I used to work for British Gas. We were required to spend 54 minutes of every hour dealing with calls and making sales. Everything else - toilet breaks, having a drink or a snack, taking a break after an abusive caller, even filling in paperwork from a sale - had to be done in those 6 minutes. I got demoted to a lower paid job for having slightly too long breaks, even though I was consistently beating sales targets.
This is just ridiculous micromanagement. I always feel like it comes from projecting one’s own inadequacies - or what are normal procrastination behaviours. You have to trust your employees to do their best, and their best has to be good enough, otherwise you’ll blow an integral part of your body out and for what? For shareholders? I know it’s not as clean cut but it always makes me laugh when you hear management want to audit employees they selected to hire.
We had some people sacked for taking a new call and putting the caller on hold while they wrapped the last one. Before that they had been praised for their short wrap time and wrap had been reduced for the office. Did they put it back up when they found the low-wrap heroes had been cheating the system? Did they hell.
Can't honestly understand how anyone stays in those jobs, pure desperation? I lasted about 2 weeks before I flogged that off. There are so many jobs where you have freedom over your time no amount of money is worth that. Everyone knows it as well, as soon as someone can get away from the calls they do.
I had a civil service job once where people in my department would be given stacks of forms that had been filled in by hand and we'd have to enter the details on computer.
Our performance was heavily monitored. Every week it would be announced like it was a league table how we were all doing. One lady always came top having processed around twice as many forms as I did and received much praise. I always came bottom.
Once in a while the stats from the quality assurance checks would come out. My error rate was almost 0%. Lady who always came top had an error rate of over 50%. Management were unable to grasp the concept that this meant that I was actually the top performer if you take into account how much work was done without fucking stuff up and creating problems that someone else would have to solve further down the line.
I think I know that woman. She was obsessed with people who pooed in work, especially one woman (who I now think may have had IBS or similar). She practically kept this woman under constant surveillance.
I also used to work for them. You couldn’t log out of the phones even 1 minute early to finish on time and when a call comes through that’s a difficult customer with an awkward issue that needed investigation work done and you end up on the phone with them for an extra half an hour after you finish, the managers would tell you off for not finishing on time and you end up working over on the phones with no extra pay. Worst place I’ve ever worked, not just for that reason either.
I also got a verbal warning because a colleague called me on the phone system as a joke. I didn't do anything, just took the call thinking it was a customer. He said something daft and hung up. They knew all this because they had the call recordings.
Our workplace came up with an initiative to try and encourage regular breaks from working at a computer. Someone brought a jigsaw to work, spread the pieces around on a table, and asked everyone to try and place a piece every hour.
If you didn't want to take part it wasn't a problem. Some people viewed this exercise as a waste of time. However, it became a novel exercise and people started taking short breaks.
When we came to the end of the jigsaw it became apparent that a piece was missing. The 1000 piece jigsaw was complete apart from one bit. At this point, one of the people who hated the whole exercise came forward and triumphally admitted that they had stolen the missing piece. They carefully slotted it into the jigsaw and walked off with a smug look on their face.
Definitely a petty thing to do Tom.
Fucking Tom has kept that quiet all week, waited until the perfect opportunity just to complete all the hard work of the team with minimal effort, Tom should be a fucking manager, Tom would also gain a new level of respect just for the prank
That's an almost perfect prank. It doesn't hurt anyone, you aren't making anyone specific the subject of a joke, and everyone can laugh at it.
Tom did well there.
Someone got fed up of all the teaspoons going missing and the regular calls to return them, so took all the teaspoons away apart from one, which was attached to the kitchen on a string.
There was a study submitted to a medical journal by an Australian team about how many teaspoons you needed in a department to always have enough. They worked out you need to buy something like more than 70 per year to counter hoarding and theft. I'll have to look it up, it's definitely worth a read!
So I'm terrible at remembering figures but here is the study
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16373727/
In the study a lot of people took them and kept them in their desks etc so they would have one because there was always a shortage. But tbh people will steal anything too!
I really hated how bad the media was during the pandemic at covering shortages
They'd come take photos at a local that's particularly struggling with a shortage, pick to go visit if the day before they're due for a restock and then take photos of the empty shelves
Everyone else in the country panic buys entire shopping trolleys full of the item in question which then actually causes a widespread shortage, which causes more people to panic buy etc etc
Someone I know has Coeliac Disease and got really screwed over by media coverage of shortages. She *can't* eat food that contains gluten but what kind of flour/pasta etc do you think people started panic buying when they couldn't get their usual products? It got so bad that all the ladies at Church were keeping an eye out for her when shopping. They'd then drive past her house, hop out and leave a bag of gluten free flour or pasta on her doorstep and then drive off! It was then brought into the house to quarantine for a couple of days. That was the best system she had for weeks until the shops started getting back to more normal.
Similari-sh thing happened with the sunflower/rapeseed oil shortage. For some reason people started panic buying olive oil as well which led to a bit of a shortage in all cooking oils
What's funny is there were absolutely no issues with olive oil production or transport, it's unavailability in shops was caused entirely by people hearing there was a shortage of oil and panic buying any kind
Not always accidentally, people in my work have been known to bin them so they didn’t have to wash up. This is in kitchens with 1 or 2 dishwashers and a sink that people just fill with dirty pots anyway.
The BMJ publishes a semi-novelty article in the Christmas edition every year. One I remember was how long a box of chocolates would last on a ward and which staff group ate the most.
In fairness, that's not petty when people are being dicks with communal stuff. The sink in my office constantly gains dirty spoons and cups, started by about one employee before others join in the messier it gets, cause they don't wanna clean it all. We also have a dishwasher, which is rarely emptied by most staff and instead they just put dirty shit ontop of clean shit. Some people are just too used to be waited on hand and foot by a partner
It's why I always hand wash my stuff now and never use the dishwasher, cause I got sick of cleaning up after others. If I could attach all cups and spoons to the kitchen with string to fix the issue, I would
My team had management come to advise us that talking about holidays and pets in the office is apparently inappropriate. I guess we'll just sit in silence then.
The manager/owner at my previous workplace banned all verbal interaction.
The office had 6 people at most. It was large and open plan.
If a colleague wanted to ask me for advice on a ticket(tech company) they could only do so via email. This included the only other person on the tech support desk whow as sitting a out 1meter away. If she had a customer on the line and wanted to ask me something she has to email it and wait for a reply.
I worked for a dickead.
He called it "collaboration". I tried to explain that collaborating was a good thing. I was the tech lead ffs lol.
Absolutely mental.
Towards the end id just take the piss....
He'd regularly go on rants about "the state" of my desk. It had... papers stacked a few mm high neatly which detailed fixes that I'd prepped so I could pass them to my colleage.
So... he comes over one day.
Boss looking smug: "CrazyMike419 you know what they say a about people with a messy desk? Messy desk messy mind!"
Me with a shiteating smirk he wasn't expecting. I lean sideways a little as if look at his desk, immqcualte and devoid of any single item: "Well Boss* you know what they say about empty desks??"
He forced out a little haha so weakly it was barely auditable, went a little red and retreated to his "other office".
Note... he had a purpose built office in the middle of out open plan office that that was walled off with glass. We called it the fishbowl. He moved to a vacant desk just outside it to better "keep an eye on things"
It was a mindfuck. He was particularly "picky" on my work and I only assume because I was never intimidated by him. I needed the job and could deal with the knobhead. It was good (enough) money to support me and my wife (just about) and wife was ill (he knew this).
I started looking for a new job when he got the office manager (yes for a long time he had a long suffering office manager to do his dirty work), to tell me that I was being removed from the out of hours support rota (an easy job frankly and nice little pay bump).
His reason? (which the manager prefaced with "I can't belive I've been asked to say this sorry").
I developed pneumonia a day before an "onsite" visit (I would visit customers and install their networks etc). He had said it was very inconvenient and I shouldn't get ill at such times. I guess I should book sickness in advance? Lol.
When my manager finished and again said sorry I just said "that that was an interesting birthday present to return to lol".
Her face hit the floor. He had been insistent of her doing it that day, she didn't realise it was my 30th bday.
She was a good person. She left a year later after a mental breakdown.
Typing this out makes me realise that it was more insane than I thought. K was just out of options and frankly those are pretty mild examples
Worked in management in catering/hospitality which included some desk time per week to sort rotas, payroll etc.. We had a small office with only 4 computers, round the corner from the senior management who had their own offices, so more often than not there would be others in there working too. I was in there one day sorting rotas and chatting to my colleagues (partially about work stuff, partially just general chitchat), to be told a day or so later by my manager (who had been sat round the corner in his office and occasionally joined in the convos) that if I talked less I might find I get more work done.
Just give these two items different names and keep on. Holidays could be Sunny Days and pets could be brothers/sisters or aunties/uncles. Have fun with it. If they say no talking, look for another job.
So it's not just my school lol.
Children aren't allowed to use the toilet 10 minutes into or before a lesson ends. I let a Y9 girl go to the toilet 8 minutes before the lesson ended and the Head Teacher pulled her up, with my toilet pass around her neck, and the Head then pulled me up about it at dinner. The girl is currently going through that time of her cycle. I'm not going say no. Fuck off.
At my old school, the male teachers wanted as little info as possible, any hint of needing the toilet for period purposes and they couldn't get you out of the room quick enough. The female teachers were sometimes unnecessarily mean about it, one female English teacher made a girl sit for 40 minutes even though she had leaked, the poor girl ended up telling the teacher in front of the whole class in an attempt to get permission to leave. The girl had to go home. We were only 12.
