “This is incredible. I’ve never seen anyone do this before. I want to shake your hand.” He shakes the shipping manager’s hand, sits down, and then says, “But I’m still not going to give you credit for this question because no one ever meets all of the requirements.”

  265. ducki3x*

    I once worked at a company where one team refused to accept forms that were printed & signed but then scanned and emailed to us. It wasn’t a matter of having the original, because they’d accept a faxed copy or even a photocopy that was mailed in, but somehow an email attached was a step too far. They couldn’t even articulate a reason, they just drew the line with it.

    We solved the problem by printing the emailed forms then faxing them from one internal machine to another, which never got questioned at all. Just bonkers.

  266. Christmas Cactus*

    In the mid 7os Hubby and I relocated to a new city for his ideal job and I used a connection from my old job to get hired at a place I call The Simon Legree Life Insurance Company, a subsidiary of a holding company that was later involved in a major national political scandal Some of the insurance written seemed pretty sketchy to me. The place was cheap and mean. Because someone had once spilled coffee on a file, by order of the company president it was strictly forbidden to have any drink or food at one’s desk. Time off accrued at a snail’s pace and only one person could be absent from a department at a time. Hours were strictly monitored and you could not leave a minute early. You had to physically work the day before and after a holiday to be paid for the holiday and there was no leaving early; I could not get off work until 5 pm one Christmas Eve despite having nothing to do for most of the afternoon. I despised that place.

  267. A Case of the Mondays*

    When I was in university I worked one summer at a golf course with a young, power-tripping boss who once confronted me about punching the clock in the morning (at 4:30 am, I might add) *after* putting on my safety boots, not before, to save the extremely cheap company the $0.17 per day from my minimum wage pay that it would take to put my boots on. I didn’t argue it at the time, but even then I knew he was in the wrong as companies are required to pay you for the time it takes to don and doff PPE. So many reasons why that was the worst job I’ve ever had.

  268. Nora*

    I was about to go on vacation for my first anniversary/honeymoon. To save vacation time I volunteered to work a weekend event that was a bit out of my wheelhouse but not out of line for my job duties. My supervisor approved. It came up on a staff meeting and another person who was newly promoted and slightly senior to me (but not in my chain of command) accused me, in front of the entire staff, of “stealing company time.” I left the meeting in tears. I complained to her supervisor but was told no one could do anything to stop her from being an ass during meetings because a family member had just died.

  269. Accidental Itenerate Teacher*

    I thought I didn’t have one of these, but then I remembered.
    Our county had redistricting this year and the county judge pushed through a map that very specifically (and obviously) put the home of one of the commissioners outside his precinct.
    Meaning he has to move if he wants to run in the next election.
    They gerrymandered this man out of his house.

    1. Abogado Avocado*

      It’s hard to say that this is an abuse of power without more information about the 2020 Census and Voting Rights Act issues in the jurisdiction. If, for example, the precinct redistricting was done to comply with the law regarding keeping minority voting groups together, this is not an abuse of power. In other news, politics ain’t beanbag.

      1. Accidental Itenerate Teacher*

        Oh there was definitely alot going on on that front. Every proposed map that went before the court claimed to be preserving voting blocks while claiming every other map disenfranchised them.
        I’ll admit to not being knowledgeable enough on the topic to know which ones were better than others, but since this one was added to the docket after the Judge said they were no longer accepting submissions, the precinct contains most of the area around this guys house except for his actual house, and there have been some not particularly veiled social media posts about how great it is that they defeated this guy… I call shenanigans.
        The rest of the nightmare that has been redistricting (75% of the population of the county and 3 county offices changed precincts) is just politics being politics, but making the guy move just seemed amazingly petty.

  270. Read and Find Out*

    Reposting from above because I accidentally hit reply instead of new comment..

    Let me tell you about Evil Kevin. We were in the same academic department but I was more junior in rank. As the new director of a program Kevin had previously run, I was given authority to assign work to a more junior colleague. The department faculty even voted to give me that authoirty–that if certain circumstances worked out in a particular way, I should assign that work. Those circumstances came to pass, I checked my plans with my supervisor and the employee, and assigned the work. The employee went to Kevin to ask for help with one of the assignments, and Kevin goes on a rampage because I did not get HIS approval to assign this work (forgetting that they had participated in the vote several months before). They complained to everyone in the department that I dared to set work for a junior colleague (within my job description) without checking with him first. He then insisted that the next department meeting agenda include time for him to berate me.

    I didn’t attend that meeting–as a rule I don’t attend meetings with peers where yelling at me is on the agenda–, and soon afterwards quit running that program. He was mad because I had negotiated a raise for the position after he quit it.

  271. Jigglypuff*

    I worked at a summer camp, supervising the teen volunteers who served food in the dining hall. The dining hall manager decided my teens were using too many rags when cleaning, so she made a new rule that after breakfast and lunch, all rags had to be laid out to dry on this one particular table so we could reuse the same rags for the next meal. Only after dinner were we allowed to put them in the wash.

    Interestingly, she changed her tune the week that the health inspector was supposed to arrive…

  272. LukeN*

    In my old neighborhood in Chicago, there was an incredibly dramatic crossing guard. She was an older woman, who would halt traffic for every single person crossing at a four way stop, yelling, “PEDESTRIAN CROSSING” at the top of her lungs. She worked every morning and every afternoon on weekdays. It was always a slightly eccentric, but harmless part of the neighborhood’s local color.

    We later found out that she was NOT a crossing guard, and had just bought a crossing guard vest at Goodwill.

    5. Neurodivergentsaurus Rex*

      she was a volunteer!! she was doing a public service!! haha. I love her

    7. LukeN*

      And for reference, it was not a dangerous intersection! It was pretty busy, but it was a four way stop, so traffic was stopping anyway!

    8. Catonymous*

      Oh this reminds me of an encounter I had once with a meter “maid” (it was a man): I was in the intersection (driving), waiting to turn left, and he was crossing on the crosswalk on the side of the street where I needed to turn. For reasons unknown (maybe I look like someone he hated?), he made eye contact with me shortly after entering the crosswalk, slowed his pace to a crawl and shuffled across the crosswalk so slowly that I was in the intersection still waiting for him after the light went red. He never dropped eye contact either.

  273. Green Goose*

    The scheduler at the daycare I worked at was so horrid, just a mean person and she would take out her meanness on staff all the time. I basically wanted to work the least hours as possible but I was never (NEVER) cut early, and there was another woman who was desperate for more hours and the scheduler always cut her early. We could start cutting people around 3:30 or so and I always volunteered to be cut and every day she would cut the other woman early and refused to change the practice. That place was awful.

    1. Merrie*

      You’d think the two of you could work out a deal and reverse this lady’s decision… “Oh, I really needed to leave early today and Cindy kindly said she’d work the rest of my shift for me, since she got cut early but she doesn’t need to leave”.

  274. Claire*

    It’s not about me this story but my husband. We are in the U.K. and he had a job in field sales in a niche area so at times had to drive across the country to see particular customers. One week he based himself in and around Scotland to see some his accounts up there. He was planning to end up in a particularly rural area one evening and knew he would struggle to find a cafe or restaurant open. So he purchased a flapjack at lunchtime from a petrol station along with his sandwich in case he needed it later to snack on. It was 54 pence. It was rejected by the Accounts Manager for being “indulgent and unnecessary” He no longer has that job and is much happier!

    1. KayDeeAye*

      Our controller once refused to pay for a traveling employee’s bottle of water because it “wasn’t bought at the same time she purchased a meal.” I guess…that made it a “snack,” and the company doesn’t pay for snacks? This was in an airport, so it was more expensive than your husband’s flapjack, but not by a lot!

  275. spic*

    The pen thing must be pretty common because I’ve encountered that at more than one workplace.

    At a job where we did indeed have to turn in old pens before being issued a new one, my grandboss thought using the mouse instead of keyboard shortcuts wasted too much time, so he removed the mouse from everyone’s desk. Some people brought in their own and put labels on stating it was their own personal property. The issue of personal mousing was brought up at a staff meeting but there was not much he could actually do about it.

    This was the same boss that wanted to know where a pregnant co-worker was having her baby. He never stated why, but we all thought it was so he would know where to find her if he needed her while she was giving birth.

    1. Spicy Tuna*

      OMG, this is Spicy Tuna! I think I must have hit “enter” too soon as I thought the “Name” box was going to autofill! Oh lord…

  276. Forrest Rhodes*

    Just want to thank all the contributors here. Really enjoyed reading so many examples of “you give ’em an inch, they think they’re a ruler.”

      1. Merrie*

        I’m lying in bed in pain after a medical procedure. This thread is a very fun distraction.

  277. Anon for this*

    Years ago, I worked for a manager who demanded weekly status reports of the whole HR team. Not just updates on our projects/positions recruiting for/active investigations, but for example, if I was recruiting for a tea pot coordinator, she wanted a list of all the candidates I’d reviewed, what the outcome was (moving forward or not), any phone interviews scheduled, what the outcome was, any in-person interviews scheduled, what the outcome was, etc. I had no problem updating her on what I was working on, but told her a more efficient way to give her this information would be to quickly run a report in the applicant tracking system for her. Nope, she did not trust the applicant tracking system and she wanted an email written with all this information for each open position. And she wanted it by close of business every Friday. When I told her how much time I was spending manually typing up these updates that could have been better spent, you know, actually doing my job, she wrote me up for insubordination.
    I quickly left that job for a promotion at another company and never looked back.

  278. Amykins*

    I was a few years into being a full time employee and had been through the company’s intern program previously, and had volunteered to help with the intern program since I’d had such a good experience with it myself. Normally every year at the end of the summer the interns would be given a company paid-for outing of some kind at a restaurant with food and drinks and entertainment of some kind, to show appreciation for that year’s batch of interns, but that year the company said there weren’t any funds for a celebration of any kind. I thought this was ridiculous and asked if there wouldn’t even be any funds for a few pizzas at the office, and was told no. Me and the two other folks on the intern committee brainstormed and decided to ask folks in the department if they’d be willing to chip in a few bucks each so we could treat the interns to pizza. I was the one who wrote and sent the email, but I was given the OK for it by the person in charge of the intern committee so I presumed it was fine to do. Instead I was reprimanded rather harshly by my supervisor as well as my grand boss for sending an email like that out to the department and that it wasn’t appropriate or my place to do so (note that plenty of line-level folks sent department-wide emails for a variety of reasons, and again, I’d been given the OK by someone above me). The head of the intern committee and the other person on the committee who I’d worked with on this both got reprimanded as well.

    The real reason we were reprimanded was that it didn’t “look good” that we were implying that the department couldn’t afford to even give the interns pizza – because almost immediately after I sent that email, another email went out from my grandboss saying to disregard my email and that “of course” we’d be funding a celebration for the interns.

    I still have no regrets, because at least the interns got their celebration, but it really soured me on my bosses and that company, big time. On the plus side, I ended up bonding with my fellow intern committee members over the unfairness of the whole thing and got a long-lasting friendship out of it.

  279. Serin*

    There’s a certain portion of my job that’s closely controlled for risk management, so I’m authorized to do this task on a very simple level (I mean “simple” is defined in great detail) and for anything more complex I have to request support from Separate Department. I don’t mind this a bit; I’d rather not be responsible for risks outside my expertise.

    The people from Separate Department are knowledgeable and helpful, but in order to get at them, you have to get your electronic request through the Gatekeepers.

    Imagine something like the automatic responses you get on a Help page when it scans your question for keywords and returns something 10% relevant, but then add a sneering tone of voice that comes through even in text. And the worst part is that anywhere it would be helpful to define, identify, elaborate, or send a link to relevant information, instead you get “This information is clearly detailed in the educational materials.”

    A typical support request requires three to five back-and-forths with the Gatekeepers.

    The whole reason for having a Gatekeeper step is to make sure we don’t waste the time of the real experts by sending them requests that are incomplete or incoherent, and it drives me nuts that these people would rather scold.

  280. It was 11 cents...*

    Our company offered a stipend ($20 per person) for occasional meals for people working on a certain cross-functional team. A colleague and I had lunch and our bill came to $40.11. He explained to our server and asked him to run $40 exactly on his (corporate) credit card and we’d pay the rest (including tip) in cash. The server was rushed and forgot, then came back apologizing. We told him not to worry about it—no big deal.

    Because it was a corporate card, my colleague couldn’t just omit the $0.11 and submit $40 for reimbursement—it was directly charged to the company. So he explained what happened when he submitted the expense (even though he felt kind of ridiculous explaining because it was only $0.11.)

    His supervisor (who did not work on this cross-functional team and so was not eligible for the stipend) reprimanded him for going 11 cents over and told him to never let this happen again.

    For the win: We were allowed to use this stipend once every X period of time. This was the first time in several periods that he’d used the stipend at all.

  281. A Feast of Fools*

    At my last job, I traveled to our corporate offices one week for some time-sensitive work. I was sick. Like, 102F fever, non-stop coughing, nose and eyes that literally streamed liquid non-stop, sore throat, the works.

    But I went in anyway because my boss was the kind to put people on PIPs for spending money from the department’s travel budget and then not being able to travel (or not attend the thing they had traveled for, like a conference or big meeting).

    I sat as far away from everyone as I could, but it was an open floor plan. Just one big warehouse-type building filled with rows and rows of stand-sit desks.

    Our department’s VP (my great-grand-boss) walked close enough by me at about noon to see that I was Not Doing Well and told me to go home. I was like, “I flew here. ‘Home’ is a hotel room. Besides, the reason I’m here is for Critical Time Sensitive Work. It *has* to get done.” So she told me to grab a monitor and go work in my hotel room, to keep my germs to myself.

    I walked past my boss’s desk on the way out, carrying a monitor under one arm, and told him what I was doing. I set up in the hotel room and even attended my boss’s weekly team meeting, with my laptop’s camera capturing the hotel room behind me.

    The next week, Boss messaged me to ask why I hadn’t recorded that day as PTO. I said, “Because I worked that day. Why would I use PTO for a day I worked?” He then told me that because I hadn’t gotten *his* permission to leave the office, that I would have to use PTO, *EVEN THOUGH I WORKED THE WHOLE DAY*.

    Had to run that one all the way up to HR and the VP.

  282. Ann Onymous*

    In my first job, there was a manager who committed petty little abuses of her power often enough that everyone (the other managers included) referred to her as “Crazy Jane” to differentiate her from the other Jane who worked there.

    1. Elle Woods*

      I had a similar situation at work. Two women named Kim. One was known as “Happy Kim” the other as “Crabby Kim.” Crabby Kim was known for her temper tantrums, power trips, and spitefulness. None of us were upset when she left for a new job.

    2. Chirpy*

      I definitely used to work with “Young Joe”, “Old Joe”, and “Angry Joe”…

    3. Rob aka Mediancat*

      When I started, we had a Quality Analyst (who check the employees’ work for errors) who was referred to as She Who Must Not Be Named. She was lazy, petty, grumpy, and vindictive; if you managed to overturn one of her errors (which happened a lot with her) she would stop being lazy just long enough to find something else you got wrong and ding you for that instead.

      (Yes, you’d made the mistake, but when I talked to my colleagues everyone said the same things: she took being proven wrong as a personal insult.)

  283. FormerClerk*

    After law school, I clerked (term clerk, one year position). The judge I was working for staggered the arrivals of new clerks over a 1-2 month period to ease the transition. I was the last to start in my group, and therefore the last to leave. I only worked with her for about 6 weeks, but the first clerk to start in the next group of clerks LOVED being the “senior” clerk. During the transition period, the newer clerks would be on their way to my desk to ask a question (since I had been there a year) and she would physically get up from her desk to intercept them to answer their questions (sometimes she was right, but not always). She would interrupt me to provide advice to her newer co-clerks (she was more “senior” than them by several weeks). She would answer questions about tasks she had never performed and make it sound like she had done them hundreds of times. It was just bizarre.

  284. Evelyn Carnahan*

    I’m half-expecting to see myself in a comment here. 10+ years ago I was a temp at a state legal office and responsible for a lot of lower-level admin work. Every time I did a supply order, one of the attorneys in the office asked for a very specific style of steno pad and would even send me links to order them from Office Depot. And every supply order I would tell him, no, I can’t order this for you. But it was because we were part of a state department and were limited to what the state supply center could get. And this was during the 2008 recession, so we were literally lucky to get blue pens instead of only black! I’m sure the other attorneys in the office would complain about how I monitored how many staples people used and other things that are honestly really unimportant — but this is because there was an underground trade system between the different offices in this department to try to get stuff that wasn’t available through the supply orders! I promise! I hated that I did it too!

    1. Observer*

      The key in those situations is to let people know what you are doing and why. Obviously you have to be careful, but you can say things like “I wish I could get those for you but I am not allowed to order from anywhere but the State Supply center” or “I know that how many staples you use is not a really important metric, but if someone in Dept X decides that we’ve used too many, we get questioned about it.”

      1. Evelyn Carnahan*

        I think that part of the issue was that I worked with attorneys who a) were not accustomed to this level of budget cuts, and b) worked for the state but also frequently moved between working directly for the state and working in private practices that contracted for the state. They had a very different understanding of the supply ordering process in the state office, because these items were readily available when they were in private practice. I work for a different state now, and you can log into a particular amazon portal to make purchases with state money and see everything available. Back in 2008/09, I had a paper form that I filled out by hand and faxed to the supply center, and would find out what requests got filled when they arrived (hopefully once a week, but sometimes only once a month).

        The people who were long-term state employees were well aware of the situation and I know that they also worked to counter the complaints. I have no guilt or regrets about counting the number of nice pens someone had and telling them that they couldn’t have any more until they ran out!

  285. Queen Sansa Snark*

    I had a professor in a grad program (designed for people who already had full-time jobs, mind you) who used to dock points on discussion assignments if your required replies to 2 different classmates were posted “too close together.” Never mind that everyone in the program had a full-time job and many of my fellow students had families, no homework batching for you! Natural conversations only (on an online classroom discussion board, the most stilted mode of conversation of all time)!

    1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

      AAAAA I have this going currently – one of the specific requirements in the rubric for the d-board in the class I’m currently taking is that your initial post and comment to a classmate must not be made on the same day.

      Between that, and the fact that nobody else in this class appears to be capable of typing a coherent sentence, I’m getting a weekly 17/20 on discussion boards because I’m not responding to my classmates at all. (I still have an A in the class.)

      1. Online learning system*

        I recently had an instructor who only “required” 2 replies, but actually wanted you to do more replies if you wanted the A. It didn’t matter if these were completely fluff responses (“thanks for asking, Liguini!”) as long as you had a bunch of them.

  286. Emby*

    The research director I had when I was a lowly junior researcher/administrative assistant got upset with me for the way I took notes. He insisted I had to do it on the computer, so I started doing that, but then he was upset that I just used the tab key and hyphens to mark new points instead of using the actual note taking function. I asked if he had trouble reading my notes the way I was doing them, and he said the problem was not their legibility, but that it was the wrong way to take notes.

  287. NeutralJanet*

    One team lead that I had created guidelines for when you could say “good morning” or “good afternoon” in your emails, with the thought that there were times of the day that were before noon, but weren’t really morning anymore and so using either would be inaccurate. The rule was that emails sent between 10:45 AM and 12:30 PM could not include either “good morning” or “good afternoon” (I am not sure why you couldn’t say “good afternoon” in an email sent between 12 and 12:30). I got chewed out for starting an email sent at 10:51 AM with, “Good morning Lucinda,” and when I argued that Lucinda was in a different time zone so for her it was 8:51 AM, a non-ambiguously morning time, I was told that that was confusing and made our brand look bad.

    2. Lurker*

      Ha, that’s so ridiculous! What if you send the email to someone at 10:30am and say “Good morning” but they took the morning off and don’t read your email until after 1pm? Were you required to use good morning or good afternoon? Could you just start the email with “Dear —- ” or their name?

  288. semidemihemicolon*

    I had a manager who didn’t like semi-colons.

    Every time I used a semi-colon – in an email, in an internal document that no one outside the company would ever see, anywhere – she would complain about it and, for internal documents, make me rewrite a sentence to eliminate any semi-colons. Obviously I tried to use semi-colons less, but I found it genuinely difficult to remember not to use a punctuation mark I’d used without worrying about it all my life before this job.

    Eventually, in a one-on-one meeting she told me that my use of semi-colons was so disturbing that she was putting me on a performance improvement plan and every time I used a semi-colon I’d get written up.

    To be fair, this “worked”, in that every single sentence I wrote when on the job – anywhere – I now reviewed it and rewrote it to eliminate semi-colons. It made me so jumpy that I got extremely nervous about grammar and punctuation, which was not something that had ever worried me before. She left the job to have a nervous breakdown, and I left it within the year for a better job where no one proofread internal emails or complained about my use of punctuation marks.

  289. Lizzy May*

    My office is divided between two floors. The main floor has a kitchen and our floor has a kitchenette. The office manager works on the main floor and I work on the second floor.

    The cutlery in our kitchenette began to go missing until it got to the point where we didn’t have forks. A coworker on our floor reached out to the office manager and asked if we could get more cutlery. The office manager refused saying if we didn’t have cutlery that was our fault for bringing it home. My coworker pointed out that we still needed cutlery. The office manager said she would only order new cutlery for us if the coworker got a signed statement from every employee on our floor that we wouldn’t bring cutlery home and put up signs to warn people.

    My coworker took time to go around to every person on the floor to get them to sign the agreement. For people at home, she had to send for e-signatures. She had to create and hang up signs telling people not to take the cutlery home and send a photo of the signs to the office manager along with all of our signed agreements. We got new cutlery about two weeks later.

    1. Delta Delta*

      I had an awesome manager at a retail shop when I was in college. She would – and I am 100% not making this up – bring her lunch every day along with a bone china plate or bowl, a cloth napkin, and sterling silver silverware. Her reasons were: a) she had this great stuff (inherited, and then awarded in a divorce) so she might as well use it and b) you never know when the work kitchen might not have plates/napkins/forks. She was awesome. And nobody could accuse her of taking work forks.

      1. A Feast of Fools*

        I have a huge box of fine bone china and a velvet-lined case of sterling silver flatware that have been in a closet in my house for 22 years, and I have *never* figured out when or where I would use any of it.

        Now I know.

        1. WellRed*

          If I may be petty: please don’t bring silver and china for lunch if you work in a cube farm. That stuff is LOUD. And please, use the good stuff at home. It deserves to be used.

        2. Sally’s Alley*

          Use it at home. A friend of mine used her inherited sterling silver flatware every day, and washed it in the dishwasher. It looked great.

    2. Lirael*

      Honestly I would make and frame signs that were WORKS OF ART if I had to do this. Complete with the name of the office manager who said it was necessary.

      (Ok, I probably wouldn’t, but damn.)

