Absurd requests/demands

[Outdoor Girl]

Reading these stories, I've never been so grateful that I have a reasonable supervisor!

Maybe I should write him a Thank You card!

[BatCity]

Slight threadjack.

In June, when we moved across the country, we found a rental house that was perfect except for one thing...it is right next to the railroad tracks, and the subdivision deflects the noise of the train with a giant wall (I'm guessing 30 feet high) that looms over the neighborhood.  It's the weirdest thing, but the house is otherwise perfect, so we took it, thinking that we'll only be here a year or so before we buy something.

Turns out the wall works...the train sounds like it's miles away, and we're walking distance from the charming downtown of an extremely expensive town.  We're thinking of asking our landlady if we can just buy the house.

End threadjack, thank you for your patience.

[Luci]

I had heard this several years ago and just saw something in a magazine about a similar thing.

A woman who had moved into a small, rural town after being in the Big City all of her life wrote a letter to the editor about two things.

1. There are no street lights in the countryside and it is dangerously dark, so they should be installed.

2. Some deer crossing signs are on tricky curves or near busy intersections so should be placed where one can see better and where there is less trafiic.

[Jones]

Absurd demands...The local hospital is a good hospital, but somewhat rural. There are a lot of things they can't do, and people who need specialists have to make a 3+ hour drive to a city with those specialists. Sometimes things happen in the middle of nowhere (oilfield accidents, hiking accidents, ranch related accidents, etc.), where a helicopter must be dispatched, bring the victim to the hospital's ER, be stabilized but too much of an emergency for our local hospital and life-flighted to a hospital in another city. Sometimes an ambulance is adequate to get a victim to the local hospital, but the helicopter is still needed for the emergency flight to another city. Three hours driving, I'm not sure how fast flying but significantly faster.

So, recently, someone who lives near the hospital complained about it to the FAA. They complained about the noise and said that the launch pad was inadequate for a helicopter's needs. The FAA sent out an inspector and issued a strongly worded warning that the medical 'copter had to be kept at and launched from the local airport until further inspecting could be done. This meant that in situations where minutes mattered, an ambulance was rushing back and forth from the helicopter to the hospital, adding an extra 15-20 minutes in a potentially life threatening situation. Plus, as the helicopter's trained crew live in a house across the street from the hospital and its launch pad, the extra minutes to get the crew to the airport and doing their flight checks.

Once the FAA had a more experienced inspector come out the edict was reversed and the helicopter is kept at the hospital again with a big stamp of approval. The complainer has been kept anonymous as an awful lot of folks in our community have expressed a desire to let him/her experience the necessity of life flight first hand. There are a bunch of apartment buildings across the street from the hospital full of very vocal citizens who were upset about the delay of medical assistance. No one can predict if they are going to be the next person in need of that service. Meanwhile, several flight paths in and out of the area have been charted to reduce the chance that one person will feel the need to complain about noise in the near future.

[Jaelle]

I'm posted this one before, but it bears repeating.

When DH's last company let him go, one of the things they cited was that he took a week off (it had been approved long in advance) when it "just wasn't a good time for the company."

It was the week our 5-month-old son had serious open-heart surgery in an out-of-state hospital. 

Another friend was forced to quit from the same company after a manager (someone technically the same rank as her, but in better with the big boss) informed her she had to hire his wife as her assistant. And, oh yeah, his wife would be working friend's schedule so that friend had to take the (admittedly lousy)  hours of the assistant job.

[Cami]

My workplace includes a small "conference center", i.e. two meeting rooms that can seat (at best) 70 people total. A former boss used to require that one of the admin assistants come in on weekends or during the evenings to start a pot of coffee for those rooms because "that's beneath me." One weekend, the admin assistant couldn't come in to start the coffee because she was out of town dealing with her elderly father's hospitalization. Boss pitched a fit and when the woman wasn't answering her cell phone, called the hospital to be connected to the  man's room to reach her. All over starting a pot of coffee.

[Really?]

"We get black helicopters at all hours on a fairly regular basis - we're a few miles from the base, and this particular army base is really more for research than active training, but there is some traffic.  Haiku, the sheltie in my avatar, frequently demands I let him outside to chase the big mean nasty helicopters away, even if it's 2 AM when they fly over.  As far as he's concerned, he's doing a fantastic job - no helicopters have landed in our yard yet!"

Stariblast, this made my laugh. One of my old dogs did this everytime a helicopter flew over the house, or the train went by.

[Slartibartfast]

SIL got fired from her job after a long and frustrating string of harassment from her boss.  Boss insisted SIL "dress more appropriately" (i.e. more girly) - I should note that SIL is lesbian and generally on the more "butch" end of the spectrum.  SIL was wearing khakis and collared shirts - not feminine at all, but not inappropriate for work (even on a woman) and would have been perfectly professional if she were male.  Her job was helping mentally disabled adults find and train for jobs - which means she spent a lot of her day at on-site training with them, such as around the fryers at fast-food places or around industrial chemicals for cleaning companies.  Not really places where high heels, skirts, and perfectly coiffed hair would have helped!  (According to SIL, high heels were something her boss specifically demanded she wear, and the would have been a real safety hazard at some of the job sites.)

So the boss started writing SIL up for a) not wearing makeup to work, b) not wearing dresses/skirts, and c) not wearing high heels.  Also revealed through several comments and conversations that she was targeting SIL specifically because of her sexual orientation, but when SIL went to HR it was brushed off because her boss's best friend (who also worked at their company) was also lesbian and the boss was nice to her, so that couldn't possibly have anything to do with it!  (The boss's friend is at the other end of the spectrum when it comes to hair/makeup/girly clothes, though.)