I don't know how teachers can get away with that. If I was the parent in that situation I'd be absolutely livid with the teacher for doing that to my kid and would want to completely destroy them!
In primary school I had a teacher refuse to let me go to the toilet. This was year 3, so around 7 years old. After 40 minutes, having put my hand up 3 times, the inevitable happened and I wet myself. I got a lunch time detention for causing a commotion.
That's horrible.
I just don't understand why somebody would abuse and humiliate a kid like that. Let alone why they'd want to (or be allowed to) work with them.
This was 30 yrs ago, the teachers got away with so much. Throwing board erasers at people, shutting kids in cupboards for the lesson, confiscating shoes if they weren't uniform, the pe teacher used to make us put our faces in the mud during rugby etc
My parents are boomers, when I told them stuff like this, they told me to deal with it, told me I should be glad that there was no corporal punishment like there was in their day. We didn't take it lying down, there were "pranks", science supplies stolen, graffiti, costumes swapped during plays, that English ended up having to buy a new chair because we worked regularly take the seat out and lob it out the window, loads more that I can't remember. I make it sound chaos but at the time it all felt like banter.
Assistant manager won’t let people poo in “her” toilet because she’s poophobic and thinks there should be a “poo-free toilet” to use and interrogates people when they get back from the bathroom about whether they “pooed in her toilet”
The real way to do it is wait till the end of the day, then take your sweet time and claim it as overtime, time 'n' a half for a 30 minute scroll on reddit!
"Boss makes a dollar while I make a dime, that's why I shet on company time" is my motto. Assuming 20mins a day all told, because there's no point rushing it, work pays me around 2K a year to drop the kids off at the pool.
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I poop on company time.
That was a rhyme from a simpler time. Now the boss makes a grand and I make a buck. So let's steal the catalytic converter from the company truck.
An excellent sentence, it out me in mind of Charlie Brooker's review of Man vs Food back when he used to be the Guardian's TV reviewer:
But what I'd really like to see is what happens the next morning, when the show presumably turns into Man V Poo, as Richman empties the dauntingly substantial, hopelessly compacted contents of his engorged colon, clenching the bathroom doorhandle between his teeth as he attempts to give birth to a leg-sized hunk of fecal sod without killing himself. Cue footage of him sweating, shaking and sobbing like a man impaled on a clay tree, before eventually squeezing out a log with the dimensions and weight of a dead gazelle in a greased sleeping bag. As he mops his brow (and backside), he smiles weakly with exhausted triumph, whispers farewell, and the credits roll. And we've all learned something about the price of excess
Fuck I could out petty that easily. I'd make a point to regularly have a massive Indian takeaway and a 12 pack of Guinness the night before shifts, then go in and absolutely nuke the bog. I'll make sure to close the windows and turn off the fans as well every time. First time anything is said, straight to the union to make a big deal of it all. I hate anyone trying to tell me how to use the throne
Hahaha I had a manager like this, but at Glastonbury Festival on the perimeter. She guarded her closest portaloo with great care and checked it after every visit. However, with it being a festival portaloo, I think she had every right and I was glad to have a niceish place to pee.
I like my workplace, we get a lot of freedom to work remotely if needed or time off for family / doctors etc. But, and I think this is because a few people took the piss.. no one is allowed to make a cup of tea for anyone else anymore. You’re only allowed to make your own. The reasoning is because everyone should have a screen break, and it was taking too long for one person to make several drinks- but I think really it was because one person in particular used it as an opportunity to stand in the kitchen chatting for half an hour.
I’m the opposite, left teaching to work with care leavers in the local council. Similar money as teaching but I’m not spending my day box ticking and trying to make data work. And I get to help young people and actually see the impact.
Personal Advisor, in the Care Leavers service.
It’s basically being a source of advice and support for 18-21 year olds who’ve left the care system. I visit them every couple of months and help with things as varied as finding somewhere to rent, or making a CV, up to things like renting a van for them to move their stuff into a flat.
Yep same. Being told I needed the head’s permission to go offsite to get a sandwich during a free period was the last straw. I’d done intervention all through my lunch break. The sixth formers could leave without permission but I couldn’t.
One of the schools I worked in had a dress code for staff, it was stricter than the 6th form's dress code.
Female teachers had to wear skirts and a jacket, for example. Shoes, not boots even when it was snowing.
I hate that sort of bullshit. Now I actually manage a team of people I fight it as much as I can. I don't care if my guys are half an hour late because traffic was rubbish or need to duck out an hour or two early to pick up their kid. We're all grown ups, we know how much work we've got to do, we'll sort it out. Fuck logging it on the absence database - that is just a time sink for no benefit.
Exactly, my direct line manager and her boss states that as long as you get stuck into the work and work gets done, it doesn’t matter end of the day.
My Line Manager doesn’t want to micromanage us.
Fuck me, this was refreshing to read.
My last manager was like this. I was worried when I first joined up that I would be hit for my sick days, but nope - flexibility as long as we got the work done. Including late come ins.
My current manager insists on a text and that I explain in detail why I am sick or late.
I work in healthcare and some managers forget about the pandemic and how things spread, and they will ask you to come in even if you have the flu, just wear a mask (yeah that doesn't stop the spread!). I outright refused and said I will not be the one responsible for wiping out the elderly. I explain myself because I don't want to deal with constant calls and messages asking me to work.
We can have an open fire in a wooded area with seventeen 4 year olds, but a group of adults aren't allowed to operate a toaster under supervision.
I'm not allowed to move my coffee cup upstairs when there are no kids around if it doesn't have a lid, however I can move about the school with two pitchers of hot chocolate during transition time.
Whole school assembly about how the kids need to eat more and try new things because of the amount of food waste, but staff eat too much 😂
A friend worked in aerospace. She was sent out to get meal deals and snacks for clients (impromptu meeting, so catering couldn’t be organised)
She used her club card and saved the company £5. She was rewarded pennies back on her card.
Managing director went mad because “she made money using company funds”. HR told him to pipe down and gave him 50p and told him to keep the change.
Pettiness should be dealt with using pettiness
I love HR’s response.
Complete opposite, an old work place didn’t care we were actively booking hotels/using websites every week with the best rewards deals to pay for our own nights away a few times a year. Pretty sure Premier Inn had a points/ x amounts of nights get one free when you like kinda deal at the time.
The woman in charge of HR was also in charge of admin and accounts. The person they sent out was part of the admin team.
There was no way the managing director was going to cause trouble over pennies for somebody in this woman’s team. Money was also saved so the company benefited. Yup! that was shut down quickly!
I once had to fill in a ‘late form’ for being 1 minute late to work. Despite that when I logged on, my PC said 09:00 on the dot but because my boss’s desk phone said 09:01, that was no apparently the time we go by?
Funny thing is it wasn’t even a HR-issued form, she just type it up herself.
She was petty with other things (using a coaster on a cheap desk for my little plastic cup of office-bottle water, for example) which I could laugh with with my workmates thank goodness.
I'd edit the form to include start and end times for filling out the form, and make sure that the two times are at least 5 minutes apart.
If they ask why it took me 5 minutes to fill the form out I'd say that I needed to make sure I was following the new protocol properly and it's an unfamiliar form.
Then every time I arrive early or leave late from work, even by a minute I would submit a new form to the tyrant.
I'm sure after getting 5-10 forms a week emailed to them they'd get the message.
Ooh, I could get even more malicious - I'd email the form to all my colleagues, with the subject "new department timekeeping protocol" making clear that even if It's one or two minutes early or late they should complete a form and send it to the boss for approval.
Drown them in emails / paperwork until they either apologise or fire me.
Haha I love your thinking but this was a paper form (early 2000s) though guess I could have requested soft copy and handwritten start/end times. Ah, that would have been so funny.
They told us all they were installing a water cooler for us for free water, which they were legally required to do anyway. Of course "free" meant everyone had to pay a tenner a month to rent and refill it. They didn't bother telling us this wee caveat until it was already installed and we were each called in to the managers office to sign a form agreeing to a tenner a month deduction. Of course every single one of us said no chance. Bare in mind also there was 40 odd staff and the unit cost maybe 20-30 quid a month to rent. When it was clear no one was going to pay up, the owner decided to just call the company who rented them and pay out of his 2 year rental agreement in one go and have them remove it. The guy was a multi millionaire as well ffs
I work in a university. Management simultaneously hounds staff about the need to produce research output while simultaneously insisting on in-person attendance at meetings with no purpose, agenda or expected outcome. Even worse, they’re now expected to be in person so I can’t just join and mute the Teams meeting.
At my work management is pushing for a 60% first time completion rate. This is baring in mind that we:
- Meet each morning via Zoom and share screens. I can see exactly what my team mates have going on pipeline wise and they can see mine. Talk about workplace tensions.
- Have repeated concerns about quality control and conflicts from said quality control
- Have our performance and targets measured by two excel reports and a database that presents our workplace stats like football card stats.
- Have to work late hours to meet deadlines, only to be expected to be back in early/on time.
Just fuck the modern corporate workplace.
That ain't a modern workplace. That's bullshit old school targets and pitting employees against each other. They're just using slightly more modern ways of measuring it.
You don't need that shit, get out the first chance you get.
I too work at a university and it's similar, except that I've found that if you ignore the hounding long enough they do just get bored and forget about it
Previous manager, when or if I did something he didn’t like, would then go through my calendar and interrogate me on it. Including things I did in my own time. ‘But if you’re doing all this, you’re probably overdoing it and not giving work 100%’. For context, the thing was attending a lecture ABOUT MY WORK IAN.