  290. Mouse Anon*

    There was a bomb threat at my work. Most people left the building immediately without car keys, etc., so couldn’t go home. After milling around for an hour or two, the group went to a local spot for lunch, and our business manager put the expense on the company credit card (probably the right thing to do either way – but especially given that many of the lunchers also didn’t have their wallets on them!). After she submitted the expense report, she received a response from Finance that the expense couldn’t be authorized. The reasoning was because it was clear that the business manager had the company card on her person when the bomb threat happened, which is against stated policy – the card is supposed to be locked away until it is taken out for specific use.

    We eventually got that decision overturned, but man… it definitely felt out of touch.

    1. never mind where I work*

      Back when I was the director of a computer lab, when we had a fire alarm go off I’d grab the server backup tapes and then exit the building. Your business manager clearly unlocked the cabinet where the card was located and saved what was important. :-)

    2. never mind where I work*

      The Worst Manager I ever worked for once said she was a great manager. A couple of examples of her greatness:

      Our organization had a rule that employees could only park on certain floors of the garage, and that you could only park head-in because the exhaust soiled the walls. My manager was reprimanding Jane, our department secretary, for parking on the wrong floor (in front of me) and asked me where I had parked. I didn’t want to get involved in this, so I told her I was staying out of this. She threatened to charge me with insubordination.

      Once I yawned in a meeting. Her response “You’re fired. Ha ha, just joking.”

      One more, also involving Jane: Jane had a death in the family and requested a day off. The manager called Jane (also in front of me–my desk was next to Jane’s) and told her “This is an unauthorized day off and if you ever do it again You. Will. Be. Fired.” Jane found her request for time off in the manager’s trash can.

      Did I mention that our manager was working towards a PhD in management?

  291. Sammy Keyes*

    When I first started a new job, I was given a giant backlog of paperwork to enter into an internal system, and was instructed to keep the hard copies even after I scanned the papers. My manager denied my request to get a small filing cabinet for my desk to store the completed paperwork in, because they had to “pause furniture orders” after the company had spent too much money. They had spent close to $60k on fancy office furniture, but denied me a cabinet that cost less than $100. To make it even more ridiculous, my desk was the reception desk in the lobby, which was going to be decked out with beautiful, expensive furniture….and then my desk would have giant piles of paper on top of it because I didn’t have storage, completely ruining the lobby aesthetic.
    I eventually got my filing cabinet after I pushed back, though!

  292. Brain the Brian*

    We have a client who regularly and rudely berates us over “invoice discrepancies” of under a dollar on reimbursement requests with total values in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of these stem from typos in their recording of past invoices that roll forward each month, and yet it usually takes us multiple hours to confirm the source of the error and compose a reply in kind corporate-speak.

    The same client makes us resubmit any invoice that’s signed the day before we email them the invoice. Our company’s CFO (whose signature appears on all invoices) has had to re-sign multiple invoices as a result; once, she *left a board meeting* to do so because the client wanted it resubmitted within an hour.

    Yes, we all hate this client.

    1. Generic Name*

      We’ve had to correct an invoice that was off by one cent. Our head of accounting said she seriously considered putting a penny in the mail and sending it to them.

  293. HigherEdAdminista*

    At one of my first jobs, I gave my manager abundant notice that there was a two week period where I would have reduced availability due to some family stuff. I even said I could work many of the days, but just not during certain shifts.

    When he put the schedule out for the first week impacted he “forgot” in spite of the note taped to his computer. Since the policy was that they could accommodate changes with notice (and I was an extremely solid and loyal employee), he had to change the schedule. At this time, I reminded him that I would have the same availability the following week and then would be back to normal.

    The next week’s schedule comes out, note still taped to the computer monitor, and what do you know… he forgot again! We go through the same song and dance, and again he changes the schedule.

    The following week, I’m back to normal availability… and I get zero shifts. He gave all my shifts to a person who was hired the week before as a temporary worker and wasn’t going to be there past that season. I use the week without shifts to find and interview for another job and quit, never working another shift there.

    Other managers asked him why he did this, and he admitted that he was pissed about the lack of open availability so he wanted to see if I would just ignore it and work the shifts anyway. When I didn’t and he had to get them covered, that also annoyed him, him so he thought I would learn to prioritize this (part-time, no benefits, minimum wage, while I’m in school) job over everything else if I saw the consequences of not being totally open at all times.

    Instead, I got a job that paid more, always accommodated my schedule with notice, gave me as many hours as I requested, had benefits, and was a better working environment! This job literally set me on the path to my career today, which introduced me to so many great people and friends. If the manager hadn’t been so petty as to use his power to schedule to punish me, I likely would have stayed there for much longer!

  294. RabidChild*

    I worked at an absolute nightmare of a company where the HR manager would use their login to Monster.com (this was waaay back in the day) to search for anonymous resumes that looked like they were from current employees. They’d then show them to the CEO who would decide what to do. I almost got fired because my resume appeared to be current on there, so naturally I was job searching, and thus guilty.

    Since when is job searching a fire-able offense?

    Was I job-searching? Of course, the place was circling the bowl for the second time, and my manager suggested it. Luckily, my manager did the tap dance of their life and my bacon was saved. I was out of there within 4 months, thankfully.

    1. Salymander*

      What a nightmare place to work! My mom had a boss like that. They required 6 months notice minimum to quit, otherwise they would go out of their way to trash your reputation. If you gave them 6 months notice, they would fire you immediately and have you escorted out. If you found a job too quickly after being walked out, they assumed that you had lied when giving notice and had planned to leave right then all along, so they would try to trash your reputation. They even had other employees get friendly with the one who was leaving, so they could get intel for the boss. It was a very cold war spy novel type situation. There was no way to win.

  295. pantslesseconomist*

    More of a story of bureaucracy run amok, but….

    I used to work for state government. We were paid IRS reimbursement rates (i.e. 50-ish cents per mile) for our travel to the airport, calculated from our home if the flight was before 8 AM, or from the office if the flight was after 8 AM. I had a flight that left at 8:30 AM, but mistakenly used my home as the starting point because I’d left from home (and had been to the airport before 8).

    I got an email from the bursar that they couldn’t reimburse my request because it was from the wrong starting point. Except that as it turned out, my home and my office were nearly equidistant from the airport, so they were denying my claim over literally $0.05. Five cents! And I had to fill out new paperwork over a nickel. Meanwhile, I spent 20 on-the-clock minutes fixing the error. Congratulations, I guess?

  296. Requiem Fancy Cake*

    During the recession, I worked at a dysfunctional local media company with an in-house ad agency. One of our clients was a bakery, and each week their ad would include a photo of the fancy “cake of the week,” which they would bring in for us to photograph. After the photo was taken, an email was sent to the staff — every one of whom were underpaid and overworked — saying “the Fancy Cake is available, have at it!” It was a sad little weekly joy for everyone at a thankless, frustrating job that had frequent rounds of layoffs and comically unsupportive management.

    Fancy Cake Day was the practice until one day, our horrible, horrible Big Boss was walking by the kitchen area and saw my coworker take the first slice of Fancy Cake — it was Bailey’s Irish Cream flavored, lest you think I have *ever* forgotten this — and decided on the spot that a BETTER use for the cake would be his upcoming lunch meeting for a half dozen local execs he was hoping to impress. (For what it’s worth, this meeting was already being catered relatively extravagantly by a nice local restaurant, *including* two different kinds of dessert). Big Boss made my coworker PUT THE SLICE OF CAKE BACK and then used a plastic knife/spoon combo to “smooth” over the cut area and pile chocolate shavings back on the edges. It may have been the most absurd thing I’ve ever witnessed in person.

    After that, Big Boss got “first right of refusal” to Fancy Cake, sometimes just making off with it, sometimes taking it to his golf buddies’ houses, sometimes only releasing it to staff after the weekend when it turned out he/his kids didn’t like it. When the latter happened, we’d be magnanimously presented with a semi-stale, partially ravaged cake in smeared plastic wrap. This job did a number on me, but I can at least treasure the memory of his face when I told him that I was quitting and would not extend my departure date beyond 2 weeks for ANY amount of money.

  297. Sbl*

    At my first grown up job, my boss told me to talk to our VP’s assistant about getting a mobile phone. The assistant refused because “entry level staff shouldn’t need a company phone” and “the cost for mobile phone use is already out of control.”
    I told my boss, assumed that she’d put her foot down behind the scenes and I’d have a phone within a few days. Instead, a few weeks later all managers in that VP’s division had to give a presentation to their teams about excessive use of company phones. More than 100 employees had to take 15 minutes out of their work day to be confronted with a slide deck full of statistics on phone use.
    The kicker: Three out of more than 100 staff members had monthly bills in the triple digits, while everyone else’s bills were below $5 a month. The three high bills were no surprise either – there were three people in the division whose jobs required constant international travel.
    It baffles me to this day that neither the VP nor any of the managers in her division objected to that assistant’s power trip.
    As for me, I refused to give anyone at work my personal phone number and after another week or two of my boss not being able to reach me unless I was at my desk, work phones for entry level staff were no longer seen as heinous.

  298. Distracted Librarian*

    I think I’ve told this story here before, but back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a student assistant in an academic library, we got a new dean, fresh out of library school. As dean, he did have actual power, but he still managed to be incredibly petty. Two examples:
    1. In his first couple of months, he made my boss in Special Collections give up her donated wooden desk b/c there were higher-ranked administrators who only had metal desks.
    2. It was my job to sit in the reading room and greet users while processing archival collections. The dean would come and go a few times a week. I’d greet him, and he’d ignore me and whoosh by to see my boss. Eventually, I’d look up, see it was him, and go back to work, because why greet someone who ignores you every time? After a couple days of that, my boss sits me down and tells me the dean’s latest edict: student assistants in the reading room must (and this is a direct quote) “make oral contact” with everyone who comes in. I had to bite my tongue to keep from telling her that the going rate for oral contact was a whole lot more than $4.25 an hour.

    2. Kimmy Schmidt*

      I so want a chance to borrow “must make oral contact” and use it in my daily life. GOLD.

  299. Small potato*

    Is none a small enough number?

    Had a coworker who was, say, a Llama groomer. They were also a Technical Lead for Llama grooming, which is like a Llama groomer, but also has the responsibility of making sure the company keeps up it’s Llama grooming capability. So, making trainings on internal processes, identifying good external training, advising junior Llama Groomers, etc.

    We had a guy who was the one person who, say, dealt with Llama orthodontics. Our Big Client had that guy full time and was very concerned that we would have an issue if that guy got covid or left. So we were supposed to build a Llama orthodontics training program so all our groomers could get up to speed and have basic background to fill in if necessary. I was tasked to get this stood up. So I reached out to our Capability manager and ask if we have trainings related to that already to use as a starting point. The response: “These are Capability tasks, not Big Client tasks.” Even when I said here’s why I need to know and what specifically I’m looking for, he refused to answer. I pressed it during a call our boss was also on and out out there were no trainings (not an issue and I’d been clear I didn’t expect any, but didn’t want to throw out any work we already had). Months later he was still going on about how he was in the right because he needed to protect things in development because others folks might change them.

    He needed to protect things that Did Not Exist.

    I left that job as the manager didn’t see any issues with this.

  300. TinaTurner*

    The pettiest misuse of “power” I’ve seen was at a famous trendy internationally known publication revered by the most “woke” types, which employed staff who were often very full of themselves. The Managing Editor went into a tailspin before she quit and insulted everyone, all the time.

    She made a point of insulting / demeaning me for doing the freelance job she hired me to do!
    I didn’t design it, she hired me for it. It was a production job I was over-qualified for, and I brought editorial skills to it, which she said was a plus when she hired me.
    How dare I do the job she offered me!

    It turned out the husband she had tried so hard to have [she was open about it] became ill and it was very sad for her; maybe her hostility to all was from the stress. Her happily ever after turned challenging and I only hope she rose to the occasion for her family.

  301. tinybutfierce*

    I previously managed a retail store for a smallish company; our corporate HQ was a few hours away in another city, but my boss and other higher-ups would visit not infrequently. My boss would give me a heads up whenever the VP was coming in so we could remove the chairs we kept behind the counter for staff to sit in on the genuinely rare occasion they weren’t actually busy, because the VP didn’t believe there was any reason for staff to need to sit at any point during an 8 hour shift on a hard cement floor.

    The company was owned/created by the VP’s dad, so you can perhaps guess how long it had been since VP had done anything resembling actual retail work.

    1. tinybutfierce*

      Oh, this same VP once threw a job applicant’s resume and application in the trash without so much as glancing at it because the applicant had a sleeve tattoo and “tattoos just say something about your character”.

      On another occasion, he told me to my face that you would never catch him with a tattoo unless he “was in a Nazi concentration camp.”

      He’s a white, non-Jewish cishet dude. Myself and his two other managers at the time all had tattoos, which he knew.

      FUN GUY.

      1. tinybutfierce*

        OH, and his dad/the CEO had a reputation for being “handsy”. I was told by several other female employees that they’d had their ass grabbed by this 60something year old man; one of them was under 18.

        ALSO A FUN GUY.

    2. ArtsyGirl*

      I had a CEO of my high school retail job feel the same thing about chairs. He was a big and intimidating guy and showed up at our location and found one of the employees sitting behind the counter. He physically picked up the chair and threw it across the room damaging the sheet rock. He ended up having to settle out of court for that temper tantrum because the female employee was pregnant and had accommodations.

    3. Petty Patty*

      Big Box Retail feels the same way about cement floors and standing.

      I had to get a doctor’s note to get a tall stool approved for behind the customer service counter. And I could only sit on it when I wasn’t dealing directly with customers. We were the busiest store in the entire region so, out of 8 hours, I maybe got to sit/lean against the stool for 30-45 minutes, tops.

      Two metatarsals in my right foot were broken.

      From standing on cement floors 8 hours a day, five days a week.

  302. Rocket Woman*

    When I was 16, I got my first job at a famous sandwich chain that makes $5 foot longs. I worked there for 9 months and was the most tenured employee by 2 months, and by FAR the best, when I eventually quit.

    So 9 months into my time working there, I got REALLY sick. High fever, congestion, sneezing, etc. You could visibly see that I was sick and it would not have been safe for me to handle food. There was a district manager over 7 stores that you had to call directly when you’re sick. I called in the evening before my after school shift since I still had a fever and wouldn’t be cleared to go in. He grumbled a bit but let it go. The next day, I am still sick so I call to be out sick the following day too. This man made me call all 7 stores, get the numbers for their on call employees, and try to find my own replacement. I spent 3 hours doing this with a 102 degree fever and found no one. When I called back to tell him he said he needed a doctors note. In my state it was illegal for them to require a doctors until you called out 3 consecutive days. I had one, so the next day (when I was supposed to work), I dragged my sick ass in there, handed him my doctors note, handed him my two weeks notice, blew my nose, and walked out.

    They called about a week later about something that frequently broke and I was the only one who knew how to fix it and asked me to talk them through it. I told him I’d need a doctors note to do so and hung up.

  303. Catonymous*

    I worked for a #toxicboss, and once a colleague requested a day off on one side of a weekend because they had a family event they had to travel for. Boss approved the day off, but then turned around and accused the employee of “stealing time” and wanted them to “prove” they wouldn’t be working on “side gigs” on their travel day (they were going to be on a ferry).

    1. HigherEdAdminista*

      Ridiculous! How does one prove you aren’t doing something?

      “Hey, here’s a 7 hour video of me on the ferry. You can see I’m reading a novel (and I read it out loud to be sure it wasn’t work related), taking a little nap, and then having a little snack!”

  304. And Peggy*

    I worked at a movie theater years ago and the different stations (concessions, box office, lobby) had phones so we could communicate. One of the managers, who everyone including the other managers LOATHED, called me from the office and berated me for using a different spray bottle of surface cleaner than the one she used. The two cleaners were absolutely identical, but she had watched me use the “wrong” one from the security camera. She ranted about how all the other managers would get together to complain about my work ethic and this was more evidence that they were right.

    I quit not long after, but should have walked out right then.

  305. DevBob*

    I work in software, and have been doing my job long enough that I’m at a senior level. I started a job last year where I was brought onto a project that was going through a big personnel shakeup – I was introduced to my department lead and the project lead and dropped in at the deep end to get on with tasks. I wasn’t sure of the lay of the land and the onboarding was awful, so I thought it was only fair I keep the project lead in the loop on what I was working on.

    At first the project lead would respond and offer guidance on how they tackle tasks at the company, but then on the 4th day into my job I was invited to a mysterious meeting with the project lead and department lead. The two leads basically grilled me and gave me a ton of harsh feedback, claiming they were “concerned” that I was asking questions and that, as a Senior level employee, I was meant to know exactly what I was doing (honestly, who knows *exactly* what they are doing in a new job during their first week?). In this meeting they also accused me of lying about my experience and skillset, and basically piled on pressure. What’s worse is that when it really came down to it, the real feedback was actually incredibly minor and could have been communicated via instant message: the abuse of power was holding a 30 minute meeting to drag out the situation, adding a severe amount of gravity to the conversation, and basically punishing a new starter for not being able to read someone’s mind.

    I left the job 2 weeks later and ended up somewhere infinitely more supportive and collaborative.

    1. PT*

      I *hate* jobs like that. “You’re experienced, you should know what you’re doing?” OK, but all the experience in the world will not make me able to read minds as to what the company’s internal procedures and office political peccadillos are.

    2. Curmudgeon in California*

      Seriously? Even if you are a 20+ year veteran of the industry it takes at least a month, more like three, to learn their repos, tech stack and processes. Anyone who has had more than one job ought to know that. Unless you are literally hired for a pure greenfield startup where you have to *invent* the standards, processes and codebase, it takes time to find all the little things.

  306. Esmeralda*

    When I was a grad student I worked as a secretary for an academic dept. The head admin, Sherrie, was smart, no nonsense, and, as I learned, wily in the ways of squeezing the university budgeting office.

    At first I thought she was tight fisted with supplies. You could get what you needed, but not more, and you had to have a good reason to request more, which you might or might not get. I asked her one day, c’mon, why are you like this. She leaned over and said, quietly, I’m getting ready for the end of the fiscal year. Money was budgeted to the department– if the dept spent too much it was in trouble, and if it didn’t spend the whole budget, it would be budgeted less the next year. She kept close track of spending and supplies; had a list of more expensive supplies and gear the dept needed, and juuuuuust close enough to the end of the fiscal year (but not so close that it was super obvious), she’d start buying. Enough paper for the following year. Boxes and boxes and boxes of floppies. File cabinets. Chairs. Etc

    And that is how I, a lowly part time secretary, full time liberal arts grad student got a new IBM selectric and a Mac in my office.

    After she submitted her year end report, the admin staff had a party (thank you, Sherrie)

    1. Merrie*

      My aunt worked in acquisitions for an academic library and apparently there was a fine science to making sure you spent your whole budget but didn’t go over.

    2. Berkeleyfarm*

      I used to work for IT in a county government. End of Fiscal Year was just nuts. It would get more so when people realized they couldn’t get POs/invoices/whatever cut in time. Definitely a “use it or lose it” situation.

  307. River Otter*

    We had a new office admin come in, replacing the previous office admin who really enjoyed having a low level of tasking. New Admin took it upon herself to be in charge of things that we had not been accustomed to being accountable to someone for previously, like how many sharpies we used. New Admin had a real bug about sharpies and kept them locked up separately from other office supplies. I learned this when I went to the supply cabinet to get a sharpie, did not find one, and let New Admin know that we were out of sharpies and could she please order some? New Admin let me know that she was keeping them locked up because people were using too many. At my salary level, during the time it took for me to have this conversation with New Admin, as opposed to the 30 seconds it would have taken me to grab a sharpie, the company probably lost enough money to keep me in sharpies for 10 years, but OK. Keep the sharpies locked up. That’s a great power trip to be on.

  308. Angel M*

    My former employer wanted me to write a summary of what I did every day, print 3 copies and leave it on his desk (He always left early) so he can review what I did EVERY DAY.
    The other two copies were sent to Corporate in Mexico and put in his special file for all employees.
    Those were to be reviewed yearly to base any wage increase.
    I did not make it that long.

    1. Delta Delta*

      I love all these facts. Like, that there are thick envelopes being sent to a corporate office in Mexico on the regular, and that someone – or two someones – there, were reviewing your daily work, weeks after it was done.

    2. Nesprin*

      I’m required to file biweekly progress reports and that’s bad enough that I’ve started doing them in Haiku.

      Instrument is broke/facilities is useless/ more progress next month.

      1. Guin*

        If you were my employee, I would give you a raise and have you teach a full-day required workshop for everyone on how to convert reports to Haiku.

  309. KC*

    I was an EA at a small company and worked closely with the office manager while our company made the move to a new office space. In the old office, I had the spare key to the supply closet, and I would let the OM know any time I took something and it was running low. (There was no formal stock-taking system in place.) The OM could be grumpy and annoying when I had to ask her for things, but this system seemed to (mostly) work for us.

    In the new office, the OM decided that I was not to have a key to the closet. In fact, NO ONE besides her would have a key to the closet because she didn’t want anyone going in and taking things without telling her. I told her that there should probably be a spare key, but she said no. She didn’t want anyone taking her supplies, so she would have the sole key available. I told her that I didn’t want to have to ask her every time I needed an empty binder or a case of water for my boss’ fridge; she told me she “didn’t mind” getting the supplies for me.

    So of course, this created a situation where if I needed supplies from the closet (often), she would act like I just asked her to saw off her own arm. I ended up just hoarding supplies at my desk and using my company card to buy myself supplies just to avoid her over-the-top reactions whenever I needed something from the closet.

    Well, one day there was an emergency at the office and the maintenance staff needed to access the supply closet area. Of course, the OM happened to be MIA…and again, NO SPARE KEY, so I gave her a call on her cell. It turns out she had an emergency of her own and had to leave, but she didn’t let anyone know. She spent 10 minutes berating me over the phone for calling her to ask for the key and telling me “not everything is about you!” Of course the whole issue could have been avoided if she wasn’t power tripping over the dang supply closet key!

  310. Soliva Gant*

    I worked at a company as a writer and editor where our entire job was producing, vetting and correcting online content. Except that the wife/husband owner team decided that the writers and editors were spending too much time goofing off by viewing personal sites like Facebook (where they also had content we needed to vet and post). So they came up with a strategy to make us more productive. They had their one-man IT department quietly work over the weekend to install a blocker on all office computers that required their approval to access every individual online page we tried to access—including those of their own company. Every time you needed to load a new page to do your work, they had to approve it. Boop, boop, boop, just approving URLs all day long. We went from going through multiple pages every few minutes to sitting around waiting for them to approve the next page for us to view. They also had a quota of how many pages you were supposed to edit per hour, but no one could meet the quota after that, so they then cut salaries based on quotas not being met. (They hadn’t planned this domino effect, they were just truly that inept.) Staff meetings involved them yelling at us for how we were all purposely tanking their company. It was a bonkers place.

    1. sofar*

      WOW. I admit part of me being amused at the idea of them having to approve all these websites, a consequence they literally did not expect (because they don’t understand how the internet works).

