The 10% Lunch

So a buddy of mine told me a story that essentially sums up the way most people feel about corporate America.

He was having lunch as he normally does after working diligently in the morning. He left the office at about 12:15pm to go get a burrito. He decided that instead of taking it to go and eating it at his desk like an animal, he was going to eat it at the restaurant.

He ends up getting back to the office at exactly 12:48pm. His allotted time for his mandatory lunch is 30 minutes (for those of you who are not math wizards he came back to the office 3 minutes late). His middle manager had the gall to immediately call him into a meeting. His manager said that he was timing him and he saw that he came back after 33 minutes. Now I wasn’t actually there, but according to my friend the conversation went something like this…

“Did you know that the time we give you for lunch is 30 minutes?”

“Yes”

“Do you realize that you took 33 minutes today.”

“No.”

“Well, we did. You took 33 minutes for a 30-minute lunch. That is a difference of 3 minutes. That’s a 10% difference. Meaning, you took a 10% longer lunch than you should have. What are we going to do to fix this?”

“I don’t know”

“We need to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. Is there something we can do to help you?”

“I guess you can give me more time for lunch.”

"That wouldn’t be productive for the company now would it?”

Unbelievable.

Comments

[WTF]

Looks like a new job is in order. How much company time did his d**k of a supervisor waste timing him and then having the meeting? Geez, how about judging on the basis of performance and accomplishment, oh, that takes more skill than looking at a watch.

[David]

Most scenarios I find like that, the person, i.e. the manager is so unproductive they are afraid of being fired themselves so they have to come up with a scheme that they are actually doing something at work.

So what do they do? Pull stuff like this out of their ass. Senator McCarthy did that with the Communist scare as did the reefer madness guy did in the 40's as well.

All too often I find management "trying to find a better way to evaluate" our jobs. If they werent complete idiots and actually had experience in the industry, they wouldnt need easy ways for evaluation.

[BizzFlip]

The truths of corporate America are scary, honestly I believe people could be more productive if they had a longer lunch, a 30 min. lunch makes me feel like I am in highschool.

[David]

I might bitch about my jobs, but I am glad we dont have lunch Nazi's here. I definately would have told that manager that he wasted a lot more time on that meeting than on the 3 minutes extra the employee took for lunch.

[Thomas]

His math is wrong too. 33 is not a 10% difference, it is 10% more.

[BizzFlip]

Well, when it comes to middle management in today's micromanaging corporations what else do you expect, they tend to be idiots, especially when it comes to time/time management...

[Sal Batista]

Most corporations(not all) all they care about is the profits so they try to do anything they can exploiting you and once they are done sucking you dry then they outsource your job to another country for cheaper labor with disregard to you as a human. They have no moral ethics , they ruin the environment and spend a lot of their money paying lobbyists and politicians to control our government.

The model philosophy of a corporation needs to change from monopoly to community oriented, from idolizing their product and profits to idolizing their employees, from destroying the environment to creating a sustainable company, from paying lobbyists and funding politicians to paying their taxes and funding communities, from outsourcing jobs to employee retention, just to name a few.

I'm not against corporations, I'm against corporations that think they can buy power, get away with damaging the environment, and put profits over employees.

A good ethical corporation

We the people have the power to make a difference, not for ourselves but for our future generations and our planet.

Boycott the corporate media is one way to start and support alternative sources of energy so we can lead the rest of the world towards a more caring and self sustainable society.

[BizzFlip]

Quite the Rant Sal, I'm at a loss of words...

[Mike]

WOW ... reminded me of a company I worked for about 10 years ago. I sold exhibit space for a trade show and I was on commission but advanced a "salary" every two weeks, and at the end of the trade show we did an accounting, deducting my "salary" from my gross commission to come up with my final commission check. The last year I was with the company the dick of an owner sat down with me with this log book and tallied up all the times I had arrived past the designated 8:30 am start time. He added up every 2 - 3 - 10 minute tardiness to come up with about two to three hours over the course of the year. He then proceeded to pro rate it and deduct it from my commission. I tried countering it with the many many days I stayed until 8 - 9 pm at night so I could follow up with calls to California (we were in the EST time zone). He said that didn't count as that was "expected" of me! So essentially I was penalized for a few minutes of tardiness but not for going over and above the call of duty by what was my calculations almost TWO WEEKS of overtime.