There’s a real irony in a guy like that not understanding how the lowest common denominator is the limiting factor for the entire operation.
In one place I worked, one of the things we did was outputting jobs on our big printer. We charged by the time, so if a job took 20 minutes to print, we got twice as much as for a job that took 10 minutes to print.
We got a new big printer that was a lot faster than the old one. One of our bosses asked the installer how to slow it down, so he could bill jobs for as much as he used to.
The rest of us just stood there, shaking our heads.
[This was the same guy who thought a mouse was a foot pedal.]
His goal, not passing the savings from his efficiency improvement on to his customer, is typical biz-think. His mistake was in how to go about it.
My Dad worked through the transition from propeller airliners to jets. Suddenly a crew could produce twice as much product (seats x miles) per workday.
Management’s idea was to pay the same hourly wage while getting twice as much product out the door. Labor’s idea was to get paid double for producing double the product. The customers’ idea was to pay half as much for the product since it cost half as much to produce.
Oddly enough, all three could not be made happy at the same time. So instead all three were made unhappy by the other two. Such is Commerce!
This reminds me of this somewhat hilarious anecdote about a computer server room that was perpetually hot and how the problem got solved:
I was expecting them to find that the vents were closed.
I was expecting to find the thermostat for the Hot Room was in the hallway near a receptionist who was skinny & liked to wear rather skimpy clothes that left her perpetually cold.
Just like many restaurants don’t have enough cooling in the kitchen and too much in the seating area and a single thermostat for both. So we’re freezing while the cooks are roasting.
In the building where I work, we have one thermostat and three distinct climate zones. There’s the public lobby, with floor to ceiling glass windows. They’ve put in shaded glass, but it’s still a greenhouse. Then there’s the hallway where the theromostat is located. Then there’s the stockroom in the back, with no exterior windows, where I have my desk. Doors between the three zones are always kept closed due to privacy and security concerns. Whatever temperature the thermostat is set to, the lobby is 2-4 degrees warmer, and the stockroom is 2-4 degrees colder. When they crank up the AC in the summer to get the lobby down to a reasonable temperature, it’s freezing in the back. I mean, not literally, but it’s usually between 66 and 68 degrees, which is chillier than I am comfortable when I’m just sitting at a desk.
Getting back to the topic of the thread, we share space between logistics in the back and patient services up front. Whenever the patient services supervisor comes into the back, she comments on how chilly it is, and I have to explain to her that’s because she set the thermostat so low, and the back is always 2-4 degrees colder than what the thermostat is set to, and she’s just passing through, and I have sit there most of the day. She just shrugs and continues to set the thermostat for the whole building low enough that she’s comfortable in her office up front. I actually have a space heater by my desk and a sweater, which I sometimes use in the summer.
Same thing, sort of –
Anyone who is a lawyer, or who has ever worked at a law firm, knows what Bates numbering is. It’s a method for placing a unique identifier on every page of a bunch of pages (a “bunch” being somewhere between two and, say, five million). So every page will have a number on it, something like ACME 000001. And then ACME 000002. And so on.
In the olden days, this was done with a stamping machine that would increment by one every time a page was stamped. Apparently this machine was invented by a dude named Bates, hence the term, still in use, “Bates numbering.” Maybe the machines were a side hustle on top of that motel thing, who knows.
These days, massive amounts of documents are produced electronically, usually in the form of pdf files. Adobe Acrobat has the capability, built in, to number documents. The user specifies the sequence, and the prefix, if any, and Acrobat numbers all the pages. It can do this across a whole bunch of files, it’s easy, it takes maybe thirty seconds.
Some years ago I worked at a firm where litigation paralegals would Bates-number documents for production. One of them would create a Word document to be printed on Avery labels, small ones, with the Bates numbers. Then he’d peel the stickers off, and put them on the pages of produced documents, one by one. This would, obviously, take hours for any significant number of documents. If the documents were in electronic form, he’d print them out, put the stickers on, and have the office services people scan them and create new pdf files, which were now Bates-numbered.
Thinking he didn’t know how to work Acrobat, I showed him how he could use Acrobat to do the job. He declined.
I spoke to the supervising partner on one of the cases in which the para was doing this. The partner said he was fine with it. Again, foolishly thinking the lawyer just didn’t know what was possible with even basic software (as so many of them don’t), I explained. The partner said he was happy with the way things were. I expressed surprise, and said that doing it this way was a colossal waste of time. The partner said “no, it’s not – it’s billable time, and we’re just fine with it.”
If you ask me, that’s flat-out stealing from the client. But I’m just the IT drone.
So… now someone has to explain to you how lawyers make money?
Well, explained? No. Do I know? I’ve worked in the IT departments of major law firms for about twenty years, so sure, I know how they make money.
Same problem in my residence. One side is totally exposed to the western Sun and therefore hot in the afternoons and well into the evenings. The other side is not. The thermostat is in the sun-exposed part. So the HVAC tries like hell to cool that front part all evening, resulting in my bedroom in back being a meatlocker by bedtime.
I finally cured that by getting a Bluetooth system where the thermostat’s temp sensor is a portable gizmo I put where I am or where I’m going to be. After dinner it lives in that bedroom until tomorrow.
Not that that helps your problem. At least not until you smuggle something like that into your office system and disable the wall-mounted thermostat the office manager knows about. Talk to your building maintenance folks; from experience I know they’re readily bribable with the right sort of friendly currency. 
One way to help balance the temp in unequal zones is to have the HVAC fan running all the time. Set it to ON instead of AUTO. This will constantly circulate the air between the zones and make for more equal temperatures. But it’s also less energy efficient since having the fan on all the time will use electricity, generate heat, and the AC will need to run more frequently.
In some offices, the individual air vents will sometimes have ways to control how much air comes out of that specific vent. By opening or closing the controller, more or less air will come out. That can sometimes help keep a room from being too hot or too cold.
I am 100% convinced that my lawyer charged me to look up how much I owed him.
I asked my lawyer what it would cost me for him to answer two questions. He said “$2000, what’s the second question?”
For me, it’s remembering which is west and which is east on a map. Fortunately, I can just remember the word “we” and know that west is on the left and east is on the right.
Ew!, what a gross mnemonic. 
When I was learning pidgin aviation Spanish I really struggled with the idea that east = este and west = oeste.
Keeping the words themselves straight was easy. It was pronouncing them the right amount of differently enough and reliably hearing the difference when spoken by a native Spanish speaker over a radio that was a bitch.
I don’t know Spanish, but that’s very similar to French: est and ouest. I’ve always found them distinct.
I just refer to both directions as weast and avoid any confusion. It works as long as I remain stationary.
Best of all, whichever way you’re facing is “north”. Between those two rules you can’t go wrong and will never be lost.
Somewhere above in the thread someone needed the explanation that north was not always the way you are facing. Someone who was sure east was always to the right, west to the left, thus north had to be the way they were facing.