When you work for a company owned by a A..hole

I can only hope that was an autocorrect, otherwise you'd better retake that training. Or maybe full-contact corrupting is a thing now...

The Native Americans recognized a greed sickness in white men. They called it watika, IIRC.

Obviously not. You order it to go, sit there awkwardly while the client eats, then bring the box of cold food to the manager who the gives it to the owner eventually.

You can generally wait 2 or 3 days before giving him the food. Of course by then it's been processed.

Vomiting is not as much fun as waiting for it to be ready for you to deposit on the boss' desk the other way.

It's all about the proper regurgitating technique

Yes. Malicious compliance.

Take long enough and you can just shit on the boss's desk, slap down the paper, and ask for a "thank you" for bringing back some lunch.

Thats a great feeling. I did extremely low level tech support for other students while at uni. in 2003 (Think issuing user names, filling copy paper, sorting out storage space allocation on the shared drives.) Small part time job that paid for boze. A girl came in with a 3.5" floppy disk on the verge of tears and said she couldn't get the file on it. It was her master thesis and the only place she had stored it. We still had floppy disk drives and I slitted it in and used a dos shell to acess a: but nothing. No disk in drive. I took the floppy out and noticed that the metal protection of the actuall disk (that soft plastic circle) didn't slide properly. To me it looked like the spring was just to worn and had no tension. Took it off and could then access the files on it. Error was that the spring wasn't able to slide the metal protector away when inserted into the reader.

Copied the files to her "home" area, sent a copy by email and gave her a new floppy with the files and told her about the importance of back ups.

The sheer look of relief and gratitude was priceless.

The whole story just warms my heart.

Heroes definitelly don't always wear capes!

Nlrb is dead in the trump era. Rip

A proper company would instead be talking about compliance and how gifts of really any meaningful value have to be rejected outright.

Same in ours.

Myself and another guy went to a tech junket that was by invite only and they gave away a laptop to one person from each company who attended. My boss tried to take the laptop from the other guy saying "that was a gift and you need to turn it over to me"

I'd already cleared it with our corporate conflict of interest ombudsman - if I'd accepted it, it would have been an issue because I had purchasing authority, but other guy was "just" a tech who couldn't sign off on anything or even make recommendations to anyone other than me, we didn't have an existing business relationship with the vendor, and we're not obligated to conduct any business with them as a result of the gift.

I told my boss to take it up with head-of-department (whom I'd copied in on the ombudsman comms.)

Other guy kept the laptop, and boss got 'audited' for gifts received (they pulled his emails) and was demoted into a position he wasn't able to handle (more technical than he was capable of, but on paper should have been able to do) and pushed out of the company soon thereafter.

Last company where I faced external suppliers, I had to take a training where they said we couldn't accept any item worth more than like $20, except food or alcohol during a presentation. But we could accept such items on behalf of the company, and they would be raffled off to a random employee. One time a guy in purchasing got a giant brass horse head from a Chinese supplier. I guess nobody signed up for the raffle, so it became a permanent fixture in the cafeteria.

What are you, a cop?

When I worked for a major database company they made me take annual training to explain that I wasn’t allowed to buy sex workers for potential clients.

One place i worked at collected all gifts and had a lottery at Christmas, where employees could win them. I feel that's a fair way to deal with this.

That’s true, but this directs them to the owner anyway, which is the same thing. It just goes to someone else. If this was actually anti-bribery policy, gifts should not be accepted full stop.

There is usually a common-sense bar where this is applied though. Some items on that list would for sure apply, but in that case the employee should politely decline, not hand the goods over to the owner. I'd like to think that's fake. But, I can imagine that it's very real somewhere.;

In some type of job it is even illegal

Yeah we had that training. Not that anyone ever offers me bribes anyway.

It's like all the lies about the drug dealers giving kids free drugs. Never happens.

Same

I've heard stories of clients giving gifts getting pissed when the wrong person claims them, so it's risky for not just legal reasons

The only time I've ever had to agree to anything like this in writing was when I worked for a publicly-traded company.

Better to just accept the gifts for yourself and let them fire you. I imagine a juicy wrongful termination suit would be appropriate.

Explain to the client that your refusing because of the policy that all gifts must go to the owner.

When you work in certain fields there are strict laws around accepting gifts from customers or clients. None of those laws allow the business owner to steal them from you.

That lovely aged fish in a can from Scandinavia called Surströmming. Make sure to ask for that.

or mayo in a pudding glass

Yeah, I’m a manager and I fully encourage my staff to take tips and gifts even though it’s against company policy. If a client offers a tip, I normally respond with something like “I don’t take tips, but if you and the part-timer want to to walk around the corner where there’s no security cameras, I’ll stay right here so I don’t see any money change hands.”

The part-timers need the money more than I do anyways. $50 won’t make a huge difference to me, but could be the determining factor in whether or not the part-timer has enough gas money to get to class next week. Plus they’re the actual boots on the ground making sure the day-to-day runs smoothly. I’m just doing paperwork and hanging out in case any big issues pop up.

bribes are for preferential treatment.

gifts are given to people who help you out and appreciate your efforts.

all this does is tells employees that customer satisfaction isn't a concern and they only have to make sure the customers are satisfied enough to not complain with zero effort to reward employees that go above and beyond the role.

if you work in a place like this, wake up. you're a cog in an orphan grinding machine.

My office is bad about the cookie thing too. My office is split across two different buildings.

I have worked here for several years, and we only found out a month ago that the main building has free bagels in the break room every Monday morning. The main building never bothered to tell us, because it’s donated from the local bagel shop as a “there until they’re all gone” situation. And the office drones in the main building didn’t want to share, so they just never told any of us in the secondary building.

We only found out because the bagel shop wanted to do an event in our secondary building. The main building was extremely pushy about us making sure it went well, and offered a bunch of free shit too. We finally chatted to the bagel shop owner about how odd it was that the main building was so invested. She casually dropped the “oh that’s probably just because of all the free bagels we send y’all every week haha” type of comment.

Did some digging, and sure enough the owner sends like a hundred bagels over to the main building every Monday morning. She always assumed that they were sharing, because it’s way too many bagels for just the primary building… But it turns out the employees over there were just hungry hippo’ing the break room table and taking like six bagels home every week.