'They took away our Cup-a-Soup!' Share your tales of bleak breakout areas with us

join us by the watercooler:

We can't, they removed all the watercoolers and replaced them with a jug of tap water in the fridge, which never gets filled up.

unintended consequence

I worked within the NPIA for a year. Coffee and tea bags were removed to save money (negligible sums even if they were made up). The result - a mass migration to local coffee bas during th day, casting time and effort at a saving of diddly squat. But that's the Home Office for you (diddly squat. Now by comparison a large US company had office in Bristol with fantastic tea and coffee. It encouraged people to meet close to where they worked and also the mass migration of R&D folks from the manufacturing group to get over and socialise.

Cost not large, impact unmeasured of course.

First they came for the coffee

An IBM office, back in the day. It had a workers area and a client area and a nice big drip coffee machine serving both. This was already an anachronism at a time when vending machines had taken over most IBM offices. One year about a decade and a half ago, it was announced that coffee was a taxable perk and to save us from ourselves, the coffee would no longer be supplied. Being an enterprising crowd, since the machine was still there we arranged to put a few pence in a jar every day and some kind soul would go round the corner and buy a big bag of ground coffee, some milk and sugar in the morning. This caught facilities management off guard but there wasn't actually a rule against it SO after about a month of this, an electrical safety audit was commissioned from which the filter machine was excluded and, without it's up to date sticker, was taken from the building to be replaced by a vending machine.

It's my experience that when a company starts getting petty about small things, they quickly build up to larger ones.

My previous job, 2 years ago, people had to bring their own tea and coffee but there was a hot water spigot and a cupboard full of mugs, mostly donated by vendors on each floor as well as a coffee franchise in the building canteen. For the "benefit of the environment" the franchise started charging for paper cups and selling reusable moulded plastic ones and to support this, the company cleared out all the old ceramic mugs which had been re-used for years so people had to pay for new plastic ones.

"downgraded the staffers' coffee machine to a cheaper, crapper one"

I really hope you meant "crappier" and not "crapper". Not that it makes much difference to my view of coffee.

jagermeister on tap

I know someone that knows a dev in Poland who works in a place where jagermeister is supplied free on tap. This sound great except their all half pissed all the time dealing with other dev stresses.

We have a breakout....

Commonly referred to as the transporter.. Now partially useless after ops took over a nearby wall to mount 5 4k tvs to watch stats on.

The kitchen behind said wall is a bizarre black hole for milk and teaspoons, occasionally brightened up by microwave immolation (about once a year since I started).

There's also a separate room with a pool table and table football (the pool table is about as a straight as a member of Parliament and table football is held together with duct tape).

Fun times.

Anon. Because its still better than other floors in the office.

Not exactly a breakout area

My team's pig-pen was located next to a meeting room. A meeting room greatly favoured by those with over-generous budgets for lunchtime meetings. We'd eye up the lunches being delivered and decide whether to go to the canteen that day or just wait for the meeting to end.

Mmm Cointreau crèmes brûlées.

Sadly, when relocation was on the cards all those folk managed to find themselves transfers to divisions that weren't being relocated out of central London and the meetings became a thing of the past, well before I took the relocation.

One water cooler use case

One place I worked in had an extremely nice flex-time policy. Great perk.

Unfortunately the flex time and dealing with civilians in general rubbed our new Great Leader the wrong way. He was a newly retired Marine who seemed to combine the aggressiveness of Chesty Puller with the ego of MacArthur.

So the story (perhaps apocryphal) goes:

GL: "We need some serious discipline here. People wandering in and out whenever they fscking feel like it... That's BS! Everyone will be at their desks at 0800 sharp..."

Deputy: "Sir... you do have the authority to order that. But what's going to happen is that everyone will just stand around the water cooler from 0800-1100 bitching about your policy..."

AC for obvious reasons

The company I work for has the water coolers with the five gallon purified and mineralized water bottles on top. We go through a lot of those bottles. One quarter times were tough and we were on credit hold so the bottles never got refilled. They had the cleaning crew take the empty bottles outside and fill them with the water hose and then put the caps back on.

The one perk I got for my team...

Had to get a fire permit, training, etc. But we set up a smoker and a grill outside. We try to do our weekly group status meeting outdoors on Fridays. Leaders take turns cooking and serving. This week is mine.

Tomorrow's treat, weather permitting, are some smoked chicken carcasses currently marinating in a beer/hot pepper mix. For the vegetarian I'm doing some strange acorn squashy-roasty thing my wife came up with. Smoking will commence at 0800, for a 1300 meeting.

A few years back I started working at an international dot.com in London that tried sooooo hard but just couldn't get it right; the place was soulless, everyone just sat at their desks and worked 8:30 till 6:00, no talking, no water-cooler moments. Management weren't overbearing, that's just how the work environment seemed to have developed. They had large rooms filled with beanbags and swings which no one ever used. They even had beer fridges; every Friday at 5:00 everyone would grab a free beer - then go back to their desk to drink it in silence whilst working for another hour.

