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votes
What workplace absurdity are you forced to live with?
Bureaucratic nonsense; a glaring inefficiency; “that’s just how we do things here”; etc.
Whatever it is, it’s absurd, but you’re also powerless to do anything about it and just have to live with it.
Tell us all about it.
Note: “workplace” can refer to career, school, home — wherever you do work in the face of absurdity
The last few days I am the only thing preventing the older students from steamrolling the younger ones during the recess transition. I don't like this because:
A) it's entirely avoidable
B) there's no communication
C) I'm that asshole teacher telling the kids to sit and wait
AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH
The company spends an ungodly amount of money bringing in catered lunches, but we have to fly economy. I'm not looking for first class, but premium economy is much more civilized.
One time I was accidentally bumped up to premium plus on a 16 hour flight. I think it was one of those 'your first hit is free' things. But it didn't work on me! Honestly it didn't feel much different. Sixteen hours in a seat in a tin can is sixteen hours in a seat in a in a tin can.
However, if they bumped me up to first every so often I might just refuse to fly economy...
I fly economy but I think for my longer haul flights I might just start paying for premium economy or more. I'm tall but with quite long legs so I just don't fit nicely in airplane seats. My "poor mans" premium economy has been to just take an aisle seat and mildly man-spread into the aisle. However, for my longer international flights, this only works for so long.
A previous company I worked at had the classic "IT runs the entire company but is given a shoe string budget" that many people have heard over and over.
Our company was spending out the nose on the shipping cost of me needing to send people a different laptop and having them send me theirs current laptops. Limping along 5-7 year old laptops for field work when every thing that is done by our employees is in the field is logged in our internal ERP system is nuts. Not only the shipping cost, but also the time spent that they were just waiting for things to load/process.
I ended up getting approval for a stop gap measure when I showed just how much we were spending to replace the disk drives with SSDs when old laptops came in, which helped immensely as a lot of the issues were HDD related due to our guys using the laptops in the field/in their trucks.
After 2 years I finally was able to get the policy adjusted to get automatic approval to replace any laptop over 5 years old once they started having issues, with a plan to eventually get down to a 3-4 year refresh cycle depending on the specs of the laptop issued.
I actually would get calls from guys in the field when they would get their new laptop thanking me because it saved them so much time having a system they didn't need to wait, which was nice.
A big inefficiency in my organization is probably the proliferation of AI-slop generated developer infrastructure. I got moved to a new org back in June and this org was only formed back in March. From day one, the infrastructure that developers in this org use has been hacked together in the name of moving fast. However, they have moved so fast that quite literally every single day, there is a large enough incident that blocks developers from doing the work they're told to do for multiple hours at a time. Someone built a little dashboard tracking reliability and out of the last 90 work days, only 20 have been incident free. It's absurd.
The dart to a calendar method of planning major feature releases. If I have to rally myself and my team to hit some bullshit deadline that has a 50/50 chance of slipping, one more time, I'm going to lose it. Holy shit.