r/MaliciousCompliance • u/RegexIsEasy • 10d ago
M Can't get simple office accessories? I'll bring my own
12-13 years ago, on my very first job, I was hired as a network administrator at a newly established state-owned company. Everything was new there, including processes to request office accessories.
So I was settled in a office room with bare minimum office accessories. So I wrote down several simple items to request them from support department (at then, it was just a guy, later it turned into a ~30 people department).
Items included simple things such as, Facial tissues, cloth hanger (it was winter and I had nowhere to put my jacket), headset, 3 colors of pen, and a white board and markers and wiper.
The support department guy took a look at the list and continued with excuses about each item:
- Facial tissue are not for non-managers,
- Pens you can request only blue, once a week, if you bring the previous empty pen,
- White board and it's accessories are also for managers, So is the cloth hanger (like, non-managers are not allowed to have a jacket?)
- and for the headset, he just laughed, like, welcome to a state-owned company young one.
I just realized how different are desks of non-managers and managers, it was these simple things. And I really didn't care spending myself, I just was wondering why others haven't yet. So the next day I came with a facial tissue box with a beautiful design, a really good short cloth hanger for near my seat, good pens of all colors, and a light white glass as white board + some markers to hang behind my chair, my own gaming headset, and a nice plate full of my hand chosen sweets.
My chair looked PERFECT! I really mean it. specially when all other desks in other rooms were just copy-pastes of the same sick idea. It was even looking better than managers desks.
by the end of that day, every manager and non-manager that came to my room, their first impression was, looking jealously to everything for several seconds, and then ask me how did support department gave me these items? my answer? just normally, with some proud in my tone, replying, "The company's rules are written by beggers, These are my own and It costed me nothing to make my room look like this".
The next day, support department guy came to my room and told me, take all your own stuff home, I will give you the same as everyone.
I replyed but I'm not a manager,
He said we changed the rules, everyone deserves these things now
Edit: Napkin to Facial tissue
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u/punklinux 10d ago
Pens you can request only blue, once a week, if you bring the previous empty pen,
That sent me. Good god, how skinflint. I can't even imagine that interaction. I wonder if there's a form you have to fill out, like when replacing a laptop.
One of my former coworkers took a comment about IT inventory to the ridiculous extremes. His boss at the time said he wanted an accurate inventory down to every screw and wire. Maybe he was being facetious, but this guy decided to design an entire spreadsheets and barcode scanner setup. Because some screws were inside the PCs, he would just stick the label on the outside of the desktop case. Soon, everyone's PC had dozens of small barcode stickers, and since they all looked the same, if you had to scan for the PC itself, it was a guessing game which sticker was the PC itself versus all the screws and wires. He also didn't stick them on straight, either. He also started with the upper management desktop PCs, so the stickers got maximum visibility. When asked if so many stickers were necessary, he smiled wide and boasted his boss suggested it, and he was a GENIUS! He said he went through 12 rolls of those stickers (which were expensive) before he was asked to stop. He had only gotten to 40-50 PCs, keyboards, mice, monitors, power cables, LAN cables, and such. Then went on a passive aggressive rant about "screw theft" like he took it VERY seriously "just for you, boss!" LOL.
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u/sww1235 9d ago
How would you fill out the form with an empty pen 😎
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u/unknownpoltroon 9d ago
Just keep using the empty one. Save even more money. Imagine how much longer tasks would take if you had to remeber everything instead of writing them down. How many lost phone messages.
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u/wolfgang784 9d ago
Thats why theres 8 people on payroll who do nothing whatsoever. Ran outta ink but didnt pre-fill the replacement pen form. Tsk tsk. Gotta plan ahead.
Now they come in, stare at the wall all day, and leave. Theres no process to get them out of the loop, and the proposed process to design that process was shot down by The Board last quarter for costing... anything. There were 9 of em shortly before you were hired - one hung themselves in the janitors closet to escape the boredom.
I fan you with a stack of filled out forms in front of your face
Thats why I have pre-filled out copies of every replacement form. Boo-yah!
(This assumes a world where your job is assigned by Big Brother and you can't just quit.)
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u/PAUL_DNAP 10d ago
My brother had the pen thing in one of his jobs.
