I used to work security during college. Nothing valuable, nor important on the promises, imagine an empty warehouse, and security due to a requirement by an insurance.
All was fine, nothing happened (would hear rumours otherwise), till one time they installed https://www.guard1.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Guard-Tour-System-Checkpoint.png system recording security checks. So now instead of just doing the common sense thing and looking for anything unusual, not going into areas which had perfect coverage on the CCTV, you had to go with a reader device (another thing to carry on you) to areas completely locked, in an illogical order, and you actually had to reach areas completely within your eyesight otherwise, to then squat (they were at floor level), to read the 35+ tags…
Then you had other morons wasting their time, to check if the security walks were done as often they wanted them done (too often). Some people just shouldn't have power, because they turn into little Hitlers, making sure your life is not too nice, and more miserable than theirs, or theirs when they were your age.
Completely illogical (saying this as someone scoring one standard deviation above average on psychometric tests, and now with bachelors of science level of education).Location of the tags most likely designed on a knee in a few hours at most, by someone who had never done the job, without any consultation with the folks who had the most efficient ways/routes to actually do the job and not miss anything, without any space for discussion/redesign.
Now, the reader (Low Frequency RFID), was an electrical device, sadly enclosed, solid, waterproof. PCB board… What I heard, is that 5 seconds in a microwave was enough to damage the fine electronics (rfid reader, ROM – memory) but not the not so fine electronics (LED, switch underneath a button). Or perhaps it was placing it near a heater for not that very long…, both would work.
Due to irremovable battery, one would need to have plans (“explanations” what happened in case of the device smelling burnout, damage to a microwave and similar) B, C, D and an extinguisher, and nothing flammable nearby. Well apparently all went well, and there was no need for plan B, C or D.
And so the common sense prevailed.
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Another thing I heard about from a different workplace was a requirement to fill in some data into an excel sheet from multiple sources daily. One quickly figured out, they wanted something into those data cells, to give you something to do. That lead to simply copy-pasting the figures from random days in the past, rather than actually pulling them from all the different systems/websites. Although there was confidence that people who needed those numbers worked with numbers from the system itself, and not on daily basis, but more like monthly basis, to do some analysis on it and spot patterns. And they ended up not spotting what was going on with the copy/paste for months…
What are your stories, where the workers fought back against pointless work, invigilation, or even had done some “planned obsolescence” to equipment/software?