the insufficiently festive cookies, “no visible heads” policy, and other stories of ridiculous micromanagement

Last week we talked about ridiculous examples of micromanagement, and here are 16 of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The insufficiently festive cookies

My boss decided we all should make cookies and do a cookie swap for Christmas. The cookies needed to be sufficiently festive and colorful, however. She brought in a cookbook with pictures of cookies on the front to show types would pass muster. She specifically pointed out some powdered sugar covered chocolate cookies as being not colorful, but they would be allowed because a beloved relative of hers used to make them during the holidays.

I happened to like to those cookies, and they were easy to make, so I brought them. My boss then pointed them out during the party as insufficiently festive.

2. The keyboard shortcuts

Early in my career I was a data entry monkey for a non-rofit, and I worked fast (100 words a minute typing speed and such), and it freaked out my manager — who had no aptitude for computers even though she was managing the Database Systems department — whenever she came by to look over my shoulder.

At one point she demanded that I stop using CTRL-C and CTRL-V for cutting and pasting, because she couldn’t understand what was happening. She insisted that I use my mouse to go up to the menu dropdowns to Select CUT and PASTE rather than using keyboard shortcuts so she knew at all times what I was doing when she looked on. The job was just data entry, and being comprehensible to onlookers was not a requirement of the job, so I refused.

3. The mini muffins

When deciding what to order for meeting refreshments, my boss had me call our internal catering department to ask what diameter the mini muffins were.

4. The pen cap

On my day off, I received an angry email from my boss stating that when my coworker from the night before and I came in, we would have to be retrained on procedures, because we weren’t doing a good enough job inspecting the library before we closed for the night. The reason why? There was a pen cap lying between a desk leg and the wall that we hadn’t noticed and picked up, thereby leaving “trash” lying around the library. I will note that we had cleaners who came in the night before and didn’t notice it either. Luckily, she eventually got more job responsibilities and stopped micromanaging us on tiny details like that.

5. The parking advice

I was a union rep in a company where many people worked from home one day per week and it was considered acceptable in most roles to WFH in case of genuine emergency (except, say, customer-facing roles that required in-person attendance or security guards). There was one head of department whose team all did desk-based work but just didn’t believe in WFH for his staff. One day there was a snowstorm forecast and one of his direct reports (a 40-something experienced professional who lived in a rather rural area) took his laptop home “just in case” and worked from home successfully for the day or two until the snow melted.

The next time snow was forecast, the head of department took his direct report aside and showed him on Google maps where he thought the direct report could park to make it easier/possible for him to drive to work in the snow.

6. The coffee ban

One day randomly, like a year into her stint at the company, my manager decided to go to war against coffee. I’ll call her Amy. Out of nowhere, Amy dictated that we were no longer allowed to get coffee during work. Were we leaving our desks and sneaking away several blocks to Starbucks every day? No. There was a Keurig in the department that we all used, all of about 20 feet away from most of our desks. Was anyone being excessive about it? Were people congregating by the Keurig and socializing? No, and also no.

Amy’s new policy was that we would have to clock out to pour a cup of coffee. Every time. (Note from Alison: this is illegal. Federal law says that short breaks of less than 20 minutes must be paid.) We were limited in how frequently we could do this, and how much time was allotted to fill our mugs. Amy also said that if we wanted coffee in the morning, we needed to arrive 15 minutes before our shift began. She became flustered when asked by another person in the department if that meant her shift started at 7:45 instead of 8:00 now and if they could also then leave 15 minutes early (the answer was a disgruntled no). HR didn’t care when a group approached them to question this, and said Amy was allowed to do whatever she wants.

However, this policy only lasted less than maybe two weeks before Amy tired of all the questions and extra time clock punches and interrupted work over a quick coffee refill. She was known as a micromanager (she also used to walk into the restroom and call out someone’s name and then ask them when they were coming back to their desks – you know, the person clearly busy inside of a bathroom stall), but that one just really stood out to me as inanely stupid.

7. The trail mix

When I was in college, I spent a summer working for an organization that did outdoor adventure trips for kids (similar to Outward Bound). My job was to organize and pack the food that they would need for trips. When it was time to make more trail mix, the executive director of the organization would come to supervise me, to ensure that I had what she felt was the ideal ratio of ingredients (peanuts to raisins to almonds to….). It was not about cost, purely about what she felt tasted the best.

8. The virtual office

For a couple of years, the owner of a company I worked for pushed really, really hard for us all to use this online environment during remote work – I forget the name, but it looked like our office recreated in Stardew Valley, and we each had an avatar.

Your mike/speakers were always on, so any time you walked your avatar next to somebody else’s, you could just “talk” to them. And if you were just there ignoring it because you were trying to work and not play a video game, you could get interrupted if somebody walked by you – sometimes they’d say something, sometimes it would just be random white noise or background noise would suddenly come over your speakers.

To him, this was great, but to the rest of us, many of them single women living alone, random men’s voices or other noises breaking up the quiet of the workday was very disconcerting. At least when we were in the office and Bob walked over to our desks to ask a question, we could hear him walking over and/or see him coming. We all ended up refusing to login. It was a small company, what could he do? Fire the entire customer-facing teams because they wouldn’t use this silly video game thing?

