Do your timesheet the day before, just as you leave.

Yeah, I know what the solution is, Ardiril, and I've already discussed this with three (3!) different managers. I really feel like taking a bat to the fucking printer right now.

In that case. subtle sabotage.

Didn't you get the memo? I'll get you another copy. And for pete's sake make sure you're using the new TPS cover sheet.

I loathe that type of crap. I used to have to do a weekly status update that was silly and seemed stupid. I put as an a weekly activity that I had to fill out the weekly activity report and logged the hour out of my day I spent on it. My boss was not pleased.

Damn it's good to be a gangsta.

I wonder if anyone has ever done a study that shows the amount of man-hours wasted by increasingly passive-aggressive employee behavior after stupid bureaucratic time-management efforts are implemented.

I'm so happy I no longer work in an office.

What really pissed me off was yesterday, when I was waiting for a time code before I filled out my timesheet, so I got a call from the department secretary:

DS: "You know you're supposed to fill out your timesheet by 8:30."
Me: "I know ma'am, I got the emails and I went to the meeting. I requested a time code for a project two days ago, haven't got it, I called the guy up this morning and he's working on it."
DS: "I understand, but that's not a valid excuse anymore. Just falsify your hours and you can correct it later."

We have to provide a change record any time we change our timesheet after saving it. In the future I am going to write "Was asked to falsify timesheet then correct it later" on the record.

Arrrgh, I feel for you. We are now having to input all kinds of codes into our system to record case outcomes, and if we do it wrong, that case is discounted from the bonus scheme. But the system is so flawed that the narrow range of codes we have to choose from don't cover anywhere near the items we need to record, so we are set up to FAIL before we even start.

I hate stuff like that. When I was working for another company, my department had its own policy for expense reports that we had to do that was above and beyond the corporate policy (and IRS guidelines) with regard to receipts.

The department required a receipt for all purchases, not just those under $15 that the rest of the company had. I would travel to NYC monthly and rather than have the $30 breakfast at the hotel, I would pick up a bagel and bottle of water from a street vendor or small deli that doesn't give out receipts. When I brought up this fact to the admin she said she needed a receipt -- no exceptions! So I said rather than reimburse me for a $3.50 breakfast with no receipt, you'd prefer I'd spend $30 at the hotel. Where is the cost control with that. You are telling me to spend more money. The compromise was when I couldn't get a receipt, I had to hand write a receipt.

The admin would then submit the expense report envelope with receipts to corporate AP to pay me. So then I'd get a call from AP saying that I shouldn't put receipts in the envelope for under $15 and that is clearly spelled out in the guidelines. I told her that our department required it.

SO A SERIES OF MEETINGS LATER the department admin decided that she would keep copies of the

On Monday we will meet all day and be blamed for the consequences of having done the work we were told to do.

HOW DARE YOU!!! Doing the work you were told to do. I mean, really. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU???

Thank you all. Your tales of corporate woe (plus a big plate of Tex Mex for lunch) have really cheered me up. :)

I think one thing to keep in mind in these situations is that this is the doing of small people with very small lives. It's not that the timesheet itself is important. It's not that there's only one absolutely correct way to process it. It's not like one tiny alteration of one tiny step will render the ultimate point -- getting paid -- an impossibility.

It's that the people who designed and control the process have control over nothing else in their lives. This one thing right here, this is where the secretary is a Viking. It's the only time she's ever going to be in charge of you, and she wants to feel it.

I always remind myself of this. It doesn't make it any less stupid or annoying or shout-inducing, but it helps me keep it in perspective. I had a similar situation two days ago where I had to entirely redo a batch of letters -- we're talking over 100 pages of tree here -- because the second-page header was right-justified instead of left-justified. I got a long lecture from the assistant to one of the higher-ups about Standard Formatting Protocol and so on. Would the letter have had less of an impact with the header on the right side of the page? No. Would the recipients have laughed at the letter's signatory because of the profound unprofessionality of that second-page header? No! But whatever. She knew about this one little internal rule, and I didn't, and she got to make me follow it. Probably made her day. And that is a very, very sad thing for her. Me? I still got paid.

*shrugs*

Thank you, 'pups. I don't even blame the secretary, actually - this is the sort of situation where dirt is flowing downhill from Way On High, and our VP is making sure that WE be the only group who is following the Letter of the Law. (At lunch, I spoke to someone in another group who received a similar email to mine, but none of the obsessive oversight and "You're 1 minute late so you are not in compliance" bullshit).

The finance department in my last office were also sticklers about time sheets. "We need them now!" "OMG we needed them yesterday!!!" "Why are you always late with your timesheets!?!?!?"

