Last week we discussed territorial behavior at work and here are 12 of my favorite stories you shared.
1. The Rolodex
I worked with a manager that kept customer information in a Rolodex to prevent any one else from making calls to them. And I mean a classic Rolodex, the big spinning thing that had index cards with hand written notes. It was kept in a locked drawer, so if the manager was sick or on vacation, then no calls were made and no money was made.
She completely refused to enter the information into the CRM, or to allow anyone to else to enter the information. She even tried to walk out with the Rolodex on her last day.
2. The teabags
I worked at a company that provided free filtered water and coffee. Teabags, however, were kept by the office manager in his desk, and you were required to show your used teabag to get a new one.
I am not a tea drinker, so I never found out how, say, a new employee could get their first teabag.
3. The copiers
When I first started out in my industry 20-something years ago, it was a small tech department of three. I, as an mid-20s female, was grateful to have two kind 50s/60s gentlemen as my mentors. One was our boss, and the other was our network guy. About a year into my tenure, I noticed that a consistent issue we kept having was that no one knew what the name of their nearest copier was when they tried to print. I proposed we changed the names of the copiers from “Copier 289729” to “BldgX-Room123-Copier” in our weekly meeting.
Suddenly the network guy was furious. He hated this idea. It meant that each time we moved the copiers, we would have to update the name. (We moved five or six of them a year.) Boss agreed with me and I implemented the change. It was a resounding success with the employees, and we got a lot of praise for making this change.
But the network guy kept bringing it up … first weekly for a while, then monthly, and settled on 2-3 times a year . He still hated it and thought it was a terrible idea. It didn’t affect him at all, mind you. I managed the copiers. He set up the original system 15 years ago, but my predecessor and then I had been managing them for the last 5+ years when I proposed the change.
Three years after we changed the copier names, our boss retired. I was the interim while they slowly and unsuccessfully looked for a replacement, and then after two years I was hired as the replacement. The department expanded. Any time we hired a new person, he pulled them aside and — without naming names or detailing the history — would “pop quiz” the new hires by saying, “If you had the choice, what would you name the copiers? ‘Copier 289729’ or ‘BldgX-Room23-Copier’?” He was not happy that they all agreed with me.
Come to find out, he didn’t limit his quizzing to our department. He had also shaken down all the department managers, including any new managers hired over the years, and asked them the same question. When I left that org to go to greener pastures, he also sprung it on my replacement. It had been 15 years since we changed the copier names and he never let it go.
What made it more bizarre was that otherwise he was a very friendly and helpful guy.
4. The bathroom
I worked at a family company that took up the whole floor of an office building. For some reason, there were no bathrooms in the office. All 60 employees had to walk to another floor to use a public restroom.
Well, I eventually learned that there were “executive bathrooms” only for The Family. It was the wildest power play. Four guys took the mens and womens bathrooms and converted them into a giant, glamorous bathroom for their own personal use. All us plebians were told that there just wasn’t a bathroom on the whole floor due to some bizarre building design flaw and we had to take the stairs to the public use bathrooms in the lobby.
5. The contacts
I had a boss one time who made me set up a LinkedIn and then insisted that I run by any contact with her before I accepted any connection. Which was absolutely no one. I couldn’t make any connections in industry or she would accuse me of job searching and freak out.
When I finally wised up to her abuse, the first thing I did was add/accepted a bunch of people as “take back my identity” moment.
6. The traffic cone
Years ago, I worked with a traffic cone hoarder. We did not have assigned parking, but we had a parking lot that was appropriate for the amount of people in the building. Yet, we had one woman who kept one of those large cones in her car. When I say cone, it was a filthy, beat up orange cone that she confiscated from a construction site.
She was one of the earliest arrivers so naturally she would get one of the coveted front row spaces. When she would leave for an errand or for lunch, she would put the cone in the space preventing anyone from getting that choice spot.
It drove everyone crazy with the entitlement, yet the CEO wouldn’t put his foot down because this woman was a toxic shrew and he didn’t want to deal with it. I eventually left for a lot of reasons that were a result of weak leadership. The cone situation was just one of the symptoms.
7. The fridges
My old department had a staff room for two distinct teams, one larger general one and a smaller specialist one. There was one fridge, but the smaller team felt there wasn’t enough space for them so they, between themselves, personally saved up money to buy a second fridge just for them.
Using the Grey Fridge and Not The Black One is a key point in induction tours for new staff members in the other team, as putting your milk in the black fridge is a guaranteed way to have your stuff thrown away. If someone is found to be using the wrong fridge, they are lectured and then ignored by the entire specialist team for the rest of their time in the department.
8. The van
Two departments shared a pair of work vans for driving to program sites. Before I was hired, apparently problems with Mr. O (from the other department) always having the van led to the creation of a sign-out calendar.
Mr. O would sign out one van for every day on the calendar, regardless of programming duties. So everyone else would sign out the other one, and if it wasn’t available would go to Mr. O and ask if it was okay to use “his” van (to, ya know, do actually work tasks). He was a retired teacher who had come out of retirement to do this job, very mild and “generous.” His answer was always, “Oh sure, baby, that’s fine.”
Years later, I talked with some people who had worked in his department. He insisted on driving one colleague to her programs and picking her up, so he could keep the van. And apparently every morning he would drive to work in his own vehicle, then get in the work van to drive to get himself coffee, then drive back. WTH?
9. The parking spots
I once worked in a longish building with entrances on either end. People tended to park by the door they used. But only one end of the parking lot had trees, so during the summer people who might usually use the west door would park on the east side of the lot so they could park in the shade. People who were officed on the east end were *furious.* Those were their trees. How dare you park under them and steal the shade that rightfully belonged to them?
10. The pods
My first job out of college had cubicles set up in sets of four where you’d have low walls within your pod and high walls outside of that pod. My boss, who worked a few pods over, decided that whenever someone moved out, he should move in. Whenever anyone else left, he put desktoys on it to claim it, and whoever allocated desks (maybe him?) assumed those were already taken (there was stuff on them after all) and put new people elsewhere.
By the time I got there, he’d claimed an entire four-desk pod for his own megadesk covered in stuff. I don’t know if he used any of them, but they were great for displaying his many tchotchkes.
11. The facility rentals
I worked with someone who used to manage facility rentals – weddings, bridal showers, and conferences – at my museum. These responsibilities were taken away from him because he had no interest in them and had so much work he couldn’t manage them if he wanted to. They were assigned to me.
He kept those responsibilities on his LinkedIn. Not only did board members who followed his account thought that our rental program success was due to his efforts, but he frequently used his account to promote our rental program. Which would have been lovely if he had actually forwarded the inquiries to me or responded to them at all.
I asked if he could edit his LinkedIn because it was legitimately creating hardship, but he refused and said it was illegal for the organization to monitor his social media activity, and our board believed him.
So for the duration of my time there, I just had to accept the fact that we’d get these horribly negative reviews because he would not change his LinkedIn.
12. The reagent
Someone in a lab I once worked in had a sign above their lab bench: “One of these reagents is not what it says on the label.” It stopped the stealing.
