"No samurai swords on the floor "


Easy rule to follow, really, but ridiculous that it needs to exist.

djseifer Report

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My last job was as a cleaner. It was a b******t job in a care home to supplement my real job there. The supervisor was a micromanaging old b***h.
Up to and including, no stopping for a coffee for one minute. It was so bizarre.


In my new job someone was making drinks for everyone and asked if I wanted one.  I was like "are we allowed?" and they looked at me like I was an alien.

DifficultCurrent7 Report

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When you are walking and have a cup of coffee, it will be in your left hand, you're left arm will make a 90 degree angle while you are walking with your forearm parallel to the ground. Yoy can not drink the coffee while walking.

MattKane1 Report

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A college access nonprofit I used to work at has a culture of hugging for staff and students. They mentioned this at my interview, but I really didn’t think that it was a “rule”. Fast forward to when I had started, each morning, every employee had to go around the office and hug every staff member before sitting at your desk. If you were already sitting at your desk, you had to stand up and hug every other staff member as they arrived to work and walked to your desk. It was awful.

buggyakaevan Report

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Bank of Nova Scotia executives signed with different color pens. They tracked down and reprimanded some clerk who had used a color reserved for an executive.

oddlotz Report

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We weren’t allowed to leave at the end of our shift unless our replacement was there. So if I was working first shift and the guy working 2nd no called/no showed I had to stick around until they could find someone to replace me. Even worse is that the multiple times this happened the one that didn’t show up for work suffered no real consequences unlike I would have if I left them understaffed for some reason.

kylexy929 Report

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Had to wear a full saftey harness even though there was no where to attach it to at all.

Resident_Dinner_5258 , Josue Isai Ramos Figueroa / unsplash (not the actual photo) Report

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No talking to each other unless its work related....we started calling out the boss and his son for talking about sports during work hours ,that rule lasted until lunch time.

Madatory shop meeting at 10 am every morning, on day 3 we were all there in the office while boss was on the phone talking about BS to someone , nobody was working for the whole time he was on the phone. Day 4 Boss wasnt in so we had the meeting just sitting around doing nothing for an hour. Day 5 mandatory meetings are cancelled.

MRV-DUB Report

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When I worked as a recruiter in the HR department of a major corporation, I spent hours a day "approving" and forwarding resumes of qualified candidates on to this one hiring manager. Just to create a paper trail of her "considering" them. Meanwhile, she had the people she wanted to hire, all totally unqualified friends or referrals of friends or relatives, also apply. She then would call me on the phone and give me the names of the unqualified dolts to ensure I also forwarded them for her consideration.

This was, fortunately, a 6 month consulting gig for me. I never encountered it that blatantly at any of the other Fortune 500 companies I consulted to. But I did have another gig where the Staffing Manager ordered me to violate multiple ethical and legal standards. I completely ignored those orders, and my contract was not renewed.

NickDanger3di Report

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No microwave popcorn allowed because the owner of the company, who worked out of a different location several states away, did not like the smell.

55124 Report

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Worked at a soul sucking call center where your bathroom breaks were deducted from your 15s. And if you did get up and go to the restroom (this was a wfh gig) you’d get a teams message after 30 seconds saying “are you ok why aren’t you taking calls we have calls holding get back in ready”.

Batetrick_Patman , Tima Miroshnichenko / pexels (not the actual photo) Report

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I asked for a different calculator at work because the one I was using didn't have all the functions I needed and the woman in charge of supplies denied me and told me the one I was using was fine. Then I left work and cried in my car and went to Walmart and bought a f*****g calculator.

LauraPa1mer Report

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I worked in an office where we were not allowed to take notes on yellow legal pads. Only spiral-bound notebooks were allowed.

dwenglish , Sara / flickr (not the actual photo) Report

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I once came in late to work, by literally 1 minute. My manager called me at 9am on the dot, as I was walking up the stairs to enter the office. I got a warning for not answering her call to inform her I was walking up the stairs.

Defiant_Island_9060 Report

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I worked at a skating rink when I was 14-18. Typical day shifts were from 12-7 when the place was open for birthday parties and such. Halfway through the shift, if they decided it wasn’t that busy and they might not need you for the second half, they’d ask you not to clock back on from your lunch break. Then you had to wait, off then clock, for up to an hour sometimes, for them to decide they for sure didn’t need you and you could go home. If you left without the manager okaying it, you were written up.   

