Workplace WTFs

Friday 5 March 2004

Imagine sharing a workplace with the following people, all of whom are earning about the same as you:

• employee #1: gets to work every day between 10 and 11:30 am, despite policy saying staff must arrive by 9 am, and seldom makes up the time by staying late
• employee #2: always gets to work an hour late, always takes an hour and a half lunch, always leaves a half-hour early; total maximum time at work each day: 6 hours
• employee #3: told to do a task by manager, including a hard deadline with customer consequences, utterly fails to do the task in time or at all
• employee #4: decides not to come to work for personal reasons, and announces that he's telecommuting that day, despite policy forbidding telecommuting for the group
• employee #5: takes two-hour lunches or leaves an hour early, never informing manager or co-workers that he's gone or when he'll make up that time
• employee #6: makes random trips to office supply store for various job-financed items, including hands-free headset, supposedly to make job easier
• employee #7: spends most of day in office with the door closed and blinds shut; unofficially caught playing network Doom with hands-free headset during one of these times
• employee #8: routes desk phone to work-provided cell phone, then uses this to screen calls, including not answering work-related calls
• employee #9: takes a company vehicle everywhere, even buildings that are a few hundred feet away; if no vehicles available, delays work until one becomes available
• manager #1: has ignored above infractions by employees #1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9 for the last five years
• manager #2: brought in to manage team due to manager #1 being too busy, ignores all 9 infractions despite evidence of all of them

What would you do? On one hand, you can be like these nine employees and just slack off and get away with it. On the other hand, you have to wonder if someone does know and is keeping them off the promotion list, so you can continue to do more than your share of the work yet receive no praise, higher raise, or other reward. As for the two managers, it has been theorized that they're simply afraid to stand up to their underlings, for whatever reason. I personally can't make any sense of the situation.

DISCLAIMER: This is not my workplace nor myself I am talking about, because after all, who in their right mind would share such details and risk trouble? No, all of the above was...a story, told to me by a very dear friend who hates some aspects of their job and felt the need to vent. Also, "WTF" in this rant's title stands for _What The F***_ just in case you didn't know.