Rules That Were Supposed to Help But Ended up a Big Fail
Credit: freepik
Double-Sided Dreams to Financial Nightmares
All printers were defaulted to print two-sided, and you were unable to disable that feature. The thought process was that this would:
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Reduce paper waste by literally cutting consumption in half
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Prevent people from printing out personal crap on work printers
This was decided by a committee of people, primarily from HR, who were tasked by the CEO to find ways to reduce costs and improve our corporate culture. To improve our culture, we basically decided that we’d be petty about work printers, and then we’d all sing together and have a coke.
What ended up happening instead was that corporate finance poop a brick because you can’t, or shouldn’t, print financials double-sided, and the IRS doesn’t take too kindly to getting filings delivered to them in that fashion. Reverse the policy? Nope. Just force areas to add blank pages into documents so that we trick the printers.
HR then implemented their new Gestapo program where you were rewarded for turning in anyone who was doing “personal business” on work computers or on work printers. The problem was that a stunning amount of “personal business” was actually stuff like employee benefits stuff. Filling out insurance forms, submitting flex pay receipts, scanning your transcripts for our tuition assistance program etc.
While the VP of HR decided to go full-on petty and say that employee benefit stuff wasn’t “work-related” and needed to be done at home on your personal PC, our freaking Chief Legal Officer came down as our voice of moral reasoning to say that was bullcrap and only then did some of the stupidity unfold. The printer thing was done officially once the CAO and CFO started getting double-sided financials. When they complained, their underlings gave them time studies to show the financial cost of having highly paid CPAs do crap like insert blank pages to trick printers instead of, you know, doing accounting and stuff.
