Weird Shit I've Been Asked to Do at Work

This month in Flower Child, I’m focusing on the world of work; I’ll tell you why in a month. If you know what I’m talking about, no spoilers please!

If you enjoy this post, I’d LOVE it if you’d click the ❤️ at the top or bottom. Thank you!!

We’ve all experienced weird shit at work from time to time.

To be fair, most of my work experience hasn’t been that weird. But I’ve been asked to do some weird shit now and then. As I think back over my years in the workforce, a few odd requests stand out.

Most of them are from the 1980s; the most recent weird shit that comes to mind was over a decade ago. Is it good that my work is getting less weird? I mean, weird doesn’t have to mean bad. Read on and judge for yourself.

As my junior year of college loomed ahead of me, I wasn’t sure what I was doing; I hadn’t even declared a major. Earlham College had three terms a year, so it was pretty low-stakes to take one of them off and ponder how to proceed. That’s how in the fall of 1981, I found myself renting a house back in my hometown of Urbana, Illinois with a few old friends. I got a job at Taco John’s, a fast-food joint on the University of Illinois campus where, working the late shift, I served drunk frat boys who wanted a bite to eat after the bars closed.

Yeah, that was a real fun job.

I’d recently turned 20, and my boss was a bit younger than me. The drinking age had been raised to 21 across most of the U.S. just as I was turning 18, but my boss thought I might still be able to buy him a six-pack. Also, he wanted me to go with him to his apartment after work to drink it.

I declined. Not long after that, I was let go, with the excuse that business was slow and it was “last hired, first fired.” I wasn’t heartbroken, but I knew the real reason I’d been fired. No matter — it was time for me to return to school and become an English major, duh.

It was my first day at my first full-time job out of college, where I had the illustrious title of Clerk-Typist Series 0322. Despite that title, I didn’t get the job for my typing skills, of which I had none; from junior high through college, I’d assiduously avoided taking any class I considered as un-feminist as typing. But I’d scored high on an embarrassingly easy standardized test for entry-level government jobs, and a job offer followed soon after.

At some point during my tenure of a year and four months in the Office of Personnel (not that I was counting), we got a word processor. On my first day, though, there was no such thing, so I was sat down in front of a typewriter and asked to type a rejection letter. Not only that, but I had to type the same letter six times for the six different rejected job applicants it was going to. Not only that, but they were being rejected for the job I’d gotten. A lot of Wite-Out was used that day (any young folks reading this can look up what that was).

Don’t even get me started on the male stripper we had in that office for the boss, Tami’s, birthday. Hey, it was the ‘80s, and it was DC. But I didn’t have to do anything for that, other than show up — which, when you think about it, was pretty weird.

My first job in San Francisco, at the EPA, was a step up from EximBank in terms of aligning with my soul and all that — though I was still a clerk-typist. One of my daily tasks there was downloading all the incoming emails, printing them, and delivering them by hand to their recipients — something that’s weird only in retrospect.

One day, though, I was given a special task that seemed weird even at the time. I was ushered into the boss’s private office and handed a pile of hundreds of form letters. There, I had to “forge” her signature on each letter, tracing her actual signature through the paper.

You can see why I watched the clock at that job.

I seem to have a history of bosses asking me to buy them liquor. It happened again at a publishing company past its heyday that was reduced to publishing its backlist. Picturesquely located by Washington Square in San Francisco’s North Beach, it was run by W. H. Freeman (who’d previously run a company by that name), who would say to me daily, “I don’t know if I’ve told you this, but I used to be rather famous.” I was the only employee other than his wife, who helped out part-time.

I think he was 92? Maybe he was 82.1 I was in my twenties, so he seemed really old. Whatever his age, Mr. Freeman was definitely feeble and not very mobile. So he’d sometimes ask me to go to the corner liquor store to buy him a bottle of sherry.

He’d also yell at me for doing things he’d told me to do, or for not doing things he’d told me not to do. When I gave him two weeks’ notice, he got livid and said, “Why don’t we make it right now, this minute.”

Though I’d lasted just two months in the job, I felt good about that — my predecessor had only made it six weeks.

My next publishing job was at a law book publisher, where I worked in the most boring division, California Codes. Interpretations of the law and case studies can be fascinating, but the law itself is pretty dull.

