I was the IT guy for a key supply chain department in [Megacorporation]. This was unusual; most departments had to call IT with questions. When an issue arose that I couldn’t answer or fix (maybe once a quarter), I turned to the super IT specialists.

One day, such an issue arose. I went to the online phone book, and those people had been removed from the directory!

I did remember who the manager of those folks was, and I called her.

Me: “Hi, [IT Manager], this is [My Name]. Somehow all the listings for your people have been removed from the company directory.”

IT Manager: “Yes, we did that because people are bothering them and they can’t get their work done.”

Me: “Let me introduce myself. I am the IT support for the [Supply Chain Department]. I handle 99% of IT support for these folks myself. When a complicated question arises that I can’t answer, I need to talk to your people since they are the supreme experts. Since they are the experts, I would think that answering questions from those who produce our products would be part of their jobs. Please note that if I didn’t exist, your department would receive all of these calls for support.”

IT Manager: “Yes, I see. I will restore their names and numbers to the company directory.”

Many years ago, I worked for a multinational engineering company in the aerospace industry. At this point in my career, I was on secondment to the Health, Safety, and Environment department, writing procedures at the site and corporate levels. And as such, I would periodically meet up with a group of HS&E managers from other sites.

Before one particular meeting, the HS&E manager of one site was having a bit of a venting session about what had happened at his site. In addition to HS&E manager, he was also the facilities manager for that site. His site was getting ready to move to a brand new facility. One of the things that wasn’t going to be there was a heat treatment plant. The old site had one, but it wasn’t being moved.

Heat treatment is required for things like hardening steels. Being an aerospace company, there are extremely strict processes that have to be followed, and only facilities that have proper aerospace industry accreditation can be used. You can’t take a component that’s going onto an aircraft and have it heat-treated at just any old place; even if that place did it properly, if the place wasn’t certified, you’d be breaking the law to put the component on a plane.

Even with certification, a change of heat treatment plant would require full inspection of the first batch of each component that goes through it. It’s not a quick process. 

Hence the venting session. You see, this move had been known about for a couple of years. And everyone knew that the heat treatment plant at the old site would be switched off for decommissioning on a certain date — no ifs, no buts, no extensions. 

How did everyone know? Aside from the usual site-wide communications, there were regular start-of-the-week production meetings attended by managers at all levels. And this facility manager attended these meetings to remind everyone that on this particular date the heat treatment plant would be switched off. So, that was at least one reminder a week for over a year.

Our meeting happened a few days after The Big Switch-Off. 

He was venting about all the managers who rang him up on Big Switch-Off Day to complain that they couldn’t get their parts heat treated and to demand to know why they hadn’t been told.

Allow me to tell you a story about a big (well, big in my country) company that decided, during a very well-known worldwide event that had it scrambling to send its workers to home offices that, hey, our offices are empty, and we don’t need them. Let’s sell them!

That part was the smart part of the whole deal.

But since no good things last forever, that global event eventually ended, and that company decided that it would be awesome to push their workers back into the offices. Not that any workers were too fond of that idea, mind you, but apparently, the remaining offices were losing value and the C-Levels didn’t like that, so let’s stuff the workers back into the offices so we can pretend these offices still have value!

Alas: we only had about 60% of our office floor space left.

So, the bigwigs hatched a great idea: 40% home office for everyone! This was announced with much fanfare at an all-hands meeting at the office. (Yes, the obvious irony was lost on them.) Why we should celebrate 40% home office when we had 100% before was also not exactly something anyone below C-Level understood, but hey, free food and drinks, so let’s humor the dorks — I mean, the C-Levels.

At this point, I already knew I was leaving the company for one that offered 80% home office. (And I was by far not the only one… but I get ahead of myself.) And nobody is more free to voice their opinion than someone who you hold no sway over. So, I had zero problem expressing myself, albeit presumably originally only to a coworker.

Me: “This is probably the stupidest idea in the history of this company.”

The CEO speaks up from behind me. He’s very obviously the source of the idea, judging by his reaction.

CEO: “What? Who are you to say that?”

Me: “You’ll see in a week. Two, tops.”

It didn’t even take two weeks. Ponder this: you get to work from home two days a week. Which days would those be? Take into account that there were many people who were “week-commuters”, i.e., they had an apartment in town where they stayed during the week and returned home to their family for the weekend.

The predictable outcome was that Monday and Friday, the place didn’t look much different than it (probably) looked during The Event, but Tuesday through Thursday, you had better come before 7:30 am, or you were hard-pressed to find a desk. And yes, of course, they were “hot desking”, the desk-equivalent to the previous torture for employees, i.e., open floor plan Hell.

C-Level’s response when asked for a solution: “You’ll figure something out among yourself to make this work.”

Well, we did. About 25% of the employees quit within a month. Another 25% quit when they noticed that they were supposed to pick up the slack with no extra pay and the demand for unannounced overtime. 

