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Office Space: Office tales, woes and misadventures
mystikspyral
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
An office, THE office: Many of us have worked there or continue to work there. We deal with co-workers, supervisors, ridiculous rules, the pants crapping insane public, the gossip, the endless emails, memos, revisions of policy and the micro-management of everything we do.
Let's discuss our office environments! How do you get through the day sane? What weird things have happened in your office? What crazy thing did your co-worker say to you that made you wonder when he's coming in with the Uzi? What fun things do you do with friends/acquaintances at work to make the day easier? What did you say or do to your boss when you finally couldn’t deal anymore? What kind of insane policies do you have to deal with on a daily basis? Positive or negative, it doesn’t matter. Let’s talk about the office.
The thread title is up for occasional change but only for something epic.
I have worked in the same office of around 45 people since 2006. When I first started there I was still in college and I was only a seasonal data entry clerk. As a lowly data entry clerk I had no public contact and no responsibility past typing competently. I miss those days.
With a bunch of college aged kids grouped in one little sweat box things were bound to happen. Some of my fellow data entry clerks used to go to the “bathroom†and come back fifteen minutes later smelling of pot. Allegedly a certain pair of them were stealing out of people’s cubicles. We’d dance, we’d sing, we’d talk too loud. We had fun but we got the job done.
One Friday afternoon when almost everyone had cleared the office I decided to use the bathroom. I walked down the long hallway, past the cubicles, past the men’s bathroom and through the two swinging doors into the women’s bathroom. It’s dingy and disgusting, lit and maintained about as well as a seedy bar and it’s not unusual for a group of “professional†women to routinely leave poop or pee on the toilet seats. Oh well. Typing monkeys and their poo.
I walked into the bathroom to start the inspection to see which stalls were clean and clear. The first stall I looked into I dismissed and started to move past it. Then I did a double take. There was hair, dark hair, ALL over the toilet seat, in the toilet bowl and on the floor surrounding the toilet. I moved in for a closer inspection. There was a cheap, pink disposable razor sitting on the top of the industrial metal toilet paper holder.
It took me a moment to really get what I was seeing. Someone had shaved their pubic hair in the women’s bathroom at work
. I have this mental image of some woman throwing her leg over the toilet, shaving, throwing down the razor and walking away. I guess she was getting ready for her Friday night.
At that point ninety eight percent of the women in my office were above the age of forty five. What a mental image :::shudders::: for me to carry around.
This happened three times that I’m aware of. It was always on a Friday. The second time one of my fellow keying crew saw it as well. It ended up becoming the talk of the office for a week. Everyone was eyeing anyone with dark hair with suspicion. I made sure it was known my hair is dyed black and that my natural hair color is light.
Let's discuss our office environments! How do you get through the day sane? What weird things have happened in your office? What crazy thing did your co-worker say to you that made you wonder when he's coming in with the Uzi? What fun things do you do with friends/acquaintances at work to make the day easier? What did you say or do to your boss when you finally couldn’t deal anymore? What kind of insane policies do you have to deal with on a daily basis? Positive or negative, it doesn’t matter. Let’s talk about the office.
The thread title is up for occasional change but only for something epic.
I have worked in the same office of around 45 people since 2006. When I first started there I was still in college and I was only a seasonal data entry clerk. As a lowly data entry clerk I had no public contact and no responsibility past typing competently. I miss those days.
With a bunch of college aged kids grouped in one little sweat box things were bound to happen. Some of my fellow data entry clerks used to go to the “bathroom†and come back fifteen minutes later smelling of pot. Allegedly a certain pair of them were stealing out of people’s cubicles. We’d dance, we’d sing, we’d talk too loud. We had fun but we got the job done.
One Friday afternoon when almost everyone had cleared the office I decided to use the bathroom. I walked down the long hallway, past the cubicles, past the men’s bathroom and through the two swinging doors into the women’s bathroom. It’s dingy and disgusting, lit and maintained about as well as a seedy bar and it’s not unusual for a group of “professional†women to routinely leave poop or pee on the toilet seats. Oh well. Typing monkeys and their poo.