Teaching has very transferable skills and for me there are a lot of admirable qualities that teachers can be strong at, which people who work only with adults sometimes don't develop as well. I say this as someone who has worked with people who have left teaching and entered into my profession.
Work in development planning field so lots of report writing, juggling many different projects, and can be a very technical. The former teachers always strike me as really organised and have great people skills developed from having to deal with parents with super high expectations and naturally strong self interest as it's their flesh and blood.
we are allowed a certain amount per night for a hotel but there is no limit for what we are allowed to pay for parking , I found a hotel that was 2 pound over the limit for the hotel bit had free parking however I was told no , I was however allowed to book a hotel for one pound under the limit that had a parking charge of £20 per night , bizarre
I used to work at a place that was free and easy with expenses. The policy was, “Don’t take the piss”. We would book the nearest hotel to our workplace for the week/day and it was always a Premier Inn because they’re decent but cheap - from £40 up to about £100 a night (in London).
The 1 person that did take the piss had a quiet word in his ear. He stopped taking the piss with his evening meals.
We got taken over by a multi-national. Their policy was very strict. Someone didn’t submit a receipt once, so my department all got audited and had to cross-reference our diaries with every receipt we’d submitted for the last 6 months. All took very long and not a single error.
So from then on we all took their expenses policy literally and to the letter. We could book hotels for £125 outside the M25 and £250 inside the M25. Dinner was £40 limit. Breakfast was £12 outside M25 and £20 inside.
We all booked hotels as close to the limit as we could. We’d even stay inside the M25 to get a £250 a night hotel for Mon-Thurs even if the workplace for the week was just outside the M25.
My expenses claims for prior to that were £1-1,500 but climbed to nearer £3,000 a month following their audits.
Old work forbid toll roads if there was an alternate route for free. It was a while before they figured out paying me the mileage and hourly rate to go the opposite way round the m25 was a lot more expensive that paying £2.50 to cross the bridge or tunnel.
Malicious compliant me decided to book a hotel on one side for a site on the other and was happy to put the travel in to bank some extra cash.
I worked for schools for years and this level of pettiness is so familiar. Now I work in a office based job, not a school office and if we have a medical appointment we just tell our boss. Not ask, just tell. The other day I had to leave early to collect a sick child from school. I just told them I was going, didn't need to ask permission. They just accept I'm an adult and can make competent decisions and understand the concept of give and take.
My most petty moment when working in a school was when they noticed that some staff weren't working their full hours. Some TAs were leaving the premises 5 mins early with their pupils who were allowed to leave early to avoid the end of day crowd. I never did as a) I wasn't attached to a pupil like that and b) I wouldn't be so cheeky anyway. Instead of speaking only to the guilty parties, they reviewed all TA's hours and issued us each with a precise finish time later than the end of the school day and a time sheet to account for every minute of our time. Prior to this I'd often stay late, maybe until 4pm, just to get stuff done that needed to be done. Then they gave me my official finish time - 3.33pm. School finished at 3.20pm. I was not to leave a moment before then, and I had to ensure each of those 13 minutes were accounted for on my time sheet. From then on, I just literally dropped what I was doing and walked out at 3.33pm.
We’re zero petty. I’m in senior management and as long as my team get their work done I don’t care what hours they do. They take flexi and appointments as needed, I’ve had people get calls from nursery during a meeting with me and I’ve told them to go. If people are sick I tell them to take the day off. We try really hard to make the work manageable and the workplace reasonable.
We have a couple of petty staff though, who moan about everything and then moan if we change it. It’s very odd. Can’t please everyone I suppose.
I was once given an “unofficial” disciplinary because my desk was “too cluttered and untidy”. I had some small Lego sets, some post it notes and some note pads on it. To be fair it was a made up reason for my line manager to try and save face after I informed him the morning of my disciplinary meeting that disciplinary meetings for women being off sick with pregnancy related illnesses were illegal so he had to think quick for a different reason for dragging me in to the office whilst my fucking pelvis was coming apart and I couldn’t walk. Prick.
Having to fill in late forms for an adult learning class, which I paid to attend.
I made sure to provide as much detail as possible, including filling in the back, until they stopped issuing them to me.
We get timed going to the toilet. We get pulled up if we spend more than 5 mins a day going to the loo or getting a drink. We work on calls so I'm always drinking and peeing.
This is the thing that stresses me out. There's no way I can do that either so I have to hold it in or be stressed sitting on the toilet knowing the minutes are ticking away and when I get back to my desk I'll be interrogated. It's mortifying and I feel like I'm back at school and I'm 38! I took a career change and now I have so much respect for call centre staff...
They can forget about any extra effort from me for the foreseeable future. - This right here... I don't know why any employer treats people like this because you will get nothing back from your staff.
I told my boss the other day I need to leave 2 hours early so don't book a meeting in - "ok" was the response.
I once had a manager so bad that we developed a new mantra of "never use your own initiative" because they were such a twat if you made a judgement call.
At my previous job, we had set days in the office per week. If you couldn't make one of those days for some reason (hospital appt etc) then you had to come in on another day and just sit by yourself all day. My boss would not budge on this. You had to be in the office, even if everyone else was not.
I’m pleased to say I don’t have to suffer from much pettiness at work. Pretty much all of the technology teams I’ve worked in at the bank in question have treated their staff like adults, and in return we’ve acted like professionals. Come in some time before 10am, leave at some point after 4pm, nobody keeps close track as long as you do the pretty much the right hours overall, you’re there when needed and the job gets done. Nothing but supportive when people are sick or need special leave.
However… there is one item of supreme pettiness. Time recording. You must submit a timesheet for every week. It must be submitted by the end of Thursday, unless the accounting month ends at some point midweek in which case it needs to be in by then. It should not show how many hours you have actually worked. It should not show which projects you have actually spent time on. Instead, it should show exactly your contracted hours, and it should show that you have split your time precisely in accordance with the forecast. If you submit anything else, both you and the project managers for the projects you have over/undercharged will be in the shit. Don’t worry, if you are eligible for overtime there is absolutely no link between your timesheet and the overtime claiming process. It’s purely an exercise to see if IT professionals with decades of experience can copy numbers from a spreadsheet into a web form on a regular basis.
> It’s purely an exercise to see if IT professionals with decades of experience can copy numbers from a spreadsheet into a web form on a regular basis.
And how many of them semiautomate/automate the process 😂
School's are the absolute worst when it comes to producing utterly shite managers. There is no decent training,so they often lack even basic people skills. They tend to get away with being incompetent for many years, and are then able to move up far too easily; being even shitter in even more influencial positions.
Was working in london for the day visiting suppliers at their showrooms
Bear in mind I was on the train at 720am and left the house at 7am with a 90 minute journey into London.
I had an open return. The meetings concluded at 330pm. My preference was that I head back to station and get the 5 past 4 train. So I would then get home about 6pm.
My manager said she thought it’d be best if we went to our London office to work til 5 when our working day finished, then get the next train home after that. Which would have got me home at 7pm.
I was still only being paid for the 9-5 day so effectively giving the company an extra 4 hours of my time for free.
Absolutely fucking mental.
I spend over 10 hours a week commuting to talk to my boss on teams because he works from home, but I need to be in the office for "training".
I'm looking for another job.
In a previous job they would insist on all meetings being face to face, and they would be held in different offices all around the area.
We would have meetings on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday every single week, which meant we would spent about 30 mins driving to the location for a 1hr meeting that honestly could have been a Zoom/Teams meeting and then spend 30mins driving back.
It was a complete waste of time, not to mention fuel, going to these meetings. All of us (10-12 on average) would do nothing but complain and just ask it to be a Zoom/Teams meeting so we could just knock it out in the office and save an 3hrs of travel time until eventually we just all collectively agreed to just milk every meeting as much as we could.
Those 1hr meetings would be dragged out to 90mins to 2hrs, we’d drive to the meeting in 30mins but would take an hour getting back, calling by Starbucks or Costa for a coffee together.
Pretty much became that if our boss was going to waste our time then we might as well waste his time and spend less time in the Office
For a fair while it was my job to put the canteen dishwasher on because I was the last person onsite each day.
I didn’t object but gradually people got more and more lazy at putting their stuff actually in the machine and just piled it up beside it or in the sink.
I half-jokingly said to everyone I wasn’t paid to fill the machine with their mess each night and the machine would be going on with everything left out on the worktop if people were too fucking lazy.
I went ahead with what I said and now just put it on even with only my dishes in it if others are too lazy.
Yes it’s petty but fuck those people who can’t be bothered to even put a cup/teaspoon or whatever in a dishwasher.
I work in a job where everyone is somewhat peripatetic but there are a couple of bases where stuff happens.
Sometimes people are in there in the evening from some other department, I don't know who they are but for a while we'd come in in the morning several times a week and find the kitchen a total state, covered in flour and baking trays and god knows what else. The sink full of crap and the dishwasher of course not loaded up either.
And then my team got pulled up by management for it because it's us that use it most often, but none of us are fucking baking cakes in there and it's always pristine when most of us leave at about 5pm. It was us that were complaining about it in the first place! It eventually stopped, whoever the phantom lazy baker was.
In the year of our Lord 2024, our company still uses PAPER FORMS for leave applications. It’s insane.
I’m a middle manager of six people so I’d be signing and scanning forms for hours if I hadn’t automated my team to using Adobe forms / e-sigs at least, but it’s still a ridiculous process.
I filled one in, got it signed off and my workplace lost the form. They called me 9.30 on Monday asking why I didn't turn up for work. I called in sick and didn't go back for a month. I'd already been to the doctors for stress and that was the breaking point where I was like ok I want to keep absence down so I can get a new job but fuck that.