Eventually he just made the team he managed use it and the rest of us just kept on using instant messenger to talk to each other like a real company.

9. The “no visible heads” policy

One particularly draconian place I worked at had all the office staff working in a cube farm. We weren’t allowed to get up to talk to our coworkers because the management had a “no visible heads” policy – the regional manager didn’t want to see people’s heads sticking up from the cubicles or around cubicle walls. If we had a question for a coworker, it had to take place on the corporate-monitored chat software. People were expected to just not get up out of their chairs except to go to the bathroom or to take breaks.

That was just the tip of the iceberg on wacky rules at that place. I left within three months, but not before using my employee discount to order a personalized gift for my sister-in-law’s upcoming wedding (the company encouraged employees ordering gifts like this to the point that it felt like some kind of enforced policy). Due to the production schedule, the gift wasn’t going to be ready until about a month before the wedding. When I called to check on its status, I was informed that the regional manager found out about it and canceled the order without telling anyone because I wasn’t an employee any more.

I got more job horror stories out of my three months there than ten years at my current job.

10. The tree removal

I once had a CEO who was a micromanager — and she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make important decisions and instead got involved in things that had nothing to do with her.

Case in point: one day, a tree came down in the carpark. No-one was hurt and no cars were damaged, but she insisted on finding a hard hat and hi-vis jacket and went out to instruct and direct the emergency crew and horticulturists (you know, the people who know what they are doing) in removing the tree.

11. The ink cartridges

We used to have to hand in an empty pen ink cartridge to be issued a new one. I felt like Bob Cratchit asking Scrooge for another chunk of coal.

12. The too-aggressive red

A recent past boss insisted that we use a specific color coding strategy for our to-do list — red for urgent, blue for important but less urgent, etc. It took about as long to organize and color code most things as it did to just DO them, but I was getting paid so whatever. (He wanted us to include on our lists items such as clocking in, returning phone calls, and other miscellaneous tasks like that, as well as breaking up the various steps for larger tasks.)

I got a 15-minute lecture because I once used the wrong shade of red. He thought it was “too aggressive” and liked an orange-red better. So I used that one, but then two days later he wanted me to change it back because the orange wasn’t “urgent enough.”

I do not miss him or that job!

13. The mopping debate

Back in the Stone Age, I worked for McDonald’s. One of my jobs was to mop the lobby. Two of the managers got into such a vociferous argument that I thought they’d come to blows over … which way I should be pushing the mop (side to side or front to back). Mind you, whether or not the floor getting clean was no part of this; it was all about what the official way to push a mop was. They finally looked it up in the store procedures notebook (about 3” thick, looseleaf so they could easily add more rules) and determined that I was right the first time.

If you’re curious, the official way to push a mop in a McDonald’s is side to side. Front to back is an abomination unto Nuggan.

14. The mistake that almost took down a company

I had a boss who was a micromanager and then trained her staff in her image — when one of her staff became my manager, I was not a happy camper.

However, the one that always sticks out for me with my micromanager boss was the time I sent an email to a group of people at 12:26 p.m. that started with, “Good morning,” then the information I needed to convey, next steps I needed from them, and so on. Short and to the point.

My boss wrote to me saying, “Where I come from, 12:26 p.m. is the afternoon, not the morning. These are the kinds of mistakes that are going to sink us.”

I printed out the email and handed it to a few people without any explanation, just to enjoy their faces and reactions.

15. The driveway diagrams

At my first most toxic job, there was an employee manual that covered EVERYTHING. Like, every little thing anyone had ever done that annoyed the president (the owner’s husband) got put in the manual with the exact way he wanted things done. It was kind of a joke that you weren’t a real employee until you did something that caused an entry in the manual. The stuff that was most intense wasn’t company procedure or anything that affected the business, but mundane office stuff, like how to put your coat away on the coat rack or how to lay out food for a company luncheon or what to do with your time if the power went out (this included using the typewriter in the owner’s desk that happened to be electric).

One of the most insane entries was for the company car (an old station wagon the owner didn’t need anymore, that was mostly used to ferry the owner and her husband to the airport on their many vacations) which was 15 pages long, including four pages about how and where to park the car in the owner’s driveway, that included several diagrams, both of the driveway and the angle the steering wheel should be during each step.

16. The blinds

We had a new executive take control of our work location. The building I work in has blinds. We adjust the blinds so that the sun doesn’t shine on our monitors and make it impossible to work. The executive would drive by the building and see the blinds at different heights and THIS WAS UNACCEPTABLE. We received multiple emails telling us all to set the blinds at the same height. But, you know, sunshine. So the blinds continued to be adjusted for practical purposes.

The executive got so angry, he ordered facilities to raise all of the blinds to the top height and had them cut the strings so that we wouldn’t be able to reach them. Three stories of wall to wall windows worth of blinds. (Some of the engineers in the building had crafted a tool to adjust the blinds by the end of the first day.)

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