the wooden blocks, the meeting “host,” and other weirdly outdated office practices

Last month we talked about bosses and offices with weirdly outdated expectations from a far-off era. Here are 12 of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The host

A former boss had very strong ideas about technology.

Pre-pandemic, some employees had access to Zoom and used it occasionally for in-house meetings.

Obviously, in 2020 we had to pivot to using Zoom for every meeting. My boss insisted that he be the “host” and the only “host” of Zoom meetings. He said it was important for people to know that he was host, in the sense that he was convening the meeting and responsible for the meeting outcomes. He could not be convinced that in a Zoom context, most of the hosting role involves managing the delivery of the meeting. Because he would not allow any co-hosts, so much time in meetings was spent on things like him asking someone to share their screen, when the person not have share screen permissions, and then we’d have to coach the boss, in real time, through the process of giving a meeting participant the ability to share their screen. Every time. There was no learning curve.

Relatively quickly, I started scheduling meetings and when he would ask to be “the host,” I’d say it was so weird, but Zoom wasn’t letting me make him the host, wow, technology, who knows, right? Then he would start every meeting by declaring that regardless of what the screen said, he was THE HOST of the meeting (akin to when Michael Scott on The Office “declared bankruptcy”).

2. The FedExes

My former boss, who just turned 90, had me FedEx a printed letter to Africa every time he sent an email to anyone there. This was literally in the last 10 years, so not decades ago. We’d often have a response from that person via email before FedEx even departed with the letter. These were $130ish PER LETTER to send, on our small nonprofit’s budget. Eventually I just started telling him I FedExed them even though I didn’t and he never knew the difference, but we saved so much money.

3. The “girl”

My boss shares an office with a separate business, and the other business owner insists on calling me “the girl” or “your girl” in conversations with my boss or others. It should be noted I am in my late thirties with a professional degree, not a high school student, not that that should matter. I finally started addressing him as “old man” with my boss’ approval and he has stopped talking to me all together.

4. The cost of an email

I once had a boss (~10 years ago) frantically pull me aside to ask how much money it cost to send an email. He was elated to learn it was a free action!

Same man wouldn’t allow us to have any books/newspapers, but don’t care what we were doing on the computers (this was a back-of-house retail job, so not in view of customers, but with some of the weird controlling behavior of your classic retail work). I think he was so computer illiterate that he genuinely couldn’t conceive of anything we could be doing on a computer that wasn’t work. You could fully see the screens while walking by, and people would blatantly be on Reddit/imgur with giant images and had no issue. But pull out anything on paper and we’d get in trouble. I was a college student and couldn’t do homework out of a physical textbook, but could off of a PDF of a textbook.

5. The mail merge

She was beyond computer illiterate to the point that she didn’t “trust” mail merging information, like mail merging name and address into a letter or invoice, and instead expected her people to type it out. I got dragged into the mess to show her how mail merge worked, try to teach it to her, show the high rate of errors when people are forced to type and Nope. Flat out not having it, doesn’t trust it, etc. Her staff ended up literally lying to her on how receipts and tax letters and invoices were being produced and basically blowing off work every Friday when they would work from home to … type for hours (and instead, of course took 10 minutes to mail merge).

6. The print-outs

We had an executive, just 10 years ago, whose admin would come in half an hour early so she could print out his schedule for the day, print out his emails, highlight the important bits, and assemble it all together in his leather folio for him. Then stick it under his iPad on his desk. She’d then stay late to type his email replies for him, from what he wrote on the paper.

This was the CIO. The head of IT.

7. The husband’s name

I worked at a very old-school membership library that wanted to grow their younger membership base. As the newest and youngest staff member, I was asked to contribute ideas. I pointed out that I made the initial membership contribution (before I got the job) and now worked for the org but the second I added my husband to my library account, every single piece of communication was addressed to Mrs. Husband’s First and Last Name. Including work mail. And that was something that was going to actively turn a lot of people away from joining or working with the org. Especially from the multiple universities around us.

The new director agreed but the rest of the staff, uh, did not and were very much in the “it is tradition! This is how we have always done it!” camp.

This was 2016.

8. The rules

At one place I worked, the owner hated the smell of coffee, so there were no coffee makers on site. People had to bring in their own coffee from home or a coffee shop. There were lots of other weird rules –

1. No popping popcorn in microwaves (one person put 30 minutes instead of 3, so no one was trusted with popcorn ever again).
2. Everyone must wear a name tag at all times.
3. No coats on the back of chairs (could get caught under wheels and cause an accident).
4. No temporarily keeping shared food on an empty desk (think donuts for a couple of hours). Eating at your desk was soon banned after a specific incident, even though it had previously been allowed. No clue why that day set the owner off. The owner was going to write up the employee until it was explained that the employee was on vacation and not responsible for someone else putting food on their desk.
5. All employees, including salaried employees, must use the time clock for entry, exit, and lunch breaks. The penalty for being one minute late was worse than calling off, so there would be people who literally called out from the parking lot and went back home. My team had a spreadsheet for time clock games to help us beat the system. Due to rounding, you could be gone for 14 minutes but clock a zero-minute lunch by clocking out at 12:08 and back in at 12:22, as an example. Both were rounded to 12:15, so it was a zero-minute lunch break. We used the same logic to have longer lunch breaks, since we only got 30 minutes.

9. The telex

I was brought in to do annual updates on a practice guide (big legal book designed to actually be helpful to practicing lawyers with real clients) in 2019 because the former editor was retiring. One of my recommended changes the first year was to change an example from “telex” to “facsimile.” The change wasn’t approved until the following year.

I will be doing updates this summer and might get bold and try to change it to “email.”

I only knew what a telex was because early in my career I worked on a case where the evidence went back to the 1940s, including telexes.

10. The last names

At my previous job, my boss was in her seventies – lovely woman, I really enjoyed working with her – but she insisted it was *just not done* to call anyone you worked with by their first name. The whole department was Miss, Mrs., Mr., or Dr. except for the custodian, and I’m like 90% sure that was just because he wouldn’t tell anyone his last name. Scratched it off his nametag and everything. My boss still called him Mr.

11. The sperm bank

I used to work in a small specialty medical lab. One of the services we offered was a sperm bank for men who were undergoing treatment for testicular cancer. A tech would examine the donation microscopically before freezing it to make sure it actually did contain viable sperm. Our boss would not let any of the single techs do the microscopic analysis, only the married ones could do it. He said it was inappropriate for a single woman to look at sperm.

12. The wooden blocks

About ten years ago, my sister worked in one of the largest public library systems in the United States, in a major city. Instead of emailing requests for books kept in the archives, she had to write each request on a piece of paper, rubber band the paper to a small block of wood, and throw the wooden block down the stairs into the basement/archives.

Twice a day, someone down there would gather the blocks, fill the requests, and bring up the books (for distribution to patrons) and wood (for reuse).

The post the wooden blocks, the meeting “host,” and other weirdly outdated office practices appeared first on Ask a Manager.

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