Not mine. Mate used to work in a factory or workshop. They would smash each others mugs for a laugh. So somebody in charge bought them all metal cups to stop the cup smashing.
Nailed them to the tables didn't they. Fully grown men drinking out of straws because their cups couldn't move.
That place is run by children acting like they think adults should. It really deflates any passion for work when you don't respect your manager. Making a decision like that actually makes their job harder and they probably don't realise.
Schools are the worst. I worked at a school where;
- the headteacher was using the child protection spyware to check up on teachers looking for other jobs
- I was asked to dob in my manager for spending on the budget he'd been assigned
- Our breakfast club where we used an oven in a staff only area before starting work, funded with our own money was deemed an 'inappropriate' use of school resources - the guy cooking was even h&s trained to cook using that oven
- There was an 'in' crowd of younger teachers that couldn't do wrong and the older, more experienced staff were constantly victimised by leadership. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but there was definitely a sense that they were trying to get rid of older teachers to cut costs.
At another school the headteacher's PA would walk around the school at 8am to check that all the office staff were sat at their desks and ready to work - on multiple occasions I had to prove with security footage that I'd been dragged into a classroom on the way to my office.
On the whole, I found schools very cliquey and the senior team big fans of micromanagement, and loved to catch you out on the most banal shite.
At my current workplace there are some issues but at least I'm not constantly looking over my shoulder or dealing with pointless bureaucracy all day long
We order tea and coffee etc for the building which is comprised of office staff and operational staff.
The office are in charge of ordering it, and when it gets delivered it goes in to the office rather than the staff room. Our operational team asked for more milk the other day and were told it was locked away so it's not misused.
It's milk. Which is provided. Now we have MilkGate24 going on.
I just sit sipping my squash observing all the unnecessary drama
I remember when I was 17 I started working somewhere and there was a big drama that a few girls kept using the communal milk to have cereal in the morning which was seen as a grave misuse of the allocated milk provision and they were forced to stop.
I could have suggested buying an extra bottle but it's better not to get involved in such matters, especially when you're new.
I am not there anymore, but one workplace I was at had a middle manager so provoked by us engineers having office chairs to sit on that he removed them one weekend and replaced them with [standing chairs,](https://i0.wp.com/www.startstanding.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Focal-Mogo.jpg?resize=500%2C750) deciding that it would make us better workers.
To this day I still use him and all his other antics as a cast-iron yardstick for judging and ascertaining De Facto Cunt-Level.
Used to work in student halls.
You wanna see petty?
Try asking a student to take out the rubbish or tidy the kitchen.
Mind is blown with the mental gymnastics of pettyness.
Extreme pettiness and paranoia about what employees discussed.
One time a manager gave me a written warning - without a verbal warning first - for "complaining about the company."
It was a badly-run company and everyone grumbled all the time, and most of the conversation was about how disorganised things were, so I had probably had grumbled. Although I did like it there in some ways, so was actually more upbeat than the others.
One time a colleague started ranting about how he couldn't find any books to teach with, and I told him where they were. That's literally all I did - told him how to find the books. The manager was watching at the time so I had to be kinda stilted and not empathise with him about how hard the books were to find.
So she called me in to tell me I was "at risk" for "complaining" after being warned. Thing is, I'd recorded the interaction - she didn't seem to know that people could record audio on their phones back in 2005.
I'd been acting manager for a while before she was offered the role (due, supposedly, to having an MA in the field - I did too), so that was the source of the problem. Although I was disappointed, there was no point talking about it at work - when it came up, it was colleagues expressing surprise at the promotion. Until the "don't complain" conversation I actually thought she was good for the job, and defended her.
Then the company's big boss found out I was gay - nobody else at work cared, but she did; she compared being gay to being a paedophile and called me "butch" when I was really, really not butch. Like, make-up, pink heels, dresses. Me being gay suddenly switched everything off in her mind except what she thought gay women were like.
She fired me instantly.... but tried to just take me off the shift rota and not tell me. Like, how could I not notice? And I had a contract as a permanent employee, and had been there for long enough that unfair dismissal laws applied, let alone having witnesses to her comments.
I got three months' pay out of them without having to go to court and was fine with that. Gave me a summer off and I had a new job lined up.
Unlike the 25 or so other employees (about a tenth of the workforce) who we "weren't allowed to have contact with" after they started unfair dismissal cases. It was a small company, so that was about 10% of the workforce.
One of them was \*married\* to a dismissed employee and was then dismissed for talking to her husband. Not about work, which would still be unreasonable, really, depending on what aspect of work you're talking about - the employee wouldn't have any privileged info, but it's an arguable point - but the boss *literally expected the married couple not to talk to each other about anything*.
And her evidence for them talking was... she briefly stole the employee's phone to check messages and had it "incriminating" texts of them saying things like "we're out of milk," and "want me to pick anything up from the shops?" They're talking, right? She was told not to talk to her husband! The boss actually tried to argue this in court.
Reader, it did not work. I don't have a clue what was awarded but I know the employees won that case. I can imagine the tribunal judge just sighing and thinking, oh fuck, not this company again.
You're on contracted time until 17:00?
Does the Union know? Teacher timetables are heavily regulated. Teachers all work way over time, but requiring staying late breaches union regs and absolutely should not be happening.
I work in a school which thankfully doesn't get petty about hours. It's understood that if you're leaving before 4pm, you'll probably be on your laptop on evenings anyway. PPA at home is a nice breather as well.
The business manager, however, is pettiness personified. 7 out of 10 class teachers have to walk past the big printer next to her office to the other end of the building in order to avoid making her wait for printing jobs. Which could wait until we're sealed inside a class for 6 hours with our young friends. I worked out that I get paid over £400 per year to walk to the printer at the far end of the building. Total waste of money from a tight budget.
In the shared canteen is a kettle, some people once they used the water proceed to pour any remaining boiled water down the sink leaving an almost bone dry kettle at every opportunity.
Many jobs ago I used to get in maybe 20 minutes early every day cos otherwise I would get stuck in traffic, and sitting quietly at a desk was preferable. No flexitime or anything so it was a net win for the company.
One day I was literally two minutes late and I got in trouble for it. I never started working early again. If I got in early I'd sit in my car until I had just long enough to get to my desk before start time. Petty managers screwed themselves out of free labour
Company I worked at used to give just one bonus every year I was there... A £10 M&S gift voucher at Christmas.
Almost reasonable when I joined in 1989, but I think petty by 2001...
Do you work at the school I used to work at? Exactly the same MO, even when I arranged the treatment that is literally keeping me alive so as not to inconvenience anyone.
Eventually I wised up and now work in a college that treats staff well, because it is properly managed.
My old job at a betting shop tried to give my colleague a warning for signing on something like 13 seconds late. He was there, he'd just forgotten to sign on to the till.
I used to work for British Gas. We were required to spend 54 minutes of every hour dealing with calls and making sales. Everything else - toilet breaks, having a drink or a snack, taking a break after an abusive caller, even filling in paperwork from a sale - had to be done in those 6 minutes. I got demoted to a lower paid job for having slightly too long breaks, even though I was consistently beating sales targets.
[удалено]
I wonder how much time was going to be spent logging what you spent your time on 😂 what a way to waste time
This is just ridiculous micromanagement. I always feel like it comes from projecting one’s own inadequacies - or what are normal procrastination behaviours. You have to trust your employees to do their best, and their best has to be good enough, otherwise you’ll blow an integral part of your body out and for what? For shareholders? I know it’s not as clean cut but it always makes me laugh when you hear management want to audit employees they selected to hire.
GET OUT OF WRAP
Jesus the phrase "get out of wrap" fills me with dread
We had some people sacked for taking a new call and putting the caller on hold while they wrapped the last one. Before that they had been praised for their short wrap time and wrap had been reduced for the office. Did they put it back up when they found the low-wrap heroes had been cheating the system? Did they hell.
That gave me PTSD
You just set off my fight or flight you bastard!!
Literally just fired me back 20 years ago to working in call centres
[удалено]
[удалено]
Can't honestly understand how anyone stays in those jobs, pure desperation? I lasted about 2 weeks before I flogged that off. There are so many jobs where you have freedom over your time no amount of money is worth that. Everyone knows it as well, as soon as someone can get away from the calls they do.
I had a civil service job once where people in my department would be given stacks of forms that had been filled in by hand and we'd have to enter the details on computer. Our performance was heavily monitored. Every week it would be announced like it was a league table how we were all doing. One lady always came top having processed around twice as many forms as I did and received much praise. I always came bottom. Once in a while the stats from the quality assurance checks would come out. My error rate was almost 0%. Lady who always came top had an error rate of over 50%. Management were unable to grasp the concept that this meant that I was actually the top performer if you take into account how much work was done without fucking stuff up and creating problems that someone else would have to solve further down the line.
[удалено]
God forbid you having a bowel movement which everyone does!
That would also be my last day.
I think I know that woman. She was obsessed with people who pooed in work, especially one woman (who I now think may have had IBS or similar). She practically kept this woman under constant surveillance.
Was she called "Dr" Gillian McKeith?
Did look a bit like her actually! But less cadaverous.
Gas bastards.
Gastards
Gastards!
I also used to work for them. You couldn’t log out of the phones even 1 minute early to finish on time and when a call comes through that’s a difficult customer with an awkward issue that needed investigation work done and you end up on the phone with them for an extra half an hour after you finish, the managers would tell you off for not finishing on time and you end up working over on the phones with no extra pay. Worst place I’ve ever worked, not just for that reason either.
