Hey, I work for Kruger Industrial Smoothing: "We don't care, and it shows."
Many people have jobs, because they like having money to pay bills and such. Some companies offering those jobs are fun, others aren't.
And then there are some companies where unless you have an economics degree from an Ivy League university, you have absolutely
no idea how the company stays in business, thanks to the staggering, mind-numbing degree of incompetence in the company. And in some really extreme cases, even
with such a degree you're baffled.
In the real world, there are sometimes mitigating circumstances that would otherwise allow an apparently incompetent business to stay active, ranging from serving as tax write-offs for larger companies, to holding monopolies on a specific resource, and beyond, but most stories
don't get anywhere near that detailed in their observations of
Real Life issues like those, for the companies they depict.
May be controlled or managed by
pointy haired bosses, be staffed
mostly with bogglingly stupid employees, have installations with
tons of safety violations, saddled with ludicrous rules and regulations that make no sense outside of some
bureaucratic hell, or some combination of the above.
Quite a bit of
Truth in Television, but no such examples here, please. Compare to
Murder, Inc.,
Law Enforcement, Inc.,
Evil Inc., and the eponymous organization of
Monsters, Inc..
Examples
Film
Literature
- In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is every single trait of one of these turned Up to Eleven. Their complaints department occupies all the major landmasses of three planets. Megadodo Publishing, publisher of the eponymous Guide, isn't a lot better.
- The Manuscriptorium in Septimus Heap progressively becomes this after Beetle's dismissal.
Live-Action TV
Newspaper Comics
- The company that Dilbert works at, generally nameless aside from one-off joke strips that don't hold beyond that strip (or episode, for the TV show). Apparently the company gets bought and sold by larger companies so often that even the employees aren't sure who they're "working" for most of the time.
Video Games
- Aperture Science in Portal. They made lots of innovative products but didn't know how to use them correctly. For an example, propulsion and repulsion gels would have had many practical uses and they used them in dietary products that worked too well, resulting in the user dying of starvation. The portal gun itself was originally designed as a shower curtain.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Mr Burns's nuclear power plant in The Simpsons. Aside from literally hundreds of safety violations, the company is staffed by incredibly stupid and incompetent employees (Homer Simpson is really only slightly more inept than the rest), and the plant is falling apart, to the point where it would cost $100,000,000 just to bring it up to code. The company really only makes money due to being the sole electric power provider to the Springfield area, and highly efficient corruption that allows crooked public officials to actually choose their bribes a la Let's Make a Deal.
- The spy agency, ISIS, where the core characters of Archer work, is largely staffed with petty and lazy workers who focus more on their hedonistic lives during the work day than on actual work, and is in constant financial hardship due to the boss' and the title character's extravagant expenditures from their corporate accounts. This over-spending has gone on for years, and it has been noted by the company's head accountant that, for fifteen quarters, the company has ended up in the red. It's only after Archer goes missing for three months by the beginning of Season 3 that ISIS turns a profit.
