The NYC Department of Health is opening a new office building and bringing a whole bunch of inane workplace rules with it.

The updated rules - which range from what workers can serve at agency powwows to how loud they can talk in the office - come as the Health Department begins to move into its new Queens digs today

Fried food is banned.? Drinks that have more than 25 calories per 8 ounces are banned.? (Hello, that bans milk, which has been proven to increase weight loss.)? Eaves dropping is also banned.? I hope they got rid of cubes and gave everyone sound proof offices, because, believe me, I’m sure most of us would be THRILLED to not have to hear about our cube mates’ toenail fungus any more.

Does the management at the NYC Department of Health think that their employees are so immature that every bit of their lives must be controlled?? Another of the rules is that bagels and muffins must be cut up.? Why?? Because everyone knows that as soon as you cut something all the calories fall out?? Seriously, someone who wants to eat a (gasp!) whole bagel will still eat the same amount.

Lest you smugly say that those people might have bad management or be immature, but your workplace would never need to spell those sorts of things out, take a look at lawsuits for discrimination.? Most of them are over things that your third grade teacher would never have allowed.? What happened that we got to be adults and yet, apparently, couldn’t handle this on our own?

Take, for instance, the question of whether diabetes is covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).? The NY Times gave us the following example of employees treated poorly due to their disease:

A mortgage loan officer in Oregon was denied permission to eat at her desk to stanch her sugar fluctuations, and eventually was fired.

A Sears lingerie saleswoman in Illinois with nerve damage in her leg quit after being told she could not cut through a stockroom to reach her department.

A worker at a candy company in Wisconsin was fired after asking where he could dispose of his insulin needles.

The mature among us would say, “Oh!? You’re diabetic and therefore need to keep food at your desk and eat from time to time to keep from, you know, dying?? Sure, we’ll make an exception to the no-food-at-your-desk rule for you!”? And the employee would quietly eat food when she needed and all would be well with the world.? Instead, you have people arguing over what the law requires.

And what about bullying and harassment?? Shouldn’t this be common sense?? You’d think, except that it appears to not be all that common–the sense part, not, unfortunately, the harassment part.? For instance, the EEOC had to issue a finding that

[A] female Houston firefighter was subjected to a hostile work environment based on gender and also suffered retaliation at the hands of the Department.? The EEOC report, released Monday, says Jane Draycott found racial and sexual slurs scrawled on her locker after she complained about workplace conditions in 2009. Another firefighter’s locker was also defaced, according to the report.

Or this case in which a football coach’s work computer had

Videos of women having sex with horses. A video of two naked women using a funnel and fish to commit an unnatural sex act. A picture of Air Force One as Watermelon One. An email comparing Michelle Obama to a chimpanzee. Frequent use of the ��N�� word in other parodies and email.

I mean, seriously, who doesn’t know this is a bad idea?? In the case of the female fire fighter, the graffiti should never have been written, but even then, the whole rest of the department should have been falling over themselves apologizing for the unknown culprit.? Instead, the fire department claims this isn’t harassment?? In the football coach story, he was suing for something else when this came out.? I guess if you’re stupid enough to have this stuff on your work computer, you’re too stupid to erase it before you file your own lawsuit.

So, are these lawsuits and rules requiring you to cut your bagels a result of our own immaturity?? Or are they anomalies?? We can’t possibly be this dumb, can we?

I’d like to think so.

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