Because our director is a dick. You see, if a student can get a free textbook they won’t buy one from the bookstore and occasionally we do have textbook donated that are same textbooks (edition, year everything) used in current courses. Our old director let the students have the books if we were going to discard them anyway and the student workers would gleam through them for themselves and their friends and possibly save hundreds of dollars. The new director doesn’t like it. It cuts into the bookstore’s profits, so now a librarian no less has to take the discarded new textbooks to a certain specific dumpster that students don’t have easy access to. It is absolutely ridiculous the lengths this clown goes to to so no one can possibly get a free book. I hate throwing away perfectly good books under any circumstances, but this really irritates me.
I am the senior secretary in the real property department of a private law firm. We only do work for very well-to-do business entity clients. When a poor individual in real estate trouble cold-calls our firm looking for legal help, having seen us perhaps on the internet, I’m the one nominated to blow him off. Of course I phrase my rejection very courteously, but it sucks to essentially tell a worried, needy person “You are not rich enough for us to give a damn about.” I give them the number of a local legal referral service, but I still feel mean and dirty.
I used to be in consulting- computer forensics in particular, and I found myself often torn between doing things the manual way that would take a full day to finish and check, or automating it, and having it take 1 hour of computer time, and another hour to check. We didn’t bill for computer time, under the rationale that our clients wouldn’t like to pay while we surfed the web waiting for the jobs to finish.
I also had a real problem with the make-work BS we did to fill hours. For example, they dreamed up this grotesquely intricate “specification” for how to format any SQL code we wrote in the course of the forensic data mining part of the job.
I suggested that we use an automated formatter, and modify our spec to match the output that it could produce- the amount of mind-numbing effort spent formatting SQL code to this particular specification would have been shorn to mere seconds, and have been absolutely consistent to boot. You see, they were also the most horrible gang of nit-pickers I’ve ever had the displeasure to work with, and would get pissy about the SQL code formatting, because they were (with a couple of exceptions) too stupid to follow most of the actual code.
But, (I suspect) because this would remove billable hours from the management’s cut of the project pie, they nixed that idea without explanation.
I also got “laid off” (read: fired) shortly thereafter.
Oh, there’s also the part of the job where they simply refuse to let me garrote my boss like a mob snitch. I’m not real happy about that either.
I really hate having to tell patients we can’t treat them anymore and not being able to tell them why. “Your insurance company has decided that the care we refer you and your fellow members for is too expensive and therefore they have terminated our contract. You now have to go to ____________ who will do nothing for you but will save the company loads of money.”
Maybe you could point out that hanging onto the textbooks and selling them used would be more lucrative than throwing them away. He could sell them back to the bookstore, or online for a larger profit than $0. Or don’t you have someone who could check to see if you already have that ISBN, and turn away donations in the first place? Let the student sell them back to the bookstore at least.
We through away literally, TONS of high quality recyclable bond paper, as well as other recyclable materials because the shit-for-brains minions infesting this establishment refuse to, or are unable to, read the sign on the recycling bin that says NO GARBAGE- BOND PAPER ONLY, and the recycling contractors refuse to do business with us. It used to make me sick. Now I don’t care. I have plenty of other things to worry about.
Unfortunately, the way the donation process is handled is flawed (largely because it was re-written by someone already mentioned). We can’t really refuse the donations (only give low values for their worth) and sometimes it is days before someone goes through them anyone. I would love to let the students sell the books back to the bookstore. They were able to do that under the previous director who let them take any books they wanted that we weren’t going to use. New director’s just a jerk who can’t stand the thought of anyone getting a freebie; hence, there’s the policy that the books must be disposed of by a faculty member in one particular dumpster located where students can’t easily access it because when we were just throwing them in the library dumpster students would fish them out for use or resale. I know in the larger scheme of things there are worse injustices, but it just really irritates me that these are perfectly good textbooks being destroyed while people are living on Ramen noodles in order to buy these exact same books.
I quit both jobs that included ethics I objected to. One was telemarketing. I don’t even remember exactly what that job entailed, something about calling people who advertised large-ticket items in Classifieds and offering them something. I was a teenager and so didn’t catch on to what they were doing until my second day. I started asking about who owned the company I was working for and realized it was shady, since no one was telling. I walked out.
The second job, I was a mortgage loan processor in the early 90’s (maybe 1994?) and worked for a small broker which was OK until she started going under. Then she started making deals and putting people into more debt than they could afford. I processed a couple of second mortgages that I didn’t feel good about, but were just OK. The third and final loan was a 60-something woman getting a line of credit so that she could buy a car. The broker had told her she could do this (and she technically could, while going 100% into equity) because she couldn’t get a car loan. I explained to the “about to be 80% in debt woman” that using her home’s equity to buy a car was foolhardy, and why, and how the broker had massaged the numbers so the woman would qualify, and how much money she would really owe, and how much she was underwater for each month based on her income, and how this was basically a third mortgage that she would never be able to get ahead on. Once she understood what I was saying, I walked out.
Maybe if I started believing Jesus would save me from my sins, I could work for people like that. In the meantime, my personal ethics prevent me from tolerating it.
I index books, so this is not really an issue for me. I guess I could conceivably be offered a job indexing a book that was on Holocaust denial or something, but I think I’d probably just turn the assignment down. One of the perks of being a freelancer, I guess.
Now, I have been asked by editors to change the index in such a way that in my opinion, it became less usable and functional. Which is annoying and frustrating, but not really against my grain morally, so I don’t think it counts.
I hate having to pursue collections against someone who the courts screwed over. It’s not uncommon for the court to issue a default order based on imputed income. Yes, the person who is (now) ordered to pay child support should have appeared; however, setting a $200/month order against someone who has never held a job longer than a few weeks or has only worked part time at McDonalds is grossly unfair, in my opinion.
Luckily, we are now allowed to nag a client about filing a motion and there are classes to help them do so. I still hate seeing clients start out behind the 8-ball with little way out. The court system abuses them first, then we come along and make it worse.
I may be assuming a lot, but child support is almost always paid by men, and I don’t feel any sympathy whatsovever for some dumb-assed chump who fathered a child and hasn’t held a job for more than a few weeks or who has only worked part-time at McDonalds.
Them’s the breaks; wrap that rascal unless you want stuff like this to happen to you.
As an architect I had some trouble with master-planning a golf course in a nice wooded area. The ecological impact on the area would have been significant.
Another time I had to work on a project for a pharmacudical company and the program involved animal labs. Now I’m the sort that volunteers at animal shelters so this was very hard.