the storage labyrinth, the tape terrorism, and other things you thought were normal early in your career but were actually very weird

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

Last week we talked about things that you thought were normal early in your career … but later learned were actually just weird things your old workplace did and which were not typical at all. Here are 15 of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The packed hotel rooms

My very first internship was the most bizarre work experience I’ve ever had, but I didn’t know it then.

My boss was personally wealthy, as in 1% wealthy. But she was super cheap at work. When we organized the nonprofit’s annual conference, we got X many rooms free for staff for however many attendees booked rooms. My boss told us that we were going to be bunking together because there weren’t enough rooms. She had her own penthouse suite though! Only unpaid interns roomed together. (The paid staff had their own. Unpaid interns made up about 70% of the organization’s entire staff.) I learned later that we got a discount for every hotel room we didn’t fill for staff.

I stayed in a large suite with 11 women. Three of us shared a bed. Three were on the pullout. I vaguely recall some people on cots and the floor. All of us broke fire code. But think of a medium-size hotel suite with 11 people staying in it. It was normal to me because I thought it was like dorm living on a Friday night.

At my next job, we were planning an annual conference, and I asked the VP of events, a very scary, fierce woman, if we could pick who we’d be rooming with or would she do it? She blinked twice and said, “No one ever shares hotel rooms. I’ve never heard of that! Hotel rooms for staff are the cheapest expense so cutting it makes no difference in the event budget.”

I was mortified for the remainder of my time there.

2. The phone answerer

The first “real” job I had in a small office, everyone answered each other’s phones when they weren’t in. It was encouraged by our boss so no customer or client “never left a message and felt unheard” during office hours. So, if I was in my office and Sally was out for the day, if her phone rang, I had to go into her office and answer it. I would say, “I’m sorry, Sally is not here for the day but can I take a message and have her get back to you?” This was office wide, no matter your position (so yes, we even had to answer our bosses phone). I didn’t know any better and I thought that’s just how things went when you worked in an office setting.

Fast forward to my next job. My first week there, my office neighbor was out for the day and her phone rang so I got up out of my new office and went and answered it. This was a bigger office, and the amount of “what the hell is this guy doing?” looks I got from everyone was astronomical. After I explained how it was in my old office, everyone laughed it off and explained that definitely is not how offices work and is why answering machines were invented!

3. The gang bang

I worked in TV news production in the late 80s through the mid 90s. First station I worked for called press conferences provided by an outside organization for all networks a “gang bang.”

First week at my second TV station as we were going through the newscast rundown prior to the show I asked if the live shot was a gang bang. And thus I discovered that it is not, as I assumed, an industry standard term.

4. The misplaced enthusiasm

At my first job, company IT support, we were not supposed to respond to manager messages in the Teams-equivalent with “Okay,” because it wasn’t showing enough enthusiasm. We had to respond with “Party!” Didn’t matter if it was something like a mandatory overtime announcement – “Party!” It ended up being a Thing a lot of us used mockingly outside of work, and I still sometimes do it. Definitely had to train myself out of it at my next more normal communicating job though.

5. The tic tacs

In my first job, which was at a call center, my team was all on the same anti-anxiety medication to the point that we called them “tic tacs” when we needed to ask a coworker for a pill.

6. The storage labyrinth

One university department I worked for right out of undergrad grossly misinterpreted the rules on retention of student records, both the types of records that need to be kept and the length of time required to keep them, such that they believed anything even remotely related to the student’s time at the university must be kept far longer than was truly necessary. This resulted in the entire basement of the building I worked in consisting of a labyrinth of locked storage areas full of boxes upon boxes of student “records” that should have been recycled a decade ago. It looked like that scene from the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark except there was nothing cool hidden in the boxes, just lengthy descriptions of academic advising sessions from 15 years ago. I’m pretty sure nothing was ever cleaned out because the task was too daunting by that point.

Upon changing jobs, I realized that the laws surrounding student retention required far, far less stringent application and the only thing that most of the storage facility in the basement was good for was probably mouse housing.

7. The sleeping

My first job made me think that I’d have to deal with sleep-related topics in the office on a regular basis. This ranged through some … unfortunate … variations.

Conflicts from people sleeping in shared office spaces while others were trying to do their job at their desks. People falling asleep while on duty. People sleeping in their direct manager’s office! Being told to share a hotel room with a complete stranger (from a different, completely unaffiliated business) to save on travel costs. Being told to share a bed (yes, bed – not just a room) with coworkers (yes, PLURAL) to save on travel costs.

I was relieved to discover this is not at all normal after I changed jobs.