I managed 4 weeks there.

No pool for you

I worked for a web company in the early 00s who were trying to be more hip and trendy so bought a pool table for the kitchen area.

No one ever played it because the boss would just hear you and come to tell you to stop slacking off.

Not really sure why he bothered buying it.. company didn't last long.

Many years ago (and two offices back) we acquired some sort of coffee machine (sorry, I'm not an aficionado, it crunched beans and made OK coffee) to stop everyone disappearing to Starbucks nearby. Though it was not the most reliable of machines. Then we moved out to Canary Wharf and it was joined by a similar machine, which took slightly different beans and didn't taste as good though it was somewhat more reliaable. A few years later the mothership decided we'd be moving as they had spare floor space and it suited their balance sheet. As this building has a canteen and coffee shop upstairs and to stop the current incumbants from complaining the two trusty coffee machines were banned. The is some sort of free "coffee" available now, but my god it is disgusting.

Another gripe is that when we moved from Canary Wharf we also had to leave behind our nice Herman-Miller chairs for some shitty, useless chairs as along with many other things that's how it was... their way or the highway.

Well before the coffee machines we used to have free lunch bought in every day. You ordered first thing in the morning and and luch it arrived like magic! Obviously the reasoning was to keep us near our desks. Though the office at the time was a bit out of the way, so it would be quite easy to use up your lunch hour. There used to be a few toasters too, but I think the frequent fire alarms put paid to them.

Frank.

Back in 1990 when I joined LUL working in the Bakerloo Line offices there were no breakout areas. There was, however a bloke on 'light duties' called Frank, who worked in a small kitchenette in one corner of the floor. Frank's job was to start off round the offices on the floor (nothing open plan in those days) collecting everyone's cups. Then dishing out tea or coffee on the next circuit. Repeating continuously for the whole day - other than at around 11am, when he would bring round the bacon rolls if ordered on the previous circuit.

They tried to charge IT for coffee

Worked one place were they decided the coffee was costing them too much so they bolted on an after market card reader to the existing machine. The idea being we could pay with the cards we used at the cafeteria - where they didn't trust the cashiers with actual money.

Being IT we figured out that if we selected the coffee you wanted, inserted the card, and immediately hit "brew", while yanking the card out,

the reader couldn't process the transaction but the machine started brewing. Left there about a year later ... and the hack still worked.

Break room downgraded

They took away the foosball machine and the air hockey table, which was all the entertainment in the room. All they left was the fridge, microwave, a soft drinks machine (not free), and some tables

I got one of the CAD people to print out a huge sign on their plotter printer thingy that said "THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK" and taped it to to the floor where the entertainment used to be. I think it survived months. Not sure when it got ripped up. May have outlived me in that building.

Feminine sanitary supplies

I can't find the link now, but I remember reading an article by a female venture investor.

She'd check out the women's executive restroom, and if it didn't have a tampon dispenser (or it was empty) then she'd conclude the company was on the downswing and refuse to invest.

I seem to recall she said the test had something like a 95% success rate in predicting if the company went bust in the next 6-12 months.

CRAP In The Afternoon

Tea bags? Cup-a-Soups? Pah!

Worked at a certain outsourcer that decided toilet paper and soap were optional luxuries. For months we were encouraged to use the facilities at a nearby supermarket. Talk about pushing staff to not give a shit!

You often had an early lunch if you needed to go or risk a stomach upset, not something you want in a building where the remaining soap was so watered down it was homeopathic.

Bean counters

So much of this reeks of beancounter management.

The usual, "if it costs money it has to be removed" approach. So good managers will come up with something to improve staff moral and hopefully productivity or retention And then the BCs will turn pale at the ( relatively nominal) visible cost, while failing to notice the downstream gains of lower turnover or improved efficiency. And scrap it.

And it seems universal. Public corps. or local govt agencies. Short term costs are more significant than long term gains.

I know it's not quite break out rooms but it's in the same vein. A Web dev friend of mine sent me a picture a few months ago of the gloves his company had provided to everyone because they couldn't afford to have the heating on. Needless to say he didn't stay there long.

At my company they provide tea coffee sugar and milk. I bring my own coffee rather than drink their turgid shite, I bring my own milk now because otherwise I have to open the UHT capsules, I'm nearly at the stage of bringing my own sugar because they've got the silly individual sachets. I know it might sound ungrateful of me and their offering is better than nothing but this stuff really does get you through the day, it's the little things that aid staff morale and retention. So providing better quality stuff myself for my own sanity is a must. I also agree that if these types of things are stopped then your company probably isn't doing so great.

Cheep version

Open an office with a supermarket over the road.

:-)

DXC Erskine

they just took away all the plants that were around the break areas (real plants, that gave it some much needed life) - we have some plastic ones at reception.

Some unknown company policy says that we are not allowed plants in the buildings.................