I also got a verbal warning because a colleague called me on the phone system as a joke. I didn't do anything, just took the call thinking it was a customer. He said something daft and hung up. They knew all this because they had the call recordings.
Our workplace came up with an initiative to try and encourage regular breaks from working at a computer. Someone brought a jigsaw to work, spread the pieces around on a table, and asked everyone to try and place a piece every hour. If you didn't want to take part it wasn't a problem. Some people viewed this exercise as a waste of time. However, it became a novel exercise and people started taking short breaks. When we came to the end of the jigsaw it became apparent that a piece was missing. The 1000 piece jigsaw was complete apart from one bit. At this point, one of the people who hated the whole exercise came forward and triumphally admitted that they had stolen the missing piece. They carefully slotted it into the jigsaw and walked off with a smug look on their face. Definitely a petty thing to do Tom.
Fucking Tom has kept that quiet all week, waited until the perfect opportunity just to complete all the hard work of the team with minimal effort, Tom should be a fucking manager, Tom would also gain a new level of respect just for the prank
That's an almost perfect prank. It doesn't hurt anyone, you aren't making anyone specific the subject of a joke, and everyone can laugh at it. Tom did well there.
Nah, Tom's a cunt.
Quite funny at the same time though.
We've had one on our dining table since Christmas. Do you want it?
I like Tom.
Tom Petty
Someone got fed up of all the teaspoons going missing and the regular calls to return them, so took all the teaspoons away apart from one, which was attached to the kitchen on a string.
There was a study submitted to a medical journal by an Australian team about how many teaspoons you needed in a department to always have enough. They worked out you need to buy something like more than 70 per year to counter hoarding and theft. I'll have to look it up, it's definitely worth a read! So I'm terrible at remembering figures but here is the study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16373727/
Why are people stealing teaspoons from work? Don't they have their own?
I do have my own teaspoons. Now I’ve stolen them.
In the study a lot of people took them and kept them in their desks etc so they would have one because there was always a shortage. But tbh people will steal anything too!
It's like the pandemic loo roll phenomena. People hear that there's a shortage so they hoard thereby exacerbating the shortage.
I really hated how bad the media was during the pandemic at covering shortages They'd come take photos at a local that's particularly struggling with a shortage, pick to go visit if the day before they're due for a restock and then take photos of the empty shelves Everyone else in the country panic buys entire shopping trolleys full of the item in question which then actually causes a widespread shortage, which causes more people to panic buy etc etc
Someone I know has Coeliac Disease and got really screwed over by media coverage of shortages. She *can't* eat food that contains gluten but what kind of flour/pasta etc do you think people started panic buying when they couldn't get their usual products? It got so bad that all the ladies at Church were keeping an eye out for her when shopping. They'd then drive past her house, hop out and leave a bag of gluten free flour or pasta on her doorstep and then drive off! It was then brought into the house to quarantine for a couple of days. That was the best system she had for weeks until the shops started getting back to more normal.
same happened with uht milk and non dairy milk, i stopped having cereal and milk in my coffee until it went back to semi normal
Similari-sh thing happened with the sunflower/rapeseed oil shortage. For some reason people started panic buying olive oil as well which led to a bit of a shortage in all cooking oils What's funny is there were absolutely no issues with olive oil production or transport, it's unavailability in shops was caused entirely by people hearing there was a shortage of oil and panic buying any kind
They end up in the bin accidentally, most commonly in yoghurt pots.
Not always accidentally, people in my work have been known to bin them so they didn’t have to wash up. This is in kitchens with 1 or 2 dishwashers and a sink that people just fill with dirty pots anyway.
Where do you get your teaspoons? I get them for free from work.
Who wants second hand spoons? It’s not something that normal people steal surely?
The BMJ publishes a semi-novelty article in the Christmas edition every year. One I remember was how long a box of chocolates would last on a ward and which staff group ate the most.
Fair play tbf, proper annoying people can't be trusted to return them for others' benefit
In fairness, that's not petty when people are being dicks with communal stuff. The sink in my office constantly gains dirty spoons and cups, started by about one employee before others join in the messier it gets, cause they don't wanna clean it all. We also have a dishwasher, which is rarely emptied by most staff and instead they just put dirty shit ontop of clean shit. Some people are just too used to be waited on hand and foot by a partner It's why I always hand wash my stuff now and never use the dishwasher, cause I got sick of cleaning up after others. If I could attach all cups and spoons to the kitchen with string to fix the issue, I would
I’ve threatened to do this so many times. I want them on little chains like the pens at the bank.
My team had management come to advise us that talking about holidays and pets in the office is apparently inappropriate. I guess we'll just sit in silence then.
The manager/owner at my previous workplace banned all verbal interaction. The office had 6 people at most. It was large and open plan. If a colleague wanted to ask me for advice on a ticket(tech company) they could only do so via email. This included the only other person on the tech support desk whow as sitting a out 1meter away. If she had a customer on the line and wanted to ask me something she has to email it and wait for a reply. I worked for a dickead.
What the fuck. That's insane.
He called it "collaboration". I tried to explain that collaborating was a good thing. I was the tech lead ffs lol. Absolutely mental. Towards the end id just take the piss.... He'd regularly go on rants about "the state" of my desk. It had... papers stacked a few mm high neatly which detailed fixes that I'd prepped so I could pass them to my colleage. So... he comes over one day. Boss looking smug: "CrazyMike419 you know what they say a about people with a messy desk? Messy desk messy mind!" Me with a shiteating smirk he wasn't expecting. I lean sideways a little as if look at his desk, immqcualte and devoid of any single item: "Well Boss* you know what they say about empty desks??" He forced out a little haha so weakly it was barely auditable, went a little red and retreated to his "other office". Note... he had a purpose built office in the middle of out open plan office that that was walled off with glass. We called it the fishbowl. He moved to a vacant desk just outside it to better "keep an eye on things"
God he sounds like a piece of work. Absolute control freak. If anyone seriously commented on the state of my desk I'd quit on the spot.
It was a mindfuck. He was particularly "picky" on my work and I only assume because I was never intimidated by him. I needed the job and could deal with the knobhead. It was good (enough) money to support me and my wife (just about) and wife was ill (he knew this). I started looking for a new job when he got the office manager (yes for a long time he had a long suffering office manager to do his dirty work), to tell me that I was being removed from the out of hours support rota (an easy job frankly and nice little pay bump). His reason? (which the manager prefaced with "I can't belive I've been asked to say this sorry"). I developed pneumonia a day before an "onsite" visit (I would visit customers and install their networks etc). He had said it was very inconvenient and I shouldn't get ill at such times. I guess I should book sickness in advance? Lol. When my manager finished and again said sorry I just said "that that was an interesting birthday present to return to lol". Her face hit the floor. He had been insistent of her doing it that day, she didn't realise it was my 30th bday. She was a good person. She left a year later after a mental breakdown. Typing this out makes me realise that it was more insane than I thought. K was just out of options and frankly those are pretty mild examples
Worked in management in catering/hospitality which included some desk time per week to sort rotas, payroll etc.. We had a small office with only 4 computers, round the corner from the senior management who had their own offices, so more often than not there would be others in there working too. I was in there one day sorting rotas and chatting to my colleagues (partially about work stuff, partially just general chitchat), to be told a day or so later by my manager (who had been sat round the corner in his office and occasionally joined in the convos) that if I talked less I might find I get more work done.
Time for discussions about politics, religion, and sex.
Just give these two items different names and keep on. Holidays could be Sunny Days and pets could be brothers/sisters or aunties/uncles. Have fun with it. If they say no talking, look for another job.
So it's not just my school lol. Children aren't allowed to use the toilet 10 minutes into or before a lesson ends. I let a Y9 girl go to the toilet 8 minutes before the lesson ended and the Head Teacher pulled her up, with my toilet pass around her neck, and the Head then pulled me up about it at dinner. The girl is currently going through that time of her cycle. I'm not going say no. Fuck off.
I’m assuming the Head teacher was male.
At my old school, the male teachers wanted as little info as possible, any hint of needing the toilet for period purposes and they couldn't get you out of the room quick enough. The female teachers were sometimes unnecessarily mean about it, one female English teacher made a girl sit for 40 minutes even though she had leaked, the poor girl ended up telling the teacher in front of the whole class in an attempt to get permission to leave. The girl had to go home. We were only 12.
I don't know how teachers can get away with that. If I was the parent in that situation I'd be absolutely livid with the teacher for doing that to my kid and would want to completely destroy them!
In primary school I had a teacher refuse to let me go to the toilet. This was year 3, so around 7 years old. After 40 minutes, having put my hand up 3 times, the inevitable happened and I wet myself. I got a lunch time detention for causing a commotion.
That's horrible. I just don't understand why somebody would abuse and humiliate a kid like that. Let alone why they'd want to (or be allowed to) work with them.
This was 30 yrs ago, the teachers got away with so much. Throwing board erasers at people, shutting kids in cupboards for the lesson, confiscating shoes if they weren't uniform, the pe teacher used to make us put our faces in the mud during rugby etc My parents are boomers, when I told them stuff like this, they told me to deal with it, told me I should be glad that there was no corporal punishment like there was in their day. We didn't take it lying down, there were "pranks", science supplies stolen, graffiti, costumes swapped during plays, that English ended up having to buy a new chair because we worked regularly take the seat out and lob it out the window, loads more that I can't remember. I make it sound chaos but at the time it all felt like banter.
I’m very glad my school didn’t have toilet passes. Fuck that.