  311. LMM*

    It is either the gentleman who disconnected a printer from the company network so no one could see that he was having me print his email – every email, hundreds of them, every day, because he did not want to read it on a screen, he wanted to read it on paper.

    OR

    The woman who asked me to bring in a vet’s note because I worked from home one day in order to take my cat, who had a UTI, in for an emergency appointment. Grumpy Cat had recently died of complications from a UTI, and the vet’s note included a photo of Grumpy Cat.

      1. Guin*

        That’s awful, LMM. And Just Me – UTIs in male cats, particularly, are emergencies. Like, 2 am emergency-vet visits. Very bad things with often not good endings.

  312. I'm just here for the cats.*

    I would love an update from the guac guy!!! I want to know if he still works there and how bad the audits got.

  313. CaRW*

    Former HR Director–when we had a raffle for a benefits fair or something she would draw the winning name in the HR suite and if she didn’t like the winner she’d draw again. Like, way to show that person–they don’t win a free toothbrush.

    We used to have a weekly cookie and coffee hour for everyone (about 300 people). She changed it so only people with Job Title A could attend (about 70 people) because there were two entire people without that job title that she didn’t like. She told everyone else it was a cost-saving measure but freely admitted the real reason to HR.

    Why yes, she was eventually fired.

  314. dude, where's my cheese*

    I started at a job that was paying me $38k to live in a very high cost of living city. They sent me to an office location in an even more expensive city to complete a “training” that could have been a 30-minute zoom call. They paid my travel ticket but asked if I could find a friend to crash with. It took days of back and forth before they agreed to pay for my meals. I proposed like $150-$200 for 3-4 days. They said no, but we can do $15 less.

    Their office lease was like $11,000/month. They went through 8 people in my role in 5 years. The person they hired after me quit after 3 months.

  315. iglwif*

    I once worked at a place where the big boss basically wrote the travel policy himself, and included in it directives such as always taking public transit unless none was available (I love taking public transit myself, but come on!), not paying for meals when a free one was available (I worked in an academia-adjacent field, so a lot of our travel was to conferences that included meals), and never tipping more than 15%. (I believe mileage reimbursement was also below industry standard, but I don’t drive so I can’t be sure.) At the time, I was mostly just grateful he didn’t make us share hotel rooms.

    In my very first office job–I think I was about 20?–I sometimes had to cover reception (there was no voicemail) and I got yelled at for telling a client that the person she wanted to talk to was on her lunch break. It was somewhere between noon and 2pm–that’s why I was covering reception, the receptionist was at lunch–and the client did not seem at all put out, just asked that the person phone her back. But when the person got back and I handed her the message and said “I told her you were at lunch and would call her back”, she went ballistic. Apparently I was supposed to say she had was away from her desk or had stepped out for a minute or something like that?

    That same person–literally lowest in the org chart except for me, the part-timer still in university–used to take great apparent satisfaction in reinstating any spelling, grammar, or punctuation errors I silently fixed while typing her correspondence (there was 1 computer in that office, and it lived at reception; only the receptionist and I really knew how to use it). She was in general lovely to other people and horrible to me, which is why she looms so large in my mind when I think about petty power trips.

    My first *full-time* office job, my manager sat next door to me in the cube farm, and she scolded me for checking email too often because what if I missed a phone call while my phone line was in use by the dial-up modem? (We had voicemail in that office, and people left messages. Also, way fewer people called me, and way more emailed me, than she seemed to think.) After a couple of months of this I realized that the only way she could tell I was checking email was the modem sound–so I secretly turned the volume all the way down. I don’t think she ever figured it out!

  316. Master of Bears*

    When I was relatively new to my current job, I accidentally used my p-card at Starbucks. I realized it a minute later, ran back in, and the manager was able to void it for me so I could pay with my own card. Submitted both receipts and a quick explanation with my expense report and figured that would be it.

    Hoo boy was that not it. My expense report (which consisted of the voided $4.25 coffee charge and about $50 of hardware from Lowes) got sent back a total of six times, by six different people in accounting, all demanding different paperwork and explanations for the (voided!) unauthorized coffee charge.

    On the whole though, I’m glad I made this mistake, because I got to overhear it resolved with the following epic phone call between my boss and her boss:

    My boss: Hey Cory? Count to ten for me
    Cory, sounding vaguely baffled: 1…2…3…4…5…6…
    My boss:okay, this phone call has now cost more than the $5 Clara *didn’t actually spend.* Will you get them to approve the damn expense report?

    2. Observer*

      LOL! I’m literally chocking back my laughter so I shouldn’t be heard.

      Your boss is a hero!

  317. I don't mean to be rude, I'm just good at it*

    Just out of high school and found a full time job in a large insurance company (think of Jonathan) that paid full college tuition.

    New department manager arrives and decides we not longer need to “decorate” the boxes of punch cards (think of a rectangular box with maybe 1000 cards).

    This was done so that if the box would ever fall and the cards would scatter, we could replace them more easily. This happened at least once every few months and it took hours to resort them into the proper order.

    It didn’t take a week for a box to explode and I picked the short straw. I marched into our genius leaders office, placed the cards and box on his desk and said, your rules, you fix it.

    Next day we all had markers again. Oh, yeah, I got to spend the next 3 days resorting the cards.

  318. WhiskyTangoFoxtrot*

    I was the office manager to a newly added VP who decided it was my job to to sharpen his pencils. Never mind that he already had an electric pencil sharpener… on his desk… right next to his cup of pencils. Twenty years and I’m still not over it. :-)

    1. Guin*

      Did you empty the pencil sharpener all over his desk on your last day? Because I’m that sort of person.

  319. Mrs. Hawiggins*

    I had a fellow admin who would inspect the trash in the main kitchen. You couldn’t throw anything away unless she saw it first. If you threw something out that she thought was still “ok” she’d bring it back out. I had spoiled coffee creamers that I tossed, she brought them all back out. ‘These are still good.” So I asked her to pour one into her coffee. “See, it’s not supposed to turn your coffee that color,” I said. She insisted that it was just ‘the one creamer’ until she used them for a meeting for her boss with a high powered VIP whose coffee turned that color. You couldn’t wash a dish, you couldn’t take supplies unless she saw it and approved it. When a notepad had been taken she had an epic meltdown because no one asked her first, to which her boss responded, “Can I see you for a moment.” It was weird. It was like the only control she had in her life was that stupid kitchen. Her boss took the notepad.

  321. Adds*

    I once worked in a place where the head of our department wanted ALL communications outside of the department to go through them. So instead of me taking 15 seconds to go ask Suzie over in sales a clarification question so I could do my job and be done with it, I had to ask my department head to go ask this question for me and then wait for them to come back with the answer. Which took at least an hour and then heaven forbid I have a follow-up question, it would be literal hours to do a task that really shouldn’t have taken more than 5 minutes.

    And it was just our department that had this ridiculous rule because my department head was more worried about looking busy themselves than the rest of us actually being able to get our tasks done efficiently. It was pretty much openly laughed at and ignored by the rest of the staff, as it should have been.

    1. Adds*

      I should add that our department was 4 people, including the head and the company altogether had probably about 100 employees total, of which maybe 30 worked in the offices. So it wasn’t like there was some huge divide between departments or that people didn’t regularly interact with others outside of their immediate department.

  322. Global Cat Herder*

    Until a couple of years ago, our expense limit for breakfast while traveling on company business was $5. The Midwest-based head of accounting refused to change it, because she got an Egg McMuffin and a coffee every morning for breakfast and it cost her less than $5. If she got breakfast every day for $5, so could everyone else! No matter where the in the world they went!

    The day after Sue retired, the expense limit for breakfast was increased from $5 to $25. LITERALLY THE NEXT DAY.

    1. WellRed*

      Our HQ us in rural Midwest and I’m pretty sure that’s the bar they use to set all the limits. In the 199os. By people who never travel.

  323. Midwest Manager*

    I work in a large, public institution, in the largest division of the institution. Over 10 years ago, the institution upgraded our HRIS system to a windows-based application, which included the ability for employees to self-report hours and PTO usage online. In the first 3 years of using the application, EVERY division migrated to using the online timesheet and PTO reporting system… except the one I work in now. This is because ONE PERSON at the divisional office decided that they preferred the manual way (including paper timesheets with pen/ink signatures) and would not allow any departments to “test the new way for the division”.

    After 8.5 years on the current HRIS system, IT administrators announce they will no longer support the manual process and all divisions MUST use the online reporting. We were all inundated with “training and resources” for the conversion to online reporting, and told “Good luck! Hope the transition to the new way goes smoothly!” You know, after everyone else at the org had been doing it that way for 5+ years. Rumor has it that the person responsible is planning a similar course when we adopt the next iteration of HRIS system in 2 years.

    1. Rainy*

      Something similar happened to me: many years ago, I started a new job where I would be the one processing the time sheets (among other things), and I was told that the office was one of the only ones in the whole organization that still used paper time sheets.

      There was ONE PERSON blocking the move to electronic timekeeping: Jane, the head of finance for our office. This was a woman would would literally nickel and dime you to death over everything else, but insisted on an outdated and ridiculous time system, and was, while not the payroll positions supervisor, higher up on the food chain and able to exert social pressure if nothing else. I took the opportunity of the entire organization updating its HR system to basically insist that we change over to electronic time. Because the HR system upgrade got delayed several times, I discovered what I believe to be the reason Jane was blocking it.

      In any month that had a statutory holiday, Jane, who was a different type of employee to almost all the rest of us (it’s complicated and would out that job, so just take my word for it), was able to claim anywhere from 2-8 hours of overtime pay in that week, and was doing so. Her system relied on just baldly putting down a wrong total on her timesheet and then angrily haranguing the payroll person into entering the wrong total. She had some kind of defense about the stat holiday pay, but it was bullshit. The electronic time system didn’t allow that particular piece of fraud, because the time system “knew” the rules and added up the figures correctly every time.

  324. throwaway5315*

    In my first job out of college, I asked my boss (…well… she told me that i was now reporting to her…and it turns out I wasn’t. that’s another story entirely) if I could leave an hour early. Told her i’d be happy to work through lunch or come in early, stay late another day. She told me she didn’t believe I had to leave a full hour early to get to my destination and asked to see a printout of directions from google.

  325. Just Me*

    THE FLAG INCIDENT.

    Once upon a time I worked for a nonprofit that worked very closely with small-town government bureaucrats and elected officials in a rural area. They would go mad with power over the most petty things. They were all Republicans in what was an otherwise Blue state. One year, the Democratic governor required all government offices to lower their flags to half-mast to commemorate the September 11th attacks. That seems like something that would get bipartisan support, right?

    We have a conference call with the small town politicians and as we call in, this low-level elected official is screaming obscenities, yelling about legal practice and jurisdiction, September 11th, governmental overreach, calling his lawyer, etc. We go, “Oh, hey. We’re here on the call! Did you mean for us to hear that?” and he goes, “CAN YOU BELIEVE THE GOVERNOR EXPECTS ME TO GET SOMEONE TO MY OFFICE ON A SUNDAY TO LOWER THE FLAG TO HALF MAST? I’LL BE DAMNED IF SHE CAN TELL ME WHAT TO DO! I’M AN ELECTED OFFICIAL FOR [insert obscure agricultural feat] CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!”

    My thought had always been…if you’re an elected official, why not call the local paper, get some boy scouts, and get photographed lowering the American flag to half-mast for an event everyone agrees was a tragedy and give yourself some free good press?

    1. Just Me.*

      sorry, to *pay respect to those who lost their lives during the September 11th attacks on the World Trade center.

  326. Lirael*

    I may have told this story before, but it’s the best I’ve got.

    For a year i worked in an office that had a tiny canteen – four tables I think. I was on a very tight budget at the time and took my lunch to work (also I was mostly vegan and the canteen food was heavily meat based).

    I used to take in pasta salad and eat with my work friends in the canteen. This was fine…. HOWEVER, I had the absolute audacity to use one of their (metal, not plastic) forks.

    They got my manager to tell me on no uncertain terms that I was not allowed to do this.

    There were less than 100 staff that worked in the office. Mostly people ate the canteen food; a few had sandwiches. I was one person using one fork 3-4 times a week; not exactly going to cause a massive problem. Nevertheless, I started bringing in my own damn fork!

  327. Could Share More Tea*

    A former colleague would call an office helper to their desk so that the office helper could scan a document on the machine right next to the colleague’s desk.

  328. Engineer*

    A couple instances:

    1) New manager hired two of his previous colleagues to work in our group. We only had one office space available, while a second office wouldn’t open up for a couple months due to a planned retirement. Instead of having his colleague move temporarily into a cube while waiting for the office to open up, he made an existing employee move out of her off into my cube, and made me relocate to a much smaller cube away from where our group was. There was no seniority difference between current employee and new employee, only the preference of the manager to make sure the new employee (his colleague) had an office on his first day.

    2) There were no set hours for lunch, and I typically get hungry later in the afternoon. I took my lunch hour to go shopping with a friend, then bought lunch to eat at my desk. I’ve seen it plenty of times, and no rules against it. I purchased Pad See Ew (w/ chicken) from a local restaurant, and dug in when I got back to my desk and started working around 130pm. Apparently, the fragrance from my meal was too much for the head of legal (older man), I was called into his office with my spineless manager, and chastised for being unprofessional for eating such a fragrant meal outside of lunch hours. He also said I was violating other professional norms for having a navy colored blanket on my lap and under my desk, since the office was always a freezing temps. I was reprimanded and told to eat less fragrant foods, only eat during standard lunch hours, and dress warmer for the office. WTF.

  329. PleasantlyGrumpy*

    Ohhh, I wish I still had the nine-point email on how to take out the trash.

  330. Lisa Anderson*

    The best was when I (Company CFO) emailed a couple of documents that went to my boss’s secretary to be added to a packet for approval at a meeting. The documents needed signatures. The next day I asked for the signed documents and the secretary said no one signed them because it wasn’t her responsibility to print off the documents for signature. She said I needed to print them off and give them to her. She actually said “I guess I’ll do you job for you”. In which I prompted replied, No, I that’s your job and I’m not doing it” and walked away. I would have had no issue printing off a couple of documents if she was swamped, but she doesn’t do anything, so printing them off should have been no issue.

    1. WellRed*

      We had this admin. If she wasn’t sitting with her feet on the desk she was playing solitaire. The EDITOR once asked her to take care of mailing out a few application packets and she complained. Only time I ever heard him drop an F bomb.

  331. Delta Delta*

    The digital recorder (I’m remembering lots of things!) incident.

    Office Manager in law firm orders Big Boss and Secondary Boss each a Brand A digital recorder. Office Manager wrings her hands and minces about the fact they were $75 each. I tell her I need one, as well, and she tells me I either have to share, or keep using cassettes (I’m just old enough that this was still a thing). I decide I want my own digital recorder, so I do some research and buy the highest-rated one, which is Brand B, and happens to be $65. I tell Office Manager, and ask her to reimburse me. She loses her ever-loving mind that a) I didn’t order Brand A, which is apparently good enough for the others and b) that it’s a dumb use of money because she ordered 2 Brand C (where C is for Crappy) recorders for “general use” amongst the 10 attorneys who didn’t have a recorder. I told her I’d just eat the $65 and the recorder would forever be mine, and there are no worries. 20 minutes later Office Manager emails the whole office to inform them I’ve just bought a top-of-the-line recorder, and that anyone can feel free to borrow it (no one did). Two weeks later she ordered Brand B recorders for everyone else.

  332. Daisy*

    This happened about 8 years ago. I have chronic FCU tendonitis on its way to becoming full-fledged carpal tunnel, and I was the main person processing paperwork for our small office. I had to use a stapler multiple times daily and requested a $7 ergonomic stapler as an accommodation after my doctor put me in an arm brace, to replace the one we already had (which weighed about 2 pounds and was made in the 70s as a torture device meant to cause repetitive motion injuries, I assume). The request was denied because “we already have a stapler that still works fine.” I was a naive person in my early 20s and ended up buying it myself to stave off further injury. I was so glad when she left because this wasn’t even near topping the list of the most ridiculous things she did in the 13 months I worked under her.

  333. whatchamacallit*

    My first professional job and has very strict, outdated rules, including but not limited to:
    -Working exactly 38.5 hours a week. No minutes over, no minutes under. Was more than once chided because I would go over by like 10 minutes for the week. (There was literally a line to clock out a 5. We can’t ALL use the time clock simultaneously. Logistically how could you get exactly the right amount of time?)
    -Dress code. Women were required to wear pantyhose or tights outside of the summer dress code. I, apparently being naive, did not think this applied if I was wearing pants. So in my first week my boss asked me why the bare skin on my feet weren’t covered by pantyhose, because I wore dress flats and no-show socks with them with my dress pants.
    -Related: It was summer and I had put in my notice already, had a week of actual work days left. I was trained to cover the front desk when the receptionist was out, but by then there was another person trained for it as well and I was considered the back up to them. It was summer dress code so I did not wear pantyhose with my (office appropriate!) dress. Lo and behold, both people that cover reception manage to be out, so I was behind the desk. My boss asked me why I didn’t have tights on since I was working out front. I said “it’s summer dress code?” and she said that doesn’t apply if you’re public facing. I also pointed out that I was no longer scheduled to work the front desk, so I didn’t realize I was supposed to following that dress code (which had also never been mentioned to me before!) Her answer was to tell me I should keep a pair in my desk just in case it came up again. (I did not do that and decided to take the odds that the exact 2 other staffers would not be out the same day again in the 7 or so days I had left of my 2 weeks notice.)

        1. Salymander*

          Yeah sounds like it to me. I worked in a clothing store then, and I had to wear tights or nude pantyhose with everything, even if the shoes I was wearing required socks. I hate pantyhose, and I think anyone who makes people wear socks over their pantyhose is a monster.

          1. Can’tAdultToday*

            I worked at an office in the early 90s where the CEO was obsessed with women’s legs lol. If he saw any female without pantyhose, he said they’d better have some on the next time he saw you, or he would March you down the block to the drugstore for you to purchase some.

            Hated that office as much as I do pantyhose. I wore long skirts and knee highs my entire tenure. No one noticed.

        3. whatchamacallit*

          Nope! 2015-2016.
          But it’s telling that this sounds like a rule that would have existed in workplaces before I was even alive.

  334. Pink Hair Don't Care*

    I was talked to by management because I filled up my water bottle before I left for my long drive home. They told me because I wasn’t consuming the water on Company Property it was considered stealing. Yes I quit shortly after that for a job paying way more money and better hours.

  335. Andy*

    In my first role in my career in broadcast TV, I was responsible for “processing and quality-checking short-form content” (yes, I got paid to watch ads, glamourous).
    Next stop after that team is Presentation, who monitor all outgoing material for on-air errors, check incoming material against schedules, etc. If there is a discrepancy between schedule and actual content of, say, a couple seconds, they will fault it because it will throw out all their schedules if it plays out enough. Note that they do allow a small tolerance of a discrepancy.
    I once had them reject a promo for some tv show, because it came in one frame under schedule. Yes, 1/24 of a second, and the smallest unit of measurement our systems record. I mentioned this to my senior, whose incredulous reaction included, “I can FART longer than that!”
    I can’t remember for sure, but it could have been a “coming up next” promo, which would mean it would play out a grand total of one time.

  336. Former Receptionist*

    I had a supervisor who went out of their way to make sure I knew my place. They would wait for me to leave for the day and then leave things on my desk. Two of my favorite morning finds.

    There was a paperclip that somehow had rust on it, so they left the paper and clip on my desk with a big red circle around the rust spot on the paper. Um, ok.

    Second they took a crumpled up paper out of my waste basket, smoothed it out and circled my typo.

    So happy to leave. Even more overjoyed to hear they went on to… not much.

    1. SH*

      my husband’s mother (deceased, i never knew her) worked for the IRS and they had a manager who would check the garbage — auditing the staff, perhaps?. Her co-worker typed something on carbon paper, took both copies home, and left the carbon paper in the trash. what’d it say? F*** you.

  337. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

    I used to work for a company where all office supplies were stored in a cabinet next to the office manager. She kept it locked so if you needed something you had to ask her. She would only give you the bare minimum (one pen, one paperclip, 1/2 strip of staples). If you wanted more you had to justify it. If you came by too often you had to justify it.

    She would also wander the office when people were away from their desks and if she saw two pens on your desk she would take one and put it back in the cabinet, even if it was a personalized pen. She would take paperclips, promotional post-its sent by vendors, anything she found on your desk (and sometimes in your drawers) that she deemed “extra”.

    Which meant of course that people hoarded office supplies like they were gold.

  338. do i have to use my real name? SH*

    my manager wouldn’t accept my mileage without a google maps readout.
    1. google maps changes as the traffic flows
    2. my estimation was in favor of my org and i got more money.

    1. Chili pepper Attitude*

      Our city paid mileage for driving between our buildings and facilities. We had to submit with every monthly reimbursement form a google map printout (paper) for the route we took. But all the map printouts were pre-created and stored electronically as PDFs and showed the accepted mileage between each facility. They had done the work to find the shortest route between each facility, note the exact mileage we were allowed to claim, and then created and saved the maps. Which we then had to print them and hand them in with each reimbursement form. Even if there was something blocking the route and you took a different one, you had to print their map and turn it in.

  339. Buttercup*

    I worked with this guy for a few years who got caught sleeping at his desk multiple times (as in, there exists photographic proof, from different days, with different outfits, that he was asleep at his desk) and routinely passed off other people’s work as his own because the project was originally assigned to him and he asked someone else to do it for him. He somehow got promoted to a supervisor position – with no experience supervising or managing employees – and I was one of the lucky guinea pigs he got to use to learn how to supervise people. He took that as permission to ramp up what he had already been doing and started pawning literally all of his work off on his team and claiming the work as his own. His boss wanted him to build a report? He asked me to build the report, and when I gave it to him, turned around and gave it to his boss and said he’d built it. I started copying his boss on everything related to these projects so she would see what he was doing, and he KEPT DOING IT. She wasn’t even BCCed, she was just regular CCed, he could see that she was on it, but he was comfortable enough in her email being utterly unmanageable that he figured she’d never see it and he was safe. When COVID hit and the money ran out and they had to lay off staff, he was kept on and his whole team was laid off, including me. I still wonder to this day what dirt he had on his boss to get her to keep him on all that time.

  340. Engineer*

    Oh I have another one!

    There is one person in our company that approves travel expense reports. For whatever reason, we still have to itemize meals even though the industry standard is to give employees government per diem rates. The travel expense approver routinely denies any meal expenses charged once you’ve landed back at your home airport. We’re not talking big steak dinners, but a $10-15 meal at McDs or Chipotle because we’re hungry after traveling 4-6 hours.