I walked into the bathroom to start the inspection to see which stalls were clean and clear. The first stall I looked into I dismissed and started to move past it. Then I did a double take. There was hair, dark hair, ALL over the toilet seat, in the toilet bowl and on the floor surrounding the toilet. I moved in for a closer inspection. There was a cheap, pink disposable razor sitting on the top of the industrial metal toilet paper holder.
It took me a moment to really get what I was seeing. Someone had shaved their pubic hair in the women’s bathroom at work
. I have this mental image of some woman throwing her leg over the toilet, shaving, throwing down the razor and walking away. I guess she was getting ready for her Friday night.At that point ninety eight percent of the women in my office were above the age of forty five. What a mental image :::shudders::: for me to carry around.
This happened three times that I’m aware of. It was always on a Friday. The second time one of my fellow keying crew saw it as well. It ended up becoming the talk of the office for a week. Everyone was eyeing anyone with dark hair with suspicion. I made sure it was known my hair is dyed black and that my natural hair color is light.
"When life gives you lemons, just say 'Fuck the lemons,' and bail" :rotate:
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Anyway, one dull summer afternoon, I was walking back from lunch on the quad and I noticed a perfectly symmetrical spider web stretched across the corner eave of our building. I thought to myself, "Hey, that's kind of neat" and mentioned it to my boss on the way in and then proceeded to forget about it.
5 minutes later, a video producer comes walking out of the back and asks me about the spider web. Odd, I thought, but I pointed them in the correct direction. 5 minutes later, another one comes out and asks the same thing. This pattern repeated, every 5-10 minutes until all 64 useless state employed motherfuckers in my office had seen "The Miracle Web".
The piece de resistance? Our staff photographer was one of the last to go look. He came back in and retrieved $20,000 dollars worth of taxpayer owned photo equipment and spent an hour shooting and editing a series of images of His Most Holy Spider. In the space of one afternoon, I went from detesting Howard Jarvis to really sympathizing with him.
He even had a coffee mug in hand always.
Great professor in clinic and in the business law classes I had him in. But still. There's nothing like having someone sneak up on you like Bill does to Peter when he's trying to flee to put the fear of God or something into you.
They day to day isn't so much filled with anecdotes as it is frustrating. I'm expected to compete with a chinese firm of programmers on IT productivity while I also get handed 75% of the customer support work because unless it's an extremely simple question no one wants or bothers to learn anything about their job, so everyone either asks me or hands it over to me. Which I could say no to, but then the customers would get extremely pissy and our sales would get even worse. It's starting to drive me loopy. I can't understand why people who have absolutely no desire whatsoever to know or learn anything new about computers or jewelry opened an e-jewelry store, it boggles the mind.
The details of the who's, hows, or wheres are unimportant.
Basically, one day, I see a few computers on the floor, I ask " Hey, what are you guys doing with these computers? "
" Oh nothing, we're just going to chuck them in the dumpster "
" They broke? "
" Nope, we just upgraded "
" Why don't you donate them, or let me take them and donate them ? "
" Nope, its against the contract with our supplier, Gotsta go in the dumpster "
" Thats insane, Just say you dumpster'd them and let me take them "
" No "
Later that day, I saw someone bash them up and chuck the bits in the dumpster, when I asked why, he said " Ladies were concerned someone would steal them. "
Not only did they throw away good computers that could have been donated, they bashed them up simply because I expressed interest in them.
This wasn't the only thing of gross and disgusting waste I saw at company X, either.
Its so god damn wasteful that it pisses me the fuck off.
Someone can use this shit, but they don't want liability or some other bullshit reason so they just chuck it by the ton into landfills instead doing anything else with it.
Bah.
blame the lawyers.
I suppose the supplier's logic is that not trashing the computers would glut the market and so drive their prices down.
I'll be fine, just give me a minute, a man's got a limit, I can't get a life if my heart's not in it.
