WEIRD WORKPLACE RULES

(March, 2023) Some companies have strange rules for their employees. Some are over-the-top. From Ask Reddit, Here are some of the weirdest workplace rules:
– “I worked at a law firm as a legal assistant. I only lasted two days. Why? Because they charged you $25 each time you didn’t answer your phone…and they only paid you $7.25 an hour.”
– “I was interviewing for a position. One office rule was that you couldn’t have Post-It notes of any kind. I laughed, thinking it was a joke, but the look I received from the interviewer was anything but comical. I walked out of the interview after telling her she was a little too controlling.”
– “I worked for a place that specifically stated in the employee handbook that women could not wear scrunchies in their hair, only clips.”
– “I had a manager once when I worked retail who didn’t want us to use the word ‘help’. We couldn’t ask customers if they needed help; we had to come up with some other way to say it. One day, my coworker blurted out to a customer, ‘How can I service you today?'”
– “The owner of where I worked hated musicals for some reason and forbade any conversation relating to musical theater.”
– “At the weekly staff meeting we’d go around the table and each talk for five minutes about what we were working on. Boss had an hourglass with sand in it. If you went long, he would interrupt, say NEXT, and flip it over for the next person. If you didn’t say anything, or finished early, then everyone had to sit there and stare at you until the time was up.”
– One of the stupidest, most pointless rules I had to follow was at a coffee shop. We had to make small talk with every single person in line…always. The line is 30 deep on a Monday morning at 7 a.m.? They still expected you to do this. It slowed us up so much. Customers hated it, too. They just wanted their coffee.”
– “At an insurance company, we had to account, on a spreadsheet, for every minute of every day. Each task had to be logged with how long it took to accomplish. If one day we did 10 items in 15 minutes and the next day we only did five, they’d question us on the discrepancy.”
– “I was told to change my first name at work because the boss had the same first name — so it was already ‘taken.'”
– “I worked at a small family business, and it was kept clean by the family. We weren’t allowed to throw away trash from our lunches. The owner made us take it home.”
* PHONE TOPIC: What is the stupidest rule at your company?