A. I was late with my timesheets because I only worked every other day, and we got paid on the 15th and 30th/31st of each month, or the last business day immediately before the 15th or 30th/31st if the 15th or 30th/31st fell on a weekend or holiday, which meant that the day the timesheets were due changed each time, and often fell on days when I was not there.

B. They tried to alert us to timesheets being due by setting appointments on everyone's Outlook calendar, but they set them all to alert us 15min. before they were due, so that didn't help at all if you weren't, you know, there that day.

C. I WAS ON SALARY. THE TIMESHEETS HAD NO IMPACT ON MY PAY. WHO THE HELL REQUIRES SALARIED EMPLOYEES TO FILL OUT TIMESHEETS, LET ALONE GETS GRUMPY WHEN THEY'RE A FEW HOURS LATE??? YOU KNOW HOW MUCH TO PAY ME WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE TIME SHEET, PEOPLE!

WHO THE HELL REQUIRES SALARIED EMPLOYEES TO FILL OUT TIMESHEETS

Oh, my institution does! The best part is when I get to fill out the "hours" line, which is an amazingly consistent 37.5 hours evvvery single week.

I wish I worked 37.5 hours every week. It would feel like a vacation.

I also have to do timesheets for my salaried position, but mine are due bi-weekly and you can bet I never know when they are actually due.
Since I'm always late with mine, two different HR people have set up calendar reminders for me, but of course those reminders are on different days, and in different weeks, and I never know which one to listen to.

Timesheets are irritating. As are the emails about me being late with them and offers to set up MORE reminders.

I'm salaried, too. Don't even get me started on the conflicting timesheet policies at every level - my various Project Managers, Section Managers, VPs, and Accounts all expect me to account for my time differently. It's madness!

MADNESS!

"Just falsify your hours and you can correct it later."

Implicit in that directive is the idea that you'll pick a reasonable value to falsify with.

Whereas if you worked in a supersonic jet flying backwards against the rotation of the earth, you might actually have worked more hours than exist in a terrestrial week! Why the hell not! We're just following orders to falsify! Without being given parameters for our fraudulence!

I'm so glad I don't have to work in an office. Just reading this thread makes my stomach twist in knots.

We're currently in the middle of switching from a paper based system to complete online time recording. My new guy who started on the first couldn't get into the time reporting system until today, and when he submitted it, his approver was someone five grades above me, so THAT person will have to send it back to him.

They've been trying to upload the student employee time worked for months. One fun quirk: the uploader will not accept file names with spaces, nor will it take .csv files, they must be .CSV files. We've reported this several times to universal disbelief. I may have to make a movie, complete with narration.

Thank God I work for people with common sense. Oy.

...but I did lose my stapler today. Does that count?

Not the stapler! I have two just for this reason. Seriously :)

"I believe you have my stapler."

*supplies muddgirl with fully charged bit driver for cubicle disassembly*

If people would just fill out their goddamn TPS reports correctly we wouldn't need timesheets.

Ugh, I am dealing with the same thing. The microcompany I've worked at for the last four years got bought out by a megacorp; everyone kept their jobs, but now we have timesheets and compliance and all kinds of crazy shit. And I've been completing timesheets - or at least, I've been going to the "create timecard" section of the site and creating a timecard every week and every week it says "Timecard successfully created and saved," which, silly me, means it's been successfully created and saved and I don't have to do anything else. But apparently I have not been "submitting" them and I have no idea what that means and now HR is on my case (but my boss has my back, so that's something).

They're also taking away the computer I've been using for the last two years (I telecommute) and giving me a laptop that spies on me; I'm not allowed to do ANY non-megacorp-related work on it, including schoolwork or web browsing. So I suddenly NEED to buy myself a new computer, which I was planning to do anyway but which really pisses me off - especially since when I live on my computer I get emails and respond within a few minutes, but since I can't do any of my normal stuff on the new one I won't be living on it and so I'll check it a few times a day, if that...so my email response time, which they track, will go down. It's all incredibly stupid and annoying.

But hey, it just justified the purchase of a hot-shit gaming computer, so that's something.

I put as an a weekly activity that I had to fill out the weekly activity report and logged the hour out of my day I spent on it.
For extra effect, you can also include the time you spent logging the hours you spent filling out the weekly activity report ;-)

I got my time sheet sent back to me last week (we submit them every four weeks) because I had accrued time outside our standard spread of hours without prior approval, so I falsified amended it and sent it back - I got it back again with an admonition not to change it. Nobody mentions that I never record the hours and hours I spend working at home well and truly outside the normal hours, even though my boss knows I do it, because she comments on me working too many hours. Lucky she's the world's greatest boss, or I'd have to do something drastic.