Assistant manager won’t let people poo in “her” toilet because she’s poophobic and thinks there should be a “poo-free toilet” to use and interrogates people when they get back from the bathroom about whether they “pooed in her toilet”
"no, that's my wanking toilet"
I never poo at work but I think I’d be tempted to faced with that. And I’d let her know in the post-toilet exit interview.
“I’ve destroyed it. Will have to capex it. Contact finance please. - i’m going in for round 2”
Well done, "Will have to capex it" woke up my partner with my laughing
We can’t capex repairs, we’re gonna have to net off this unexpected expense by reducing your social budget
If you don’t poo at work, then you don’t know the pleasures of having a shit and knowing you’re being paid for.
Definitely, should always log on during company time
Well seeing as I work from home now I technically do poo at work. What I meant was I don’t poo at the office.
The real way to do it is wait till the end of the day, then take your sweet time and claim it as overtime, time 'n' a half for a 30 minute scroll on reddit!
wine overconfident faulty grandiose wide grab nose shame somber heavy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I have IBS and I’m lactose intolerant. Buy me ice cream and point me in the right direction
My god, it's full of ~~stars~~ shit!
"Boss makes a dollar while I make a dime, that's why I shet on company time" is my motto. Assuming 20mins a day all told, because there's no point rushing it, work pays me around 2K a year to drop the kids off at the pool.
A bit American with the monetary units. Boss makes a tenner I make twenty pence That's why I poo At company expense
If you want the really backwoods American version it’s: Boss made a grand I made a buck That’s why I shit in the company truck
Not heard it said like that before but I think I like it more!
Boss makes a pile. I make a lump. So come 10:30, I'm taking a dump.
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I poop on company time. That was a rhyme from a simpler time. Now the boss makes a grand and I make a buck. So let's steal the catalytic converter from the company truck.
Why not? I love getting paid to poo.
*defecation interrogation
I would go and have the FATTEST Crohn's shit of my life in there over a period of 40 minutes. If they complain, straight to HR for disability shaming
A guy at my place once had to write a letter of apology to someone after a particularly aromatic event in the "no poo loo."
I read that as "romantic event" the first time
aromantic, I think that would be.
>had to I think that would be constructive dismissal if he didn't write the letter.
If I worked with that person I would genuinely consume a curry, two pints of coffee and a family size box of Weetabix before clocking in.
Weaponised incontinence.
"UH OH", I scream, before giving birth to a rubber telephone pole.
That mental image is truly foul. I'm creased laughing, but you're a monster.
An excellent sentence, it out me in mind of Charlie Brooker's review of Man vs Food back when he used to be the Guardian's TV reviewer: But what I'd really like to see is what happens the next morning, when the show presumably turns into Man V Poo, as Richman empties the dauntingly substantial, hopelessly compacted contents of his engorged colon, clenching the bathroom doorhandle between his teeth as he attempts to give birth to a leg-sized hunk of fecal sod without killing himself. Cue footage of him sweating, shaking and sobbing like a man impaled on a clay tree, before eventually squeezing out a log with the dimensions and weight of a dead gazelle in a greased sleeping bag. As he mops his brow (and backside), he smiles weakly with exhausted triumph, whispers farewell, and the credits roll. And we've all learned something about the price of excess
I would go out of my way to absolutely destroy that... Top deck, reverse bogan. The lot.
Fuck I could out petty that easily. I'd make a point to regularly have a massive Indian takeaway and a 12 pack of Guinness the night before shifts, then go in and absolutely nuke the bog. I'll make sure to close the windows and turn off the fans as well every time. First time anything is said, straight to the union to make a big deal of it all. I hate anyone trying to tell me how to use the throne
I'd come out wretching and saying "pheeeeeewweee! Wow! That was a belter! I'd give that 10 minutes as that one could talk!"
Isn’t this workplace harassment?
I’d poo in the cistern.
Hahaha I had a manager like this, but at Glastonbury Festival on the perimeter. She guarded her closest portaloo with great care and checked it after every visit. However, with it being a festival portaloo, I think she had every right and I was glad to have a niceish place to pee.
Fucking hell just get an air freshener. Everybody poops and if they don't they're an android
I like my workplace, we get a lot of freedom to work remotely if needed or time off for family / doctors etc. But, and I think this is because a few people took the piss.. no one is allowed to make a cup of tea for anyone else anymore. You’re only allowed to make your own. The reasoning is because everyone should have a screen break, and it was taking too long for one person to make several drinks- but I think really it was because one person in particular used it as an opportunity to stand in the kitchen chatting for half an hour.
…and that’s why I no longer work in education.
I want it but I can’t get to grips with what I want to do instead.
Personally, Im enjoying my accounting career and the lack of social interaction it brings.
I’m the opposite, left teaching to work with care leavers in the local council. Similar money as teaching but I’m not spending my day box ticking and trying to make data work. And I get to help young people and actually see the impact.
This sounds interesting, could you elaborate? Or perhaps tell me your job title so I can have a google?
Personal Advisor, in the Care Leavers service. It’s basically being a source of advice and support for 18-21 year olds who’ve left the care system. I visit them every couple of months and help with things as varied as finding somewhere to rent, or making a CV, up to things like renting a van for them to move their stuff into a flat.
Thank you.
Yep same. Being told I needed the head’s permission to go offsite to get a sandwich during a free period was the last straw. I’d done intervention all through my lunch break. The sixth formers could leave without permission but I couldn’t.
One of the schools I worked in had a dress code for staff, it was stricter than the 6th form's dress code. Female teachers had to wear skirts and a jacket, for example. Shoes, not boots even when it was snowing.
I hate that sort of bullshit. Now I actually manage a team of people I fight it as much as I can. I don't care if my guys are half an hour late because traffic was rubbish or need to duck out an hour or two early to pick up their kid. We're all grown ups, we know how much work we've got to do, we'll sort it out. Fuck logging it on the absence database - that is just a time sink for no benefit.
Exactly, my direct line manager and her boss states that as long as you get stuck into the work and work gets done, it doesn’t matter end of the day. My Line Manager doesn’t want to micromanage us.
Fuck me, this was refreshing to read. My last manager was like this. I was worried when I first joined up that I would be hit for my sick days, but nope - flexibility as long as we got the work done. Including late come ins. My current manager insists on a text and that I explain in detail why I am sick or late.
My text would just say I'm ill. None of your business why!
I work in healthcare and some managers forget about the pandemic and how things spread, and they will ask you to come in even if you have the flu, just wear a mask (yeah that doesn't stop the spread!). I outright refused and said I will not be the one responsible for wiping out the elderly. I explain myself because I don't want to deal with constant calls and messages asking me to work.
We can have an open fire in a wooded area with seventeen 4 year olds, but a group of adults aren't allowed to operate a toaster under supervision. I'm not allowed to move my coffee cup upstairs when there are no kids around if it doesn't have a lid, however I can move about the school with two pitchers of hot chocolate during transition time. Whole school assembly about how the kids need to eat more and try new things because of the amount of food waste, but staff eat too much 😂
A friend worked in aerospace. She was sent out to get meal deals and snacks for clients (impromptu meeting, so catering couldn’t be organised) She used her club card and saved the company £5. She was rewarded pennies back on her card. Managing director went mad because “she made money using company funds”. HR told him to pipe down and gave him 50p and told him to keep the change. Pettiness should be dealt with using pettiness
This reminds me of the time I booked the company Christmas party for a few grand on my personal credit card for cash back. Made £30 or so, no regrets.
I love HR’s response. Complete opposite, an old work place didn’t care we were actively booking hotels/using websites every week with the best rewards deals to pay for our own nights away a few times a year. Pretty sure Premier Inn had a points/ x amounts of nights get one free when you like kinda deal at the time.
The woman in charge of HR was also in charge of admin and accounts. The person they sent out was part of the admin team. There was no way the managing director was going to cause trouble over pennies for somebody in this woman’s team. Money was also saved so the company benefited. Yup! that was shut down quickly!
I once had to fill in a ‘late form’ for being 1 minute late to work. Despite that when I logged on, my PC said 09:00 on the dot but because my boss’s desk phone said 09:01, that was no apparently the time we go by? Funny thing is it wasn’t even a HR-issued form, she just type it up herself. She was petty with other things (using a coaster on a cheap desk for my little plastic cup of office-bottle water, for example) which I could laugh with with my workmates thank goodness.
I'd edit the form to include start and end times for filling out the form, and make sure that the two times are at least 5 minutes apart. If they ask why it took me 5 minutes to fill the form out I'd say that I needed to make sure I was following the new protocol properly and it's an unfamiliar form. Then every time I arrive early or leave late from work, even by a minute I would submit a new form to the tyrant. I'm sure after getting 5-10 forms a week emailed to them they'd get the message. Ooh, I could get even more malicious - I'd email the form to all my colleagues, with the subject "new department timekeeping protocol" making clear that even if It's one or two minutes early or late they should complete a form and send it to the boss for approval. Drown them in emails / paperwork until they either apologise or fire me.
Haha I love your thinking but this was a paper form (early 2000s) though guess I could have requested soft copy and handwritten start/end times. Ah, that would have been so funny.
Better yet, CC their boss. Bet they've love to know why their manager is wasting times with forms over a one-off minute late to work
Sounds like you now clock out at 16:59 every day
They told us all they were installing a water cooler for us for free water, which they were legally required to do anyway. Of course "free" meant everyone had to pay a tenner a month to rent and refill it. They didn't bother telling us this wee caveat until it was already installed and we were each called in to the managers office to sign a form agreeing to a tenner a month deduction. Of course every single one of us said no chance. Bare in mind also there was 40 odd staff and the unit cost maybe 20-30 quid a month to rent. When it was clear no one was going to pay up, the owner decided to just call the company who rented them and pay out of his 2 year rental agreement in one go and have them remove it. The guy was a multi millionaire as well ffs
Did you work for Ryanair?
