Office humor

As I've mentioned many times here, I work from home. I'm not self-employed; I work for a company that allows many employees to have home offices. I am incredibly fortunate to be able to do this, as it allowed us to move here to the beach. There is very little in the way of professional employment here, so the only way we could move was for me to bring my current job with me.

Having a home office spares me much of the usual office drama, but I certainly had my share of it in the past.

I once worked in a call center for a public utility where we had to raise our hand and be given permission by a supervisor to stop taking calls so we could leave our desk to go and use the bathroom. Once approved, the supervisor placed a big orange flag on our cubicle so other supervisors would know someone was not taking calls. If the maximum number of people were away from their desks, we had to wait until one returned in order to use the bathroom.

Using vacation days was another horror. Leave days had to be scheduled in advance, by seniority. They literally passed around a calendar and everyone selected their vacation dates in the order in which they were hired. Only a limited number were allowed off at any given time, and some had 4 weeks of vacation. This was done in November of the previous year. Then if someone gave up a day or a week, the passing of the calendar happened again, to give everyone the opportunity to select the day or week given up. It was horrible. I remember having the choice of Feb and March for my week's vacation.

So I am no stranger to office drama, that's for sure. After several years in the same office, I found a sign to hang on my cubicle wall which I thought was funny:
"Beatings will continue until morale improves".
All my co-workers thought it was funny too, but our supervisors didn't. One pretended she didn't understand and asked me to explain the sign to her. When I did, she asked me why I thought it was funny. Clearly, she did not appreciate it.

These thoughts came to mind today because a friend sent me an email that included the following:

As you can imagine, I loved these and had to share them.

What's YOUR office horror story?

Crush du Jour: Daniel Norell