  341. Isomorph*

    Visits to the doctor’s are paid time off for a few exceptions in my company. One of those exceptions applied to my 1h doctor visit and I provided proof exactly according to the respective rules. Some weeks later someone from HR called me, telling me they could not approve this 1h, since my documentation was faulty. When I asked what exactly was wrong, she could not answer, got really impolite, accused me of fraud, and finally just hung up on me. It took several phone calls, involving my boss and her boss, where she claimed repeatedly there was a rule I violated, but it was not her job to show us where this (non-existent!) rule was written down. When finally her boss told her to provide proof of this rule after a few weeks, she suddenly claimed it was not her responsibility to decide whether to pay me for that time and deferred that decision to my boss (who had already approved it MONTHS ago). So we spent several hours of work time to finally get me paid for that 1h.

  342. BA*

    Pens. Damn pens. My previous employer had company pens that we could give to clients. They were paid for by the company out of the general budget. I went to the supply room to grab some for a client event and there were very few, even though we’d just received a new supply. Went checking around and found a coworker had put “their” pens under their desk. Turns out this coworker felt like their particular program budget had paid for a particular share – the amount under the desk – and they might need all those pens at some point that year (mind you, we could order more if we needed more at any point in the year) and didn’t want to be without. The boss quickly put a stop to that practice and also made it very well known that the pens were paid for by the company’s general budget, not any particular program’s budget.

  343. the Viking Diva*

    Our unit was moving into a new building and getting new office furniture. The department head asked me to choose an office chair from the catalog, then vetoed my choice because “only the senior associates get that kind of chair.”

  344. Miss E*

    One morning as we were getting ready for work, my then-partner sank to the floor with a sudden, crushing headache. I drove him to the ER, terrified he was having an aneurysm. While there, I called my supervisor to tell him why I wouldn’t be in. He told me that we were going to have to have “a talk” about taking unplanned PTO the week of Christmas. (And no, I did not have a history of excessive absences.) I was LIVID. Fortunately for him, he didn’t say another word about it when I returned to work the next day.

    (Partner was fine. Extensive testing, including a spinal tap, revealed there was nothing seriously wrong, it was just some kind of random, sudden-onset migraine or something.)

  345. it happened*

    First job out of college. There is a woman about a decade my senior who frequently engages in seriously unprofessional behavior (for example, getting up in the middle of meetings and doing yoga stretches), but I suspect she gets away with it because she is *extremely* beautiful. She begins to abuse the work from home policy, and rather than sit her down and explain why she can’t use work-from-home as extra PTO, the company suspends work from home altogether. This obviously sucks, and some employees have very good reasons to be upset (they now have to arrange new childcare, commuting changes, etc.) but the only person who decides to take it on is the Extremely Beautiful Woman. She brings a complaint to management, and they tell her to prepare a case for why work from home needs to be brought back.

    Extremely Beautiful Woman calls the entire staff to a three-hour meeting she has organized. No one understands what the meeting is about, and it has a vague name like “Our Working Environment.” As we come in, she spends 20 minutes talking about the importance of being vulnerable, not making assumptions, being willing to speak honestly, setting discussion ground rules, etc. The entire staff is extremely uncomfortable because we have no idea what she’s talking about. It becomes clear that she wants everyone to create a manifesto to present to management about how we are going to fix. our. work. culture. and all ideas would go on a whiteboard in the “bike rack.” What was the bike rack? It was like a place to “park” our ideas, but reflecting an active form of transport and therefore better.

    This did not impress management and Extremely Beautiful Woman gave five days’ notice before leaving for another job.

    1. Goldenrod*

      “and all ideas would go on a whiteboard in the “bike rack.” What was the bike rack? It was like a place to “park” our ideas, but reflecting an active form of transport and therefore better.”

      ahahahha! OMG!

      This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder – was her weird self-involvement caused by her extreme beauty? Or was it unrelated?

      1. it happened*

        My theory was that she had gotten whatever she wanted all her life because she was very beautiful. She would have been beautiful no matter her size, but she was also obsessed with fitness, hence her doing yoga in the office and wanting to promote the “active form of transport.”

        Whether or not she knew that this was happening is anyone’s guess. I remember once she was talking about travelling in New Zealand and she went, “Everyone in New Zealand is SO NICE! Every time I went to a bar someone would buy me a drink!” I, trying to be nice and make conversation, went, “That’s very cool you were in New Zealand. I’ve wanted to go to Wellington ever since I saw What We Do In The Shadows.” She responded, “Oh!” and then turned to someone else and started a completely unrelated conversation.

  346. Zephy*

    At OldJob, for reasons I was never clear on and no longer care about, my manager and the director of operations Did Not Get Along. No idea what their beef was, but it got to the point where it affected my ability to do my job and was what ultimately led to me leaving.

    Anything Manager asked for was denied by DOps just because she was the one asking for it. Manager had run a few different programs before she came to manage me (in a role created for me, specifically); when they hired her replacement in a previous role, that person immediately got everything Manager had asked for and been denied, without a word of explanation from anyone about any of it. It escalated far past the point of absurdity – Manager at one point wanted me to keep a handwritten list that I would use to check through our very searchable digital database that could generate that exact report every single day, and I had to hide that list to boot. No idea what she thought would happen if DOps or anyone else saw my list. I was formally disciplined for insubordination after using a function of the software that every other department used in exactly the same way and for the same purpose (to generate a list of inventory meeting certain criteria, you know, literally the entire purpose of database software). That’s when I started job-searching. I left four months later. They had to replace me with two people and pay each of them 50% more than they were paying me. I loved the actual work but the political BS with Manager and her boss was too much.

  347. Lynx*

    This happened to my spouse, not me, but was so ridiculous I had to share: he was a full-time remote employee at a huge corporation with thousands of employees. When he started, he was issued a $10 VPN key to generate a 2FA code in order to connect to the company network. After a couple years, the company switched which VPN they were using. Fine, but the VPN key he had wouldn’t work with the new system. He waited, no new VPN key was issued, so he put in a request for a VPN key that would work with the new system. It was rejected! He was told he needed to submit another request that included the “business case” for the new VPN key. Which cost $10 and was necessary for every part of his job.

  348. Tammy 2*

    I was in an office job once where we had a facilities coordinator who did stuff like handle the mail, empty the dishwasher, order supplies, etc. I always labeled any food I put in the fridge with my initials and the date, per this person’s instructions. One day, I brought in a yogurt on its expiration date, which I intended to eat as an afternoon snack, but it was thrown out at 1:30 pm because I “didn’t eat it at lunch and it was going to expire.”

  349. Purely Allegorical*

    So many from my current job alone.

    Current client lead is both a micromanager and extremely resistant to basic project or knowledge management process… even something as simple as a status tracker she will throw a tantrum over because it’s ‘not necessary’ and ‘distracting’. We had a big project assigned by client lead’s boss that required a lot of logistics. I created a Slack group for the people assigned on the project, something that I’ve done many times before with this woman with no pushback (and something others have done too). She wrote me a personal Slack message ripping me up and down for having the temerity to usurp her authority in that manner, and said I should never create a Slack group again because it was her responsibility.

    This is also the same client sending me on a 24-hour flight around the world in economy, even though I found a business-class ticket that is cheaper–and even though I found and quoted the client’s own travel policy that states we can book business travel if we can prove it’s cheaper than economy. The economy ticket, while a faster overall flight, is nearly $1000 more expensive than the business flight.

    There are so many more from this job. Which is also why I plan to quit in the middle of next month’s big project.

  350. Elle Woods*

    Reading all these reminded me of another one. Many years ago, the company I worked for had a suite at a local sporting arena. The VP of our division gave our department tickets to use the suite for a game. What he didn’t tell us was that food & beverages were not included with our tickets and if you wanted food & beverages in the suites, you had to order it from the kitchen; you couldn’t go to a concession stand, buy food or beverages, and bring them back to the suite. The game was around the dinner hour and we were all hungry.

    One member of our group, “Kris,” talked to the suite level wait staff and asked if he could pay for the food himself rather than have it charged to the company. The wait staff said that was perfectly OK, he just had to give them a credit card. We ordered pizzas, platters of nachos, buckets of popcorn, and a round of soft drinks for everyone. Everyone gave Kris money for the order and he paid for everything on his card.

    The next day those of us who attended the game received a very sternly worded email from the VP. He told us he’d learned we’d ordered food & beverage while using the suite, we were not allowed to do so, and we must immediately reimburse the company for said food & drink. Kris replied to the VP and cc’d all the attendees and mentioned; he mentioned how he had paid for things and that he had no intention of submitting the receipt for reimbursement from the company. VP’s response to Kris’s email was that next time our department is offered the company suite we are to eat beforehand and not in the suite. HR got looped in at some point and assured us we’d done nothing wrong, not that VP cared.

  351. NopNopeNope*

    While walking in a hallway during my middle school years I passed a smirking teacher giving a crying eighth-grader their first detention ever with less than ten calendar days left in the school year. The teacher had caught the student chewing gum in school for the the third time that year. The school’s discipline system required teachers to give detention as punishment for a third infraction like this one.
    The disturbing part was the obvious satisfaction the teacher had in being “forced” to give the student their first permanent disciplinary action just before the student was out of their authority. The student was a good egg who was popular, athletic, and a good student as well as kind and friendly to everyone. The teacher had a reputation of being petty and capricious among students and parents.

    1. Chirpy*

      Ooh, this reminded me what I got my one and only detention in middle school for. So many kids in my math class had done badly on a test that the teacher was furious, and made us take the tests home to have a parent sign to show that they’d seen it. I’d actually gotten a B, but the paper slipped to the bottom of my backpack and I forgot to get it signed that night (we were only given overnight). I got a detention.

      I didn’t know how detentions worked, so I sat in the classroom after school instead of the office where I guess I was supposed to go, but at least the office people believed me when someone asked why I hadn’t shown up for detention. The whole thing was incredibly petty, and because I rode the bus it meant a parent had to figure out how to leave work early and come pick me up, too.

      Also, if most of the class did that badly on a test, it means the teacher failed to teach the subject well enough. This guy actually disappeared halfway through the year, and our long-term sub was much nicer, at least.

  352. jbrandt*

    Long ago, I worked as phone tech support for a slightly shady PC clone maker. We would occasionally have to mail out 3.5″ floppy disks with drivers on them to customers who needed to install and actually use our non-standard mouse or some other piece of the semi-standard hardware we sold.

    The floppy disks were guarded by one of the senior support employees. He treated them like a precious treasure– he kept them locked in his desk drawer and refused to give you a floppy disk (worth, at the time, approximately 35 cents) if you didn’t have a really good excuse and hadn’t made utterly sure the user couldn’t download the drivers. Since this was before the web was really wide-spread and we didn’t sell PCs with modems, this was usually the case, but no, you had to thoroughly defend your decision to copy the driver onto a floppy disk and mail it out before he would give you one. Our manager knew this was a huge pain but didn’t really want to get into that argument with him. (And I think they were worried that employees would steal floppies for personal use. Yeah, not a great company in general.)

    I spent quite a lot of the time I was on the phone learning to pick the cheap desk drawer locks with unbent paperclips. By the time I quit I was pretty proficient, so on my last day, when the guardian of the floppies was out sick, I picked the lock on his desk, left him a note bidding him a fond farewell taped to the disk box, and relocked it on my way out.

  353. Red Sonia*

    The head of our (public) school district liked to tell our stakeholders that he was on a mission to save money and energy. He did some great things suggested in an energy audit, and made a lot of headway. But he took it too far when he initiated a “pay to plug” policy and sent out the pay sheet to all employees. You had to pay something like $2 a month per lamp, $5 a month for a mini-fridge, $5 a month for a space heater, and there were about 15 things on the list. The building principals were tasked with walking around to each room and inventory what each teacher should be paying for so they could be billed correctly.
    It was a double abuse of power…
    It died a slow and gruesome death when the building principals passively but aggressively undermined the idea. They refused to bill or collect anything.

  354. lia*

    I worked for a state university with a tight budget, but we did have free coffee. Enter new VP who was tasked with “cutting our budget”. First thing on the list? Coffee. When that got overruled – he cut out coffee creamer, for a savings of about $6/month.

    He also tried to cut our software licenses to one and have us “share” it but the license was tied to each machine and we all needed access to do our jobs. I think he envisioned us just playing musical desks all day. That would have saved us about a grand a year…

    The kicker was one Friday afternoon, he wandered by my desk about half an hour before the end of the day. I wasn’t at my desk. He immediately fired off an email to me, my boss, HIS boss… and the university president, snarking that clearly I lacked work ethic because I’d skipped out early. A) I was salaried and B) if he had looked at my calendar … he would have seen that I was in a meeting. With the president. LOL.

    2. MiloSpiral*

      That would have saved us about a grand a year…

      And yet, it really wouldn’t have, because the amount of time you’d all have spent waiting for someone else to finish up at the computer would have amounted to muuuuuch more than $1,000’s worth.

  355. Observer*

    Nitpicking central – all of these happened either to my org or organizations I’ve worked with:

    Auditor one: You can’t use this for because it has you put Y or N as an answer to a set of questions instead of Y and N check boxes at the question.

    Auditor 2: You cannot use YOUR copy of the form required by Government agency because it sues the wrong font (think Times New Roman vs SchoolBook- ie two extremely similar fonts, with the required font having zero additional legibility)

    Auditor 3: This is not an acceptable service contract because it’s not formatted the way I think service contracts should be formatted. (that one we fought and won, but the guy retaliated by wasting a week of our time asking for documents he didn’t need.)

  356. Just @ me next time*

    I once worked as an admin clerk in one department of a University. I reported to an office manager who had been working for the same department for almost thirty years and was the queen of micromanagement. Some of her worst offences:

    * I pushed to be allowed to register for a training session HR was hosting. She eventually said yes, but then proceeded to write an office policy stating that admin clerks could only attend one training session per calendar year.
    * She once asked me to make a sign to post above the water fountain informing staff not to brush their teeth in the fountain (in response to a single employee who sometimes brushed his teeth there).
    * She made all staff pay for their personal photocopies (10 cents a sheet) and for personal long-distance calls made using their work phones.
    *She banned candy jars because there were four admin clerks working in the office, and she refused to pay for candy for jars on all four desks, but she also refused to allow only one candy jar (because it would be unfair to the other three clerks for one person to have a candy jar).
    * We had to copy her on all emails to anyone in a manger position or higher
    * We were in a union environment, so she couldn’t actually fire anyone unless they were doing something undeniably awful (like stealing money or harassing other employees), but she orchestrated a restructuring of the office that effectively demoted one admin assistant who she didn’t like, who then had to either accept a lower position or move to another department.

    I’m sure more will come to mind later.

  357. AnneC*

    In college I had a part time junior software development job at a small consulting engineering firm. At one point, they hired a guy who, for whatever reason, decided he was going to try and turn me into a “project”. He was a lot older than me and had about 20 years programming experience, but he wasn’t technically my boss. Nevertheless, he started doing obnoxious things like pulling up a chair while I was trying to write code, alternately giving unsolicited advice and pestering me about when I was going to be finished.

    At the time, being 21 years old and severely lacking in confidence, I was intensely unsettled by this but also had no basis for comparison and thought maybe this was some kind of Workplace Thing I just needed to get used to.

    He then started insisting to me that “if you tell me you’ll be done by a certain day and then you’re not, you’re a liar, because giving a task completion date is a PROMISE, and you’re BREAKING your PROMISES”.

    (again, he was not my boss!)

    In any event, it all just escalated, culminating in a bizarre instance where he invited me to the CEO’s office (on a day when the CEO was absent) under false pretenses of wanting to discuss technical aspects of a project.

    What he *actually* did during that ‘meeting’ was try to indoctriate me into some kind of neuro-linguistic programming cult, which he claimed was the only way I could become as “master” in engineering. This apparently involved my having to accept him as MY “master”. I kept trying to leave the room, but every time I got up, he’d start mocking me as “weak” and saying stuff like “okay, leave, if you want to RUIN your LIFE”!

    I eventually *did* leave and was so visibly shaken that another employee asked me what waas going on, so I told her, and she was like, “um, that’s psychological abuse”.

    I reported the guy to leadership, and was told that while how he’d treated me sounded “upsetting”, he hadn’t actually broken any rules, so they didn’t fire him.

    They DID fire him a few months later, though…for indecent exposure (after he pulled his pants down in the middle of the office to show someone a skin graft(?).

  358. machinedreams*

    I’m never going to forget this one and it’s been over twenty years.

    Sixth grade, at a parochial school. Science test, question was something or other about the Big Bang, I forget how it was phrased but it boiled down to “do you believe in the Big Bang”.

    My answer was “At this point in life, I do not feel that my faith is developed enough to have an opinion one way or the other.” Which I thought was pretty mature for a 6th grader, personally.

    Everybody who didn’t answer some variation of “no I don’t believe in it” got yanked out into the hall and lectured en masse. So here’s like half a dozen kids getting lectured in the middle of the hall where anybody and everybody could potentially see and hear.

    Cue almost a dozen parents raging at the principal. I don’t remember how it ended, I don’t think anything really happened — the principal was… not exactly on the students’ side, ever — but I’m never gonna forget the sheer number of parents that went off on the guy.

    1. Yakko, Wacko, and Dot*

      My son was in 3rd grade. The kids were working on an assignment in class but the teacher said once they finished they could work on reading or other work. My son chose to do that night’s homework. The teacher approached him as he was finishing it up and asked him what he thought he was doing, that homework was meant to be done at home, and then ripped up his homework in his face.
      I didn’t believe him when he told me what she’d done, but he was adamant. So I called her and asked and yes, it went down as she said.
      I’m petty too. For the rest of the year I would send his homework back unfinished with a note that said I wasn’t a teacher and please don’t send schoolwork home with my son.

      1. Guin*

        That’s appalling. I would have tried my damndest to get that teacher fired, and I certainly would’ve made them switch my kid to a different class. She had no business being in a classroom.

  359. EZPast*

    I live in a coop complex in a suburb of NYC. Our Board of Directors consists of 7 members that are elected by the shareholders of the complex. I volunteered, along with another resident, to work with the BoD on the gardening committee to help with beautifying the front courtyards and picnic and seating areas. The front of one building was in great need of an upgrade. For years it had a large portion of it planted in a ground cover under a large pine tree which also had poison ivy and attracted rodents. My partner, Mary and I spoke with the “gardening” liaison “Derek” on the BoD and prepared a low cost, low maintenance proposal to remove the ground cover and poison ivy and plant some shade and drought resistant plants instead. We prepared a presentation, along with a cost analysis, which we understood would be approved by the board. Our presentation was just a formality, we were told.

    We arrived early and waited outside the board meeting room. After about 15 minutes after our appointed presentation time, I knocked on the door, and a board member, “Barb”, opened the door, then slammed it in our faces without saying a word. We were rather stunned at this rebuke since we both knew her and had friendly conversations with her in the past. A few minutes later, Derek opened the door, apologized and let us into the room. We started our presentation and Barb started screaming. “How dare we propose pulling out the beloved ground cover and poison ivy” or words to that effect. Her face turned a brilliant red and I thought she was going to have a stroke. We tried to finish our presentation while she continued screaming, and finally left the room while the Board took a vote on our proposal. We were called back in to learn that because of Barb, the proposal would not move forward at that time (despite all the other board members loving it). Barb lived in that particular building; the other board members and Mary and I lived in other buildings.

    It became too late in the season after a while to try and propose it again, so it was put on hold. The next year, Barb headed up the gardening committee’s upgrade of that building’s garden. We stayed far away from it for at least another year. Then Barb welcomed our help upgrading the front garden even more.

    2. Berkeleyfarm*

      Oh, I really sympathize. I was a board member at a “pastoral sized” church. There were a lot of Barbs very resistant to any change, but once it looked like things would be successful/they could take credit, they were all over it.

      (I am not there any more.)

  360. Yakko, Wacko, and Dot*

    10 years ago I was working for big theme park in Florida. I was working a closing shift in one of the shops. I was making small talk with a guest and her teenaged daughter while I was ringing out their purchases. We started talking about state capitals and she asked how many I could name. The only way I know them is to sing the song from Animaniacs, which I started doing under my breath…sort of blurting out the cities and states without being too obvious that I was singing in my head. The girl laughed, said that this was how she knew them too, and she finished singing the song. The moment they left the store – happy and with several hundred dollars worth of merchandise I had just helped them select! – the shift supervisor jumped all over me and said that I was NEVER to mention any Warner Bros cartoons at work again because they were direct competition. Um…okay? I did try to protest that I was only trying to entertain the guests and never actually mentioned the show or even actually sang the song and that the girl did after I started listing them in order of the song. The supervisor all but screamed “This is the house of the mouse, not a rascally rabbit!!!” and then walked out. After that she would pause anytime she saw me speaking to a guest and eavesdrop on our conversations saying crap like “that’s better” or “More like it”. She was all in for this job and expected her staff to be as well. It was exhausting.

    1. Eleanor Shellstrop*

      Omg, as a fellow former retail worker for the house of the mouse, this is such a perfect representation of a certain type of manager that would pop up a lot. Like they would be REALLY into all of the IP, spend tons of their paycheck on new merch that came in, and would be willing to demand absolutely ridiculous standards from their staff in service of the “magic” or whatever.

    2. Guin*

      I CANNOT EVEN. The Animaniacs States and Capitols was how both my kids learned them, because they LOVED Animaniacs (and so did I!) Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Indianapolis, Indiana, and Columbus is the capitol of O-hi-O. The House of Mouse is a cult, although I’m also a huge ***ney fan.

  361. Cosmerenaut*

    My previous company of employment (biotech in the DC corridor) was getting a fancy new HQ. We moved in a few weeks before the grand opening ceremony. And it was truly very nice, except for the fact that the break room’s two microwaves were both perched on shelves that were at least 5’10” off the ground, if not more. I would say “tall” people who could reach the microwaves in a way that didn’t involve steaming hot food over head/shoulder height made up no greater than 25% of the staff at the time. So someone, not sure who, moved on of those microwaves to the countertop, so that one microwave could be at the much more reasonable and safe height of four feet.

    One of the C-suites went *ballistic*. There were two shelves for a reason, having a microwave on the counter was *ruining the aesthetic*, and if we didn’t put it back on that shelf he was going to take BOTH of them away.

    I think it took another admin (safety officer) to talk him down from that. The microwave stayed on the counter for a few weeks. Then he brought in some more carpenters to modify one of the shelves to bring it down to maaaybe 5’5” if I’m being generous, and he would budge no further.

      1. Cosmerenaut*

        If anyone did, I imagine it was that safety officer admin. Not to mention what a bad look it would have been to make everyone eat lunch cold, although we probably would have just intruded into the admin area and used their microwave and gotten him to cave sooner rather than later!

    2. CEO of note cards*

      Omg we had the SAME problem when we moved into a new office years ago. 3 microwaves and only one was reachable without putting food in over your head!

