Several years ago, I interviewed at an office for a job. The interview started okay in the beginning, and then the office manager surprised me with these questions.

Office Manager: “Are you single, married, divorced, or widowed?”

Me: “Divorced.”

Office Manager: “Do you have any children? If so, what are their ages, what grades are they in, where do they go to school, and who takes care of them?”

Me: “May I ask how this is relevant to the job?”

Office Manager: “We don’t like to hire single mothers who have young children and no babysitters. If your child gets sick, we expect you to have a backup for them. We don’t want anyone missing any work for their kids. We don’t allow anyone to bring their kids to work. It would cause chaos, and no one would be able to get any work done. Also, we expect you to come in sick. If you need to go to the doctor, it will have to be done after work. No exceptions.”

Me: “Okay. I don’t wish to answer your questions as they are not relevant to how I can perform the job. I will end this interview now.”

I got up and walked out. A few weeks later, I got another job at a different office, and thankfully, they didn’t ask these questions or say those other things about getting sick. They said if you are sick, you should stay at home and don’t bring whatever you have into the office.

At the new office, I met a girl who told me she had previously worked for the first office where I’d interviewed, and it was horrible.

She went on to tell me that the office manager fired people for anything. The girl told me she got fired for leaving work early when her toddler son fell and hit his head at daycare and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. The office manager said, “I hired you to work for me, not your son. If you need to see your son, you can do it after work.”

Another person was fired for getting into a car accident on the way to work and being taken to the hospital with a concussion. She was fired for not calling to report that she would not be in prior to 8:00 am.

Lastly, another person was fired for going to the post office to pick up the office’s post office box mail. The manager timed how long it took each person to make the trip, and it averaged twenty minutes. This person took like 28 minutes (due to a wreck) and was fired because the office manager decided that they must have stopped off somewhere for personal reasons.

The office with the terrible office manager is a law firm, and the office manager is the managing attorney’s wife.

The girl said that the office manager would bring her four-year-old grandson to work almost every day as her son (who worked for another company) was a single dad with no babysitter. The child spent all day being disruptive toward everyone, and the office manager didn’t do anything about it.

I’m so thankful I walked out of that interview.

I have heard that they closed a couple of years ago.

I’ve been at my current employer for more than ten years. For the first five years, I was the supervisor of our production area. After that, I switched to IT. Since then, I have new bosses (who are located in a different branch), but as my old boss is the manager for the branch where I am located, I still have to deal with her regularly.

Our company is a scanning service, so we have a lot of high-value documents on location: banking documents, deeds, employment documents, and all manner of correspondence. You name it, we got it. Obviously, security is a major concern as we would be liable for any damage or losses incurred. But both my former boss and the guy who now holds my former position care more about things being convenient, even if they go against regulations.

One repeat discussion I’ve had with them is about how they like to prop open doors to our production area for hours on end, often without anyone supervising the open doors. Obviously, this is a breach of data security, as anyone could just walk in, grab some documents, and walk out again. In addition, as these are fire doors, it is against German law to keep them propped open, as this endangers people in case of a fire.

The last time I noticed that door blocked, I decided to send a reminder email to people in our branch, pointing out the danger as well as the relevant part of criminal law. I honestly expected to be ignored as usual, but then [Former Boss] replied. The following is a chain of emails going back and forth.

Former Boss: “Do your own work! It’s not your job to play security. If the door is open, it is open for a reason. Also, these are not fire doors; inform yourself.”

Me: “If I note a violation of criminal law, let alone one endangering everyone in the building, it is absolutely my job to point that out. Also, it’s interesting that you would accuse me of not informing myself, as you don’t seem to have done that, either. Our doors are [full serial number of door brand]. You can find the technical specification under DIN 4102 (German standard for fire doors) under this link.”

Former Boss: *Sarcastically* “Props for having the time to busy yourself with that. We carried boxes into the production area; it wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Let this be my problem and keep out of it. Nothing was blocked.”

Me: “The door to the production area was held with a wedge. The door to the office area was held open using a fire extinguisher (which is somewhat ironic). So, saying nothing was blocked is provably false. However, it’s moot to keep discussing this; I did my duty and pointed out the problem. At least no one can claim they didn’t know if anything happens now.”

I had started to CC my bosses starting with the second email, as I wanted to raise awareness of the tone of these replies. Unbeknownst to me, one of them forwarded the whole exchange to the safety officer in our main branch. (My branch doesn’t have one.) I only knew when we got the following answer to my last email.

Safety Officer: “WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?! EVERY EMPLOYEE HAS A DUTY TO POINT OUT DEFICIENCIES IN THE WORKPLACE!”

He then proceeded to point out the sections of employment law that obligate any employee to look out for their own health and security, as well as those that empower employees to make suggestions to their employer where health and security are concerned. He also pointed out all the problems with propping up a fire door; words like “gross negligence” and “life insurance” were used.