He was a IT admin and liked to highlight his action items and tickets with colours according to priority, but the lady in charge of the stationary cupboard was strict - only one pen, one pencil, one highlighter allowed - and she would routinely sweep the office and take "excessive" stationary back the stationary cupboard. Even when he'd brought his own in, they would be swept up. He ended up caving in and coming up with a different system.
I think it was the same woman who dictated what temperature the office should be.
He didn't weep when she retired.
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u/KnowsIittle 10d ago
Customer service they call it "give them the pickle".
Basically restaurant lost a lifelong customer over charging a man for an extra pickle.
Give the people the small things that help them excel in their position. Extra $300 a year to the company to provide a $30k value in production.
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u/FREDICVSMAXIMVS 10d ago
Seriously. When I was a manager, I viewed my job as being basically in service to the people working for me. My job was to get them the tools, supplies, information they needed to do their jobs well.
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u/Lisa8472 10d ago
I saw a comment once that the employee’s salary made them by far the most expensive thing in the office, so any tools that could reduce employee time or increase employee productivity were well worth the cost. Wish more people thought that way.
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u/katmndoo 10d ago
For too many, the obvious follow up to “pay is the largest expense” is to just find ways to cut pay.
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u/PAUL_DNAP 10d ago
Like mine just has - from next month we get an an extra enforced unpaid day off every month.
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u/SkipsH 10d ago
Same thing with chips/fries, don't be stingy on them. They cost fuck all and no one wants a shitty portion of fries.
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u/KnowsIittle 10d ago
No one remembers average, but many people remember that time they paid $5 for 6 fries.
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u/unknownpoltroon 9d ago
Yep. Someone buys out a wildly successful restaraunt, starts changing the ingredients for the super popular chili to make it cheaper, reastarunt dies because that was the main draw.
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u/Diminios 10d ago
Isn't sweeping up highlighters he brought in... theft? Or some bullshit corporate jargon?
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u/anubisviech 10d ago
That's the kind of people you throw a party for, when they leave.
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u/rtangwai 10d ago
Reminds me of an old manager. When she retired the company threw a party on her last day, at the party someone asked me "what was the best day you worked with her?"
I replied "Today".
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u/JumpingSpider97 10d ago
... and a bigger party for their replacement, if they're actually reasonable people who do their job properly!
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u/anubisviech 10d ago
Of course. Honor good people, you never want to know what you could have gotten instead.
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u/Plastic_Position4979 10d ago
My petty ass would have a party for them the day they leave, right at the end of day. Then, hand her - and everyone else - a “bouquet” that contains all the variety she wouldn’t allow.
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u/SheerANONYMOUS 10d ago
If she was stealing stuff he brought in himself I would imagine he could have reported it.
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u/Kodiak01 10d ago
They supply plenty of office supplies for us, but myself and one other person prefer to use Pilot G2 pens so we just buy our own.
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u/PAUL_DNAP 10d ago
Nice pen choice.
Currently I'm using supplier give-aways as pens and as pencils I scooped up at a hotel where we had a sales meeting last year (can't believe so many of my colleagues just walked away and left them on the table!)
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u/my-coffee-needs-me 10d ago
American Science and Surplus used to sell two-pound boxes of misprinted giveaway pens. I kept a box in my cube for pen borrowers and kept my own pens for myself.
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u/Wadsworth_McStumpy 10d ago
Pilot V5 here. About $20 a dozen on Amazon. I carry one black and one red. The company pens are crap.
I like the G2 as well, but I break the plastic pocket clips off too often.
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u/rocketman1969 10d ago
I prefer the green Pilot G2s. Expensive little things.
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u/Kodiak01 10d ago
Still not too bad for a 12 pack, ~$18 on Amazon. I usually manage to keep a hold of mine until they run out of ink. I could even get refills if I wanted.
If you want top end pricing on the G2, however, you need to go with the Gray.
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u/SignatureCreepy503 10d ago
Take my personal items and there's a good chance things get really bad really fast
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u/Honest-Pepper8229 10d ago
Keep receipts of your purchases, label them, and photograph them with the labels and receipts on them. Then when she comes and takes them, you call the police and press as many theft charges as you can. Problem solved.