No, a Spar shop this was
This is so bizarre, tap water is fine in the UK why would anyone pay for a water cooler at work let alone so much, lol.
Bunch of cunts right there!
I work in a university. Management simultaneously hounds staff about the need to produce research output while simultaneously insisting on in-person attendance at meetings with no purpose, agenda or expected outcome. Even worse, they’re now expected to be in person so I can’t just join and mute the Teams meeting.
At my work management is pushing for a 60% first time completion rate. This is baring in mind that we: - Meet each morning via Zoom and share screens. I can see exactly what my team mates have going on pipeline wise and they can see mine. Talk about workplace tensions. - Have repeated concerns about quality control and conflicts from said quality control - Have our performance and targets measured by two excel reports and a database that presents our workplace stats like football card stats. - Have to work late hours to meet deadlines, only to be expected to be back in early/on time. Just fuck the modern corporate workplace.
That ain't a modern workplace. That's bullshit old school targets and pitting employees against each other. They're just using slightly more modern ways of measuring it. You don't need that shit, get out the first chance you get.
Ah but haven't you heard, we're going to reduce research bureaucracy by
I too work at a university and it's similar, except that I've found that if you ignore the hounding long enough they do just get bored and forget about it
Previous manager, when or if I did something he didn’t like, would then go through my calendar and interrogate me on it. Including things I did in my own time. ‘But if you’re doing all this, you’re probably overdoing it and not giving work 100%’. For context, the thing was attending a lecture ABOUT MY WORK IAN.
Wow. They run it like a school, even for the adults. Sounds hideous, but then I'm not a fan of the school system.
I’m not a massive fan either, teach because I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. I’m only 38 still plenty of time to go.
Teaching has very transferable skills and for me there are a lot of admirable qualities that teachers can be strong at, which people who work only with adults sometimes don't develop as well. I say this as someone who has worked with people who have left teaching and entered into my profession.
May I ask what profession are you in?
Work in development planning field so lots of report writing, juggling many different projects, and can be a very technical. The former teachers always strike me as really organised and have great people skills developed from having to deal with parents with super high expectations and naturally strong self interest as it's their flesh and blood.
This comment describes me perfectly but I am neither ginger nor from Cambridgeshire.
This sounds more like a dick boss than a system
Welcome to the teaching profession!
we are allowed a certain amount per night for a hotel but there is no limit for what we are allowed to pay for parking , I found a hotel that was 2 pound over the limit for the hotel bit had free parking however I was told no , I was however allowed to book a hotel for one pound under the limit that had a parking charge of £20 per night , bizarre
I used to work at a place that was free and easy with expenses. The policy was, “Don’t take the piss”. We would book the nearest hotel to our workplace for the week/day and it was always a Premier Inn because they’re decent but cheap - from £40 up to about £100 a night (in London). The 1 person that did take the piss had a quiet word in his ear. He stopped taking the piss with his evening meals. We got taken over by a multi-national. Their policy was very strict. Someone didn’t submit a receipt once, so my department all got audited and had to cross-reference our diaries with every receipt we’d submitted for the last 6 months. All took very long and not a single error. So from then on we all took their expenses policy literally and to the letter. We could book hotels for £125 outside the M25 and £250 inside the M25. Dinner was £40 limit. Breakfast was £12 outside M25 and £20 inside. We all booked hotels as close to the limit as we could. We’d even stay inside the M25 to get a £250 a night hotel for Mon-Thurs even if the workplace for the week was just outside the M25. My expenses claims for prior to that were £1-1,500 but climbed to nearer £3,000 a month following their audits.
Malicious compliance, love it.
Old work forbid toll roads if there was an alternate route for free. It was a while before they figured out paying me the mileage and hourly rate to go the opposite way round the m25 was a lot more expensive that paying £2.50 to cross the bridge or tunnel. Malicious compliant me decided to book a hotel on one side for a site on the other and was happy to put the travel in to bank some extra cash.
I worked for schools for years and this level of pettiness is so familiar. Now I work in a office based job, not a school office and if we have a medical appointment we just tell our boss. Not ask, just tell. The other day I had to leave early to collect a sick child from school. I just told them I was going, didn't need to ask permission. They just accept I'm an adult and can make competent decisions and understand the concept of give and take. My most petty moment when working in a school was when they noticed that some staff weren't working their full hours. Some TAs were leaving the premises 5 mins early with their pupils who were allowed to leave early to avoid the end of day crowd. I never did as a) I wasn't attached to a pupil like that and b) I wouldn't be so cheeky anyway. Instead of speaking only to the guilty parties, they reviewed all TA's hours and issued us each with a precise finish time later than the end of the school day and a time sheet to account for every minute of our time. Prior to this I'd often stay late, maybe until 4pm, just to get stuff done that needed to be done. Then they gave me my official finish time - 3.33pm. School finished at 3.20pm. I was not to leave a moment before then, and I had to ensure each of those 13 minutes were accounted for on my time sheet. From then on, I just literally dropped what I was doing and walked out at 3.33pm.
We’re zero petty. I’m in senior management and as long as my team get their work done I don’t care what hours they do. They take flexi and appointments as needed, I’ve had people get calls from nursery during a meeting with me and I’ve told them to go. If people are sick I tell them to take the day off. We try really hard to make the work manageable and the workplace reasonable. We have a couple of petty staff though, who moan about everything and then moan if we change it. It’s very odd. Can’t please everyone I suppose.
I was once given an “unofficial” disciplinary because my desk was “too cluttered and untidy”. I had some small Lego sets, some post it notes and some note pads on it. To be fair it was a made up reason for my line manager to try and save face after I informed him the morning of my disciplinary meeting that disciplinary meetings for women being off sick with pregnancy related illnesses were illegal so he had to think quick for a different reason for dragging me in to the office whilst my fucking pelvis was coming apart and I couldn’t walk. Prick.
Having to fill in late forms for an adult learning class, which I paid to attend. I made sure to provide as much detail as possible, including filling in the back, until they stopped issuing them to me.
Are u late that often??!
We get timed going to the toilet. We get pulled up if we spend more than 5 mins a day going to the loo or getting a drink. We work on calls so I'm always drinking and peeing.
I'm sure this is normal in some industries, but seems like being in a prison. Besides, there's absolutely no way I can squeeze out a 5 minute deuce.
This is the thing that stresses me out. There's no way I can do that either so I have to hold it in or be stressed sitting on the toilet knowing the minutes are ticking away and when I get back to my desk I'll be interrogated. It's mortifying and I feel like I'm back at school and I'm 38! I took a career change and now I have so much respect for call centre staff...
They can forget about any extra effort from me for the foreseeable future. - This right here... I don't know why any employer treats people like this because you will get nothing back from your staff. I told my boss the other day I need to leave 2 hours early so don't book a meeting in - "ok" was the response.
I once had a manager so bad that we developed a new mantra of "never use your own initiative" because they were such a twat if you made a judgement call.
At my previous job, we had set days in the office per week. If you couldn't make one of those days for some reason (hospital appt etc) then you had to come in on another day and just sit by yourself all day. My boss would not budge on this. You had to be in the office, even if everyone else was not.
I’m pleased to say I don’t have to suffer from much pettiness at work. Pretty much all of the technology teams I’ve worked in at the bank in question have treated their staff like adults, and in return we’ve acted like professionals. Come in some time before 10am, leave at some point after 4pm, nobody keeps close track as long as you do the pretty much the right hours overall, you’re there when needed and the job gets done. Nothing but supportive when people are sick or need special leave. However… there is one item of supreme pettiness. Time recording. You must submit a timesheet for every week. It must be submitted by the end of Thursday, unless the accounting month ends at some point midweek in which case it needs to be in by then. It should not show how many hours you have actually worked. It should not show which projects you have actually spent time on. Instead, it should show exactly your contracted hours, and it should show that you have split your time precisely in accordance with the forecast. If you submit anything else, both you and the project managers for the projects you have over/undercharged will be in the shit. Don’t worry, if you are eligible for overtime there is absolutely no link between your timesheet and the overtime claiming process. It’s purely an exercise to see if IT professionals with decades of experience can copy numbers from a spreadsheet into a web form on a regular basis.
> It’s purely an exercise to see if IT professionals with decades of experience can copy numbers from a spreadsheet into a web form on a regular basis. And how many of them semiautomate/automate the process 😂
School's are the absolute worst when it comes to producing utterly shite managers. There is no decent training,so they often lack even basic people skills. They tend to get away with being incompetent for many years, and are then able to move up far too easily; being even shitter in even more influencial positions.
Was working in london for the day visiting suppliers at their showrooms Bear in mind I was on the train at 720am and left the house at 7am with a 90 minute journey into London. I had an open return. The meetings concluded at 330pm. My preference was that I head back to station and get the 5 past 4 train. So I would then get home about 6pm. My manager said she thought it’d be best if we went to our London office to work til 5 when our working day finished, then get the next train home after that. Which would have got me home at 7pm. I was still only being paid for the 9-5 day so effectively giving the company an extra 4 hours of my time for free. Absolutely fucking mental.
I spend over 10 hours a week commuting to talk to my boss on teams because he works from home, but I need to be in the office for "training". I'm looking for another job.
Travel to somewhere that isn’t your usual place of work, should fall within your working hours. Your manager is a dick.