  362. Assistant Girl*

    At my first job out of college, our company’s director was a proud micromanager. We had a tiny office in a very small town and seldom had clients come in. There was a gas station just yards away from the office on the same side of the road and we would sometimes walk there on our 10-minute breaks (which were staggered so the office was never empty) to grab a snack or drink. The trip there and back took like 5 minutes max. The director noticed after MONTHS of this and decided we couldn’t leave the office on our breaks. There were a couple people who took walks on the break to stretch their leg and needed to do so, so the director had the poor girl working HR create a map of a little walk around the office building. They were not to deviate from that approved walking path.

    1. Valkyrie*

      Omg my face as I read this ahahaha… that’s ridiculous. I had a boss who basically also told me I wasn’t allowed to go on walks during my breaks cause no one else did and it would look bad to the other employees. I was like “ok, are you telling them that they can’t do this or do they just not do this because they just don’t? and if they just don’t, why would they care if I did?”

  363. Valkyrie*

    I’m left handed. I had my 1st job doing accounting/data entry so I asked my manager if I could have a keyboard for a left handed person because having the number pad on the right side felt awkward but the number keys up top were also not ideal. IT wanted me to do a typing test to prove it was necessary. My manager wasn’t going to make me do that because he thought it was insulting that they were implying that I just didn’t know how to type – he knew it was about comfort, and not that I had any issues with efficiency. I bought an external number pad for $10 that I could just plug into my computer. We weren’t really supposed to plug external stuff into company computers, but fortunately everyone on my team had enough common sense to realize that there was a huge difference between this cheap number pad and, say, plugging in my phone. Surely IT could have said “so left handed keyboards are not really a thing, but here’s a cheap solution we can offer”.

  364. Nightengale*

    This was in medical school, not work, but I think it fits

    I have/had difficulty climbing stairs. The lecture hall where I had classes for a year had two entrances. The back entrance was never locked but you had to climb down from there into the seats. The front entrance was accessible but kept locked. I asked if that door could be left unlocked for me. Apparently it had to be kept locked for security purposes. I could never figure out what a person could steal going in the front entrance to a room that they couldn’t steal going in the back entrance of the same room.

    Of course this same medical school made me get a letter typed, on letterhead, from my doctor giving me permission to sit on the floor in the lecture hall. If everyone showed up, there weren’t enough seats and students were on the floor. That was fine. But my choice to sit there on a daily basis, to prevent pain (also to prevent being knocked over by my classmates) if there were seats available required a formal accommodation request.

    1. MiloSpiral*

      This medical school sure seems like a pain in the butt towards someone who needs physical accommodation.

      1. Nightengale*

        Oh it was. They only really recognized learning disabilities that required testing accommodations. When I told them I couldn’t handwrite, they asked for the results of my psychological testing. I wish I could say this was a long time ago but it was around 2003, and a study just came out last year showing how little doctors still know about disability so I’m not sure how much things have changed.

  365. But Why Tho?*

    In a department of about 20 people, three of us shared the same birthday: our manager, me, and Mike, who was approximately my level. Traditionally, birthdays meant maybe some office decorations and a cake in the afternoon, but that’s about it.

    That year, our birthday fell on a Saturday. At some point during the week before, the manager told us that the office would be celebrating only her birthday on Friday, then would celebrate mine and Mike’s on Monday. Not sure what Mike said, but I told her not to bother. I’m pretty sure I turned in my notice that week, as well.

  366. germank106*

    Years ago I worked for a Company that dealt with large amounts of cash. We routinely had to take lie detector tests. The computer would spit out an employee name at random and that employee had to take the test that day. We had a new employee who had not been at the job for more than two hours when he was told he had to take the lie detector test. One of the questions during the test was “have you ever stolen anything from the company including office supplies or food.” The new employee answered negatively and was dismissed that day for being “deceptive”. He tried to explain to the person who read the test that he had just started that day but was told it didn’t matter because every employee would take home a pen or a piece of paper sometimes and he should have answered with “yes”.

  367. Frustration Nation*

    Well, there are already 1200+ responses to this, so I’m not even sure who will see this, but I’m really looking forward to coming back at the end of the work day and reading through this thread! I work in nonfiction/reality TV production where we are regularly nickeled-and-dimed to death, but the pettiest power abuse I can recall happened a few years ago, at a longer term gig I had. Many of us producers used those desk calendars with the big squares to plan our shoots, because we could hang them on the wall and use sticky notes to move shoot days around easily. There were around 30 different types of producers on this project, so when December rolled around, I suggested to our admin that we just order a case of those calendars to have them ready, since January shoots were starting to be scheduled. I checked the Staples catalog, sent him the link, and even priced it out – it was like $3 cheaper to order them this way. He got the request in, and then a week or so went by. I checked in with him to see if the calendars would be coming soon, and he told me he’d had to fight with the front desk a bit (we were in a satellite office), because they wanted to know “Why do you need so many right now?” and apparently they weren’t accepting “It’s DECEMBER” as an answer. They did finally agree to the order, and I will always enjoy how that was December 2019, and no one used their calendars after March of 2020.

    1. Seespotbitejane*

      I posted a comment and read up from the bottom, so I saw this and it was great. This case of unused calendars has brought me great joy.

    2. CEO of note cards*

      Isn’t December prime calendar ordering time?! This is a perfect kismet situation!

  368. Crazyoboe*

    Charter school I worked with would not let anyone clock out until it was exactly 4 pm. Our duties ended at 3:55 and 5 minutes wasn’t enough time to start any new tasks, so all of the teachers had to sit in the hall outside the office twiddling our thumbs until exactly 4 pm. They also wouldn’t let us wear sneakers for any reason ever. We would have jeans days during professional development, but they insisted we wear dress shoes with them!

  369. CJ Cregg*

    When I was in college (this was 20-ish years ago) I had a summer internship with a Senator at the main office in the state (not in DC). The woman in charge of the interns was only in charge of the interns. Once she hired us and placed us with different staffers she didn’t seem to have anything else to do (I guess until it was time to recruit the next crop of interns). She wasn’t much older than an intern herself and seemed to long to be a real staffer in charge of policy or constituency work or press. With this lull in her time she seemed to need something to do. She decided to police what the female interns wore on their feet. At the time there were these trendy slipper shoes that everyone was wearing. A lot of us wore them into the office but changed into office shoes. Just like people who commuted in sneakers and then similarly changed into work shoes. Welp, the intern coordinator called an intern meeting to “look at our feet” because the shoes we were wearing were “beyond inappropriate for an office.” She called this meeting right at the beginning of the day so some people didn’t have time to change our of their slipper shoes! She lectured us for 20 min and then wanted to inspect our feet. Two people had the slippers on, she felt totally justified on her power trip, and banned the shoes from the office “indefinitely.” She clarified that this meant walking into the office with the shoes on and 60 seconds later changing out of them. That was forbidden.

  370. JustAnotherKate*

    Not sure if this counts, but I had a boss give me a 2 (of 5) for my writing skills on my review, thereby denying me a raise, because I supposedly overused the organization’s acronym. This had never been mentioned before, even though she reviewed a piece of my content at least once a week. We weren’t allowed to use “we” or “our” in our fundraising materials, so it was either the acronym or the super-long name of the organzation were the only choices. AND we were hundreds of thousands of dollars ahead of our fundraising goal. But she took the time to print out a sheet, highlight (and count!) the number of times I’d used the acronym in some piece of content, and shove it in my face as a reason I couldn’t have a raise.

    1. MiloSpiral*

      Oh my godddd. I feel your pain. When you work as a fundraiser and you’re constantly told how the org doesn’t have enough money to do small things to make your life easier (or give you a decent raise), meanwhile you’re busting your butt to raise money and smash goals. I’m sympathetic to the fact that nonprofit budgets are stretched thin, but it gets old real fast to be constantly told that you have to give them work worth more than what you’re paying you and still have them complain that the org doesn’t have enough.

      Your boss sucked. I’m glad you’re using the past tense and I hope you’re in a better position now.

  371. Beautiful, talented, brilliant, powerful musk-ox*

    I have two.

    1. Technically this person had ALL the power over me because they were my boss, but this particular issue was so minor, I could barely believe it. They required that the team send them weekly progress reports that were pretty detailed (so much so that the manager who took over after them looked at the report once, deemed it “ridiculous”, and I haven’t seen one since). They had created the template that they wanted us to all fill out and, for some reason, had chosen this particular font that was fine when normal but difficult to read when bolded. But a lot of the important parts of the report were bolded.

    My boss had already turned into an extreme micromanager over the course of six months as their facade cracked, so I felt the need to ask if I could change the font to something like Times New Roman so I could read it better. The response was a very terse email saying that I wasn’t allowed to change the font and that the form had been used by more than one team and they’d never heard complaints. I spent the rest of their time at the company copying the form into Word, changing the font so I could read it better, filling out each section of the report, and then copying it back because this person had already been using me as the primary target of their ire and I didn’t feel like inciting any more of it over a font. (I cannot stress this enough: this document was seen by my boss and my boss alone. It’s not like it was something that needed to be in a certain format for a presentation, nor would it have fit our company’s standards for that anyway.)

    2. There was an EA who really seemed to hate the contractors. There’s a long list of things that they did to make life difficult for all of the contractors, but the most absurd one in my mind was when they banned the contractors from a floor-wide potluck. Like, the contractors weren’t even allowed to stand in a room with other employees and eat food that they’d contributed to.

    1. Beautiful, talented, brilliant, powerful musk-ox*

      I realized I worded the second part strangely. The contractors didn’t contribute to the potluck only to be banned from it; I just thought it was so strange that they weren’t allowed to attend when they hypothetically WOULD have been contributing. Basically, the company wasn’t providing anything, so why would it even matter if they went?

    2. MiloSpiral*

      My boss had already turned into an extreme micromanager over the course of six months as their facade cracked, so I felt the need to ask if I could change the font to something like Times New Roman so I could read it better.

      Oof. I am just getting out of a job where I suspect I’ll need some time to readjust my norms because I’ve had this exact same impulse. I hope you were able to regain a semblance of control after your old manager left.

      1. Beautiful, talented, brilliant, powerful musk-ox*

        It has been a long process, in part because Old Manager took it upon themselves to essentially poison my teammates against me right before they retired and all but one of my teammates began to actively ignore my existence despite the fact that a. we’d all been very friendly previously and b. my knowledge of certain aspects of our department was actually pretty important for them to do their jobs well. It was all very Mean Girls and definitely lengthened the process of healing from the situation. But New Manager is great and treats us all like adults who know how to do their jobs. It’s definitely taken longer than I’d have liked to bounce back and not feel like I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I have gotten there (at least most of the time).

  372. Little Miss Sunshine*

    Many years ago while working on my MBA, I requested tuition reimbursement using the bill without the payment coupon attached. The payment coupon has the logo of the school and the name in letterhead style. The remainder of the bill has the school’s watermark as the background. The bill and my transcript together were not sufficient proof that I had actually paid tuition. So, I asked the bursar’s office to fax a bill, which again didn’t have letterhead, but did have the name of the school on the fax margins. Still not good enough. I spent weeks going back and forth trying to prove that I paid tuition to the school that issued my transcript. I almost had to delay my program because without reimbursement, I couldn’t pay tuition for the next semester.

  373. Saraquill*

    Did you know there’s a proper way to flush a toilet? (/sarcasm) It’s not enough to remove all waste from the bowl, but to make sure the handle is at a 90 degree angle after pushing. Manager used the bathroom right after me, then complained about me leaving the handle at 85 degrees. Weeks later, she scolded me in her “I hear you from the other room” voice for damaging the toilet. And continued to complain in her loud voice even after I said I hadn’t used it all morning.

    It should also be noted I’m not the only one who lever left it at 85 degrees.

  374. jaxgma*

    I worked for the head of a school district’s food service office. The head cashier was harassing one of the other cashiers with whom she did not get along for using too many nickels. She was doing this by leaving post it notes in her cash bag each morning. The cashier responded by saving all of the notes, making copies of them, and sending them to the head of the union.

    1. betty f*

      Our company balked at buying dish soap for the break room. They also won’t pay for the water (Culligan), so a manager has to spend multiple hours collecting money from people in the office every year. It is under $1000 annually.

  375. Lifelong student*

    In my first year of public accounting, I was working on an audit where I had to verify numbers and indicate with a check mark in red that the numbers were verified. I did so. A peer came back to me and told me that the check mark had to be on the right side of the column- not the left where I had put them- and that I had to erase my marks and redo the sheet. I refused. Later, I saw the sheet that it had been done.

    At a later accounting job- still in public- I had a partner spend time instructing me on the way to create a folder from a 13 column spread sheet- while I was on an important webinar. I brushed him off.

    I only stayed in public accounting long enough to earn my CPA!

  377. Mr. Random Guy*

    This is volunteering, not work, so I’m not sure if it counts. A fellow volunteer and I were moving boxes of various shapes and sizes into a specific area in the storage room. Since he had a better sense of how to make all of them fit, I told him I would move the boxes and he could just tell me what to do. His immediate response was to instruct me to stick my hand in a bin of donated underwear.

  378. TessNYC*

    The control freak admin at my Fortune 100 company sent me out to buy about $300 worth of office supplies. These were supplemental ‘luxury’ office supplies such as special organizers and nice pens on top of the regular paper and cheap pens and such that a Fortune 100 company would normally provide. While at the checkout, I saw a pack of multi-colored highlighters on sale for $1. I remembered that the admin was recently complaining that the company only supplied one color of highlighters and it would make her job easier if she had different colors. So I thought she would be really happy to have this pack of multi-colored highlights for only $1. Based on her reaction when I gave them to her, you would have thought I spent $100, not $1. Granted I did not have permission, but when you are buying over $300 worth of supplies, I didn’t think it was a big deal. Also, this was just before cell phones came out, so it’s not like I could quickly text or call her. I learned my lesson and apologized for spending $1 without permission. She waited for the next official meeting and in front of all the C-suite, lambasted me for wasteful spending and held up the pack of highlighters I splurged on as an example. From that day forward, not only did I never make that mistake again, but I purchased ALL of my own personal office supplies because I never wanted to ask her permission for anything.

    1. CEO of note cards*

      I will never understand the admins that act as if buying office supplies comes from their own wallet. Our admin hides things because she’s convinced people steal them. No Karen, we just use lots of paper towels to clean things, nobody is shoving them in their bags and taking them home!

  379. BookMom*

    I used to work at a preschool. We had mandatory deep cleaning days a couple times a year. The director wouldn’t purchase cleaning supplies like buckets or sponges, so some of us brought them from home to use for the day. I got written up for leaving with my own personal bucket at the end of the day because it wasn’t labeled and registered in my personnel file as a personal item.

  380. Anonymousaurus Rex*

    During grad school I was an unpaid intern for a department of the United Nations in New York that shall remain nameless. I was required to go on a business trip to Boston to take minutes during a conference. My boss would only authorize paying for the $9 Megabus for me because “you’re the intern.” All of my colleagues flew to the conference business class. They arrived well-rested and ready to go, while I hopped off the bus disheveled and already tired, having gotten on the 4am bus to make it to the 9am conference. I also had to pay for my own hotel room that night, because I didn’t want to take the four hour bus ride back to NYC after the all-day conference. Everyone else’s rooms were paid for, but they couldn’t pay for mine, because: “you’re the intern.” I was already going into debt just to be able to get this prestigious internship on my resume. My boss and colleagues knew I was living at the YMCA in Greenpoint, surviving off $1.00 pizza slices and cheap bagels. When my return bus the next day was $12 instead of $9, my boss refused to reimburse me for the full amount, citing that I could have waited and taken a cheaper bus. Again, they flew *business class* from NYC to Boston and apparently thought nothing of the disparity.

    1. Delta Delta*

      I think the issue jumping out here at me is that they flew from New York to Boston. It would literally take less time to drive from New York to Boston than it would to travel to one of the 3 NY area airports (unless they flew out private out of Westchester or one of the other little airports, but still that’s an hour), check in, board, fly the seven minutes to Boston, and then get out of the hell that’s Logan and into the hell that’s Boston morning traffic. Honestly, but for all the other bad stuff here, the Megabus would have been the way to go for everyone.

  381. Seespotbitejane*

    I used to work in a bonkers workplace where folks were very resistant to any kind of change. I worked reception so I was the only employee who didn’t have customizable space to store personal effects. In the winter I had no place to hang my coat. I was in charge of ordering office supplies and was given fairly free reign so I just decided to add a coat rack to the next supply order. It was around $35 and reasonably nice looking and I figured it would also be useful for occasional clients who visited the office. I put it up in the empty corner near the door and as soon as I did every person who worked there came by to express concerns about the coat rack. Head of Accounting, the CEO, half the engineers. They just didn’t think it was going to work out. The head of IT argued with me that was going to interfere with his arming the building security at night because it would get in the way.

    I pointed out that by the time somebody was setting the security everyone would have left the building…with their coats, so it would be empty. Then I gently suggested that we try it for a few days and if it caused a problem we could find somewhere else to move it. He grudgingly agreed that was reasonable and apparently the coat rack didn’t impact his ability to get the security box because no one ever brought it up again.

    This was also the same Head of IT who wouldn’t give me a new phone cord from the enormous stash of extra phone cords we already had because even though mine was frayed with exposed wires and kept dropping calls, it still mostly worked. Did I mention I was in charge of ordering supplies? I bought myself a new phone cord.

    2. Curmudgeon in California*

      LOL. I bought a coat rack for my office at my last job, because there were no coat hooks, and hanging heavy coats on the back of chairs can tangle in the chair. My office mate and I used it. Then we moved to an open plan office. They tried to tell me I couldn’t take my coat rack because it didn’t fit in with the “design” of the place. Fine. The open plan didn’t have coat hooks near the desks either. I carefully took it apart and took it home. After we got all moved in and settled, I brought in in, assembled it, and put it in a corner near my group’s desks. My boss, coworkers and me used it. I left it there when I got laid off, because I had another one at home, it was inexpensive, and the rest of the group still needed it.

  382. Dragonfly7*

    The director who made an employee make a numbered diagram and key of all of the contents of all of the drawers and cabinets at our primary workstation. The drawers are already labeled with their contents.
    The potable water to our building was turned off during the COVID closure even though folks still worked on site a few hours a week. The director purchased bottled water, but we were only allowed one 16oz bottle per shift, regardless of whether that shift was 3 hours or 8.
    Locking up the disposable coffee cups (but not plates or plastic cutlery?) because another department was using them.

  383. HeckZone*

    I spent about three years working for a small business (and when I say “small” I mean “about seven to 10 employees total, including the owners”) that was run by this terrible married couple–think Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek, minus any of her charm and character development, paired with Richard Branson.

    About a month into working there, Moira led me out into the showroom and sat me down on a couch. My one friend in the office (who had recommended me for the position) was sitting across from me, looking DEEPLY uncomfortable, and then Moira launched into what I can only describe as The Airing of Grievances, where she raked me over the coals for reasons such as “you are easily the most unsanitary person in this office” (her evidence: one time I left a cup in the sink for more than five minutes) or “everyone can hear you laughing at your podcasts and it’s unacceptable” (I wore headphones and would occasionally let out a quiet snort but never an out-and-out laugh).

    So I spend the rest of the workday feeling absolutely miserable, convinced everyone in the office hates me, and then on my drive home, Work Friend calls and says “…so I bet you’re wondering where all of that BS with Moira came from earlier.” Yes, actually, I was! Turns out, our logistics manager had his annual review that morning, and in an attempt to curry favor with Moira and Richard, he trashed EVERY. SINGLE. ONE OF US. during the review. There were…A LOT of issues with this company besides this one incident, so I really wasn’t too hurt when they laid me off in 2019 for being “too expensive”. Toodle-oo, HellJob! You shan’t be missed.

  384. Usagi*

    I used to work at an office where each department had 2-5 admin assistants, depending on the role. Each and every admin was in charge of a different resource. It started when one admin adopted the “role” of being in charge of batteries (ordering, handing them out, etc.). Another admin saw this, and wanted to add value to their role too, and so they adopted paperclips. So on, so forth, until every admin had something like this. And there wasn’t any kind of way to tell who was in charge of what; you just had to ask around until someone could tell you. The worst part was that there was an office admin who was actually in charge of ordering, she just… allowed? encouraged? this behavior. And, as you can guess, each admin was fiercely controlling of their own resource, and there would be weird little battles when a “new” resource was discovered that no one was in charge of yet. Some examples:

    When it was discovered that no one owned printer paper yet, one admin assistant tried to bribe the office admin with treats. Of course, another assistant caught wind of that, and brought in their own treats. Which turned into an unofficially official bake-off.

    Staples caused a lot of drama too. There was an admin assistant who was already in charge of it, but then another admin assistant started her own… black market, I guess, of staples, since the “official” assistant was more tyrannical than most. So the black market assistant would be extra nice about it, and give you extra sticks of staples (but never a box to take back to your desk, you’d get like two or three loose sticks). It was super sketchy too, there was this whole process of pinging her on our internal chat with some kind of random emoji (I honestly can’t remember what it was) and she would respond with a time, and you would meet her by the elevators on the 4th floor or whatever. Of course, when the “official” assistant that owned staples found out, it turned into A Thing that HR had to get involved in. I never really found out what happened but the “official” one won out.

    Highlighters was the resource that finally killed this whole system. HR was already somewhat aware what was going on at this point, thanks to the staples black market thing, so when the assistants started trying to control specific colors of highlighters, HR, backed by one of the VPs, stepped in and told everyone to quit acting like idiots and get back to work. All the assistants got in trouble, and of course the office admin did too. She left/got fired shortly after, since that wasn’t the only problem with her. The funny? twist was that one of the admin assistants (the black market one) was promoted to office admin, but thankfully she actually ran things pretty well.

    I realize the way I wrote this makes it sound like this all happened over months or maybe even a year or so, but this was like… not even a month and a half.

  385. First-Time-Comments*

    Directly after finishing grad school for library science, I moved across the country to be with my boyfriend and took a job at Library From He*l. I was in $100k debt from undergrad and grad school, lived in a miniscule studio apartment for an outrageous price, and was desperate to find any full time job in my field. I also came from a great school and had a previous stellar position with supervisory capacity and loads of responsibility that also had treated me well. I was simply unprepared for the amount of petty that was about to hit the fan.

    I was supposed to receive my insurance card within 2 weeks of starting. It took MONTHS. Several claims about it being mailed and that I must be checking the wrong mailbox or something (?!) followed. I made polite phone calls, followed by stern phone calls where I mentioned I needed insurance to pay for medication. They brightly told me I can use the insurance even if I didn’t have the card. I said I needed a policy and group number. They said they could provide that…and then didn’t provide that. I inquired again, and was emailed a screenshot that very much looked like someone had typed my name and the words ‘company insurance from Library’ on a word document. Shockingly, it was not useful. I couldn’t log in to the online insurance portal without info from my employer. It was ridiculous.

    To fill out my student loan paperwork (since I *might* have qualified for a tiny amount of loan forgiveness if I worked there forever) I also needed a tax number from my employer. Same HR department flat out refused to provide it and thought I was trying to scam them. I explained why I needed it, showed them the paperwork from the federal program, had my supervisor talk to them. But nope. Was hung up on. Was told someone would get back to me. Was told they don’t care that I need it, and it will never be provided.

