They Are Confiscating Office Chairs!

Unspoken status symbols at work don't make the employee handbook, but they do cross lines of sanity.

Who knew that one day, Michael would aspire to achieve a great number of ceiling tiles?  You see, at his full-time job, success is rewarded with 12" x 12" squares hanging over your head.  The higher up the ladder you climb, the more ceiling tiles you are issued.

For the record, we're not talking about moving someone from a cubicle to an office. We're talking about counting tiles - literally - and then pushing out your cube walls to give you more space.

But wait, there's more!  The size of Michael's chair counts too. Entry-level peons get a low-back seat, mid-level employees get a mid-back (arms available at your boss's discretion) and high-backs go to, you guessed it, The Suits.

Without a doctor's note, there are no exceptions. Just ask Larry.  The Chair Police literally wheeled away his seat when he was in the bathroom. Apparently, he inherited the chair when his department moved locations. Little did he know he was violation the company's policy.  He enjoyed the chair for about three months until an employee, suffering from some serious chair envy tipped of the powers that be. This rat definitely deserves a new chair, preferably, of the electric variety.

Goodbye back support, hello crappy chair.

It's idiocracy like this that motivates me to:

a) Work for myself one day
b) Strive for Jobacle world domination

Some organizations have corner offices and company cars and free gym memberships; Michael gets ceiling tiles and chairs.  If these are the modern day workplace carrots, I might opt for the stick.

What unspoken employee "perks" does your place of employment use as an incentive to get you to aspire up the corporate ladder?

Whether it's generous or outlandish, we want to hear about it!

Excuse me.  I must get back to work.  If not, they might wheel away my chair.

Comments

[Duane]

Oh, the battle for chairs is legendary. Almost every job I've had has had some sort of story on the subject. My favorite came when our IT team at a large mutual fund company was tasked with recovering assets from a startup (that we'd funded) that was going belly-up. Manager went over there to claim the computers, which we had a right to. So to move the big 21" monitors, he put one each on a nice Aeron chair and wheeled them out the door and onto the truck. When he came back to sign out the bankruptcy overseer guy running the show said, "You're gonna bring those chairs back, right? Nice try, though."

Never put developers on the same floor as a conference room with nicer chairs than you give the developers. Daily we would steal them, nightly the office managers would steal them back. Ah, good times.

Just the other day at my current job, the CTO quit. My whiteboard does not hang properly on my wall, so I went over and stood in his cube (CTO had a cube!) thinking about whether to raid his space. CFO and HR lady walked by and said, "You look puzzled."

"Just thinking about stealing something," I said.

"That *is* how you look!" one of them said. Then it dawned on the HR lady, no less - "Hey, we haven't raided this cube yet! I CALL THE CHAIR!" And I got to watch the CFO and HR lady fight over the CTO's abandoned chair.

[Nancers]

We don't have any chair battles but we do have coffee status wars. Only people who are managers or directors are entitled to take coffee or hot water from the break room. Employees who are at the lower rungs must visit the vending machine for a 65-cent brew. So let me get this straight. The people who can actually afford Starbucks get free coffee and the ones who are busting their tails are forced to spend money. What type of logic is that!

[Benjamin A.]

Our senior level people all get drivers. I could understand if I worked in government but we are in medical sales so there is really no need.

[Ben E.]

We get virtually no perks. All of our chairs suck, and there's no foreseeable end to the torture!