Yeah there's actually a decent chance they were breaking the law by doing this. You're not supposed to dump electronics, especially not computers and monitors. There's some heavy duty toxins in there, especially arsenic, lead and cadmium. Its a federal crime to dumb CRT monitors and in a lot of state you can't just dumb electronics into a standard dumpster.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
I work in IT for a Town Hall/Local government. Every year we replace the computers that just ran out of warranty (about 4 year old computers). We try to find a use for most of them, but according to what the lawyers wrote for the town we are unable to give the computers away. We will strip them and salvage what parts we can, and then bring the remains to an electronics recycling factory. Its kind of painful to just dismantle perfectly good, but a little old PCs.
This one time we were out and I mentioned that I was going to a nerd fest the next weekend (PAX, in fact), and he said he was going to one as well. When I asked, it turns out it was a furry convention. Later someone brought up WoW, and he said "I play an MMO, but not WoW." I immediately say "what, then, Second Life?"
Dead. On.
A different guy once said "this is probably the best meal I've ever had," at the Macaroni Grill. Another dude was trying to tell me where he'd just dined and had the best steak of his life, but he forgot the name of the place. He calls his wife and asks, hangs up and says "outback steakhouse."
dot dot dot
I was already extremely proficient in my trade (web development) by the time I was 18, and I mostly just went to college for the sake of meeting people; things were going sour with my then-girlfriend, and I figured I might need a new one soon.
I didn't come right out and tell any of my professors that I was already working in the field, but doing all of the assignments in my "Intro to HTML" class on the first day of class was probably a bit of a giveaway. Two or three weeks into my classes, I got called into a meeting with the department head, and he asked me if I had time for lunch. I initially assumed he was coming on to me, but he insisted he just had some "website questions". We went in his (brand new) BMW to a (brand new) expensive restaurant, where he told me about an "exciting, hands-on learning opportunity". It turned out that dude was on the city council, and they needed a new website. Now given that I was already making $30/hr as a freelancer, I wasn't initially too keen on the idea of doing an internship for $5.25/hr. The fucker read my mind: "I'm sure you're not too keen on a minimum-wage internship, but if the project goes well, we'll bring you on full-time -- around your school schedule, of course -- at thirty-five grand a year."
I remember the exact moment when I realized I was in trouble. They'd offered me some work space in one of the city buildings, "right with our IT guys". What they hadn't told me was that they were giving me an office. Of my own. Next to the IT guys' cubicles. The councilman who hired me introduced me to the networking guy by saying, "This is Steven, he's going to be taking over that office you've been wanting. HA HA HA." I'm standing there thinking that it can't get any worse, and that's when he adds, "Steven, these guys are at your disposal, so if you need coffee or anything, just let 'em know. HA HA HA."
And that's how I became enemies with the IT people.
From there, the project became something of a punchline waiting for a joke. After actually reviewing the content they had provided, I determined that it'd be about a 15 hour project. I was then discreetly told that I needed to make the project last the whole semester, so maybe I should, y'know, spend some time doing "research" and writing "progress reports". He made little finger quotes and everything. Turns out that the city the guy worked for was being billed by the school the guy worked for as if it was the school doing the work instead of li'l ol' me. For every hour I worked, I made five bucks, and the school's art department made $45. And I was logging a lot of hours. It sounded like out-and-out fraude to me, and to this very day I feel a little bit guilty for not trying to report it. But if the city council was in on and, and the mayor was in on it... well... who do you report that to?
Meanwhile, the IT team was attempting to drive me insane (and I think they might have been poisoning my food). The team consisted of four people. One guy handled the networks for all of the city departments, another other guy seemed to be in charge of hardware and software, and I'm not really sure what the other two did. I'm pretty sure one of them was only kept around because she was cute, and the other do-nothing might have been related to the mayor. The IT team had somehow found out that I was getting hired on at the end of the semester (for more than they were making, ouch), so they set out to "haze" me. And when I say "haze", I mean they left thumbtacks in my chair, two of them had sex on my desk while I was out, and I think one of them slashed my tires. I finally told them that while there was a time and place for pranks, if they didn't cool it for a while, I was going to issue written warnings -- or even suspensions if it came to that.