This was back in like 2003, and the only reason they got away with it is because all of the employees were kids and we were all friends with each other and with most of the regulars, and we all liked to skate, so most of us were there hanging out until the place closed even when we weren’t on the clock. We didn’t know that what they were doing was hella illegal.

stephanonymous Report

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I was banned from wearing headbands when I worked as a barista in a café. Owner saw me wearing it one day and made the manager take me aside later to tell me I couldn’t wear them anymore. Stated reason was it made me look too “ethnic.”.

trickybritt Report

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I used to work in a shop, and there we had to ask permission to use the bathroom, and even during breaks, when I think it should be normal to go to the toilet.

girllovescuddling Report

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Worked in an up market hotel, here's some of the crazy rules I had to follow
1) always use a company pen to write anything down
2)If you need water you must crouch under the bar so guests dont see you drinking, you cant be seen to be tired.
3)Social media must always be private so guests cant look you up, you must not be seen to have a life outside the hotel, it was unprofessional.
4)Ice cream must always be scooped in professional style quinnels (none of us had restaurant experience, we were bartenders) or it couldn't be served
5)Glasses from the bar couldn't leave the bar unless they had liquid in or were dirty
6)We weren't allowed to say no to a guest, to the point where someone spent a whole day building a flat pack bunk bed set for a guest because her kids wanted that instead of separate.
7)If they heard a guest discussing you, you were under investigation and if they heard a guest say anything negative, fired with immediate effect. They had to look pristine at all times. One afternoon I had to juggle 150 orders alone in 30C heat in tights and I forgot one, I got fired for it.
8)If you did get fired, they asked you not to discuss it with anyone, they asked me not to tell anyone about the rumours management spread about us, about how I was treated, etc. However I didn't sign anything and it was years ago
9)This was a multi million chain, they had cruise ships, they had hotels, etc. But they were checking us all to the penny. I got caught putting 10p change in the tip jar from a guest and was written up for not giving it back to the company. I got chased out on my way home because they found that I gave a replacement cola bottle to a guest.

Theres probably loads more but those are things I can think of.

Complete-Mess4054 Report

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A friend just told me they would have cake in the break room for birthdays, but the time spent “celebrating” (awkwardly standing around with a slice of cake) would have to be made up at the end of the day.

kit_kat_barcalounger , Richard Burlton / unsplash (not the actual photo) Report

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Was working at an Office Depot briefly (I quit after less than a week). One morning, not a single customer was in the store. I asked the store manager if I could straighten up the front of the store til a customer came in. “No. You have to stay behind the register so it looks like we’re prepared in the event a customer comes in.” Literally supposed to just stand there like a robot. I went to lean against the wall. Manager calls from the back room after seeing me on camera, “No leaning. You have to just stand there.”

With no customers even in the store. Just stand still, on concrete, behind a register, indefinitely. All for a measly $8 (back in 2007). I quit the next day. What a f*****g joke that job was.

Heffe3737 Report

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At my company years ago, you could go out for dinner on business travel - full dinner, including wine and dessert at the best restaurant in the city - and charge it all off on your expense account. No problem.

But if you just grabbed a $4 can of peanuts for dinner from the minibar at your hotel after work - expense denied.

Gorf_the_Magnificent Report

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McDonald's.

We deleted orders from the Screen and sent Cars to parking Lot without reason in Order to get better waiting time statistics.

Because of this Corporate b******t the real waiting time gets longer and there are more mistakes, but Nobody Cares.

Icy_Cry_8825 Report

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I had a micromanaging GM who suddenly announced we could only have one nail per wall in our offices to hang up something. Some of us had been in our offices for years and they were highly personalized. It was crazy.

radicallymoderate Report

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If they ran short of people to work, and they managed to get you on the phone, you had no choice and had to come in if they asked. It was required. But if you didn’t pick up the phone, they couldn’t prove you got the voicemail and they would keep searching for someone. I was not on an “on call” shift at the time.

BoredToRunInTheSun Report

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I was working as a historian and we published government documents sorted by year, commented. I was done with 1974 and wanted to start 1975, my lazy boss told me I could not start until she finished her part of 1974, so I didn’t do anything but watch movies and write my thesis on paid time for 6 months.

DasallmaechtigeJ Report

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Women were required to wear dresses and stockings. This was in the 1980’s. Also, I got into trouble for not walking quickly enough past the boss’s office.

XRaysFromUranus Report

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No headphones.

