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In my first job after college, I shared a cubicle with another worker. For whatever reasons, our desks were next to each other, rather than spaced out. I want
by fatnoah 5y ago
In my first job after college, I shared a cubicle with another worker. For whatever reasons, our desks were next to each other, rather than spaced out. I wanted to rotate my desk 90 degrees and had mentioned this to my manager. In a near panic, he asked if I'd moved anything. I hadn't moved anything, so he told me the proper procedure to move the desk.
I put in the request and about 3 weeks later, two people came to move the desk. I'd already unplugged any wiring, so one guy simply picked it up and rotated it. At that point, I found out my network cable (this is in the days before WiFi) for my PC was too short to reach the new desk location. I had to put in another request for wiring, and had to wait a week and a half for someone to come with a longer cable. During that time, I sat on the floor, with my monitor sitting on my chair. While installing the new cable, he asked if I'd unplugged the previous cable before the desk move. When I told him yes, he told me not to worry and that he wouldn't note that, but that I shouldn't do it again.
While I totally understand work rules that exist to ensure that workers aren't being made to perform duties that they're not contracted for AND to prevent companies from simply doing end-runs around them, when things reach this level of absurdity, it really sours things. Of course, the nature of "contract" is that common sense is hard to dictate and it does open the slippery slope. "I was just moving the desk in my cube" becomes "I was just moving the desk to the cube next door" to "I was just moving it on the same floor" etc.
- mc32 5y agoHa! I recall something similar some time ago at one of the then big valley companies. There was a big procedure around moving equipment and one could not do it oneself --it required a ticket and then a day or so later some guys would come over and move things that I could have done myself with one of those rubbermaid restaurant service carts.
- fatnoah 5y agoIronically, my previous job was an internship at a big valley company, who's former HQ is now occupied by one of the biggest valley companies. There, I needed to ship a bunch of equipment to another office. It needed to be there in 3 weeks, but the soonest the shipping department could pick it up was 4 weeks for some reason. However, there was an unspoken agreement w/the folks there that anything that made it to the shipping area would be shipped w/no questions asked as long as it "just appeared" there. So, over the course of a few nights, I stayed late and moved the equipment to the dock, labeled it appropriately, and everything made it to the destination on time.