They never actually figured out I couldn't really do any of that.
The final straw came about a month and change into the project. My first scheduled payday rolled around, and I was told that there was no record of my hours. The fuckers were keeping my time off the books. I went straight to the department head and asked him what the hell was going on, and I was told that the city was going to pay me when I finished the website. I briefly fantasized about grabbing the flash drive with the website out of my pocket and swallowing it. Instead, I slumped my shoulders and went home. I never did get paid, the city never did get their website, and I dropped out at the end of the semester.
I would assume that all offices aren't that bad, but I hope I never have to find out.
I used to test kids for AD/HD for a living. Fifteen dollars an hour, sessions would take 3-4 hours depending on the kid. It's a series that includes an IQ test, achievement tests, an attention test, some self-reports, and my observations of the kid during the testing. I loved when kids were rebellious because there was no incentive for me to pressure them or do anything other than what I was supposed to do, which was simply try to talk them down for as long as it took and reschedule when it became clear we weren't going to get anything done on that day.
So one day I get this 8-year-old kid to work with. His background is pretty atypical: foster family brought him in, he gets visitation with his mother in the prison once a week, she's there for meth sales and use, just a bad situation all around. I talk to him for a bit to make sure he's receptive and ready to work, and we begin. We get about three subtests into the WISC IV when he just shuts down, where previously he was doing alright. He stops responding. He just stared at his feet and didn't say anything.
Now, I've been trained for these situations. There's a routine, a procedure, I have to go through when this happens, otherwise the test results are considered invalid. So I start it, but we're not able to move on from step 1 of the procedure and I've never seen a kid that just flat-out didn't respond to me like this. Eventually he just yanks his hood ove rhis head and balls up into a tiny little rocking figure of emotions I wasn't able to decipher at the time.
Turned out one of them was rage.
I'm mid-sentence when he literally leaps out of his chair, over the table between us, and headbutts me in the chest, knocking me to the ground. Understand that I'm not a big guy. I'm only 5'3" so many of these kids were taller than I was. I hit the ground hard with this kid kicking me in the groin and screaming at the top of his lungs, yanking on my ears and slamming my head into the carpet. Fortunately, the walls of the office were paper-thin and one of the other testers came in almost immediately and restrained the kid.
I was bruised, my head was a bit bloody from where he'd been slamming it into the ground, and most of all I was just in a state of shock. If you can imagine, though, an oblong bruise on your chest that grows to take up almost every visible bit of skin shoulder-to-shoulder from your stomach up, you'll get how hard this kid threw himself into me. It was like being hit by a fucking cannonball.
It's either this or a McJob for lower pay and not even a full work week (I have no car and am limited to jobs I can make it to by foot or bike, which doesn't give me many good opportunities), so it's not like I have a choice. They actually want me to generally handle more of the IT stuff but no one else really wants to bother learning how to respond to the customers so either I have to do it or they get told to email us and then our chinese office shoots off an engrish filled response to them that night. It's really a no-win situation here sadly, if sales go down any further I won't even get forty hours a week. *shrug* The economy sucks.
working harder and making yourself indispensible is actually a good thing during a recession. sure you lose some free time and sanity, but you are almost guarunteed to be the last to go.
just make sure that in a couple of years, you get a supervisory role out of this and can then tell other people to do it right (since you know how to do it).
This is true, the owner really likes me and the girl that packs the orders, so I know I'll have a job. I just hope they don't cut my hours any further. I used to be allowed nine hour days (I make $9.50 an hour) but due to the recession my OT is gone and everyone's hours got cut. So I get frustrated when I see what I know is hurting sales. Still, I find it so strange that people who don't know computers and don't know a lot about jewelry opened an e-jewelry store, it makes things weird when I have to explain why we need to do X or Y to my boss.