DEPARTMENTS

I've been working for my company for 3 years. We recently underwent a "restructure", which as far as most of us are concerned means an excuse to dump staff.

As part of this restructure, a lot of admin jobs came up, including my own. Now I like to think I'd done pretty darn well at my job, and it requires a little more technical knowledge than a regular admin job, due to it involving asbestos knowledge.

But still, I had to apply for my own job, along with many other admin staff. I was informed that my interview would involve a manager and a HR representative. When I went to the interview, I found that it actually consisted of *six* managers. This threw me straight away, and I was a bit nervous throughout the interview, but felt confident that since I knew so much about the job, I'd be fine.

I was informed less than a week later that I hadn't got my own job, and what was more I had to train the clueless girl that did get it how to do my job! Nice going... LINK

My most embarrasing day at the job was when I crashed into the clear glass doors of my office, while I was holding my mocha. Plus it was my birthday, that day, and I was wearing all white.
Every single person in the office laughed. Even though I was the boss of everybody there.
On my next birthday, just when I got to the office; one of the employees came up to me, holding a mocha, and spilled it on my shirt.
Suddenly all the employees jumped out from their cubicles and yelled, “HAPPY BROWN SHIRT DAY!!!”
Every single person was wearing brown stained shirts.
Now they do this every year, and I gave them all promotions.

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

I worked for a small stand-alone operation within a large multi-national corporation. Our 1,000 square foot front office building had 10 people working in it with our GM's office in the corner.

The GM was in over his head in every way except when it came to whom he made friends with at Corporate. Eventually his friendships paid off and he got promoted to Vice President. Now a big shot, he needed special treatment. No longer could he walk in the front door with all of the "little people." He had carpenters cut a hole in the side of the building and put in a door so he could have his own private entrance to his office. LINK

I used to work in an office estate out in the middle of nowhere- we were ferried in by minicab from the train station at nine, taken back at six- you were otherwise trapped. My job was the 'change request manager'. Every week I would have a meeting where all the problems with the program we were working on would be presented and I had to approve or deny funding for the fix. Since the project had gone over budget well before I even began working, I was under instruction to always decline the fix- my job was to tell people no.

The company was crazy about buzzwords. We didn't have problem solvers, we had 'solution architects'. The architecture metaphor was well and truly out of hand, instead of saying they had a fix, they said they had a 'solution blueprint'. Once I was asked to fix something, and I sarcastically said: "Well I'll just load up AutoCAD, lay out the foundation for the solutions building with some answer-concrete, and then maybe write up some budget cladding on top of it?" This suggestion was met with enthusiastic agreement.

There were two people whose sole job was to make life working in the office estate more bearable. Every year they came up with a campaign to make people feel better about their jobs. One year it was giving to the Cancer Research Fund. They installed a projector screen in the lobby and looped an ad for the Cancer Research Fund on it 24/7- we were constantly subjected to images of children looking in the mirror to see their mother fading away behind them while sad music played. Work had quite literally become as 'fun as cancer'. LINK