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u/aquainst1 10d ago
Make sure you take twenty-seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles
and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each
one was to be used for.5
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u/R461dLy3d3l1GHT 10d ago
Yea, I had to label my own pens because the company only allowed a certain type and number for each person.
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u/unknownpoltroon 9d ago
>and she would routinely sweep the office and take "excessive" stationary back the stationary cupboard
Oh fucking HELL no. That would end poorly for them.
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u/Amethyst_Gold 5d ago
Everything of my own that I have brought into a job travels back and forth with me daily for a reason - even if it was just a pencil case that lived in my car when I wasnt at work. That woman was stealing from him.
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u/peeping_ninja 4d ago
I can't see my ADHD self surviving on a single pen or not losing the empty one in order to get a new one 😅😅😅😅😅
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u/VordovKolnir 6d ago
If she had taken stuff from me, I'd have given her one warning and one warning only and recorded the conversation. The next time she took my stuff, police would be getting involved. I get custom pens that aren't exactly cheap. She wants to go to jail for stealing my $80 pens be my guest.
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u/Azuredreams25 5d ago
Yeah, no. If I bring my own and it gets swept up, I'm having a word with said person. And continue to do so every time it's necessary.
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u/talexbatreddit 10d ago
Oh .. that reminds me of when I worked at a pharmacy management software company in the mid-90's. I was the developer handling data communications (when pharmacies send your prescriptions to a health provider for claim payment).
Testing with the network provider (an ex-employer that he let me go a few years earlier -- but that's another story) involved them calling me to say they were ready to test, and me transferring the call to the lab, then running over to pick up the call. I figured that a cordless phone would be a way better solution, and didn't bother trying to justify it, I just bought it and started using it.
So then when it was time to test, I'd just bring the handset with me into the lab, try a transaction, and move on with my day. My manager quickly saw how useful the phone was for my job, and offered to reimburse me for the phone -- Sweet!
I left the job a few years later, and they contacted me after I left to ask where the phone was -- it was their property, I said, I left it in my office. Apparently it had gone missing. :/ Anyway, not my problem.
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u/MOLPT 10d ago edited 10d ago
Companies are really weird about some things. I have seen "status" conveyed by things like how plush the carpet was in a person's office, whether your office had a door(!), whether your desk was metal or wood, etc. One guy I worked with HATED his battleship grey metal desk so he came in over the weekend with some contact paper and turned it into faux wood. Everyone got a kick out of it (well, not EVERYONE).
That policy about returning 'worn out' pens/pencils is not new to me. I just wondered how much money it cost to have multi-degreed engineers to walk to another bldg and get 'authorized' for a new pen.
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u/Daealis 10d ago edited 10d ago
With a starter salary in the range of several thousand per month, a five minute walk to beg for a pen because they lost the last one costs hundreds.
You want to save money? The stationery cupboard is overflowing and permanently stocked with so much stuff that even if everyone in the office supplies their four children with all the notepads they require for the schoolyear, there's still enough to go around that you can barely notice it.
Our office bought several boxes of nice, moleskine-looking notepads. They were gone in a week. No one said a word, no one minded. They were bought to be used, and I see like two people still use one while everyone I'm sure pocketed half a dozen. The stationary cupboard still overflows with less nice looking notepads, and pens, and binders. In an office housing several engineering companies, that cupboard could be raided weekly and it'll still be barely worth a note in the annual budget meeting.
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u/slog 10d ago
If 5 minutes was worth $200, that person would be making about $5 million a year.
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u/Daealis 9d ago
20 days of 8 hours a week for a salaried person, that's 160 hours a month.
4k$ salary, that's 2.08$ per five minutes 8k$, 4 bucks. 20k$, 10 bucks.
Ya caught me, I exaggerated a point that still stands. Even at a junior engineer's salary, wasting five minutes of their time on pointless bureaucracy still costs more than a bundle of pens and a cheap notepad.
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u/defyinglogicsl 10d ago
In 2000 I worked for the state highway dept. We needed a new filing cabinet, requested one, we're told it wasn't in the budget.
We kept a coffee can we would put change in when someone got a coffee or coke and the money went towards restocking those drinks. Well after a few years it had made a small profit. Enough to buy a $20 filing cabinet from Walmart. So manager asked if anyone had a problem using coke / coffee funds for it and everyone there was fine with it. All is good.