So, that company is now hobbling along with about 50% of the staff they’d need, and even back when I was still there, we were working on a skeleton crew, so I don’t even want to imagine what it’s like now. They’re pretty desperate to hire, but with a 60% office mandate, this isn’t going to fly in an industry that has a hard time attracting any talent with less than 80% work-from-home.

They could technically now demand 100% return-to-office; they sure have the office space for that. But I guess if they do, they will find that the rest of their staff will desert them.

For two years, I worked as a lifeguard at a public pool. My manager retired, and someone I had never met before took his place. Three weeks later, on my day off, I received an email telling me that I was fired. The following reasons were given for my termination.

• Coming to work in a pickup truck. I live an hour’s drive from the city where the pool is located, on a stretch of dirt road that provides next to no traction if there has been any rain the previous night. The pickup truck in question is not wider or longer than a parking space, but it was notably taller than the cars and SUVs that most staff and customers drove.
• Not using all of the provided storage space. Each lifeguard at this pool was permitted the use of two lockers, roughly the same size as those available for the customers. The combination of my clothes and personal effects were not enough to fill one locker, so I’d not been using a second.
• Using a poor choice of words while reprimanding a parent who tried to leave her child alone in the main pool. (The reason was not the act of reprimand itself, but my choice of words.) Apparently, saying, “You should not leave a young boy unattended in a pool deeper than the height of a grown elephant,” and, “If you continue to endanger your child, security and I are gonna have to kick you out,” was a problem on account of upsetting the customer. I was supposed to just point out, “We cannot allow a child to be left without supervision,” and leave it at that.
• I was often seen eating at a certain fast food chain after work and visiting a nearby arcade on my days off. Neither of these businesses were in any competition with our pool, to say nothing of the fact that, to be clear, this was not happening while I was working, and what I did while off the clock was not my superiors’ business.

Any attempts to make further contact with the company superiors or Human Resources were met with silence.

I am now working at a different public pool in a city closer to home. It’s not as expansive and varied as my previous workplace, but the management actually tells employees if something they’re doing is a problem rather than firing them without warning, and all of the things that merit punishment and/or termination are actually reasonable. I call that a fair trade!

I’m the author of this story. Given the amount of folks who were shocked by the president’s reaction, I’d like to share some of the other write-ups I received before I departed.

1. One day in late October, the president asked me to go take some pictures of the outside of the office. She and her husband spent the year traveling among all of their various properties, so they didn’t spend time at the home office. She wanted to see how the landscaping looked.
   I took the pictures with the office digital camera, attached them to an email, and sent them to her. Not good enough. She didn’t know how to open attachments. So, I got written up for not embedding the photos in the email.
2. Once I got that figured out, it was discovered that one of the trees was growing too close to the front door for the president’s liking. I got written up for that, even though the tree was planted two years before I arrived.
3. Two weeks later, I was asked to contact the fellow who had planted the tree so he could replant it before the first frost. Unfortunately, he was out of town when the first frost hit, so I was written up for the tree not being replanted quickly.
4. The exterior needed some attention due to poor construction that was causing interior leaks. The office was constructed in the 1960s, but I obviously got written up every time it leaked between when we started trying to find a solution and when the solution was ultimately installed.
5. The rear door broke. I discovered it. Obviously my fault, despite the fact that I hadn’t used that door at all during the day.
6. One day, I was asked to do an inventory of all office supplies. I was given specific instructions. I followed the instructions I was given to the letter. The person who wrote the instructions failed to give me a whole set of information, and my inventory was incomplete. Guess who was written up?
7. Once I inventoried absolutely everything, the president discovered a particular supply that she did not recognize: a type of envelope. I was written up for these envelopes existing and then asked to find out why they were there.
8. The envelopes had been ordered three years prior because the president had wanted to use a specific label to celebrate an anniversary year. I had only been employed for six months at this point, but I was written up for allowing employees to order useless supplies and allowing them to order incorrect amounts that led to waste. The employee accused of ordering them was also written up, though she sat in my office crying that she hadn’t even placed the order; it had been the president herself.

And my personal favorite:

1. I was written up because the city had to shut down the sewers for a full day due to a sudden construction emergency, and I hadn’t already created and implemented a backup plan for the office to use the bathroom during the sewer shutdown (which I only noticed when using the bathroom myself).

I did, in fact, leave that job without having secured another one, simply because I couldn’t face being written up for yet another thing that had nothing to do with me. Mercifully, I found a new job very quickly, advanced rapidly and didn’t regret a single thing.

Actually, I still don’t. It’s been ten years, and I understand that the whole operation has changed, but being treated like that made me realize how much better it is for me to work for myself. So… thank you? I guess?

Related:
You’d Think They’d Appreciate An Employee Like That