Just when I thought the job couldn’t get duller, I was handed some boxes filled with small slips of paper, about three by five inches. Each slip of paper had a number in the upper right corner, and my task was to file the papers in each box in numerical order.

You can see why my friends and I often passed the time at that job writing limericks.

It wouldn’t have taken much to come up in the world from those first publishing jobs, but working at HarperSanFrancisco was like being spirited away to Oz from Kansas. I can’t recall anything particularly weird I was asked to do in my five years there; maybe I’ve blocked out the weird because it was a pretty great job overall, despite some corporate shenanigans I blame on Rupert Murdoch, who owned the company. Eventually, though, my entire department, minus our boss, was laid off (thanks, Rupert).

After that, I ended up in tech by accident (I live in the Bay Area; need I say more?). Macromedia wasn’t too weird, unless you considered it weird to be treated like an adult professional, have lavish Christmas parties, and take a six-week sabbatical every four years.

But now and then, I was asked to do something I considered weird. Like when we went on a two-day “offsite,” as they called them, at a fancy spa a couple hours north of San Francisco. There, we were made to form teams, come up with names for our teams, and take part in some kind of relay race that I dimly recall involved stomping on grapes. (If you worked there with me, did we actually do that?) [Update: A Macromedia co-worker confirmed that we did in fact stomp on grapes.] I was so cranky during the whole thing that I was sure I’d be fired — but then, I spent my whole fourteen and a half years in tech thinking I’d be fired for not being technical enough, and that never happened.

When Adobe bought Macromedia, things got weirder in many ways, and I was more often asked to do weird shit.

We had to use a tool the boss called a “grammar checker on steroids” to edit our user manuals. We had to go through a crazy copyright process for the user manuals that I calculated took over 1,000 hours a year — half a year of work for one person. And for a while, I was made to attend a weekly meeting — over the phone, there was no Zoom yet — with a team in India at the ungodly hour of 7am. I’d get out of bed, pee as fast as I could, and head straight for the phone. Imagine my dismay one week when no one else showed up. I shut down that meeting soon after and vowed my next job would not be for an international company.

Can you believe they even wanted me to use Times New Roman for internal documents? Not only did I consider that an unacceptable font, but the fact that a font was being dictated at all for internal documents struck me as — well, dictatorial. And weird. I declined, probably not all that politely, to be a font slave, and kept using whatever font I favored at the time. If you don’t think this mandate was weird or worth resisting, remember that wars have been fought over fonts. By Adobe, among others.

Get ready for my favorite weird work request of them all.

Eventually I followed … maybe not my bliss, but my meaning. I needed to do more meaningful work, so in 2013, at the ripe old age of 52, I made a career change into clean energy.

I worked at a startup that was attempting to connect homeowners with solar installers to streamline the process of going solar. Before long, we were acquired by another startup, whose goal was to help anyone — homeowners or renters — take clean-energy actions of all kinds.

It wasn’t easy to get the word out to the public about our services, but we were trying. One day, one of the co-founders of the original company, an eager young man, came in all excited about an idea he had. He was, and is, a very sharp guy, and he’s done well in his career. But this was his idea: we should make a viral video.

So I did what he asked: I created a video, and then, in the video editing tool, I clicked the button marked “Viral.”

Okay, I didn’t do it. We didn’t do it. There’s no Viral button. The company eventually closed, and I’m sure it was because I didn’t follow that young man’s directive to make a viral video. What else could it have been?

I don’t doubt for a minute that I’m forgetting some weird shit I’ve been asked to do at work. I’m not exactly known for my good memory.

I’ve certainly seen and heard some weird shit at work — like when the sales director at Harper said we shouldn’t use the word “suicide” in the title of a book about suicide, because “it has a stigmata attached to it.” Or when one of my many tech bosses ensnared me in an argument so emotional I felt like we were a couple having a fight. Or when my boss at Bancroft-Whitney kept saying about herself, “When you’ve got a rep, you’ve got a rep.” I could go on.

But I promised this would be about weird shit I’ve been ASKED TO DO at work, not weird work shit in general. Maybe I’ll get to that another time.

I’d love to hear about weird shit you’ve been asked to do at work — and whether you did it. Let me know in the comments!

Leave a comment