Heh. Who needs to rant on this when you’ve taken all of today’s rant mojo quota out of the universe?

In the Arizona case, the caller allegedly posing as a police officer remained on the phone to instruct the manager for each step of the examination of his young customer, which included a demoralizing cavity search.

Did the article say whether the youth actually had any cavities? Do these managers think they can impersonate dentists, too?

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. I think the managers are mostly smart enough to think that even if the caller isn’t a police officer, they can always argue they thought he was and decided they should do as he says. They can probably cite obstruction of justice concerns and citizen’s arrest authority.

Y’all assume to much. Maybe the manager had a buddy call in to have a dumbass excuse to give a young girl a finger or two.

That’s just plain disgusting elwe-whatever.  I don’t think that any employer would ever be so dumb as to deliberately do that to an employee. Maybe this was one of those high school kid Managers with no experience.

Too lazy to cut&paste?

I’ll take bets for the dumbest thing managers have done.

This smells of Urban Legend even though it seems that it was a news article, I can’t believe we haven’t heard more about it on the news.

I deeply resent the description of Taco Bell as a ‘restaurant’.  I mean really- ‘slop-trough’ maybe, but restaurant?? Poor Bernard Loiseau would have to come back and off himself again, to hear such a thing.
BTW Lustybustygal, in my thankfully short experience in the food service biz,” those high school kid Managers” were the norm, not the exception.  ‘Course, this was long before Dub’s reign..

That was my first thought as well, Brooks, but searches of Snopes.com among other UL sites hasn’t turned it up as of yet. You would think the WSJ would be inclined to make sure stories like this are real before printing them.

In my highschool just a few months ago they said we’d be using name tags on a particular date. I find the idea of nametags in a school disgusting as seemed to be the case with many others. However on the given day everyone was wearing a nametag, me being one of the only people to not. That seemed to show me that people will speak often about how they think something is stupid and they’d never deal with it yet when the time came they allow followed like blind idiots. This article simply reminds me that people will easily follow any instructions a person in a perceived position of authority tells them to do.

re the school nametags - if you are the only one without a nametag, you are very conspicuous.  If on the other hand, you (and perhaps many others) have the WRONG nametags, much more thorough confusion can be engendered, and perhaps not even noticed until the nametags are NEEDED - especially if you could talk twenty kids into wearing the SAME nametag.

This all reminds me of that experiment where a member of the public gave electric shocks to a subject under the guidance of a professor. Even when the subject was rolling in agony pleading for the person to stop, they continued to do what the authority figure told them. (in reality the prof and victim were actors, but the person thought the pain was real).  This phenomenon has been linked to the Holocaust.

Obedience to an authority figure is a survival instinct, and is still important in dangerous situations.  However since the onset of intelligence it can misused.