My last job was as a quality control technician for a certain sour cream company named after a flower. It wasn’t a bad place to work for by any means, but our boss would get extremely overbearing to a ridiculous degree when she was stressed.
During one of these fits of anxiety-induced micromanaging, she was looking at PDFs we uploaded of some logs and called my lab coordinator (LC):
Boss: “Hey, what pen does [redacted] use? It writes so beautifully!”
LC: “Um… I don’t know. Probably the same pen we all use, so most likely the Sharpie.”
Boss: “Can you please check and send me a picture of it when you get a chance?”
LC: “…sure.”
Me, across the room: “Uh oh. You’re making a face. What does that face mean?”
LC: sigh “She wants me to take a picture of [redacted]’s pen and send it to her.”
Me: “…why?”
LC: sighs and shrugs
SpongeBob Narrator Voice: 5 minutes later
phone rings again, caller ID says boss’s name, we both groan
Boss: “Hey, LC, I want you to confiscate all the pens and make sure that everyone switches to this one.”
LC: “…are you serious?”
Boss: “Yes. I’d like this to be done by second shift.”
LC: “…….Okay.”
So that’s the story of how any pen except for the Pentech black ink gel pen was illegal in our quality lab for about six months until our boss got promoted and another one took her place. Naturally, when we spread the word to our coworkers, they thought we were doing a bit.