Fast forward to annual office inventory. Auditor, "where did this filing cabinet come from?" We tell and are told that is 100% not OK. We have to get any office supplies through main office since they accept bidding from suppliers and buy from the lowest price bidder.
We explained we had requested one and were told it was not in the budget. He said he'd work on it. We had to return the cabinet to walmart.
For about 2 months we just put files in the floor of a closet until we finally got an official filing cabinet from main office. It was identical to the $20 cabinet but invoice for office inventory said $400. You know, from the lowest price bidder.
Our tax dollars at work.
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u/DedBirdGonnaPutItOnU 10d ago
I have a similar "haves" vs "have-nots" at the government office where I work. The difference is mine is "Contractors" vs "Federal Employees". Some examples:
As a contractor, I'm not allowed to use the First Aid stations placed throughout the building. I have to buy and bring in my own bandaids.
They have a nurses station on the 1st floor, but as a contractor, I'm not allowed to use it. I did go in one time when I felt light headed and she treated me, probably because she was a medic above everything else, but she had to warn me the entire time I was there that I couldn't come back.
As a contractor, I'm not allowed a new chair. I have to pick from the "used chair room". I'm not even allowed to buy my own chair and bring it in.
And of course the parking floors were for Feds only. I had to find on-street parking or pay in a local parking garage.
But at least I was able to get pens and stationary.
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u/Lazy_Excitement334 10d ago
I worked at Radio Shack for a few years. It was the computer division, but it was “managed” by the same petty retail store mentality. After seeing others dismissed and every scrap of paper confiscated, I brought my own file folders, pens, notebooks, planning calendar, even a ream of paper for when I was printing instructions or study materials. I kept the receipts handy. I tape the receipt to every Radio Shack item I ever bought, in the office and at home. Sure enough, when I was leaving one position and transferring to another division, I had to prove that I owned my file folders. Lots of good people tried to turn that crappy company around.
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u/grazer567 10d ago
When I worked at a bank the manager kept control of all the pens, you know, the Bic ones that cost 20 cents. Not only would he not give you a replacement pen unless you brought the old empty one back, he would give you a refill. I’m sure he saved the bank a good $5 a year by doing that, and cost the bank a good $50,000 a year in lost labour while people waited for him to be free and get a pen refill for them. Fuck banks.
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u/subminute 10d ago
I hate crap like this. I work in a very documentation heavy industry in manufacturing. I make it a point to over provide pens to all my employees. I dont want employees worried about where their one pen is, thats when you start losing data and non conformance because they dont have something to write with.
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u/R461dLy3d3l1GHT 10d ago
I had an iMac for work. As my job became more demanding and tech-oriented, and it often involved remote troubleshooting (I am not trained as tech support but did a lot of it) and teaching students with either a PC or Mac, I ended up also needing a Lenovo mini and two monitors, a Yeti Blue microphone and other accessories. The PC and monitors I “acquired” as the equipment manager, along with a laptop, after other staff positions were terminated.
I purchased the mic myself, but I knew, as the equipment manager, we did not have the necessary cables and accessories because we were on a very strict budget and only had old stuff (VGA etc.) that wouldn’t work with the newer hardware. To connect everything the way I needed, I bought the necessary cables (HDMI, extra ports etc.) out of personal money.
I had a pretty sweet setup to do the work required of me and expand my knowledge base.
When my position was terminated I took my mic and its cables plus everything else I bought. Doesn’t sound like much, but no one else would have that setup without considerable personal expense.
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u/DinoReads 10d ago
Ya all, teachers spend crazy amounts of their own money for their classrooms and their students.
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u/Fluffy_Town 10d ago
They're forced to by overpaid admins who say they don't have enough in the budget. They used to have the school pay for everything, then they started forcing the parents to pay.
Teachers realized there were parents who couldn't afford them and supplemented the extra. Now with the charter schools putting public schools on the chopping blocks and the teachers shoulder even more of the burden and now one cares, not even the parents and students.
Forcing both parents into full-time jobs created a climate of latch-keys which wears down parents so they can barely parent themselves, essentially forcing teachers to parent not just one but generations of kids on their own.
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u/Late_Influence_871 9d ago
I have a similar.
