Tales of Corporate Idiocy

[HemlockGrey]

Regale us with tales of the largest fuckups, biggest cockups, most frustrating jackups, or generally embarrassingly stupid tidbits that have come about through the stupidity of large corporations, the management, and the cretinous morons who comprise your co-workers.

The following anecdote was told to me in person by the President of Boeing Japan during my recent visit to Tokyo (that's right, I have connections, yo):

At Boeing Japan, there was this one Japanese man who came into the Boeing offices everday and just tooled around. Didn't do any work, just chatted up employees. He didn't actually work for Boeing, he worked for some Japanese heavy machinery company, but every day he was in the lobby, shooting the breeze with Boeing employees. Evidently, the people of Boeing grew to like this man so much, they gave him his own ID pass, so he could move freely throughout the Boeing building (and having been in the Boeing Japan building, I can tell you that it has tighter security than Camp Foster), and over the years he gathered up quite a wealth of information about Boeing, some it it rather secret.

So after numerous years of this, he was preparing to leave Japan for another job overseas. He was nonspecific as to the exact job, but the employees of Boeing hated to see him go, and threw him party and made him a gift of a golden watch.

Guess where he ended up. That's right.

Airbus.

[Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman]

It's quite ironic, considering such idiocity, big corporate vampires seem to be insidiously smart in squeezing every penny from its customers...

[Darth Wong]

I had a boss who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on business consultants (a consulting firm called "Carpedia") who informed on their first day of "consulting" that "we may not know your particular industry, but we know business". Bad fucking sign.

When they were done, they had totally revamped all our procedures, based on only minimal feedback from employees because it was painfully obvious that they were just deploying a cookie-cutter solution. I could see how their "improvements" were clearly geared for a mass-production environment rather than a custom-job shop such as ours, but the owner of the company could not.

Naturally, productivity plunged. Errors rose. Product quality plummeted. So what does an owner do, when faced with the fact that everything seems to be going to shit after making a lot of changes to the way things are done? Does he reconsider the changes? Of course not, because that would entail admission of error. No, he calls together all of the employees and rails at them for failing to make the new procedures work. He then accuses them of not caring, rants that they're sabotaging the new procedures, and fires a bunch of people in order to send a strong message to the employees.

Yep, management genius in action.

[Ryoga]

Well, I work at a grocery store. Oddly enough everyone there's pretty cool, I don't have much to complain about. But I have some doozies.

-The store has a certain number of 'handicapped' people due to Affirmative Action. There's one guy who messed up his back and can't really walk more than 10 feet under his own power, a guy in the deli who's morbidly obese (~300-400 pounds), etc. etc. And, of course, people with Down's working as baggers. Now, I'm not going to mock people with disabilities (they're all nice kids, y'know), but there's one of the Down's baggers who's really creepy.

He's something like 40 years old, and always has a 'topic' that he goes on about with everyone who comes through the line. One day it was how he was going to college after he learned how to read (wtf?), another day it was how he was going to be starring on a sequel to Friends and moving into a million-dollar mansion (which became a billion-dollar mansion as the day went on ).

Then one day out of the blue he tells a customer that he hears Princess Di's voice in his head telling him to do things. He then went on to say that when he heard Elton John sang 'Candle in the Wind' (that song he wrote for Di's funeral) with Madonna, he wanted to beat Elton John with a broken glass bottle. I told a manager that he was freaking out the customers (the lady he told this to practically bolted), and she told me that when John Ritter died, the guy was saying he was going to be taking Ritter's place on the show. Having an active fantasy life is one thing, but this guy's is rather ghoulish....

No surprise, I haven't seen him around for almost three months.

[dragon]

We have the same kind of idiots as NCOs and officers and not just my unit.

[aerius]

The Canada Customs postal facility. So management has a ~$3 million surplus in their budget, so they buy about 100 new computers complete with big screen LCD monitors to replace the computers they bought with last year's surplus. Seeing that they still have money left over, they decide to hire ~20 new employees so that we can all spend more time sitting on our asses doing nothing. If you want to know how ridiculously overstaffed we were, you could fire 4 out of 5 people and the remainder would still only have to work 4 hours a day to get the daily quota of packages sorted & inspected.

[Col. Crackpot]

The Canada Customs postal facility. So management has a ~$3 million surplus in their budget, so they buy about 100 new computers complete with big screen LCD monitors to replace the computers they bought with last year's surplus. Seeing that they still have money left over, they decide to hire ~20 new employees so that we can all spend more time sitting on our asses doing nothing. If you want to know how ridiculously overstaffed we were, you could fire 4 out of 5 people and the remainder would still only have to work 4 hours a day to get the daily quota of packages sorted & inspected.

i'm so moving to Ontario.

[phongn]

Regale us with tales of the largest fuckups, biggest cockups, most frustrating jackups, or generally embarrassingly stupid tidbits that have come about through the stupidity of large corporations, the management, and the cretinous morons who comprise your co-workers.

The following anecdote was told to me in person by the President of Boeing Japan during my recent visit to Tokyo (that's right, I have connections, yo)

Shit, I thought you were going to talk about the 7J7 fiasco

[Glocksman]

At the warehouse where I work, I drive trucks like the Crown TS Series and the Raymond Swing-Reach Very Narrow Aisle trucks in the storage racks to locate and retrieve pallets of merchandise.

A couple of years ago some bright boy in home office management ordered us a new Crown TS without checking the dimensions of the bay doors the truck would be expected to travel through.

Yep, the center mast is 5 inches too high to fit through the door.
Rather than admit error and exchange the truck with Crown for one that would fit, we kept the truck and it's only used in the one storage rack area where it was originally assembled.

Drivers kept trying to take the thing back to the other rack area (damaging both the truck and the fire door) so many times that maintenance installed an alarm complete with flashing lights and bell that goes off if this truck gets within 20 feet of the bay doors.

[Trogdor]

The company my father works for is known for penny pinching by its employees. Then the CEO (I think) gives his son the job of company VP. Said VP then proceeds to attempt to create a catalog for the company, a scheme everyone except him knew was going to fail. He does it anyway, and surprise surprise, the company loses several million dollars.

The fuckup caused by the LA Times's experimental removal of the "Great Wall" which seperates the reporters/editors from the businessmen (two groups which will occasionally lock horns somehow or another even when they're kept seperate) is legendary amoung journalists. The business people were given control, and kept cutting out hard news stories in favor of ads and fluffy articles that weren't really news. When the number of readers dropped, the businessmen tried to make up for the loss by putting in even more ads and even less news. The numbers of readers dropped again, and their solution was the same. A downward spiral followed until it was discovered that the edior in chief (a buisness man who was pulled from managing a cereal company) was using some profit sharing techniques, generating a big scandal.