I later heard through the grapevine that [Former Boss] called [Safety Officer] and whined about how inconvenient it was not to be able to keep these doors open, but she didn’t get far.

Related:
Safety Schmafety

I’m a middle-aged woman, and I volunteer at my kids’ school library once a week. One time, the regular librarian was gone and there was a substitute librarian. I’m not sure where she was from, but her accent suggested a region of the world known for being homogenously Christian (as in, a different one other than Alabama). We were alone in the library and started chatting.

Substitute Librarian: “And you do this every week? You’re such an angel! I can surely tell that God sent you to this school to witness through your good works…”

She went on in that vein for a while, and I mostly just nodded and smiled; I was raised Christian, but I’m no longer exactly practicing. I don’t remember what her exact question was that led to this, but then we had the following exchange.

Me: “Then, my wife and I moved here—”

Substitute Librarian: “Your wife?”

Me: “Yep.”

Substitute Librarian: “You’re married to a woman?”

Me: “Yes.”

Substitute Librarian: “But you said you have kids! Were they…” *makes a weird hand gesture* “You know, needle babies?”

Me: “Oh! No, actually, my wife was my husband for fifteen years first, before she transitioned, so they’re our biological kids. She’s just a woman now.”

Substitute Librarian: “But… how?”

She seemed genuinely curious and more baffled than judgmental (and the library was still empty other than the two of us), so I ended up basically explaining Queer 101: how transitioning works, how you can be bisexual even when monogamous, how transitioning doesn’t actually change your genitalia unless you opt for additional surgery (which many trans people don’t, my wife included).

Normally, I don’t answer intrusive questions like that, but I think she legitimately had no idea that this whole world existed! In the end, her conclusion came down to:

Substitute Librarian: “Well, I still think you are a wonderful person doing God’s work. It’s good that you’re staying with your husband even though he’s… going through some things… because divorce is a sin and too many people just give up.”

Sigh… So close!

My dad passed about ten years ago, and my mom just passed this year. When I was collecting my inheritance from my mom’s passing, I wanted to transfer her accounts from her advisor in her home state of New Mexico to my advisor closer to home.

As I went through the process of transferring the accounts, I got a call from the advisor. He begged me to leave the account in his hands because after my dad passed, he had a whirlwind romance with my mom and wanted to keep managing that account to remember her.

I admit, my response wasn’t very professional. I said, “Ew,” hung up, and finalized the transaction.

This just happened to a coworker of mine who is active-duty military. She’s been in a leadership class all day, so she left her military-issued laptop in my office for safekeeping while she’s in class. 

For those not familiar with US military IT regulations, there are a great many things that cannot ever be plugged into a government computer’s USB ports — chiefly anything with internal memory such as flash drives, cameras, and cell phones. Doing so causes the government computer to report the unauthorized plug-in to the network, and the network security people take steps to secure the device from possible attack.

As mentioned, [Coworker]’s laptop has been sitting in its computer bag in my office since she left for her class, and nobody has touched it. A little bit after her class broke for lunch, [Coworker] got a phone call from her Chief Petty Officer. It seems the network security people had been frantically trying to reach [Coworker] about an unauthorized plug-in to her computer. Since she was in class and her phone was therefore turned off (Navy tradition says anyone whose phone rings during training has to buy donuts for the whole class the next day), they couldn’t reach her and therefore decided to shut off not merely her computer but her entire network access.

Once she’d turned her phone back on and started seeing all the calls from network security and her Chief, [Coworker] called the Chief to find out what was going on. After she was told about the “problem”, [Coworker] talked to me and found out that no one had been anywhere near her laptop at all. Confused, [Coworker] called the Chief again to find out how to fix the problem.

She was told it would be no problem. The Chief would annotate that he had counseled [Coworker] about network security, and she would have to retake the online network security annual training. Once these were accomplished, [Coworker] would be able to get back into the network to do her military job as Leading Petty Officer for the shop.

Most of the readers familiar with various IT disasters are doubtless nodding sagely as they can see where this is going. In order to regain access to the network, [Coworker] had to take a network security training course on the network, and all of her network access had been shut off. She couldn’t even get into the network from another computer because network security had killed all of her access rights.

After laughing until I was blue in the face, I strongly suggested she take the laptop to the network security office and kindly ask them how she could retake the security training if they’d shut off her access. She was too tired to get into a fight after a day in the classroom, so she called the Chief and told him someone else was going to have to handle the morning muster reports and other administrative tasks she normally handled until someone at network security realized the Catch-22 situation they had created.

Network security is actually a pretty important job for government workers — especially military — but some of the network security administrators are full-on caricatures who absolutely belong here on Not Always Right.