I spent a lot of time at work this week onboarding a new (fabulous) member of my team. This was work that I am frankly thrilled to be doing. The hiring process takes a long time at my work and it always feels like a relief to actually get through it. The position this person is filling has been vacant since last spring, so I’m grateful to finally get someone started in it who I think is going to be excellent.
The onboarding process is always interesting though, because it really makes you aware of all the particular little weirdness about your office culture or processes that you become sort of blind to, until someone new says “um, wait, what is happening here?” And while my current job (which I love) is generally one of the more functional places I’ve ever worked, we still have our quirks.
Spending time thinking about office culture generally, and my office specifically, made me remember two instances in former jobs were I broke office culture rules and got in the dumbest kind of trouble.
The first was at a small private college that, while it had both a President and a board of trustees, was actually run by an ancient woman in the purchasing department who brought some real Roz from Monsters Inc. energy to her work.
In my role at the college, I had access to a purchasing card, which I generally used for buying food for campus events or sometimes school supplies, rarely spending more than a few hundred dollars at a time. One of the school’s purchasing rules was to always make sure that we used our tax exempt ID when buying things, which would help save a little money.
Well, one hot summer day, we were planning an outdoor event for our new students and needed to buy a few bags of ice, so I made a quick trip to the gas station and got a few bags with the p-card, saving the receipt as I always did (rule follower!). A few days later, I got a phone call from “Roz” who was quite unhappy with me because I had forgotten to use the tax exempt card and had been charged 38 cents in tax for the bags of ice. I laughed and said “oh, shoot, sorry about that!” and kind of expected that to be the end of the conversation.
It very much was not.
When it became clear that this was a problem that Roz expected me to solve, I said “well, can I just, like, give you the 38 cents?” and was told “absolutely not” but, don’t worry, she had a solution.
And was her solution that I walk across campus, get the receipt back, drive to the gas station, ask them for a refund of 38 CENTS, drive back to campus, walk back to her office, produce the receipt for the refund, and then sign a form for her records and my HR file to indicate that I had screwed up? Yes. Yes it was.
At my next job at a different college, I also got in trouble with HR and the purchasing department over less than $10, this time over a box of tissues.
Our college had an online portal where you could reorder office supplies from Office Depot (or some place like that). I went in to order some new folders and pens and then noticed that they had an option to order boxes of tissue. In the few months that I had been there, I’d noticed that our office never seemed to have tissue around, which was sometimes problematic as we housed some departments where students tended to cry (financial aid and counseling, mostly. Advising, occasionally). I clicked the link and got a multipack of generic tissue and then placed the order.
A short while later I got an email requesting me to come to HR so I could sign a “violation form” relating to a “purchasing irregularity”. Confused, I went to HR where the senior VP for HR sat me down and explained that I had made a “non allowable” purchase and would need to sign an attestation form indicating that I accepted responsibility for it and that I would also need to reimburse the college for $8.99 for the multipack of tissues.
Now, I worked for a public institution and knew that there were things that we were obviously not allowed to buy with school funds: alcohol, anything gambling related, gift cards, etc. But … tissue?
It turns out that there was a school policy that we couldn’t buy anything that was for “personal use” and tissues were a “personal hygiene” item and thus not allowable. I asked them to clarify why were allowed to supply toilet paper in the bathrooms under that logic because that is definitely a personal hygiene item but that question gained me no traction whatsoever. I ended up having to write them a check for the tissue and was encouraged by HR to not put the tissue out in the common areas of the office so that people wouldn’t “start to expect it to be provided”.
(Please know that for the rest of the time I worked there I could not help the way my eyes rolled whenever anyone in HR said that we were “like a family at XX College”… um, no.)
Obviously, I would love to hear any of your stories about very stupid office rules or dumb things you’ve gotten in trouble for, so feel free to entertain us all in the comments if you are so inclined.
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Some things I was into this week include:
I like salt and vinegar chips but can generally only eat a few before my mouth starts to wimp out. These Goldfish salt and vinegar crisps are a little milder flavor and lighter texture than potato chips and quite tasty.
I’m not currently in a rage phase but I can relate to this essay about female/maternal rage. Hat tip to Stephanie for mentioning it during our writing group.
Silly but made me laugh (sound on required)
Forever impressed by the athletes still competing in their 80s and beyond
In grad school, tea and cookies were served every Tuesday and Thursday at 4 o'clock outside the admin office. The idea was all the labs get together and socialize, cross pollinate, whatever together. I got there a few minutes before 4 one day, and figured I would be helpful by moving the plates of cookies from the front admin office desk out into the common room. I got in trouble for putting the cookies out "before 4". It was probably, like 3:58.
Your toilet paper comment made me LOL!