I was operating a reactor vessel which consisted of two very loud machines, and the monitoring station was right in between them. It was ear-splitting. So I bought a noise-canceling headset which cut the loud rumbling, but allowed me to hear my co-workers over the noise.

Management objected. They didn't want people listening to music while on the job, so they had banned all types of earbuds, headphones, etc.

I explained that I was just using the noise-canceling function, and demonstrated it to the manager. He agreed that it was very helpful against the noise, and saw that I wasn't listening to music or anything else.

But he still went with the "rules are rules" approach and the ban held - no headsets allowed. I'll never understand how a person can manage with his head so far up his a*s.

kirradoodle Report

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No personal phone calls allowed, even during breaks.

OkraRepresentative16 Report

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I unfortunately worked at burger King during covid, I was the manager. In drive through we had to have customers put cash, coins, and credit cards into a random plastic container they gave us, when giving change back it had to go in the same plastic container. When handing food out it had to be in the container, even a single drink had to be handed out awkwardly in a plastic container.

The owner would sit at home watching security cameras and would damn near instantly call the store if someone didn't use the f*****g container.

So their idea to prevent people getting sick was to make everyone reach into and touch the same plastic container, we were only required to clean it once every 6 hours.

Hated that job, district manager treated us all like s**t, f**k you Judy.

DickMcLongCock Report

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Being obliged to always wear a suit, matching shoes and tie, even if you had to pick up some stuff from the office outside of normal working hours or in weekends. This rule was also enforced for customer visits. We had one customer which had a parking spot at 2km from their office, which required people to walk through some muddy field. Even then we were obliged to wear a suit, and matching shoes and tie.

Th3L0n3R4g3r Report

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Don't give receipts to homeless people.

I worked for an upscale grocery store in an area with a lot of homeless people. There was a lot of ready to eat food options including a salad/soup/hot food bar, sandwich counter, and pizza by the slice as well as a seating area. Obviously for someone without a place to cook who likely would get turned away from restauraunts this was perfect.


A lot of the local homeless population came in to get food and the vast majority were decent people, were polite and kept things clean. Even most of the ones with obvious serious mental illness. I even remember a (most likely) schizophrenic woman who would meticulously wipe every inch of the table and chair she used before and after.


Anyway they did a lot of stuff to try to deter homeless people just because they didn't want them seen in the store. First they tried getting rid of reusable dishes and only having takeout boxes available to nudge people to leave the store with their food.


Then they took out all the chairs at the tables and made people ask a cashier for a chair with their purchase, but not let homeless people. Obviously it didn't work, cashiers were too busy to deal with that and homeless people just stood at the tables or used a chair the cashiers didn't have time to collect and lock up again.


Then they put code locks on the bathroom and put the code to enter on the bottom of the receipt. It changed daily. Staff weren't to give it out to anyone, and we were told we're not to provide receipts to the homeless when they purchase something and just give them a paid sticker so they can't even take a p**s.


Needless to say I didn't follow the rule at all.


Got written up for it once when I gave a receipt to a guy who was wearing dusty clothes covered in paint and the manager was right there. Funny thing was the guy was clearly some kind of contractor/tradesman who just got off work, not homeless.


Anyway I'd been taring the cardboard takeout containers as the heavy ceramic salad bowls that we no longer had for most of the homeless customers for a while because f**k da police, so I guess they were right to fire me in the end. They never caught onto the tare thing though.

13thmurder Report

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For most of 2020 during Covid restrictions I had to clean all surfaces in the office three times daily and keep a log of it which I had to email to the district manager. I was the only one working there, who was I sanitizing it for?

stephers85 Report

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I got written up for not tucking my shirt in. Same job, I had to cover my nose piercing with a bandaid.

Guaranteed not one customer cared if I had my shirt tucked in. I was behind a counter. And more people commented on the bandaid than ever would have on the piercing.

kindnessoffensive Report

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Punching a timeclock for a salaried position. Ostensibly, it was because the clock was one of our products, and having everyone use it was part of the testing, but the owners were super old-school and were probably low-key using it to see when people were in the office.

Though I barely used it (and would occasionally forget to clock out and have like a 3-day shift in the records, lol), and that doesn't seem to have been held against me.

kooshipuff Report

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Whoever is late for a meeting needs to bring chocolates for all team members next day.

chutiyabachcha Report

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No coats on the back of chairs. No bags near desks. We just worked at a desk on a computer.

T_raltixx Report

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