    Despite the fact that I had tons of library experience, I also had a baby face and a high voice, leading people to think I was very young and to latch onto me in the worst ways. Two middle aged-to-older ladies in particular. Despite being higher on the totem pole than them, and not remotely connected to them, they both took it upon themselves to try to assign me work. Or take away my work. One of them told me I wasn’t qualified to make a library display (keep in mind I had a master’s degree…) and asked a high school volunteer to do it instead. ANother time she said my display was too exciting looking and took it down 4 hours after I created it. It had been scheduled to be up a month. The other randomly announced to the boss that “we’ve discussed it and First-Time-Comments wants to take all my nights and weekend shifts! Isn’t that great?” We had most certainly not discussed this. At one point one of them tried to ban me from certain projects, despite not having that ability and those projects were in fact written into my goals. The other complained to multiple people that I actually took a lunch break…the lunch break that was on the schedule and that I was not paid for. She started making note of when my lunch was scheduled and would come running to me with a problem “only First-Time-Comments can fix!!!” 1 minute before my lunch. Every. Single. Day. I started driving to the nearest PetSmart and looking at bunnies during my lunch instead of eating in the break room.

    Most egregious, was that the Library From He*l had dolls in the children’s area. It became my duty to keep these clean. Every single other employee was at least a decade older and owned their own home- it was a wealthy area. Some had multiple homes. Many worked as a hobby, and they definitely had washing machines in their own homes. But I lived on ramen and it cost me $4.50 a load to do laundry. They wanted me *and only me* to undress all the dolls, take the doll clothes home and wash and dry them on my own time, and bring them back the next day. I politely declined since I was charged per load. Their solution? Use dish soap and stand at the break room sink scrubbing the itty bitty underpants. Yup. And despite everyone knowing I was tasked with washing doll clothes, I always got some side-eye when there were naked dolls at my desk. It came to a head when one of the older ladies tried to demand I at least take the clothes home to iron them after washing. Yes- for doll clothes. I lied and said that I didn’t own an iron.

    I lasted 2 years. I was young and out of grad school, but had a lot of advanced experience. I was so under utilized for my skills, and so so so so so mocked at times. To this day I think I let them get away with it simply because they put me in a constant state of shock. When someone old enough to be your mother calls a meeting with your boss and sheds actual tears because you were “mean” to her- simply because you didn’t sound cheerful enough when you said hello- and the entire workplace just goes with it…you start to think you must be the bonkers one. I cried at least once a week at that job. I regretted my master’s and thought I’d made a terrible mistake with my life. I fought constantly with the boyfriend I’d moved for from the stress.

    But things got better. I now have stellar job (still in libraries!) with amazing people. Boyfriend and I are now married and I’m no longer stressed. I’ve clawed my way up the career latter and also mostly out of school debt, and we’re even looking at buying our first home! (On my first day at Library From He*l, everyone had a long conversation about how millennials were ruining the housing market because they weren’t purchasing homes…when I politely said a lot of us couldn’t afford it they were so hostile! I can’t believe I might actually have won that much good karma!) To anyone in an insane and petty job like that, please hang in there. Life will get better :)

    1. MiloSpiral*

      Okay, I really lost it at the doll part. That sounds awful and so demeaning…….. but the image of you cussing out your colleagues as you stood at a utility sink, scrubbing “itty bitty underpants,” while in the background a pile of naked dolls lies strewn across your desk—that made me chuckle.

      Also, your display was “too exciting?” ……..what? That’s a bad thing?

      I can’t believe you lasted two years. Good for you. And congratulations on getting out and finding yourself much more happily situated now.

    2. Narise*

      It would have been great if you had taken the dolls clothes home and burned all of them with the iron and then dressed them again with iron burns. Or better yet say that the laundromat had an issue and the clothes were destroyed so now all the dolls are naked.

  386. ITGuy*

    Worked in IT at a medium sized company. Spent a good half a day or more working away from my desk, because my job was to go to other people’s desks and fix problems. Got a new boss, was told I wasn’t allowed to leave my desk for any reason other than lunch and up to 2 bathroom breaks per day (yes, he specified). Took exactly one day of me emailing end users and asking them to bring their laptops to my desk to fix them as I wasn’t allowed to leave for that policy to end.

  387. Cheap, cheap*

    At one institution I worked at in 2010s, we had to justify to IT why we needed them to update Adobe Flash on staff computers. They demanded to know why we needed Flash. I honestly didn’t know how to respond. Because websites?
    At the same institution, they decided to centrally purchase all office supplies and required signed requisitions to pick up said supplies. I had to have a supervisor sign for a 12¢ box of paperclips.

    1. MiloSpiral*

      I bet by the time your IT department had signed off on Adobe Flash, website design had already moved on to HTML5.

      1. Berkeleyfarm*

        There was a lot of legacy stuff that broke when Flash got retired! We have an important program from a major equipment provider whose name a lot of people would recognize that was STILL not “doesn’t need flash” when the hammer came down. We had to build a couple of very isolated terminal servers for the people who needed that software and not patch them.

        1. MiloSpiral*

          That’s very true. From what I understand a lot of e-learning modules also broke, which is a real shame.

          1. Berkeleyfarm*

            Yep!

            Flash notably has security holes you can drive trucks through, so I’d ask.

  388. BL*

    I took a new job as a director of a department with a bunch of teams and a sizable budget for our institution. There was a structure in place to help teams weigh in on decisions pertaining to their work. Great in theory, but this one was a mess in practice. One day an employee came to my office since his manager was out asking to buy a broom. I said no big deal and sent him to the stock guy to get one. In a public meeting weeks later this guy’s teammates attacked me about approving a broom without taking it to the team to weigh in on. He also thought a broom cost $50 (it was $12) so he lost credibility with some people when they realized he was fighting with me over a $12 purchase.

  389. Retired ESO*

    I worked for a department of the Canadian Government. In the early 80’s I went on a two week course on the other side of the country. When I came home and submitted my travel claim they denied my breakfast expense for the return travel day. They said since they served breakfast on the plane I wasn’t entitled – at the time breakfast was a fixed $3.50 Cdn. I explained that I got up at 4AM to shower, pack and check out of the hotel. At 5AM I left the hotel in my rental car and drove nearly an hour to the airport including gassing up the car and returning it to the rental company. I checked in at 6AM for my 7AM flight and had breakfast since food wasn’t served at my hotel when I left. I had my first flight at 7AM landing at 7:30 and waited for my 2nd flight at 9AM. About 9:45 they served breakfast on the plane. They thought I should wait from 4 in the morning until nearly 10 to eat my first meal of the day. I finally convinced them that they were wrong and they paid me begrudgingly.

  390. betty f*

    The company will not pay for the water service (giant bottles in a dispenser), so instead a manager has to organize a water collection every year. It is voluntary, so people have to opt in, then be told the amount based on who opted in, then confirm they will pay, then pay… all for an amount that cannot be more than $1500 per year.

  391. ffs-stop-it*

    A colleague of mine, “Rose”, is tasked with proofreading everyone’s work before it’s finalised. When she started, she did was she was supposed to do: check for typos, spelling or grammatical errors, and any funny formatting.

    We have a senior manager who is too busy to actually be hands-on, and two brand new deputy managers who have no idea what they’re doing. They are relying heavily on Rose, for reasons none of us can figure out.

    So now Rose seems to be drunk on the “power” and is tearing everyone’s work to shreds, and not because there are actual problems: just because she is nitpicking everything to death. Only a handful of any of the hundreds of edits she makes in any given week are even remotely approaching being either helpful or required. It slows the entire process down, and causes people to miss deadlines, but Rose is never blamed for the delays.

    Rose, who’s 68, said something to me last week about how she really enjoyed “showing up all you kids with your Masters degrees”, and “everyone writes really well, but it’s good to be brought down a few pegs”, and now I just feel sick. The ferocity of her unnecessary edits, and her massive delays in getting the edits back, have caused serious trouble for several people, to the point that a few of them are at risk of getting fired. Rose knows this, and she’s continuing to do it.

    1. Guin*

      HR. Right now, on Monday morning, and bring your coworkers who are missing deadlines with you.

  392. Notecards*

    Yers ago I worked for an association doing conference planning. It was the job of the Director of Education to take roughly 300 or so sessions suggested by members and out them in some semblance of order, and to ensure there was no scheduling conflicts between faculty, or sponsoring bodies. She used a system of postcards that she physically placed on a large cork board to visually see the schedule. It was old school for sure, but she was old school and it worked just fine. To be clear, it wasn’t anything me or my coworkers felt strongly about, and we had little to do with it other than supply the cards upon request.

    Enter a new CEO, who HATED everything we did. He wanted everything digital, hated the manual processes, and frankly just didn’t like her or really our team. He suffered with her note cards for 2 years before she retired. On the first day her replacement started, he proudly walked over to our area and called our team over for a discussion. We had an open office so it was very public. He loudly and proudly RIPPED the various notecards from the wall and threw them on the floor proclaiming that we would NEVER use physical note cards again, and that the new Director of Education was going to do things her way and we had to just get on board. Again, reader, WE HAD NO DOG IN THIS FIGHT. We all stood there jaws agape at this display of masculinity and power wondering what the heck was going to happen next.

    In a shock to nobody whatsoever, the new director of education was way in over her head and things went down hill immediately. His power trip continued until he was forced out by the board, but I will never forget the moment he tossed those cards on the floor as if he had just solved the world hunger problem. Imagine letting stupid note cards ruin your life for years. How sad.

    2. JustSomeone*

      As someone who has held a similar job, I stand by the notecard method! I’ve used various software to do this kind of work, and I vastly prefer notecards and a roll of tape, particularly if you are laying out the conference collaboratively with other team members.

  393. CEO of note cards*

    Years ago I worked for an association doing conference planning. The Director of Education was tasked with taking roughly 300 submissions by members and organizing them into a full conference program. She had to ensure there were no overlaps in topics, speakers, etc. Her method was to use note cards and place them on a cork board to visualize the schedule. Yes, it’s old school but it worked for her, as she was also old school.

    A new CEO came on board and it was immediately clear he didn’t like how we did things, he hated the note cards, hated the way we managed things, and overall didn’t really like us very much. For two years he dealt with things, and she was allowed to keep using the note cards.

    When she retired he hired a new “younger” Director of Education who was going to help “modernize” our department. Just to be clear, nobody in our department cared about these cards, we didn’t really have anything to do with them other than to help her get them printed. On the day the new Director started, he proudly marched over to our area and called us over to where the notecards were posted. With great flourish he tears them down off the wall one by one giving us a speech about how we are “Doing things differently now, and the new Director would be changing things up, and we had to get on board with things” AGAIN READER, WE DIDN’T CARE ABOUT THESE NOTE CARDS AT ALL.

    After he was done with his speech, he smugly toddled back to his office, I’m sure patting himself on the back.

    In a shock to nobody, the new Director was a disaster, he was a disaster, and was fired a little year or two after that for getting the association into huge debt trying to “modernize” things without concern for costs or budget. But I’ll never forget the look on his face thinking he really showed us, all while thinking how sad it was that this man, who was paid close to a half a million dollars a year, was so all consumed about note cards for years.

    1. MiloSpiral*

      Ugh, this sucks! I am in my late twenties and I would’ve probably used a similar system as your previous Director. Some people do much better when they’re working with physical media that they can move around and look at IRL.

      I’m all for improving processes—and I’m sure pieces of this could have been automated in a way that would’ve helped your Director—but jeez. It sounded like this CEO had some real ageist beliefs, too.

      1. Louise B*

        I would argue most people do- I’m young and often do things digitally but I’ve only found digital significantly easier when you’re dealing with communication (email is the best) or when you’re doing something VERY complicated. I suspect some people think digital is always better all of the time because it’s new and shiny.

  394. Dwight Schrute*

    At my first job out of college I had offended the person who got birthday cakes for everyone at the office when I said I couldn’t do our usual staples run together because I had a client to see. So when it came time for cakes for another coworker and I who had birthdays two days apart, she only got the cake he wanted because “his birthday was first so he gets to choose the cake”. No cake for me; which was unusual because every other previous birthday celebration everyone got their own cake no matter how close the dates were. Even our boss commented that it was odd I didn’t get a cake.

  395. Waving not Drowning*

    I have two stories – one where I was the good guy, and one where I was the petty one…..

    I took a temporary transfer to another department for a maternity leave cover role for a year. First day there, I was handed the keys to the (multiple) keys to the stationery cupboard – about 5 cupboards, each with a different lock. The department I came from had no such stationery process – I asked why all the locks, and it was because someone might take something they shouldn’t. Day 2 – I unlocked all the stationery cupboards, and once word filtered through, I had some VERY happy people! I also had a major stationery cleanout (donated excess to a local school), there were things that noone had used in YEARS – so much coloured paper! boxes upon boxes of paperclips! Enough boxes of staples to survive the staple apocolypse!! (there were staples that didn’t fit any of the multiple staplers we had!). Pens! So. Many. Pens. in all the colours of the rainbow (I admit, I took the purple ones for my desk……) I love stationery – but, I love it being used!

    This one is where I’m the bad guy…… Same place had TWO massive kitchen drawers in the Tea Room with dozens of different flavours of tea varieties. Part of my role was to restock the supply – by the end of it, I’d whittled down two drawers to half a drawer of the 5 most popular flavours.

    1. MiloSpiral*

      Honestly, the second story doesn’t make you sound that petty. It sounds like you were paying attention to what people were actually drinking and saved some money and space because of it. Especially considering you were the Stationary Hero, I can’t imagine you came off as a miser. Good on you!

      1. Waving not Drowning*

        The teacher receiving the excess stationery was so happy – particularly with the reams of colored paper – she said that it was hard getting resources from the school office – if she wanted colored paper for something, she needed to specify the number of sheets and why, and didn’t get any extra. She promised to share the secret stash with other teachers. She was thinking of all the craft activities she could do in the classroom.

        There was so much stationery, and obsolete things such as overhead transparency sheets (something we havent used in the 10 years I’ve been here!), and blank CD’s, which again, we don’t use any more. Because the cupboard was locked, noone knew what was in there that they could actually use!

        Workplace has now instigated that each department needs to schedule a designated clean up day each year. There is a week set aside, with the expectation that you will choose a day in that week. They have spots set up for e-waste, areas set up freecycle for things that are no longer needed, competitions to see who can find the most waste and NOT have it go to landfill.

        1. MiloSpiral*

          And I’ll bet that amount of control you granted to that teacher made her feel so much better about her job, even for just a little bit! This is honestly the tragedy of controlling workplaces and micromanagers: they don’t seem to realize that the more they try to control, the less their teams/companies will actually grow.

  396. MiloSpiral*

    I don’t know if this is an abuse of power, per se, but it’s definitely a perfect example of the kind of controlling behavior that drove me out of this job: I used to work at an animal shelter, with a very small staff (less than 5 people) and which relied heavily on volunteers. Some long-time volunteers came in one day and left a note for staff saying that they’d named a couple of the new cats who had come in. I mentioned this in passing to my supervisor, to which she immediately responded: “Oh, I hated those suggestions. We’re not using them. We’re going with different names.”

    To be clear, these names were not offensive in any way: they were cute names taken from a popular book series. I was so taken aback that I just looked at her with my mouth open, and she must have seen that I was dumbfounded, because she followed it up with: “It’s just…….. the volunteers choose terrible names.”

    You know what’s a really good way to show appreciation for volunteers and to make them feel like they’re a special part of your organization? Letting them name a couple of damn cats. This was not the first time that my supervisor complained about the names folks suggested, nor was it the only thing she complained about, but it was probably the most egregious and crystalized example of how controlling and myopic she could be.

    1. MiloSpiral*

      Another one: While planning an event, I made an admittedly careless mistake that ended up costing the organization an extra $100 for some event swag. When my manager pointed out this mistake to me and expressed her disappointment, I tried to sincerely apologize. She blew past me and handed down the edict that because I had cost the org $100, I must now make it up by raising an extra $100.

      I was planning a major event, effectively single-handedly, with very little guidance and no previous event-planning experience, and was being paid $15 an hour. As the org’s primary fundraiser, I easily made the org $100 a day, minimum. The event itself made over $7,000. I was still expected to raise the $100.

  397. GiraffeGirl*

    Whoever processes my mileage reimbursement requests actually goes through and Google searches EVERY route on there. If she can find a shorter route than the one I took, she will only pay me the milage of the shorter route, even if the difference is less than a mile. She also rounds down, so if a trip was 7.2 miles, she will round it down to 7 miles in order to save the business a couple cents. The amount of time she spends double-checking all my trips and recalculating my reimbursements just to say the business a dollar or two is insane! The fact that they are paying her an hourly rate to do all this means that the business is actually losing money by her trying to save 14 cents here and 37 cents there. When I first found out about it, I couldn’t believe it. Now I just roll my eyes when my reimbursement payment comes in and I notice that it’s 88 cents less than what I submitted.

    1. MiloSpiral*

      This reminds me of the guacamole travel expenses post! (Which is one of my favorite AAMs.) You’re absolutely right that she’s spending more money on this ridiculous process than she is saving. I started thinking about that at my old job when the org got stingy about paying for certain things that would make staff’s lives much easier and speed up needlessly manual processes.

    2. Chirpy*

      Plus, the shortest route isn’t always the fastest route. There’s a trip I do regularly that has a state highway route that is shorter distance, but about 20 minutes longer than taking the interstate. Which one I take depends on when I need to arrive and what the weather conditions are, and whether I feel like dealing with either stupid drivers or deer….and occasionally, whether or not the state highway has a bridge out.

  398. From truck driver to Installer*

    Drove a delivery route for a hvac/plumbing supply house. We started at 5am and would load our route and try to be on the road between 630 and 7. Boss thought it was taking too long to get the trucks out so he told us drivers nobody could use the bathroom when we came in. And to hold it til our first stop and use the customer’s bathroom.

    Also we didn’t ever take our paid two 10 min breaks. (But there was usually enough bsing and standing around after the route, or I would just spread it out over a couple stops). One drive complained he wasn’t getting his and same manager says “so you never go to the bathroom? That’s your paid breaks.”

      1. Former truck driver*

        They varied. You could be back 3 or 4 hours or 9 or 10. And everything in between. Just ridiculous to tell your guys they can’t use the bathroom the first 2 hours of your shift.

  399. Mia*

    I work in a technical role and my cubicle was right next to a coworker who thought it was ok to a) talk on speakerphone all day and b) interrupt me all day to ask questions. She was friends with the head of our department so when I pushed back on constantly getting interrupted they didn’t say anything but waited until performance review time and wrote me down in my performance review. I still have scars from that job.

  400. Keith*

    Founder/CEO of my first job told the office manager she couldn’t buy Post-it Notes, and also she couldn’t tell employees this was the CEO’s policy.

    Eventually the client services VP and managing consultants cornered the CEO that did he really want notes to go out on our Big Pharma clients reports with tape on torn scrap paper?

    1. LilPinkSock*

      I wonder what the rationale behind that is.

      Never mind. There’s so little rationale in any of these stories.

  401. Jessie*

    Not me, but my dad worked and traveled internationally so had to use currency exchange rates in his expense reports. One time he used the same exchange rate for expenses from one day, with one charge that happened a little after midnight the next day. The end result was a reimbursement a couple pennies off of what it should have been. They made him do the whole thing over again.

  402. Berkeleyfarm*

    I read about half the thread before lunch today and was crazy busy all afternoon so I need to catch up.

    I can spare some sympathy for the admins who kept the replacement batteries locked up. I used to be the keeper of the batteries myself (why a six-figure-salary tech professional was doing this instead of the receptionist I DO NOT KNOW) and that stuff, and old laptops, and every USB thumb drive we had grew legs and walked until we were able to secure it better. People regarded our storage area as a combo Office Depot/Fry’s (RIP Fry’s) and just rummaged. It was apparently beneath them to place an order and drive about 30 miles round trip to go get it.

    I suspect someone took too many liberties with the office supplies once upon a time. I mean, my dad used to bring the occasional legal pad home but these folks took a lot of stuff.

  403. Waving not Drowning*

    Ohhh, another one! It was decreed from on high that Admin were not allowed to purchase USB sticks for staff use (and, it was a place where USB’s were used a lot).

    Funnily enough, we had company branded USB sticks, but I wasn’t allowed to hand those out to staff – they were for marketing only! But, then of course, we changed logo so instantly all the USB’s that marketing had hoarded for handout at events were not able to be used. They came past my desk to get rid of them. I did. By hiding them in a drawer, and handing them off to staff whenever they asked for a USB (with instructions to say they didn’t get them from me!)

  404. Snowy*

    The pettiest thing I’ve ever seen at work (and one of the most disgusting) was when I worked for a burger place in college. Any of the food that was a mixed up order (or things that fell on the floor, etc) went into A BUCKET KEPT UNDER THE FOOD PREP TABLE. Why? So it could be *counted* later, to make sure nobody was taking it. Someone actually had to dig through the slop hours later and log everything. This was a place where I threw out an entire trash can of perfectly good lettuce nearly every day because they only wanted the nice green leaves on the sandwiches and not the white ribs, but only ever bought iceberg lettuce.

    I’d previously worked at a sandwich place in high school that had a screen on the register to log unsellable food (mostly if we broke a cookie, or customer changed their order after it had been made), so it was disposed of immediately. And our manager let us eat the broken cookies. Both of these places were similarly sized chains, but oof, that burger place. Heaven forbid they give their minimum wage workers *literally anything at all.* Sandwich place gave us free sandwiches and soda daily, and treated us like humans, not trash thieves.

  405. Chelle*

    When I worked at Wells Fargo call center they clocked everything including the length of bathroom visits. My supervisor told me to change my diet so I wouldn’t have to poop at work and could get my aux 7 bathroom time to less than 5 minutes per day. Never mind that I worked 10 hour shifts and had a 90 minute commute, asking me to change my diet to intentionally be constipated is just wrong.

  406. Cookies For Breakfast*

    The senior management team at my first job would be worth an entire essay.

    One of them made it a policy in the company handbook that the only way to call in sick was a phone call to him. Emails or texts were not enough. He was convinced that people would fake illness to skip work at every opportunity, and certain that by hearing their voice he’d instantly know whether they were really not well enough to work.

    So, it couldn’t be in writing, but voicemail was ok. That job was so bad, I got to a point I needed a mental health day. That was very frowned upon at that workplace: only physical illness counted as not being well. I called when I knew he’d be travelling on an underground train, and left a message, dropping my voice as if I’d had a sore throat. I was dreading getting a call back, but it never came. All good! Sick day granted! What an effective policy to catch out lies!

  407. Photocynthia*

    A workfriend who left us told me that their new place had a very strict plant-on-desk policy. At first none were allowed, but later on a special plant committee had been set up to develop the rules. Thre were only 5 types (species) of plants allowed, with a certain type of pot (if the pot needed a saucer underneath it had to be the same colour).

