Back when I was working, we took photos using old style film cameras. We did it routinely in situations where we thought we might want a visual record of something.
My boss called me into the office one day and said we had to reduce expenses by taking fewer photographs. I said “Okay, tell me which situations you want me to photograph and which ones you don’t.” This caught him off guard as he apparently hadn’t expected to actually have to do his job and formulate a policy. But I knew if I didn’t get him to create the policy he would me responsible for any future problems that happened.
He attempted to evade responsibility for several minutes but I kept pressing him. He finally came up with this policy: we should take pictures of any situation when it occurred if it would later be involved in a court case.
I tried to explain to him how time worked but I was unsuccessful.
When I worked for Safeway at one point corporate got a huge bug up their ass about the plastic bags. There was a whole series of trainings on packing bags full, using as few bags as possible, and never doubling up except by explicit customer request, which I’m sure looked great in the presentation in the boardroom, but in the field most people will not tolerate super heavy bags packed to the point of near guaranteed failure.
Not to mention they simultaneously switched to much thinner plastic bags, which saved them a few bucks per pallet, but ultimately ended up costing them dearly because checkers continued to fill bags the same way as before, only now they had to double up every single one because single bags weren’t even making it out the door before dumping people’s groceries all over the floor.
I’ve got an example in the other direction. I was a government contractor building their email infrastructure. Someone had made the decision that all servers must use the expensive network hard drives rather than directly attached storage. However the email system they were upgrading to was designed to run on cheap hard drives directly attached to physical servers. I showed them that they would save over a million dollars on equipment if they went with my solution but they decided they had to go with the expensive solution.
You’re right – serves me right for listening to the commentators at the game. Last year, the MLB average per team was 0.2 per game, which is 0.4 by both teams per game, or one every 2.5 games, or a little over a half a second per commercial break.