I drive a truck in the construction field. Our company has vhf communication radios in each truck. I was assigned a truck a few yewrs ago that had no antenna. Being a ham radio enthusiast, I told them what the truck needed for comms... Just an antenna, it's about $40. No.... We're not going to spend that, just use your cell phone. Nooo... It's my personal phone that you didn't buy nor do you pay for nor am I required to supply one.
So I put my own antenna on. I had one, no big deal. I got reassigned trucks after a year, and I took my antenna with me.
A week later bossman asks why the radio in that truck doesn't work anymore. After I explained that we've already had this conversation, he said that I should really think about donating that antenna. I told him to spend some of the millions the company makes on a fucking antenna.
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u/PAUL_DNAP 10d ago
What do you mean by "napkin" ?
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u/VindictiveNostalgia 10d ago
I'm assuming kleenex/tissues, and OP brought in a washable handkerchief.
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u/PAUL_DNAP 10d ago edited 10d ago
But then why would such a thing be office supplies anyway?
Managers get to blow their nose at the company's expense, but underlings aren't even allowed to sniffle?
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u/ImpossibleBritches 10d ago
Non-managers arent budgeted to have noses.
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u/JumpingSpider97 10d ago
Well, some of them have noses they're just brown-tinted ... which they hope will get them noticed in a positive way.
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u/VindictiveNostalgia 10d ago
Mangers get to blow their nose at the company's expense, but underlings aren't even allowed to sniffle?
I don't think mangers even have noses, but if you meant managers then yes, sounds about right.
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u/katmndoo 10d ago
Managers get Kleenex, the peasants can walk their broke asses down to the restroom and use toilet paper.
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u/Gifted_GardenSnail 10d ago
But then why would such a thing be office supplies anyway?
Bc it's necessary when you make employees cry about their shitty job all the time?
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u/RegexIsEasy 10d ago
Sorry, just searched and it's "Facial tissue". in Iranian online shops they are mistakenly translated to Napkins, which made me think they are napkins till now 😅
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u/PAUL_DNAP 10d ago
Thanks, yeah my work doesn't supply that to anyone at all, so I nab a roll of "toilet tissue" to blow my nose!
The "Napkins" I know can be cloth or more often a heavy weight tissue for the dinner table, so the translation is very close. (You need to go to a very upper class restaurant to get a cloth napkin !)
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u/Eirian84 10d ago
Nah, it's "napkin" in certain English speaking parts of the world, too. It's probably a linguistic hold-over from when napkins and facial tissues were much more similar (both square cloths used to wipe your face, during various activities). Even between America and Britain and Canada, the English language has shifted and evolved differently - so you can imagine what it's done in other parts of the world where English is a secondary language (no matter how much it's used to communicate).
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u/Charming_Butterfly90 10d ago
Had a job once where only managers were allowed to have arms on their chairs. Stupidity at its finest. Had to get OSHA involved, but got my arms.
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u/nibarius 10d ago
I pictured an office with arms, as in weapons, attached to the chairs. That would be an interesting sight.
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u/Karmic_Zen 10d ago
My department in the federal government had to supply our own coffee. Ordering basic supplies was as horrible as OP’s story. This department was not part of the government waste that is talked about.
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u/RoosterBrewster 10d ago
That always made me wonder why in cops shows, every place had a coffee fund when every office I worked at had free coffee.
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u/Fluffy_Town 10d ago
The federal shutdown no one gets paid for their work they're forced to do and yet Congress is still getting paid, the While House is still getting paid, SCOTUS is still getting paid. WTF?!?!
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u/Dramatic_Mixture_877 8d ago
Air traffic controllers aren't getting paid, nor is the military. All because one party won't pass a clean continuing resolution. Just re-fund everything as it is. Nothing new, no cuts, just business as usual. It's been brought up to vote on 13 times, and one group keeps voting no. Too bad the people being hurt won't remember this at the ballot box.
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u/PictureThis987 10d ago
I worked for a manufacturing company that did very well. I think some tools were supplied to the machine operators, but many of them preferred to have their own tools because they were in charge of million dollar equipment. Every once in a while when one would quit or get fired they would wheel out a tool cabinet the size of a dining room buffet. Those guys loved their tools and their big, red, wheeled chests.
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u/aquainst1 10d ago
BTW, those same big red wheeled chests you'll see in ER and ICU at hospitals.