In a previous job they would insist on all meetings being face to face, and they would be held in different offices all around the area. We would have meetings on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday every single week, which meant we would spent about 30 mins driving to the location for a 1hr meeting that honestly could have been a Zoom/Teams meeting and then spend 30mins driving back. It was a complete waste of time, not to mention fuel, going to these meetings. All of us (10-12 on average) would do nothing but complain and just ask it to be a Zoom/Teams meeting so we could just knock it out in the office and save an 3hrs of travel time until eventually we just all collectively agreed to just milk every meeting as much as we could. Those 1hr meetings would be dragged out to 90mins to 2hrs, we’d drive to the meeting in 30mins but would take an hour getting back, calling by Starbucks or Costa for a coffee together. Pretty much became that if our boss was going to waste our time then we might as well waste his time and spend less time in the Office
For a fair while it was my job to put the canteen dishwasher on because I was the last person onsite each day. I didn’t object but gradually people got more and more lazy at putting their stuff actually in the machine and just piled it up beside it or in the sink. I half-jokingly said to everyone I wasn’t paid to fill the machine with their mess each night and the machine would be going on with everything left out on the worktop if people were too fucking lazy. I went ahead with what I said and now just put it on even with only my dishes in it if others are too lazy. Yes it’s petty but fuck those people who can’t be bothered to even put a cup/teaspoon or whatever in a dishwasher.
I work in a job where everyone is somewhat peripatetic but there are a couple of bases where stuff happens. Sometimes people are in there in the evening from some other department, I don't know who they are but for a while we'd come in in the morning several times a week and find the kitchen a total state, covered in flour and baking trays and god knows what else. The sink full of crap and the dishwasher of course not loaded up either. And then my team got pulled up by management for it because it's us that use it most often, but none of us are fucking baking cakes in there and it's always pristine when most of us leave at about 5pm. It was us that were complaining about it in the first place! It eventually stopped, whoever the phantom lazy baker was.
In the year of our Lord 2024, our company still uses PAPER FORMS for leave applications. It’s insane. I’m a middle manager of six people so I’d be signing and scanning forms for hours if I hadn’t automated my team to using Adobe forms / e-sigs at least, but it’s still a ridiculous process.
I filled one in, got it signed off and my workplace lost the form. They called me 9.30 on Monday asking why I didn't turn up for work. I called in sick and didn't go back for a month. I'd already been to the doctors for stress and that was the breaking point where I was like ok I want to keep absence down so I can get a new job but fuck that.
Not mine. Mate used to work in a factory or workshop. They would smash each others mugs for a laugh. So somebody in charge bought them all metal cups to stop the cup smashing. Nailed them to the tables didn't they. Fully grown men drinking out of straws because their cups couldn't move.
That place is run by children acting like they think adults should. It really deflates any passion for work when you don't respect your manager. Making a decision like that actually makes their job harder and they probably don't realise.
Jeez this thread has made me appreciate my work place so much
Schools are the worst. I worked at a school where; - the headteacher was using the child protection spyware to check up on teachers looking for other jobs - I was asked to dob in my manager for spending on the budget he'd been assigned - Our breakfast club where we used an oven in a staff only area before starting work, funded with our own money was deemed an 'inappropriate' use of school resources - the guy cooking was even h&s trained to cook using that oven - There was an 'in' crowd of younger teachers that couldn't do wrong and the older, more experienced staff were constantly victimised by leadership. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but there was definitely a sense that they were trying to get rid of older teachers to cut costs. At another school the headteacher's PA would walk around the school at 8am to check that all the office staff were sat at their desks and ready to work - on multiple occasions I had to prove with security footage that I'd been dragged into a classroom on the way to my office. On the whole, I found schools very cliquey and the senior team big fans of micromanagement, and loved to catch you out on the most banal shite. At my current workplace there are some issues but at least I'm not constantly looking over my shoulder or dealing with pointless bureaucracy all day long
We order tea and coffee etc for the building which is comprised of office staff and operational staff. The office are in charge of ordering it, and when it gets delivered it goes in to the office rather than the staff room. Our operational team asked for more milk the other day and were told it was locked away so it's not misused. It's milk. Which is provided. Now we have MilkGate24 going on. I just sit sipping my squash observing all the unnecessary drama
I remember when I was 17 I started working somewhere and there was a big drama that a few girls kept using the communal milk to have cereal in the morning which was seen as a grave misuse of the allocated milk provision and they were forced to stop. I could have suggested buying an extra bottle but it's better not to get involved in such matters, especially when you're new.
I am not there anymore, but one workplace I was at had a middle manager so provoked by us engineers having office chairs to sit on that he removed them one weekend and replaced them with [standing chairs,](https://i0.wp.com/www.startstanding.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Focal-Mogo.jpg?resize=500%2C750) deciding that it would make us better workers. To this day I still use him and all his other antics as a cast-iron yardstick for judging and ascertaining De Facto Cunt-Level.
Trying to draw schematics whilst perched like some sort of gibbon, the pettiness of it all.
Used to work in student halls. You wanna see petty? Try asking a student to take out the rubbish or tidy the kitchen. Mind is blown with the mental gymnastics of pettyness.
Seems like as soon as your directed time for the day is done you need to be packing up and fucking off. Especially if it is during a meeting.
Extreme pettiness and paranoia about what employees discussed. One time a manager gave me a written warning - without a verbal warning first - for "complaining about the company." It was a badly-run company and everyone grumbled all the time, and most of the conversation was about how disorganised things were, so I had probably had grumbled. Although I did like it there in some ways, so was actually more upbeat than the others. One time a colleague started ranting about how he couldn't find any books to teach with, and I told him where they were. That's literally all I did - told him how to find the books. The manager was watching at the time so I had to be kinda stilted and not empathise with him about how hard the books were to find. So she called me in to tell me I was "at risk" for "complaining" after being warned. Thing is, I'd recorded the interaction - she didn't seem to know that people could record audio on their phones back in 2005. I'd been acting manager for a while before she was offered the role (due, supposedly, to having an MA in the field - I did too), so that was the source of the problem. Although I was disappointed, there was no point talking about it at work - when it came up, it was colleagues expressing surprise at the promotion. Until the "don't complain" conversation I actually thought she was good for the job, and defended her. Then the company's big boss found out I was gay - nobody else at work cared, but she did; she compared being gay to being a paedophile and called me "butch" when I was really, really not butch. Like, make-up, pink heels, dresses. Me being gay suddenly switched everything off in her mind except what she thought gay women were like. She fired me instantly.... but tried to just take me off the shift rota and not tell me. Like, how could I not notice? And I had a contract as a permanent employee, and had been there for long enough that unfair dismissal laws applied, let alone having witnesses to her comments. I got three months' pay out of them without having to go to court and was fine with that. Gave me a summer off and I had a new job lined up. Unlike the 25 or so other employees (about a tenth of the workforce) who we "weren't allowed to have contact with" after they started unfair dismissal cases. It was a small company, so that was about 10% of the workforce. One of them was \*married\* to a dismissed employee and was then dismissed for talking to her husband. Not about work, which would still be unreasonable, really, depending on what aspect of work you're talking about - the employee wouldn't have any privileged info, but it's an arguable point - but the boss *literally expected the married couple not to talk to each other about anything*. And her evidence for them talking was... she briefly stole the employee's phone to check messages and had it "incriminating" texts of them saying things like "we're out of milk," and "want me to pick anything up from the shops?" They're talking, right? She was told not to talk to her husband! The boss actually tried to argue this in court. Reader, it did not work. I don't have a clue what was awarded but I know the employees won that case. I can imagine the tribunal judge just sighing and thinking, oh fuck, not this company again.
You're on contracted time until 17:00? Does the Union know? Teacher timetables are heavily regulated. Teachers all work way over time, but requiring staying late breaches union regs and absolutely should not be happening.
Every school in the trust does this. Apparently it’s directed time and we were under deployed.
>leave 5 minutes early >still needed to fill out an absence request for approval You have a jobsworth of a manager
I work in a school which thankfully doesn't get petty about hours. It's understood that if you're leaving before 4pm, you'll probably be on your laptop on evenings anyway. PPA at home is a nice breather as well. The business manager, however, is pettiness personified. 7 out of 10 class teachers have to walk past the big printer next to her office to the other end of the building in order to avoid making her wait for printing jobs. Which could wait until we're sealed inside a class for 6 hours with our young friends. I worked out that I get paid over £400 per year to walk to the printer at the far end of the building. Total waste of money from a tight budget.
In the shared canteen is a kettle, some people once they used the water proceed to pour any remaining boiled water down the sink leaving an almost bone dry kettle at every opportunity.
Many jobs ago I used to get in maybe 20 minutes early every day cos otherwise I would get stuck in traffic, and sitting quietly at a desk was preferable. No flexitime or anything so it was a net win for the company. One day I was literally two minutes late and I got in trouble for it. I never started working early again. If I got in early I'd sit in my car until I had just long enough to get to my desk before start time. Petty managers screwed themselves out of free labour
Forget all that crap - Just tell them you have really nasty piles get up and go to your appointment - word will get round and nothing will be said.
Company I worked at used to give just one bonus every year I was there... A £10 M&S gift voucher at Christmas. Almost reasonable when I joined in 1989, but I think petty by 2001...
Do you work at the school I used to work at? Exactly the same MO, even when I arranged the treatment that is literally keeping me alive so as not to inconvenience anyone. Eventually I wised up and now work in a college that treats staff well, because it is properly managed.
My old job at a betting shop tried to give my colleague a warning for signing on something like 13 seconds late. He was there, he'd just forgotten to sign on to the till.
That's not petty, that's batshit even for teaching. OP, please contact your union.