SIL was ultimately fired because she wasn't placing enough people in jobs.  However, the boss got to choose which clients were assigned to who.  She assigned all the clients with less severe handicaps to her friend and all the clients with extremely disabling handicaps to SIL.  Not surprisingly, it's much easier to find jobs for someone who is capable of making change, chatting with customers, doing simple tasks unsupervised, etc. than someone who will need constant co-worker supervision for even repetitive tasks.  Voila, boss's friend has good placement numbers and SIL doesn't.  The company demanded SIL place as many people as her boss and boss's friend did, which SIL was just not able to do, so she was fired.

[hermanne]

^ That stinks. Was there anyone higher up she could've gone to?

[Slartibartfast]

^ That stinks. Was there anyone higher up she could've gone to?

Not really.  She actually talked with a lawyer about suing for discrimination and started putting together a case, but when it came down to it she would have had to stay in that toxic environment even if they had taken her back, so she ended up dropping the suit.  The confrontational part of me wanted to see her fight the firing, but since it was really more of a "we'll let you quit" kind of thing, she wasn't even particularly assured she'd win if she took them to court 

[Elfmama]

The thing is, when you move next to/on top of/within a certain distance from a noise hazard, YOU KNOW IT GOING IN.  You have no call to fuss when you bought or rented knowing full well that the loud thing exists, it's ridiculous to pitch a fit after.

Several years ago, a pilot flying a small private plane going into BWI had a heart attack at the controls and died.  The plane crashed onto a house and killed a child inside. The neighbors all signed a petition demanding that the planes cease flying over their neighborhood because "It could happen again!  They hadn't ought to be allowed to fly planes over where people live!"  Yep, another neighborhood built long after the airport went in.

Elfmama, was that the one where the family had a large number of kids (like 9 or something?) and they got all of them out except the 9-month-old or so baby?  If so, my in-laws were friends with that family.  They told me the story once, and I tried to look up news articles but couldn't find anything on it.  I think in Linthicum or Linthicum Heights?

I don't remember any more kids, since the events happened so long ago, but the child killed was an infant.  It was definitely in the Ferndale/Linthicum area. Very sad, but stuff happens that no one intends.  The airport, when it was built, was surrounded by nothing more than farm fields.  I'm sure that when those neighborhoods were built after WWII, no one thought "I know!  I'll build this subdivision near the airport, so that planes can crash on people's houses!"

[gmatoy]

last time I checked, having a family is NOT a good excuse to do something for one employee over another.

That was the reason, many decades ago, why it was acceptable to pay a man more than a woman for exactly the same job.  He was supporting his family.  She just spent her income on fripperies like clothes and makeup and magazines.   Or else she just worked to "have something to do" instead of lying on the sofa eating bon-bons and watching soap operas.  Because some man was really supporting her, you know, either her husband or her father.  Self-supporting single women were myths.

My grandmother was picking cottom, when she realized that the man ahead of her was paid more than she was. She protested and was told that "HE had a family to support!" She retorted, "What are my three daughters? Cabbages??!!" The man in charge told her to find a man and try to keep him.
Ah, the good old days!

[Kari]

One winter day it snowed so much, it reached to my waist. I took public transportation and knew that no buses would be running in those conditions. And even if the buses spontaneously became hovercrafts and were running on time, there still was the problem of me being unable to walk to the bus stop in waist-high snow without being an expert in yoga. I called out. My boss got VERY huffy with me and whined, "Can't you tryyyy?" Nope. Can't.

As if to prove a point, she showed up to work that day. And was the only one. Her normally 20-minute commute took two-and-a-half hours. One-way. But she worked that day, stewing and fuming the entire time. I know this because she told us this the next day -- when she informed everyone that we would be coming in that Saturday to make up for taking the day off. To which, everyone replied to her in person or in firmly-worded letters that it would not be possible. She was livid. Someone must have appealed to her boss, the president of the company -- who, incidentally, ALSO didn't make it in that snowy day -- because we soon got an email saying that we were granted a "holiday" for that time and didn't need to make it up. Boss never forgave us, though. She informed me that since she lived near me she would pick me up the next time public transportation was down. Next year, another blizzard whomps down upon the land. I called my boss and asked for a ride. She hemmed and hawed, finally saying she couldn't come get me.

But that's all silliness. I have friends who went through much worse. One was a bartender for a sports bar. His grandmother unexpectedly passed and a funeral was quickly planned for that Saturday. He was told by his boss that if he didn't come in that day, not to come in at all. He no longer works there.

[Hillia]

One of the smarter things a town where I used to live did was institute a "no build" zone around the flight line of the local Air Force base. 

If this is the same town I'm thinking of, for the past several years the developers have been suing to open the 'no build' area for development.  The city council/mayor were seriously considering it, last I heard, and joining in the suit.

[Wulfie]

When I was in college, I worked at a pizza joint making the pizza crusts each morning. I told my boss even before he hired me that I needed X date off because my father was getting married.  No problem…….. yea right!  No, I could not make twice as many crusts as normal on the day before, I had to come in THAT day to make the crusts. No, I could not come in at 4am to do them, I had to come in at 10am so I could also help with the lunch “rush” which was maybe 10 pizzas in a 2 hour period.  It was not like *I* was getting married, my father didn’t need me to be there.  Plus, he was divorced once so this marriage would not last and I could go to the next one.  I quit on the spot. Dad and Step-mom have been married for over 20 years.