    This came from senior management. Apparently some guy high up hates office plants… (oh, and it was an environmental organisation even)

  408. Josephine*

    I worked as a receptionist at a head office and the office manager was my manager. The CFO was the most obnoxious person I’ve ever met. He had an assistant of his own but for some weird reason she worked at another location, so my manager had to assist him with everything under the sun. One time he came up to me asking where my manager was and I told him that she’d left for the day. He got upset and said someone “apparently” had sent him some papers to sign and asked me to call her and ask if she could see the email and print it… She did not answer so he ended up sending the documents to me and then I had to print them for him. I went over to give him the papers and he said “have you marked where I have to sign?”. I had not, because WTF. So I had to take the papers back and add little stickers where he was supposed to sign. And then, of course, I had to put them in an envelope to send. Throughout this, he was still very rude.

  409. SavedFromLorna*

    The boss who inspired this pseudonym once screamed at me over video chat and threatened to fire me for “stealing from [her]” because I said one of our freelancers would have to give her permissions to view an old, outdated file (because I obviously did not have access to his personal drive). Then she hung up on me.

  410. asteramella*

    I worked in a very small department (5-6 people) for 3 years. Most of the department had worked together for 10+ years and I was the newbie.

    The department had a tradition where the department head would take everyone out to lunch to celebrate staff birthdays. The birthday person picked the restaurant. Well, my birthday never got added to the rotation—I started right before Christmas and with HR people out of the office, my birthday didn’t get added to the companywide birthday calendar that only managers had access to.

    The first year, when my birthday went by without a lunch, I thought it would be too awkward or would come off as entitled to say anything, so I just never mentioned to anyone that it was my birthday. I’m not a huge birthday person anyway. No big deal.

    The second year, I had been to enough of these lunches to know that I didn’t enjoy them. So I still didn’t speak up when my birthday rolled around and I felt fine about it. Sometimes it’d come up in conversation—“Where did we go for lunch for your birthday last year, asteramella?” but I would just change the subject and nobody ever noticed. Still, though, it did feel a bit odd to be the only person who wasn’t recognized this way.

    The third year, I was really hating the job and planning to quit soon, due in part to relentless bullying from my colleague Sandy, whose antics my boss and the department head simply ignored. Sandy was really awful. I was never anything but pleasant to her, but I was her Designated Office Enemy for some reason. She made about twice as much money as me and did about a fifth of the work I did. Most of her working time appeared to be used in coming up with new ways to insult and condescend to me. By this point she had criticized my clothes, my speech patterns, the way I talked about my relationships with my family members (who she did not know!), my car, my eating habits (which she particularly criticized at these department lunches since after a while I wised up and stopped eating in front of her otherwise), etc… nonstop… for years. Also around this time she had decided to stop speaking to me whenever possible, to the point of pointedly remaining silent when I asked her a question or even said good morning. But she still talked ABOUT me to herself and anyone who would listen, so I got to hear her criticism anyway. In fact, everyone got to hear her criticism because our open office plan had zero soundproofing. Our boss and department head shrugged all of this off as, “Well, that’s just Sandy” because she was the Missing Stair of the office—they’d spent a decade tolerating this behavior and sure as hell weren’t going to stop now.

    A few weeks before my birthday on the third year, I get an email from HR: “Oh asteramella, we realized you aren’t on the company birthday calendar! We’re so sorry, you never got mentioned in the company newsletter list of birthdays, etc! We’ve added you on now.” Ok, sure, I guess I’ll get a birthday lunch this year. It will suck because Sandy will spend the whole lunch reciting a litany of my faults, but I don’t get paid enough to turn down a free meal.

    The day before my birthday came and nobody mentioned it. Walked in on the morning of my birthday and nobody mentioned it. Oh well, guess HR forgot to put me on the calendar after all. I worked a normal workday, then called in sick the next day because I had a lot of PTO to burn before quitting and I loathed being in the office anyway.

    And then I get a text from a coworker who I got along with. “asteramella, can you come in? Department head and boss realized that it was your birthday yesterday. They feel really bad. They have a cake and flowers. Are you really sick? Can’t you come in?” And of course I’m like “ohhhhhh yeah no, I’m totally sick buddy, see you tomorrow” because what am I gonna do, say “yeah I lied about being sick because this job is severely impacting my mental health and I cannot wait to quit ASAP”?

    I came in the next day and the dept head and my boss awkwardly apologized for missing my birthday and said they “didn’t know how it happened” (and also seemed to have no awareness that my birthday was skipped the past couple of years). There would not be a lunch due to scheduling conflicts, but there was a cake. We awkwardly ate cake together in the office. Sandy loudly remarked to nobody in particular on the size of my cake slice and speculated that I must have engineered the whole situation to get myself attention (?) … still refusing to speak to me directly. My boss and department head did not acknowledge her behavior in any way but continued to apologize for missing my birthday. I said thanks, finished my cake and didn’t say anything else because I simply wanted this interaction to be over.

    All of that is not the petty part. The petty part is that a busybody manager from another department, who sat about 20 feet away in our open office plan and had spent the last several years listening to Sandy berate me, eavesdropped on this entire interaction, waited until it was over, crept over to my desk, and confides gleefully, sotto voce: “*I* knew it was your birthday.”

    Like … why would you say anything at that point? How is that helpful to me? Am I supposed to thank you for … knowing it was my birthday and not saying anything to me or anyone else about it? Was that thoughtful of you? Is there a point to you saying this to me other than just to point out that you knew stuff that other people didn’t know? Wouldn’t it have been more helpful to me if you’r expressed sympathy for the incessant bullying you’ve been eavesdropping on for the past few years? I just said something like, “Oh, uh, ok.”

    I quit 4 months later. In the years since, Sandy has been promoted, has gotten a pay raise, and is still a miserable person who has moved on to torturing my successor.

    Sandy, I’m sure you’re not reading this because you think you have nothing left to learn about work life, but just in case you are: I wouldn’t spit on you if you were on fire.

    1. Sorcyress*

      You have a magnificent gift for writing. Happy birthday, whenever it may be, and may there be no more Sandys in your life!

  411. chersy*

    (1) When our small team of three ran out of bond paper for printing our marketing materials, my manager told me I had to ask for bond paper from another team and count exactly how many I got so that I could pay that team back the exact number of sheets of paper. (I had to beg other units for paper.) And when I needed to use the only (?!) colored printer for those marketing materials, I had to write down how many sheets were printed and for what purpose. Same manager also refused to buy nice envelopes to give out our marketing collaterals in, so I had to reuse obviously used folders and envelopes.

    (2) When a client got sick and hospitalized, I was told to buy fruits within a budget (~$6.00) and send it to client. I was the one who had a relationship with the client and signed my name in the card which had the company name. Same manager in #1 said I should not have done that. (Not sure if I broke any etiquette rules here, but please weigh in if any!)

  412. Skippy*

    In my last job I worked for an absolute nightmare of an Executive Director.

    Not long after he started he called me into his office and accused me of skipping work because he didn’t see my car in the parking lot. If he’d paid even the slightest bit of attention he would have known that we’d bought a new car after my previous car had been T-boned on my way to that very same office — I’d called in late and everything — but rather than apologize, he continued to lecture me about working my full 40 hour week.

    I was never so happy to be laid off in my life.

  413. lu*

    We have a guy at work who is your typical squeaky wheel, mansplaining, quick to point out errors of others and gets defensive about his own mistakes. He was promoted from a team lead to “Assistant Teapot Engineering Manager” but his email signature says “Teapot Engineering Manager.” That is someone else’s job – not his.

  414. I just work here*

    Just got a call from an employee whose colleague sent a long email to all their teammates explaining how they all needed to reorganize their Outlook folders because ‘department protocol is xyz’ and provided a long list of directions, including what to name all the folders, what folders they needed, what folders they didn’t need, etc. Colleague has worked here for about a month and has no supervisory role or administrative role and we are not talking about a shared email account either. The directive was clear and started with the heading “Required formatting for all email accounts as of xyz date”

    Big boss is having a frank talk with colleague today…..

    1. LilPinkSock*

      What on earth would possess someone to do that?! The brass ones on Colleague, oh my.

    4. Berkeleyfarm*

      Also, please let us know how it goes.

      (If someone called us at my company with this hot gossip tidbit, the whole IT department would be giggling over it.)

  415. Scruffy*

    I didn’t realise how much of a big deal of having adequate office supplies, paper, and stationery until I left my previous Not For Profit job.

    We were in a demanding industry, that despite being a large organisation, there was limited amount of printing paper, pens and even boxes of tissues.
    New staff would often have to wait up to 5 months to have their lanyards, ID cards and security swipe cards given to them.

    Despise the grumblings amongst staff, I always believed that if people put their heads down, worked hard and made do with what little supplies they had, all would be well.

    Until one day, 2 staff weren’t able to get into the building to escape a stray aggressively dog (cause obviously they never had their own swipe cards delivered to them and no one was in the building to let them in).
    And when our organisation was about to be audited, there were long lines of staff near the printing machine waiting to print/copy/scan only to have it run out of paper quickly.

    Looking back, I think the friendliness of the organisation made me overlook how dysfunctional and ineffective things were. I’d been so grateful for a job there that I didn’t realise how the little things ended up affecting everyone.

    When I left that NFP to work at others, not only was I supplied an ID card and swipe card within 2 days of commencement, stationery and office supplies were restocked monthly and were abundant (you’d be surprised how generous smaller organisations can be).

  416. YarnOwl*

    My brother works for the company I just left for a new job so I know all the players well here. Everyone in his position is sort of managed by one person, and she absolutely loves being in charge of people. She will take any opportunity to remind people that she’s in charge.

    My brother had a medical event in the office (the second one of this kind) where when he woke up he was very confused and in a bit of pain. One of his coworkers who he trained with and is friends with was kneeling next to him on the ground while they waited for the paramedics to get there, holding his hand, telling him what happened, and just comforting him. Their boss was standing over him when he woke up, and when he asked what happened, she explained curtly and in an annoyed voice. After a few minutes, she told the coworker who was comforting my brother to go back to her desk and stop sitting around and watching (despite basically everyone else just standing around watching and doing nothing else – not that there was anything they could do, but she sent away the only person who was comforting him and making him feel better).

    Her management style has created pretty much a rotating door of employees coming in and out of the company who can’t stand working for her, but management doesn’t do anything because she’s been there for so long!

  417. Hedgehog O'Brien*

    My boss at my previous job for some reason had a weird hangup about spending money on professional development and also like….basic things we needed for our department. I once had to spend an inordinate amount of time making the case for two of my employees to attend *part* of a conference in their field – not even the entire conference. And it was in town. They both had specialized roles and had been with the org for 5+ years and neither had attended a conference or any other professional development during that time. One of my employees and I also had to write a FULL 2-PAGE BUSINESS PROPOSAL in order to get piece of equipment we needed that cost a few hundred dollars. Interestingly it seemed like this only happened to women in our department.

  418. nobadcats*

    When I worked at Large Publishing Company, we had at least one catered lunch per month for our team of about 30 people. Usually, this would be sandwiches from Corner Bakery. We had one (1!) person on our team who was vegetarian and so, out of 40 sandwiches, the admin would order one (1!) caprese sandwich, everything else had meat in it. Corner Bakery’s caprese sammies are yummy. Someone would always snap up that particular sandwich before my co-irker could get to it. When I brought this up to the admin, she said, “It’s not MY fault if Sabrina doesn’t get to lunch on time. If she wants vegetarian options, she can just bring her own lunch.”

    I was fuming, but Sabrina was just like, “Meh, not worth it.” Although I would have liked a caprese sammie (because who doesn’t love a mozz/basil/tomato sammie?), if I was there before anyone else, I would grab the ONLY one for her, then go back and get my own.

    1. Delta Delta*

      If the caprese was so good (which, it sounds like it was), why didn’t they order more of those? or let people pick what they want?

      1. Rainy*

        It is my experience that catered lunches are opportunities for people to wield a little power in a way that makes them feel big, and a lot of them do so.

        I had a supervisor some years ago who was a kale freak, and for whatever reason, just could not grasp that I am allergic to kale. Any time she volunteered to handle the catering, I brought my lunch, because EVERYTHING would have kale.

  419. Penny for a Paperclip*

    We were funded by many grants and took documenting grant-related costs very seriously. There were tracking sheets in the supply room for supplies taken and which grant to charge them to. People documented each paperclip taken!
    I will never forget this! Some people took a whole box of paperclips at a time and charged it to the appropriate grant, which was the most reasonable way around this. But now I’m at a similar organization and we never track paperclips by grant funding source.

  420. Lissa*

    Our company used to track “non-work” internet usage and your name appeared on the List for the month and it was addressed with you by your Supervisor. The importance of not appearing on this list was stressed heavily during the onboarding process so I was sure to avoid using the internet on my computer for anything that wasn’t strictly for work. Another woman was hired at the same time as me. As with any new job, the training was endless. Lots of videos, quizzes to take over said videos, certificates to print to “prove” you can click the mouse. And the capacity of the net speed, not great. So while waiting for all of these things to load, my coworker took the time to click all the links that showed up on the employee page and read all the articles that popped up in relation to the job, employee benefits, policy notations, etc. The next month rolls around and she finds herself in front of, not only her Supervisor, but the steely-eyed glared of the Office Manager who is LIVID that she would “dare appear on the List” – upon which time my coworker is totally confused and says “wait a minute, if you will look at all the sites, you will see that they were all sites that I got to by clicking links on the employee page” – They backed down but only slightly. She didn’t get fired but she quit within a little more than a year. You don’t keep employees that way.

  421. ITWorkerBee*

    When I worked in the admin space of BigBoxCompany – I hit my head while out on the “factory” floor and was bleeding. My boss sent me to the doctor with a note of “If a tetanus shot is OSHA reportable, don’t get one”. Then when I returned to gather my things to go home (after being written off work), he asked me to sit in my chair quietly bleeding for a “few hours while he finished meetings” so he could do the required paperwork.
    Same boss enjoyed calling people in the second their medical leave was over regardless of their shift assignment. I worked 8-5 (days) and got a call at midnight the day my leave was over asking me to return to the office immediately.

  422. Anon pharmacist*

    Retail pharmacy manager here at a large chain pharmacy. At the very beginning of the Covid lockdown, before masks became mandatory, but six-foot distancing was advised, I was very concerned about the safety of my staff and wanted to do what I could to enforce distancing in the pharmacy. I wanted to put a box in front of the register to force people to stand back. My boss wouldn’t let me, so I taught my staff to step back. Then they were going to ship out plexiglass shields, but they kept changing the expected arrival date. I went out and bought a clear plastic shower curtain and command hooks and made my own for the interim. Leadership told me to take that down. They used the excuse that the Board of Pharmacy had approved the plexiglass setup but not this other setup. Yeah, 1. I’m so sure that the Board will cite someone for this during a pandemic rather than either overlooking it or at most telling me to remove it, and 2. since my name is on the license, I’d be the one who got in trouble anyway and I was willing to risk that. I refused to take it down so they told my boss to do it. If any of my staff had caught Covid and gotten really sick, I’d have waged a war. Thankfully nobody did get sick. And it turned out that retail isn’t a real hot site for transmission, but we didn’t know that then and I was trying to do what I thought with my professional judgement was best for my pharmacy, like I was supposedly hired to do. That was two years ago and thinking about it now I’m still incensed.

  423. I Wish My Job Was Tables*

    A lot of details of this story got told to me by other people in the tech department, so I probably got details wrong about how tech works.

    I worked for a company where only one Tech person (gonna call her Lima) was allowed to log software bugs. There were tech staff there to fix those bugs, but there weren’t a lot of them because Lima got to decide what was and wasn’t a bug.

    I worked in customer support and noticed a number of calls for a specific issue. I tested it myself and was easily able to recreate it. I went to a techie I knew and asked about the bug and was told to submit it to Lima.

    Lima refused to log it. She kept saying it wasn’t recreatable on any of her machines and it must be user error. She even refused to believe it when I demonstrated the bug by triggering it in front of her. She gave me a huge list of information she required me to get from fifteen customers in order to even consider listing it as a bug. Stuff like “date the device being used was produced by the factory that manufactured it”, “size of device used, including depth”, and “every single app on the user’s device.” (The software was only for Apple products.) I refused and the bug never got logged.

    After an update made the bug happen even more often, I went to the (recently hired) head of the tech department and begged them to make Lima log the bug. They were clearly confused as to why they hadn’t heard about it and said they’d talk to her. They also informed me that everyone in the tech department should have been able to log bugs, not just Lima.

    From what I heard, prior to the head of tech coming in, the IT guy (who was incredibly lazy) set up the bug tracking system, gave admin privileges to Lima and told her to add everyone else to the bug tracking software. Lima took this privilege and somehow set it up so only she could log bugs and a host of other things. She wasn’t the team lead, she was the newest programmer on the team and took the opportunity to give herself extreme power over the rest of the tech department. Other people had gone to IT to ask for permissions but IT said he was too busy and to ask Lima. She got away with it for as long as she did because there hadn’t been a team lead or head of tech for over 2 years. The head of tech I talked to had only been there for a week or two.

    The bug quickly got fixed. I heard there was some struggle to get Lima ousted because Lima didn’t want to share her power over the bug tracking software while IT kept saying he was too busy to deal with it. I’m not sure what was said to Lima, but after she was removed she went from being boisterous and gossipy to being very quiet. IT had been terrible for a while, but that was the last straw that got him fired.

  424. Stephanie*

    Late to the thread, but I got a gentle reminder from my boss about a $4 rental car refueling charge on an expense report. We work in a travel heavy department at a F50 company that made $10B in profit last year.

  425. RandoLlama*

    My boss wanted to deny a day of per diem because the person was only over midnight by 30 minutes. The individual’s connecting flight was delayed three hours and arrived at something like 12:30 am. Ignoring the fact that the person still needed to get luggage and get home from their work trip, Boss wanted to just deny them the per diem for that day. It wasn’t even a full day of per diem; it was the arrival day, which is like half the normal amount.

    I circumvented the back and forth, by going to the approver for the expense report who was like, “yep, approved, good to go.”

    It was the weirdest thing to be petty about – a whole like maybe $30 – when the person had been at a multi-day conference costing so much more.

  426. I'm so tired*

    If I have to take time off at my office job, I have to clear it with four different people and find coverage three weeks in advance and have been reprimanded when I gave less notice. Yesterday, my boss emailed me to say they were taking off for the next few days and to cover for her without prior warning. I wasn’t given this much grief when I worked retail.

    1. I'm so tired*

      And I have to get my timesheet approved (I’m hourly) by two different people before submitting it to payroll.

  427. All I wanted was to pee without alerting everyone*

    I worked at a small school where my office was located inside an annex building down the block from the main building, where we rented an entire floor from another company who also housed staff in the building (this is only important because the point is: the bathrooms stayed locked and it wasn’t up to us, but our landlord). On our floor of the annex there were two offices (one was mine) and two classrooms/labs. The director of the labs who had the other office, had keys to everything, including the bathrooms down the hall. The instructors and students occupying the classrooms used shared bathroom keys that hung inside the door of the classrooms. I was never given a bathroom key myself, because the operations director “didn’t want to give out too many”.

    When I needed to use the bathroom I had to dip into a classroom that was usually in use 9-5 every day, grab a shared key, and return it afterwards. I did this quickly and quietly so as not to interrupt the class, but still, everyone in the room was aware of it. This eventually got to be *very annoying*, especially after I’d worked there for a few years and had become the director of my dept. I asked multiple times for a key but my boss and the operations director were always in a pissing contest to control whatever was in their power so the other couldn’t have a say in it.

    One day I couldn’t take it anymore. I needed the bathroom many times that day, like you do once in a while! It felt embarrassing that everyone in the classroom know I was in and out of the bathroom often. I emailed the ops director and copied my boss:

    “Dear X,
    I’ve used the bathroom 6 times today already. Think that’s too much information? You’re right! It’s also too much information for Instructor Y and the 15 students in her all-day class who notice every single time I have to go in there and borrow the key from their room. I am urging you once again to all0w me to have my own bathroom key so as a full-time professional staff person, I do not have to alert everyone whenever I need to pee or worry that they’ve noticed how many times it’s been. This is ridiculous. Thank you.”

    I finally got my key and won a part of that power battle.

    1. All I wanted was to pee without alerting everyone*

      I also just wanted to clarify, the keys to the bathroom did not let you in while someone else was using it – they were multi-stall bathrooms and they were only locked because people were only supposed to use the bathrooms on their company’s own floor. In our main building the multi-stall bathrooms were not locked so there was no school-wide policy on this, it was just a weird situation on our annex floor that affected very few people! Mainly only me and anyone I had visit my office.

    2. All the coffee*

      The control of keys is always insane. At my current job, I’m second in command, reporting to the Executive Director and running the largest department. I’ve also been tasked with “resetting the internet when it goes down”. This is all perfectly fine, we are pretty small and I don’t mind the odd responsibility. HOWEVER, the server room is locked and only the executive director and her assistant have the code to the box where the key is. So, I have to go ask them to open the box, give me the key, unlock the door and push one button….every time the internet goes down. The suggestion that the admin could do this was shot down because she’s not “an IT person” – NEITHER AM I.

  428. Nora*

    I once worked for a manager who followed the letter of the law to such a degree that it often undermined the productivity of our team. We worked in an office that on paperwas technically business formal, but in practice most people on our floor often wore nice jeans and blouses.

    One day (laundry day, I was wildly underpaid at this time and had almost no budget for clothes) I wore a pair of solid black pants that, while not made of denim, had jeans-style buttons. I wore them with a nice black blazer and blouse, and a belt and oxfords to make them look formal.

    My manager SENT ME HOME TO CHANGE. Mind you, my commute was an hour each way that included paying for two trains and taking two 15 minute walks. I asked if I could just go home and work from home, so I wouldn’t lose another hour of work time. She said no! I wasted two extra hours of travel time when I could have been working, and arrived back at work just in time to leave again.

    (This is the same boss who did elaborate bistronomics to make me pay for my portion of a “social meal with boss on a mandatory conference trip,” despite the fact that she had demanded I go to the dinner with her and had picked an expensive restaurant I never would have picked and couldn’t afford. Also the same boss who regularly made non-exempt employees stay an hour overtime without logging it, but then would nickel and dime about coming in 5 minutes late when the train was stalled.)

  429. Cheshire Grin*

    At one of my Old Jobs, my manager decided that too many people were coming in late to our weekly Monday morning meetings. He decided that for every minute a person was late, they would need to pay a late fee. My job was to collect the money. Sounds fairly straightforward, but odd right?
    Our department ran tests for R&D. As in, you need to be there in person while item is getting tested. The people coming in slightly late were only doing so because they were doing their jobs correctly. Also, the worst offender was the manager, who of course was the exception to the rule.
    I thought the whole thing was a bunch of baloney, so I only collected a few dollars and “forgot” to ask people to pay in.