8. The glorious cornucopia of pens

In my first job after graduation, we had to ask a senior executive’s assistant for any new office supplies, although almost nothing was actually available anyway. My main request was for a new pen — the cheapest kind they could buy in bulk — which I could only get one of at a time. And you had to show that your existing pen was clearly out of ink. If I had lost it, the assistant would quiz me about what happened to my old one and where it was. When I moved to my next job, there was a whole closet of office supplies and I still remember the amazing moment when I was just casually told I could take what I needed. I was so nervous that for a long time I’d only take one pen at a time in case anyone saw me taking — god forbid — two.

9. The emails

At my dysfunctional office job after I finished college, it took three people and upwards of half an hour to send even a short internal email. You’d write the email, recruit a coworker to read over your shoulder and critique/wordsmith while you wrote, and then have your supervisor do the same.

This was not the kind of office that did life or death work, it wasn’t a field where that level of word choice mattered, and to this day I have not heard a better explanation than “someone in upper management was afraid of our department looking bad with an insufficiently perfect word choice.” I don’t even think the other departments did this! I was a recent college grad and had no idea this wasn’t normal for corporate jobs until I mentioned it to a friend, who looked at me like I’d grown a second head.

10. The mailing labels

We had to type the mailing labels … on intra-office envelopes.

11. The elevator access

An old employer that was notoriously cheap kept some costs down by not allowing employees to use the elevator without a doctor’s note. At first I didn’t realize quite how bonkers that was because I was fresh out of school and (at least way back then) plenty of high schools and below didn’t allow all students to use elevators, so I guess I read it as an extension of that? I realized how thoroughly bizarre it was when a colleague broke her ankle and had to crutch up and down three flights of stairs in a cast for the few days it took her to get a doctor’s note certifying that she did indeed need elevator access.

12. The permissions

I had one manager who found it “disrespectful and suspicious” for staff not to ask permission before leaving our department’s office. Like, to drop off a paper. Or to return a piece of IT equipment. Or pick up materials. If you were leaving your immediate desk vicinity, you had to find Ms. Boss, ask her if you could go take care of whatever business you had down the hall, and then finish it quickly once permission was granted. This boss did not last long (shocking, right?), but I was very young and so on-edge from her outbursts and micromanaging that I went to my next job with the habit of asking every single time I needed to leave my desk. Finally, after a couple weeks, my (wonderful) new manager explained that he really, really didn’t care if I needed to go give Jane a paper … I could just do it.

13. The letters

I work in a hospital. When we needed to send a letter to the patient, we would print it, fold it and put it into an envelope. Twice a day, someone from the internal post team would collect the letters and their team posted them. I did this from 2018-2024.

In August 2024, I moved departments. When I printed a letter, everyone looked at me like I was crazy and told me it goes electronically to an off site printing company. I immediately emailed my old manager to tell her, thinking she would love this new information. Turns out she knew this all along but didn’t trust the process. So she made us do it all by hand. I asked the internal post guy about it and he said we were the only admin team that he collected packages from. His team’s actual job was to arrange transportation of clinical samples to labs.

14. The tape terrorism

In my early 20s, I worked in insurance (home/auto/life) for a few years at a few companies. The first office I worked at after receiving my license was a very large and successful franchise office of one of the nation’s top home/auto insurance companies, so I assumed (naively) that it was a well-run representative of the industry. I did learn a lot, but the owner/manager was an absolute tyrant who would scream at us while we were on the phone with customers, move our bonus requirements so she never had to pay us, and required everyone in the office (all women) to wear makeup and keep their hair done and call all the male clients “honey” and “sweetie.”

Beyond all this, she had a set of strange rules/requirements we could never quite understand. We rotated desks monthly, and she didn’t allow us to have any personalization at our desk: no photos, no decorations, no notes. She enforced this by outlawing tape in the office — it was impossible to find a roll of Scotch tape for love or money, and we were screamed at if we brought in our own. The only exception to this was our list of agent names/codes, which was taped to each computer monitor with one piece of tape. If we desperately needed tape for a ripped paper or another normal office use, we would very carefully tear off a tiny sliver of this single piece of tape. If the owner noticed that we’d put tape on something else, she would shrilly demand to know where we’d gotten it and what did we think we were doing.

When I started my next job at another insurance office, I opened the office supply drawer to find rolls upon rolls of Scotch tape. I felt like the richest person in the world, and almost overcome by emotion exclaimed, “Oh my god, tape!” My new bosss’s reaction to this made me realize such tape-based terrorism was not, in fact, typical in the industry.

15. The Miller time

I used to work at a startup where the owner’s last name was Miller. So much of our internal design-related things (not official logos) was a clear rip-off of the Miller High Life logo, and for major celebrations the featured drink was always 40s of Miller High Life. I was straight out of college, so this frat-like stuff didn’t seem that weird at the time!

I should also mention that the only place in town to buy 40s of High Life was a sketchy gas station…. So for major office events someone would have to go to the gas station and buy a bunch of 40s, totally normal work activity!