Sabotage in the American Workplace: Anecdotes of Dissatisfaction, Mischief and Revenge

• Employment law attorney Michael Maslanka reviews the book Sabotage in the American Workplace: Anecdotes of Dissatisfaction, Mischief and Revenge by Martin Sprouce. Review recounts employees’ tales of pranks in the workplace.
  

I came across a book on the remainder table in our favorite bookstore called Sabotage in the American Workplace by Martin Sprouse published by Pressure Drop Press out of San Francisco. Sprouse spent several years interviewing workers in a variety of industries across the country and catalogued accounts of merry pranksters who make work amusing. I thought I’d give you a sampling of some of our favorites. Here goes:

Well, the editor said he wanted it short and punchy, and it did have four of the five “w’s.”

A reporter at a daily newspaper in New Jersey was constantly squabbling with his editor over how to write. The editor told the reporter to cut to the meat of the coconut and stop wasting precious column space with extended lead paragraphs for run-of-the-mill stories. After one of these heart-toheart talks, the reporter wrote the following story:

DEAD

That’s what Harry Serbronski was after his car hit a telephone pole at 86 miles an hour.

That was it. Frankly, we think this is worthy of a Hemingway, a Chandler, or even a Charles Bukowski. The editor was not amused. Like that other great activity in life, the reporter experienced a moment of pleasure but a lifetime of regret.

Now that we think of it, perhaps the family of the unfortunate Mr. Serbronski should talk to one of these merry pranksters in Detroit.

Sprouse interviewed some individuals in a car assembly line. Any time they were given an opportunity, they’d deliberately mess up some internal parts of a car. These wily devils would mess with the wiring and electronic parts in infinite permutations, so that the car initially worked, but later on the owner would experience all types of problems. Since it was impossible to trace the source of the problem, no one could find out who did it or how it happened. As one of the workers noted: “That’s the beauty of it.”

And after doing such a bang-up job in military procurement, she got a promotion punching up the code for America’s nuclear arsenal.

Now here’s a tale from the Department of Defense. One of the employees was a typist who worked for captains and bird colonels. She hated it. They were always hassling her, second-guessing her work, and smoking “stinky pipes.” It was all just a “big drag.” One day she decided to do a little creative typing. One of her bosses gave her a letter to type requesting authorization to construct fuel facilities for the Eighth Army, which used to be America’s bulwark against the evil empire in Europe. Well, the letter not only described what the tanks were supposed to look like, but also what they held and how much they could hold. Whenever the volume for one of the storage tanks was either 1,000 or 10,000 gallons the typist would simply add a zero.

And this year’s Gordon Gecko Award for Financial Wizardry goes to . . .

Sprouse didn’t just limit his interviews to factory workers. He even ventured to Wall Street, where he interviewed a stockbroker who told him that he’d seen traders on the floor deliberately lose millions of dollars for their firms because they were hung over or just hacked off at their bosses. One day this stockbroker picked up a phone on the trading floor, squeezed his eyes shut, and started punching up keys. The market plunged, paper wealth was shredded, and he may have caused (to hear him tell it) millions of shares of IBM to be sold that very second.

Well, see, it started like this. I went to this Tom Peters seminar, he started talking about empowerment, and I always really wanted to be a doctor and I thought if you put the two of them together . . .

The corporate buzzword nowadays is empowerment, which will help America rise from our industrial ashes, compete with the Japanese and the Germans, and send GNP skyrocketing. Or, more likely, it will just fatten the bank accounts of management consultants like Tom Peters. (Question: What’s the definition of a consultant? Answer: A guy who knows 10,000 ways to make love but doesn’t know any women.) As we understand it, empowerment involves less management from the top, resulting in more decentralized decisionmaking, with empowered managers thereby getting greater latitude to succeed or to fail. Well, one of the managers for a national toy store chain, who was apparently a frustrated doctor, found this a heady combination. One day he found a Barbie doll on the floor with half her leg chewed off. So he took it home, sewed on a little peg, resealed her in a box, and sold her as a peg-legged Barbie. He found a ripped up Cabbage Patch doll. He and a friend took it into surgery, resewed part of it, and took it back to the store as an anatomically correct Cabbage Patch doll. His version: “I’m not trying to sound like a jerk or anything, but I was the best worker at the store.” Last we heard, he was studying for the Medical Boards and applying to medical school in Barbados.

DEWEY WINS!

Way back in 1948 all the pollsters and pundits said that Tom Dewey, the man who looked like the groom on the top of a wedding cake, was going to be America’s next president by defeating then incumbent Harry Truman. Some newspapers the day after the election even heralded him as the winner. Well, the conventional wisdom was wrong, he lost, and as a consolation prize had the interstate highway in New York State named the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway. Let’s fast forward to 1992. Sprouse interviewed a telephone surveyor who did surveys for political parties and lobby organizations. According to the surveyor, the employees just didn’t like the owner. Since they hated doing their jobs, most people didn’t do the interviews at all. They’d start making up names and answers for people who they were supposed to ask questions of but never did. They were not, however, without a conscience. If a survey came along that they felt strongly about, they’d fill in their own answers. As they told Sprouse, “We’d die laughing.”

And the envelope please . . .

Sprouse also interviewed a mailroom clerk for the Heritage Foundation, which is one of those right-wing think tanks in Washington, D.C. The Foundation sent out a lot of direct mail, soliciting monies from both millionaires and widows on pensions, and getting responses ranging from the minuscule to the humongous. A mailroom clerk was bored with her job, however. So, on a rough day, the clerk would reach into a mail bag, pull out an envelope, open it, determine the amount of the check, and then shred it.