DEPARTMENTS

...not exactly a corporation, but...
I worked for a small office furniture installation company for several years. Each year at Christmas, the owner would give us each a generous bonus. On the last year I worked with this company, Christmas crept closer and closer with no bonuses having been given out and no word of whether or not they were coming. The day before Christmas, the owner, who had recently returned from a long weekend in Las Vegas, announced to the company that no bonuses would be given out as it had been a "tough year for us". Some of my co-workers were crushed. Many of them had kids, for whom these bonuses were used to provide a nice Christmas. We're talking about some very blue-collar guys. When we returned to work after the holiday, we were greeted with the site of where our bonuses had really gone. The owner had parked his brand-new, top-of-the-line, 25 foot power boat in the warehouse. He, needless to say, was beeming ear to ear with enthusiasm. The productivity of the installation crews dropped off the charts. I have to say that I should thank him. That one act convinced me to go back to school and earn my degree. He closed the business 2 years later. LINK

I worked for an outbound call center that aggressively slammed real estate agents on marketing products.

Every morning at 6am we had a team meeting with about 40 people all standing around our cubicles.

One particular morning my manager, a 5'8" has been football player whose head connected directly with his shoulders yells at me in a very Vin Diesel "Boiler Room" Moment, "Davis, what the hell are you wearing!? You have f***** us all. We are going to have a terrible day in sales!"

I was silent and thought he was merely being rhetorical, he yells again demanding, "what the hell is on that shirt!?

I respond, "it's a sesame street shirt, you know, big bird, Elmo, Grover, Burt, Ernie."

He yells, "F***!" and shakes his head in disgust.

That day was in fact one terrible day in sales. Later that night I get a call on my phone with a message from my boss, "Thanks for F****** us today with your G** A** shirt, you are never allowed to wear that S*** again"

I showed up the next day with a purple, pink and blue pattern flannel looking shirt that he hated even more! LINK

I used to work for a company that bid on construction tenders, usually worth between 30 and 300 million pounds. For one such bid, for a new school, we made sure to hire an architect with an extensive background in schools. One part of the bid involved this architect answered some questions from the council in a live interview format. He completely flubbed the interview, and seemed unable to answer very simple questions about school-building that even I knew the answer to. We lost the bid right after the interview, and had a sort of post-failure analysis meeting. I was a bit amazed at how badly our man had performed, but the older hands were completely unfazed:

"He probably got a call from one of the competitors in the night, offering him a few hundred grand to intentionally fail the interview, then a position with them if they got the bid. We'll probably do the same thing at the next round of bidding." LINK

Right out of college I was hired by an arrogant blow-hard of a boss. It was a small company... just him, me a part-time assistant and four freelancers. I had worked there for two years, getting regular paychecks -- everything was pretty normal. Then one day, the guy calls me into his office. It seemed that though he had been withholding taxes and Social Security from my wages, he wasn't actually sending that money in to the IRS. He had talked to his accountant and the scheme they worked out was to make me an independent contractor, retroactively to my start date. To do that, he needed his accountant to do my taxes.

Sure thing. I walked and my first call was to the IRS. LINK

I worked in credit card dispute resolutions for a mid sized bank. Customers would complain about an unknown charge on their credit cards and it was my job to investigate and report back to them. This usually took about 30 days. I was at the behest of the credit card providers, not the bank's rules, hence the 30 day turn around time.

Our team was running smoothly until they appointed a new Team Leader and shunted our much beloved usual team leader sideways. This woman was a nightmare. She would hold weekly meetings and tell us all the new procedures that would be implemented, most of which ran contrary to the smooth operation of the team. She was clearly a corporate climber and had a nasty attitude to boot. She would always ask for questions or comments, but she'd trained everyone to be so scared of her reaction that nobody would put up their hands. At the end of the meetings, she would say, "Good work, Team. You're all STARS!!!!"

Upper management wanted to save costs, so they did a review of everyone's job. We were all on contracts so we were cheap fodder anyway. I liked my job until her underling/moron lackey/team leader wannabe was appointed to do an audit of my job. I tried to explain to him over many meetings why some months had a lot of disputes resolved and other months didn't. He JUST.DID.NOT.GET the concept that the disputes were clocked at 30 days from the day I received them, not 30 days from the 1st of each month.

Each meeting with him would find me getting frustrated constantly having to justify my work ethic (which is quite substantial) and him not understanding my plain English explanations.

In the end, it was decided that I wasn't good enough at my job and my contract wasn't renewed. I heard they ended up giving my job to a girl who was completely lazy and spent most of her time on the phone to her boyfriend. Meanwhile, my perfect turn around record was reduced to at least 280 disputes outstanding longer than 90 days! What happened then? The credit card providers ended up following their rules and denying anything older than 30 days and the bank wearing the costs of the dispute as they tried to keep their customers happy.

I went on to greener pastures and lived a happy corporate life. I ended up finding out from old work colleagues that the corporate climbing Team Leader lost her job in the downsize. LINK