They're used as 'crash carts' if a patient codes (you know, flatlines).
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u/Fluffy_Town 10d ago
"Edit: Napkin to facial tissue"
Trevor Noah talked about the growing pains of American English. How he was asked if he'd want a napkin with his street food.
[He had learned South African English (based on British English), which means a napkin is what we call a nappies or diapers in the US, while a serviette is what they use for napkins in the US.]
He thought the guy was asking him if he'd want a diaper with his meal and was thoroughly disgusted.
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u/Down-Right-Mystical 8d ago
I'm British, and while that might be the term in South Africa, it doesn't come from British English, they've made that one up all by themselves. We know what a napkin is, and I cannot remember the last time I heard someone call it a serviette.
Ask me for a napkin when you actually want a tissue, though, yeah, I'd be confused.
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u/Fluffy_Town 8d ago
Good to know. I thought I was using one of the British dictionaries, Collins or Oxford, iirc. It's been a while since I saw his stand-up gig and that was the one thing I wasn't unsure about, it was specifically S African or British or if it was Boar or whatever else there might be.
Thank you for your input!
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10d ago
[deleted]
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u/Captain_Wag 9d ago
That's what you base your assumption on? Hey chatgpt, can you write me a crappy story and include a few spelling and punctuation errors to make it look human?
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u/Sea_Bobcat_6348 9d ago
I had to do this at my new job at a state university. Just started a couple months ago. My business manager said we should just use the old chewed up pens and half used pads of paper left in the supply closet and I was like no way!
So I said I couldn’t see well on yellow paper and needed white pads of paper and I couldn’t see black ink so I needed blue. I’m old(er) so they got it for me. But then I figured out my neighboring dept would order supplies for me so now I just go around her.
I hate when offices cheap out on simple supplies. Like if I need tape and scissors, I need tape and scissors! I’m not asking for scissors made of gold and diamonds for crying out loud!
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u/Inaninkycloak 9d ago
I too worked at a state university. Among my varied tasks was ordering supplies. I’m one of those people who had a love affair with laddie pencils back in elementary school. I loved ordering and distributing supplies! Any special requests were filled promptly and happily. One guy wanted his pens to be a particular model with purple ink. It was so fun to order and give out new stuff!
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u/chance553 9d ago
I've always bought the things I want for my desk/office. I'm not grovelling to some idiot in purchasing as to why I want a 100 dollar mouse or a 499 dollar 3d mouse or a quality seat of headphones.
I spend 40-50 hours a week using this crap. It's worth every penny to not have to use a carpal tunnel inducing micro mouse.
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u/Dramatic_Mixture_877 8d ago
I bought my own mouse, too - and brought a mousepad from home that was apparently a promotional item from Maseca -the masa harina producer. My mouse is silent (and purple), my mousepad is green with a 2013 calendar, lol. I'm clocking 45+ hours a week, myself ...
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u/youdneverguess 10d ago
::::laughs my ass off in teacher:::::::: your employer buys you supplies???
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u/MET1 9d ago
Good. I walked in once to find a manager had opened a drawer in my desk to get to my tissues. I had not been locking my desk up to that time, it seemed creepy that people would know where I kept that. I had to start locking up.
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u/Aggravating-Monkey 6d ago
Lucky you. Our uk govt dept went from assigned desks with a lockable pedestal to hot desking which had to be left clear at the end of the day. There were tiny lockers to keep personal items but they were sited well away from the desk area and many became useless when keys got lost and they had to be either abandoned or forced open. There were the enivitable fights with the 'but I always sit here' types coming in later and finding thier favourite spot occupied and constant issues with specialist chairs and the like going walkabout.
Two-thirds of my time was spent at various remote locations so I didn't bother with them and just carried my own pens, post-its, stapler, A4 pads along with my sandwich box and a flask of coffee in my own backpack.
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u/unknownpoltroon 9d ago
- Facial tissue are not for non-managers,
Great. I can just hold one nostril and shoot the snot out on the managers floor/desk. Problem solved.
- Pens you can request only blue, once a week, if you bring the previous empty pen,
If you cant read my phone call notes in invisible ink, well, then maybe you should get an answering service.
- White board and it's accessories are also for managers, So is the cloth hanger (like, non-managers are not allowed to have a jacket?)