  430. wine dude*

    A very long time ago I was an engineering intern at a Very Big Defense Contractor. There was an engineer who I will call Worm who somehow had cornered the market on assorted electronic parts in our department. So if you needed a 10 cent transistor To Do Your Job you had to suck up to Worm big time so that he would deign to unlock his Massive Parts Locker and grant you your transistor. My desk was in the same 4 person cube so I saw these performances regularly. I once even saw one of my fellow interns on his knees begging for parts. And then one day, his desk was empty and the MPL was unlocked. And there was Much Rejoicing!

  431. Really?*

    Many years ago, I was an assistant manager in charge of opening a big city hotel restaurant at 6:30 in the morning. One day a woman from another department appeared to tell me that she had been asked to speak to me because I needed to refresh my lipstick more often. Seriously. I did apply makeup before starting the shift, along with towering closed-toe heels, a skirted suit, and hose. At the same time, one of the other assistant managers frequently turned up worse for the wear, reeking of whatever he had drunk the night before, and as far as I know no one ever spoke to him!

  432. SeekYou*

    In meetings Toxic Boss would always sit where she could be the center of attention, in the best chair, at the head of the table. She would sometimes make people move so she could sit there, even if she wasn’t the one leading the meeting. I had called a meeting that required her presence, and she was late for it. She was in the building eating her lunch, making us wait (a common tactic she used to keep us all walking on eggshells). I had enough of her shenanigans, so I started the meeting without her and sat in “her” chair. The look on her face when she walked into the room, and saw me conducting the meeting from “her” chair was priceless. Thankfully I found a better job and left not too longer after.

  433. Play Without Asking Again*

    Had a developer refuse to change to another program (that was becoming an industry standard in front-end dev) which would have streamlined workflows between departments. They didn’t want to change how they worked and everyone had had to work around them, causing issues. They went as far as making a fake ‘news article’ about how the original program was better, and sent it around as ‘proof’ they were right.

  434. RJC*

    I had a coworker who was junior to me but did not report directly to me (she was an assistant). There were massive, massive problems from the start, but one of the weirdest power-trip issues I can remember is that she really enjoyed bossing around my high school volunteers. They had a regular meeting once a week for an hour, and after the Assistant had been with the organization for about a month, I had the meeting day off, so I asked her to run it for me. It was very simple and very laid back; they were high schoolers and they were volunteering a huge amount of time, so I liked to keep everything positive and casual. They did excellent work, and were a truly important part of our organization.
    The day after the meeting, I walked in to find a multi-paragraph email about how unprofessional my volunteers were, how much more training they *urgently* needed, and exactly how I should train them. Despite the length of the email, nothing to me stood out as unprofessional at all, so I emailed her back asking to discuss in person. She informed me that “one of the volunteers wasn’t able to stay the whole meeting, but before she left, she had a personal conversation with two of the other volunteers.” I asked how long the convo was, and she said “Oh, about 5 minutes. But when they’re volunteering, they need to be 100% FOCUSED for the entire hour. I pulled them aside and gave them a serious talking-to.” And I said “did… did this cause some kind of problem..? Or is it just that they had a personal conversation…?” to which she replied “It was the conversation. I need 100% focus, for all 60 minutes.”
    To be clear, I don’t have them doing high-level stuff. I have them do relatively easy, repetitive tasks, and the particular task that day was pretty mindless. I politely explained that I like to keep things upbeat, and that a short personal conversation while performing an easy task was just fine. She did not seem satisfied with that. Two of the volunteers came in later that day to tell me that they felt extremely disrespected by her, so I tried my best to limit her time with the high schoolers from that point on. There were still “issues” every single time she interacted with them, though, and I finally got my manager to take it seriously when (about a month after the first incident) another volunteer quit because she was constantly bossing him around.
    The ironic part of this is that we found out she was not nearly as knowledgeable as she initially led us to believe, and she often relied on my volunteers to teach her the things she didn’t know.

  435. mhmhmh*

    I think I can win this.
    When I worked in academia, most of my department were all sent to a mandatory conference. We had the option to stay in a (shared) hotel room on the department’s dime, but one of my colleagues had family in town with a large house so about 4 of us decided to stay there. For free. We drove 5 hours to get there (saving more money for the department) and arrived late in the evening, so got takeout (which was WELL under our meal allowance). Accounting had told us in advance that if we ate at a the same restaurant as a colleague we should put the bill on one person’s card and that person should submit for reimbursement. So we did that.
    Apparently, the final bill didn’t divide by 4 into a round number and as a result there was one cent unaccounted for. One. Cent.
    My poor colleague who had put it on her card received a lecture (!!!) about how she shouldn’t have put all our meals on her card, and when she pointed out that that was the policy was told that what we should have done was order a footlong sandwich from Subway and split it. She then received multiple more emails from accounting threatening not to reimburse her because there was this one cent (¢1) discrepancy that a person who presumably went to school to be an accountant couldn’t resolve.
    The next year we all stayed in the conference hotel and made the department pay for it, and the year after that we all had different jobs.

    1. mhmhmh*

      Oh this same job also reprimanded me for not getting funding approval to attend a free conference in my partner’s hometown, on a weekend when we were there visiting family anyway.

  436. No Fax For You!*

    I was a student in college applying for a summer internship with the US State Department. The application had to be submitted by fax, so I went to the university’s Career Center and asked to borrow their fax machine. An employee proceeded to ask if I had found the internship through them. I responded that no… the internship is with the US State Department and it’s advertised on their website. The employee then told me I couldn’t use the fax machine. I eventually convinced them that as a student, they were supposed to help me with internship applications, and they begrudgingly agreed to let me use the machine. I now work at my alma mater and still use this as an example of really bad student service/support.

  437. Kwazy2*

    Back in the days of paper forms for everything, we had a CEO who had us keep outdated forms and make “note paper” out of them because she would not approve the purchase of post-it notes.

    I also had a supervisor who dinged me on my annual review for being occasionally absent. When I called her out on this – I was never absent – she argued that I was, because when I used my scheduled vacation time I was not at work and was therefore absent. It was a game of ANYTHING to deny an annual raise.

  438. Not a Bootlicker*

    When I worked for a Fortune 500, the CEOs executive assistant reported me (a director) to my grandboss (CMO) for my bad attitude. My crime? I said, “Hello. I’ll be working at that empty desk for a couple hours,” and then sat at that desk and worked a couple hours, as I’d done multiple times in the past. My boss (SVP) was almost embarrassed to have to bring it up. When I asked what I should’ve done, the answer was be more of a suck up when I was anywhere near the C-suite enclave.

  439. Secretary*

    Since the pandemic started, I am the only person still going to our small office to work in-person and my boss makes me send him an email every day broken down into half-hour chunks explaining what I did during that time period. If I don’t say I did one of my daily tasks I do every day, I get accused of not doing it. So I started including absolutely everything and then got told my emails were too long to read. Twice now I have been lectured for not informing my boss of something in my daily email that I absolutely did include!

    We also now have a stamp log, because two managers got into an argument about how many stamps we use to mail newsletters.

    1. RebelwithMouseyHair*

      I had a job that involved working in three different places. I had a colleague who did exactly the same job as me, in the same three places, but never at the same time. We only ever saw each other on Thursday if he came in early and I didn’t go out for lunch.
      We had to leave reports for each other to explain what we’d done and what needed to be done. The boss insisted on us putting in a level of detail that took our breath away. We always joked that “hey Alan you forgot to write down how many times you went to pee”.
      Then one day I got to work, and saw he’d actually written “bathroom visits at 9.13 and 12.56” because apparently the boss had called and he missed the call because of the 9.13 visit, and the boss was convinced he hadn’t even arrived at that point.

  440. ArtsNerd*

    Once I had a boss that made us submit requisition forms for everything, even though the finance department begged us to just use our company credit cards and submit our receipts after. He would not approve the expenses if we did not give him a requisition form first. No paying for things out of pocket and getting reimbursed. Forms. For. Everything.

    I submitted a requisition form for one (1) copy of the Washington Post because we were in it and I needed to archive the press clip. I had to escalate it as a top priority because if it wasn’t approved that day, I’d miss the edition.

    The policy loosened up a little bit after that, but not by much.

  441. ArtsNerd*

    Annnnd I just remembered a much better one:

    A supervisor on the opposite coast called me once during an evening event I was working. The bar staff weren’t putting enough ice in the drinks. (She was watching on the security cameras.)

  442. My Boss is Dumber than Yours*

    A few years ago, an admin from a completely different department sent us a borderline deranged multi-paragraph email demanding that we stop using printer paper for handwriting. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but it was stuff like “we purchased 20,000 pages of paper for your department, and when I last checked 13,500 pages were gone from your office storage closet but the printer only shows you printed 12,987 pages this quarter! Who can account for the missing pages? I will not tolerate more than 100 missing pages next quarter!!!” (NB this was extremely cheap 18 lb bulk copier paper. 40 reams cannot have been more than $150–$200, and we were a highly successful department in a multibillion dollar company.)

    We all kinda rolled our eyes, and joked about how we should just print blank pages whenever we needed to hand write stuff quickly, but one colleague took it to a hilarious level. He grabbed a brand new ream, threw it into the printer, and printed 500 blank pages. Then put those pages right back in the trey to be used again. He did this a few times over the next month whenever he got bored. Cue the email next quarter, equally deranged, demanding to know how we printed more pages than were purchased and telling us that admin was “investigating the consequences of using unauthorized paper.”

  443. Allison*

    I’m not sure if this really counts, since the person in question didn’t actually have any power. She just wanted to have power over me so she invented some. I was an assistant manager at a store a few years ago. There was one other assistant manager. She was full-time, and I was part-time. And since she was in charge of our truck deliveries, she had a bit more knowledge about certain aspects of the store, but we had the same job title. She was not my boss in any way. I think she didn’t like that she wasn’t actually over me, so she would act like it in really weird ways. She would try to manufacture situations where she could show that she outranked me. Examples! Our bathrooms were locked. One day, I hung a sign on the bathroom door saying that it was locked and to see the cashier for the key. Next day, I came in to find that she had taken the sign down. She had previously said that a sign would be a good idea, so the only reason to have taken it down was because I did it. We had a monthly safety thing that we needed every employee to sign off on. One day while on a boring conference call, I made a chart to keep track of them all. Next time she was working, she made a new chart. Hung hers right on top of mine. They literally had the exact same information and were practically identical. She once told me that our district manager stopped by and told her to tell me that I was covering the cash register too much and that my transaction numbers should be lower, like hers. No way in hell that happened. Our DM wouldn’t have had her tell me something like that, since we were the same level. And I typically worked shifts with unexperienced cashiers, so I had to jump on the register more often than she did. She would frequently spend her day doing really pointless “projects” and then asking me to finish her actual work that she wasn’t able to get to. She would use the excuse that she had twice the amount of tasks as I did. She worked 8 hour shifts, I worked 4 hours shifts. Basic logic should make one think that she should have roughly twice as much work as I did. I will say this, it was never boring with her around. I worked with her for almost three years. And she did make very yummy cupcakes on my birthday. So, totally worth the drama.

  444. Haltermare*

    I worked on a horse breeding farm as a manager. The owner was loaded. She was paying me very well for the industry. But the level of bs I went through was really deleterious to my mental health. She decided that it was my job to take out the trash every day before lunch. It didn’t matter what I was doing. Arm in a mare, I don’t care. One day we got a massive order of supplies in about 2 or 3 pm, 5 or 6 large boxes with all the packing material. I unloaded it and put it away. Flattened boxes and stuffed the paper in one. And then I went to bring in horses and do meds, a typically 2 hour chore with the number of horses I was in charge of. When I got back to the lab/ office trash was all over the flor. The psycho owner had dumped it all in some bizarre power trip because I hadn’t taken it out yet. But the trash was removed every day, twice a day if necessary. I cleaned it up and I hoped she heard me cussing and letting her know how childish and stupid she was. Completely nuts. I lasted 4 months and quit without a job lined up. She would ration toilet paper also.

  445. Anon-E-Mouse*

    Abuses of Power:

    I once had to provide the dimensions of my *$$ along with a photo to prove that I couldn’t fit in a 17″ wide airline seat so had to select a different airline that had 18″ seats.

  446. Lemon balm*

    I once worked at a small family owned company. I was the receptionist I also had to do light data entry. The office supervisor was so strange!
    First off we were not allowed to talk to each other. Mind you there were only 3 of us in the front. I once came into the office at 8:32 and she complained about me being late. (I started at 830, also their time was 5 mins fast…)
    It took me 1.5 months to get my own email. I also “had” to give her my username and password because ‘it was protocol…’( she monitored the emails)
    She was in charge of the customer order verification and the inventory system. But she had no idea how to work it. Customers would order parts and I would follow the exact order but she would tell me i inputted the Information incorrectly, because she didn’t know how to update the system with new order numbers. I was just supposed to know which were active and which were not…
    She loved to tell us to stop ‘chit chatting’ even if it we were saying hello… ugh. That was the longest 3 months of my life…

  447. Striped Badger*

    Self-burn: I’ve rejected a document submission (for a contract deliverable) solely because it didn’t follow the bibliographical style guide. The content of the assessment was fine – which is impressive in itself. But I rejected it for a singular appendix not following the style guide.

    In my defense; it was a risk assessment, which reflects a point-in-time situation. People can and will question the risk rating years into the future when changes to the system come to light.
    I need the bibliography to include document version and publish date so that I can properly identify the size of the change between those two times. While I try to be reasonable, if you just list document sharepoint locations and don’t follow any bibliography style, I will have to reject it.

    But because I am the one the entire organization relies on to know everything about the risk assessments, to literally everyone in the world it looks like I’m flexing on my ability to reject a single document.

  448. Kayem*

    Let’s see, there was the purchasing/accounting/authorizing employee for the company I worked for that was senior to me and made every attempt to make sure I jumped through every hoop she threw up just so I could get the basic tools to do my job. Like, she refused to pay the bills for my office if I didn’t meet certain financial goals, said goals being completely out of my hands and not related to my job. She also made sure she never received paperwork for an important audit so I would have to work 16 hours every day for two weeks to redo the whole thing and meet the deadline. I know she got the documents, there was a fax receipt, but “those can be faked” because I’m really going to do that. She was really mad that I took over from the previous office manager who was her bestie.

    She was also such a penny pincher, she wouldn’t let me take ten minutes to drive to Staples and spend $30 on a new toner cartridge using the petty cash card we had for that purpose. Now, I had already been asking for a new cartridge for the past week, as it was already well past the standard toner life and I had reset the printer to squeeze more out of it. Which I explained and said that it was going to run out very soon and since my office depended on printing, copying, and receiving faxes to do our job, the sooner we get a new one the better. When it finally ran out in the middle of printing audit paperwork, I emailed her to tell her I really needed a new cartridge and could I just run to Staples and pick one up using the petty cash card (since that was the point of having said card, except she wouldn’t let me use it without formally requesting authorization that was a whole other pile of nonsense). She refused because I would have to submit authorization and it was after her business hours. I told her that we had deadlines and really needed to finish the work so the state didn’t fine us for failure to file, and asked if I could just buy it with personal funds and request reimbursement, which I already did for mileage and maintenance purchases.

    She refused to let me do that. Finally, I got it out of her that she thought the toner was way too expensive and she was going to find something “better.” So I…sat around doing mostly nothing all day since everything had to be on paper. The next day, she tells me she found a third party toner source that sold cartridges for $15 each, so she was going to order two for me and then I wouldn’t have to worry for a while. I said fine because this was the last day before my two week holiday and I figured since the office was shut down anyway, it didn’t matter and the toner would be here when I got back.

    Wrong! The toner hadn’t arrived yet when I got back into the office. I contacted her again and she insisted she ordered it and it would be there any day now because the holiday delayed everything (uh, no). ONE WEEK LATER the toner finally arrives. During that week I was waiting, I can’t do my job. I can’t even take a phone call from a client because I have to document it on the computer and then print the record to physically mail to the office in the weekly drop (this is in the 2010s…why none of us could email pdfs and they print them was never explained).

    As soon as I put that cartridge in the printer, it bursts and spreads toner everywhere because it’s a crappy bargain bin fly- by-night outfit whose website soon vanished. So the company had to buy a new printer for the office and pay me almost three weeks of salary to sit around and do nothing just to save $15 dollars on toner.

    She still works for the company and her bestie was back in my position when I left. They can have each other.

    Oh, and another thing during the company reorganization and shenanigans, where I was ousted from my position. I found out when I walked into the office after lunch one day to find she had removed my personal laptop’s hard drive and used a demagnetizer to wipe the drive, because “it might contain proprietary data.” My laptop was in my computer bag in my locker, which was locked with my own combination lock (as per company policy). She had cut the lock off because she had to make sure I wasn’t trying to steal company property and I guess decided to root around in my bag. She also took my lunch, my earbuds, a change of socks, and a box of tampons because I couldn’t prove they weren’t company property (beyond common sense). The only reason she couldn’t take my computer bag is because it had my name on the inside, but she kept the strap because she thought it was identical to the straps on the bags they issue their IT department.

    I was able to get most of my computer files recovered, though it cost me hundreds, which I made a loud fuss about for long enough that I was reimbursed the cost. Didn’t get my strap or socks back though.

  449. Programmer amongst Excel Users*

    Paper scrubs.
    I used to work as a traveling clinician at operating rooms at many different hospitals. Would need to change out of my street clothes into scrubs, that were provided by the receptionist. Some hospitals (perhaps wary / weary of visitors stealing scrubs) would only provide XL (or better yet XXL) paper scrubs. I’m 5’2″ and less than 120lbs. The scrubs would literally be falling off me, and instead of offering to let me borrow something closer to my size, would offer me staples and tape to maintain some standards of decency. I was not amused.

  450. SophieChotek*

    I’ve mentioned this before, but in my first professional job my first boss hated that I wore darker colors (black, grey) to be more formal and when we went to a n event she literally made me wear one of her dresses (we were the same size), because she felt it was more cheerful and colorful. (I was still in probation and didn’t feel like I could refuse.)

  451. NopeNopeNope*

    This is a story about how a petty power play backfired.
    During the late nineties housing boom I worked for a local home decorating chain. That company was screwed up in all ways. One time there was a rare Very Important Staff Meeting around which there was Much Secrecy scheduled on short notice to take place at all store locations on a Saturday morning. Staff were told they’d be fired if they were absent or late for the meeting (which I was by five minutes). However, karma intervened on behalf of us miscreants.
    The company’s general manager over all stores was going to conduct our location’s meeting. They arrived thirty minutes after it was scheduled to start. When the GM walked into the store they made a serious comment about being afraid they weren’t going to make it on time. Our store manager said quietly and without rancor that they were late. No one was fired.
    The Big Secret was that the company was going to begin selling popular Custom Home Product that came with Big Commissions. The kicker was that only the the store decorator or store managers at each location were allowed to sell it or given any training on it! Regular sales associates were to have nothing to do with it.
    Predictably, Custom Home Product was a bust. The company went belly-up within two years.

  452. which circle of hell are nonprofits?*

    1. I worked at a nonprofit once where there were no dishes in the kitchen because people weren’t cleaning them, I guess – but it got worse.

    For some reason, the janitorial contractor didn’t clean the break room/kitchen. So leadership became upset about crumbs, etc. in the break room. Instead of hiring the company to do whatever light cleaning was required, they installed a keypad lock on the break room door and would only give the code to people who signed up for a weekly cleaning shift.

    2. I worked at another nonprofit where we partnered with a local business for a fundraiser in which they donated $1 per cookie sold on our behalf during a whole month. We usually received several thousand dollars and a lot of publicity, although we were a well-known nonprofit that also helped the business receive promotion through it. It was a fairly equal partnership, especially thinking about the volume of cookies they baked.

    One year, we started working with a different local business with amazing cookies. But when we had some samples, my director decided the icing was ‘bland’ and that I had to go tell our partner that because it would reflect poorly on our brand (side note: some of the cookies we had might have been not the best, but another batch was amazing). It was a basic sugar cookie, and that was probably the most mortifying thing I’ve ever had to do at a job.

  453. RebelwithMouseyHair*

    We were out of soap in the toilet (bathroom). The boss was on holiday. I bought a bar of soap for €2 at the local supermarket and made sure to ask for a receipt separate from the rest of the stuff I was buying. I put the receipt for the soap on the boss’s desk for him to refund me once he got back.
    He saw the receipt and pitched a fit, because I had not asked for permission to buy soap and be refunded later (I thought it was called “initiative-taking”, and that it would be viewed as a good thing). Also, he claimed that I should have asked for a proper invoice made out in the company’s name rather than just a receipt saying soap had been purchased for €2 on Monday. My partner had his own company, and confirmed for me that no, a simple receipt was fine for small purchases. You can’t get much smaller than €2.
    I looked it up and printed out a page on an official website explaining what my partner said, and pointed out that the boss had not answered the phone once on the day we needed soap (he was on holiday in a place without any signal), and I said I would alert the occupational medical centre that we were not allowed to stock the place with the necessary articles to maintain good hygiene. He said he’d see with the accountant.
    Two months later, he came and handed me a €2 coin, saying with very bad grace that they had decided to “make an exception” but that it was never to happen again.
    I left the €2 coin on my desk for the rest of the time that I was working in that office, just to remind him of the battle he had lost, and to point out that it was the principle of the damn thing, not the amount of money, that was important.

  454. RebelwithMouseyHair*

    We were out of soap in the toilet (bathroom). The boss was on holiday. I bought a bar of soap for €2 at the local supermarket and made sure to ask for a receipt separate from the rest of the stuff I was buying. I put the receipt for the soap on the boss’s desk for him to refund me once he got back.
    He saw the receipt and pitched a fit, because I had not asked for permission to buy soap and be refunded later (I thought it was called “initiative-taking”, and that it would be viewed as a good thing). Also, he claimed that I should have asked for a proper invoice made out in the company’s name rather than just a receipt saying soap had been purchased for €2 on Monday. My partner had his own company, and confirmed for me that no, a simple receipt was fine for small purchases. You can’t get much smaller than €2.
    I looked it up and printed out a page on an official website explaining what my partner said, and pointed out that the boss had not answered the phone once on the day we needed soap (he was on holiday in a place without any signal), and I said I would alert the occupational medical centre that we were not allowed to stock the place with the necessary articles to maintain good hygiene. He said he’d see with the accountant.
    Two months later, he came and grudgingly handed me a €2 coin, saying with very bad grace that they had decided to “make an exception” but that it was never to happen again.

    I left the €2 coin on my desk for the rest of the time that I was working in that office, just to remind him of the battle he had lost, and to point out that it was the principle of the damn thing, not the amount of money, that was important.

  455. KC/DC*

    So many of these are office managers! Despite being a member of this tyrannical group, I always gives supplies freely and trust my colleagues to do their own jobs… clearly I’m doing it wrong. :D

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