Penny-pinch this!
Daniel Gross on Slate recently wrote about idiotic corporate penny-pinching, and my comment made it into his follow up article of examples from readers. I’m the “former Bank of America investment-banking analyst recalls that the megabank ‘once told its employees to use paper clips instead of staples because paper clips could be re-used to save money.’”
However, my example wasn’t the worst one. At least I didn’t have to “keep a listing (on a piece of paper) of each clip that we used, and the reason for the use!” They probably had to keep track of paper usage, too.
The psychiatry ward has boomboxes that patients can borrow, but we don’t give them AC adapters because they might use them to hang themselves; so we give them batteries instead. My pregnant hypersexual schizophrenic Filipino patient really likes to listen to “Fantasy” by Mariah Carey, which would be fine if it were just once a month. But she likes to put it on repeat and listen to it all day with the volume on 10. And she always forgets to turn off the boombox when she leaves her room. At last count, she had gone through about 200 “C” batteries.
She could have used some penny pinching.
I guess we know where we stand on the “pinchable vs. rock-hard” debate when it comes to corporate expenses.