• As a middle manager in a corporate hellscape, one of my few joys in life is setting logic traps for HR and making them choose between admitting company policy is bullshit or directly instructing me to violate labor laws.

  • Our boss was freaking out over people sometimes doing some private calls during work hours and at a certain point absolutely forbade it. So yeah, people would just end the call at 17:00 sharp and switch off the work phone. It took one week before that rule was rescinded.

  • I’m not allowed to work from home and it seriously pisses me off. Whenever I complain about this to my boss, she always gives me shit like “you’re a school bus driver”.

    • I am in a weird position, as a software developer, I work for a tiny company and they’re against work from home, but they’re absolutely amazing and accommodating in all other areas and I have no complaints.

      So I had car issues and was able to work from home 3 days a week, but it still pisses me off that I have to go in those two days. They say it’s so we can communicate and ask for help, but mostly it’s a silent office and we can’t even wear headphones. Often I can go in and if I’m in a mood there is no communication all day long (I am the chatty one and will engage in debates a lot). Yet I’ve had to take a 3 hours public transport route to work (car issues) just to sit there and not talk.

      I’m torn because they’re amazing in every other aspect and super understanding about my mental health issues and leaving early and making up time etc. we don’t have targets and are just trusted we will work hard, I struggle as I overthink and put a lot more pressure on myself than my employer does, but I can’t change the way my mind work.

  • 2 years

    The policy is you can only work from home when it benefits the company, not you.

  • I always refused to put work apps on my personal phone because they would make you agree to some bullshit where they could remote access your phone or potentially wipe it. So I would refuse and say they needed to provide a company phone for me if it was that important. Most companies are either ok with this or provide a phone, except for one company. This was a software company, and literally everything else about this company was a unicorn of a job. But for some reason they wanted me to have slack on my phone and also wouldn’t give me a company phone. So I dug up an old phone, reset it to factory settings, and added slack to that so I could say I did it. Then I put the phone away and they never asked about it again. So I really don’t know what the point of that was 🤷

  • 2 years

    Man we had someone in the army do this. Army doctrine is either outdated or very accessible to the poor, I don’t fuckin know, but you aren’t required to have a phone.

    So this one weird junior Joe just decided he didn’t need a phone. Got rid of it, and as a result never got the information he needed on army shit. I loved him for it, and by the law he was in the right. Can’t tell him to get a phone.

    Unfortunately I was his team lead, and every time my chain of command decided to put out bullshit last minute information over text I had to tell them to suck it and pvt NoPhone wouldn’t be at their surprise formation.

    Sometimes for important stuff I would have to drive to the barracks and knock on homies door to let him know there’s surprise inspections or piss tests and shit.

    The workplace should operate entirely without external communication. It worked since the dawn of man, and it should continue to work until the end of man if we want any semblance of work-life balance.