Our boss was freaking out over people sometimes doing some private calls during work hours and at a certain point absolutely forbade it. So yeah, people would just end the call at 17:00 sharp and switch off the work phone. It took one week before that rule was rescinded.
This reminds me of a work-to-rule or a “White Strike.” It turns out that every company, even those that supposedly operate off of “unskilled” labor, utterly rely on employees making a ton of judgment calls and often working outside their job description. When employees start working to the letter of their job description, the whole operation quickly grinds to a halt.
“Other duties as assigned” is a bitch.
I always refused to put work apps on my personal phone because they would make you agree to some bullshit where they could remote access your phone or potentially wipe it. So I would refuse and say they needed to provide a company phone for me if it was that important. Most companies are either ok with this or provide a phone, except for one company. This was a software company, and literally everything else about this company was a unicorn of a job. But for some reason they wanted me to have slack on my phone and also wouldn’t give me a company phone. So I dug up an old phone, reset it to factory settings, and added slack to that so I could say I did it. Then I put the phone away and they never asked about it again. So I really don’t know what the point of that was 🤷
As a middle manager in a corporate hellscape, one of my few joys in life is setting logic traps for HR and making them choose between admitting company policy is bullshit or directly instructing me to violate labor laws.
I’m not allowed to work from home and it seriously pisses me off. Whenever I complain about this to my boss, she always gives me shit like “you’re a school bus driver”.
The policy is you can only work from home when it benefits the company, not you.
…you shouldn’t have to respond in home hours regardless. Any time you spend on work during your life outside of contract is them stealing your labour.
I keep critical applications running at work that thousands depend on. While I was at a union convention, one of my apps broke. I had to login that day and fix it while going over the budget with other members.
This is how the IT world is. I’m the only person capable of maintaining it and I must be available if things go wrong. The show must go on.
In all of my IT jobs I would have been fired if I had signed into work accounts on my personal phone. It’s a pretty big security risk.
True, but in small companies it’s not uncommon.