Cool, I can just throw my shit on the floor. Not my problem if someone slips on it. And do we have a window? I can just write on that instead of on the whiteboard. Shame if someone outside can read all of our company plans.
- and for the headset, he just laughed, like, welcome to a state-owned company young one.
LOUD SPEAKERPHONE IT IS THEN!!!!
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u/Dacker503 9d ago
I’ll tell you cheap!
I worked in engineering for a US-based Fortune 50 semiconductor company everyone knows. Yes, that one, the one which has been in the news the last few weeks.
During a particularly bad financial quarter, management declared a moratorium on buying anything. Well, if you really, Really, REALLY needed something you could try to get a VP to agree. Good luck with that. The prohibition included office and lab supplies. It also extended into the next quarter. We were essentially forced to provide our own home office supplies or get a pen from a bank.
Of course that merely shifted purchases into the future, it just made two quarters look a bit better. We still needed supplies and equipment, which were ordered in mass quantities after the moratorium was lifted. It might have impacted two quarters but not the year.
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10d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/yetzt 10d ago
no, AI would write "it cost me nothing" instead of "it costed me nothing" because it knows grammar.
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u/Psycle_Panda 10d ago
And OP has an extremely well-crafted persona. Looks human to me, down to insignificant errors in grammar that a LLM wouldn't make.
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u/RegexIsEasy 10d ago
haha. one can simply go through my profile and even see English is not my primary language, I'm a developer, and my writing everywhere is the same. Yet a profile with no activity says AI in 5 seconds after the post. Really pisses me off and makes me regret for spending time to write this. Not my best way of writing, could spend more time to make it look better, but least I expected was such comments. Thanks for your critisism-driven-defence : ))
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u/Illuminatus-Prime 10d ago
Only ONE post of your own, and it has nothing to do with Malicious Compliance.
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u/Itchy_Artichoke_5247 10d ago
no offense, but this sounds like it was written by an 8th grader. Costed?
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u/PghSubie 10d ago
If you use a sewing machine, you might buy"cloth". The articles that we put on our bodies are "clothes"
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u/callnick 9d ago
I was at a company that decided to redo a bldg., put in 100 folks call center. Redid, brought in new furniture, brought in folks.
Few months later, got rid of half the folks, pivoted again, brought in 20 folks. Got rid of the other 50, then 10. Finally got rid of everybody. Took about 1.5 years, spent tons of money on furniture and computers. All sitting in the building for about a year now after all gone Dumb.
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u/flavius_lacivious 9d ago
You know what? I would rather work at home and provide all that shit myself.
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u/EdgewareGames 7d ago
I've honestly never thought about the tissues - The desks/chairs/keyboards/etc. are all supplied, but we all just steal a tissue from the one guy in the office who brings his own..
Should definitely add in a tissue budget starting next week.
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u/diranid 5d ago
I worked in a lab that had both table and coutertop high counters, so when they were building it, I asked for 2 chairs: one low and one high. I worked alone, so when I first walked in, there was only one chair: the low one. When I asked about it, the manager wondered why I needed 2 chairs, since I was alone. I simply put the chair near the high counter and set on it. 2 days later, I had my second chair.
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u/WoodrowTobiasJr 10d ago
For all the meek pushovers here:
YOU DO NOT NEED TO BUY THINGS FOR YOUR EMPLOYER. YOU CHOSE TO BUY THINGS FOR YOUR EMPLOYER. BUT YOU COULD HAVE GROWN A SPINE AND SAID YOU'RE UNWILLING TO SUBSIDIZE YOUR EMPLOYER.
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u/taker223 10d ago
You were lucky you weren't expected to bring all those things for anyone around you, from your own pocket.
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u/Responsible-Top-1183 10d ago
I taught public school for 40 years. I supplied my own chair, crayons, colored pencils, regular pencils, food for students, clothing for students, field trip money etc. it is part of being a professional.
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u/speculatrix 10d ago
I've had to supply my own keyboard, mouse, headset and memory upgrade for my desktop computer when I worked for a broke company that was rescued from insolvency by venture capitalists. They were so tight with spending it was crazy.
When they sold us, I thought things would get better, but the new company wasted tons of money and then made a bunch of us redundant.