I worked at a place that brought in consultants to cut costs. They wound up passing around their findings to every employee. Save erasers, and pencils by using them down to the nub. Save staples by using less on every good document. The whole thing was just more of the same. They spent a ton on these guys. They certainly cost them selves money with that program.
Bosses love to be proven wrong. If you do this with your immediate boss, he’ll love being put on the spot and won’t see you as a troublemaker and/or potential threat at all. If you do it with higher-ups, they’ll love the fact that you’re proving to them that they hired idiots for middle management–bonus points if those idiots are family members, colleagues from a previous company or members of the same church.
To be fair, if your crankshaft is leaking, prayer may be your only option.
One of my offices’ cost-saving goals has been to cut down on paper costs. So they take a 30k Excel spreadsheet, print it out to have the branch manager affix his signature, then scan it into a 2 Meg pdf file, which gets e-mailed to 6 or 7 people and stored on the shared server. So what would have been 2 or 3 copies (max) of one sheet of paper becomes 12 to 20 Mbytes of server storage space, per page.
On a completely unrelated note, we get weekly messages from IT about low drive space on the S drive and they’ve eliminated all of the personal G drives from the server. :rolleyes:
Since I don’t believe in the Lord God, I carry around a walking staff. I refer to it as my Staff of Attitude Adjustment or my Staff of Smiting. I can’t believe in God, there are entirely too many people who remain unstruck by lightning.
Hah. I vote for a new Board word: prosletroll.
I spent six months working at Lucent, so I know what the place is like.
But my best example was at Hallmark Cards. It’s a huge, privately owned company with an astounding profit margin (selling something that costs $.06 for $3.95), but business school graduates tend to apply the same rules no matter the nature of the business.
Hallmark is in the middle of Kansas City, MO. As they grew, they would attach new buildings onto the old one. As is usual, the new buildings didn’t exactly fit very well with the old, resulting in a painfully circuitous route from one end of the complex to the other.
The building I worked in was the “Rice Innovation Center”, filled (at the time) with people charged with development of new business areas (I was making their first web site). It was the most southern building in the complex. The “Crown Room” cafeteria was in the oldest building, and the furthest to the north.
For years, the cafeteria would bring two carts to the atrium of the Rice center, with hot and cold food. All these very bright and generally well paid people would visit the atrium and eat their lunch there, or take a tray back to their desks.
Some pinhead with a spreadsheet decided that he could save the company the cost of paying a couple of cafeteria workers to bring the food. Instead, all the “intellectuals” could just walk to the Crown Room.
The thing was, the trip to the Crown Room involved at least two elevator rides and a lot of hallways. It was a 10-15 minute walk.
The parking garage, on the other hand, was directly below the Rice Center.
Faced with a choice of a long trudge to get cafeteria food or jumping in your car, many chose the latter. And suddenly people who had been taking five minutes to grab a sandwich were taking a genuine lunch hour off campus.
Saving the wages of a couple of cafeteria workers had resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost time by some of their best and brightest.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
My boss there called this “Excel thinking”. Back when a spreadsheet was done on paper, by hand, you had to have a damn good reason to do one. But once PCs enables any idiot to do one, they did.
Plus ça change…
It is frustrating. I would not say prayer won’t change that, though it is unlikely to change it right away. What I am suggesting here is to turn to God for the frustration.
Keeerist, kanicbird, enough already!
Someone in my office asked the Supply Matron for a box of tissue the other day as she was in the middle of a nose-running eye-watering alergy attack. The Matron gave her 3 tissues. I cracked up and offered her the spare box I keep in my drawer.
“Sorry, only 3 tissues dispensed per person from the sacred tissue box.”
Jesus is only the answer if the question is, “what do you say when you find a crocodile in your bathtub?”
That depends on whether or not you see the croc before you get into the tub. Otherwise, the right answer is “AAIIIIGHgetitoffgetitoffAIIIIGHGHGH!”
“Hey, you’ve got Weasels on your face!” 
Now that you mention it, every time I’ve turned to God I’ve wound up frustrated.
This is a common problem with deities that don’t exist.
Next time, punch some baked potatoes. It won’t fix your problem, but you will have mashed potatoes.
Or walk a mile in Jesus’s shoes. Then when he looks around for his missing shoes, you’ll be a mile away and he’ll have to chase you barefoot.
Personally, I’ve always had a lot of admiration for Jesus and his work. It’s his fan club I find disturbing.
But having greeted my friend Jack, let me get back to the subject of this thread. Our contribution to cost cutting? Tripless Wednesdays.
I work in a prison. We sent prisoners on trips all over the place for things like transfers between prisons, court appearances, family funerals, and medical appointments. In my particular prison we have a large medical program and send out a lot of medical trips.
So some pointy-haired genius in Albany decided to cut back expenses by eliminating all non-emergency trips one day a week. Given we don’t send many non-emergency trips on weekends, he probably figured we were reducuing our trips by 20%. On paper, a huge savings. (Wednesday, incidentally, was supposedly chosen because that’s the day most doctors take off in the middle of the week.)
But down in the trenchs, we deal with reality not theory. And the reality is we’ve just changed our scheduling procedures; we didn’t actually eliminate any trips. So now we set up the same overall amount of trips in a four day schedule instead of a five day schedule. Not a great cost saving.
And we don’t even achieve the theoretical zero overall change. We have a limited amount of guards available for trips and many of them work Monday-to-Friday schedules. So now we have a day when most of them are sitting idle instead of taking trips. And we have four days when we’re often shorthanded and we end up having to hire people on overtime to take trips.
I know. It’s like Springsteen in the 80s.
As the angel said to the new arrival asking who the guy in blue jeans and bandanna was…“Oh, that’s Jesus…he thinks he’s Bruce Springsteen”.
“Once I was sad, because I had no shoes. Then I met a man with holes in his feet…”