Wasteful Spending

The company I work for likes to waste money. In fact, I would say that my company makes a lot of money, in spite of its best efforts to lose money. It's kind of puzzling. In an age where decent companies, who watch their bottom line everyday, still go out of businessor are at least in the red, my company watches its money go right out the window and somehow manages to paint its bottom line black. It truly defies all logic.

For instance, one might think that since our company has been told to watch its expenditures that we would be "tightening the belt" and trying to save money at every turn. And oh how wrong you would be. It seems that the way we tighten our belt is by enlarging our waist size by spending money on company sponsored picnics, meals and other various food associated gatherings.

You might also think that we would do our best to conserve paper by using the electronic copies of documents that we already have in existence. And you would be wrong again. We evidently enjoy printing and copying electronic documents onto paper so much that we have hired an outside company to come shred and recycle the tons of paper we waste every year. So we waste the paper and ink by printing something that doesn't need to be printed and then we pay someone else to take it all away. Amazing.

We also like to outsource small things that could easily be done within the company. That ten page, black and white, stapled document that is being handed out at the meeting was just printed two hours ago at Kinkos. And no, we didn't send someone there to make the 50 copies, we had Kinkos come pick it up and then delivery us the completed product. Oh, and we didn't think about needing this document until this morning, so we paid a hefty rush fee to get it done in time. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we have at least 15 copiers on site and dozens of printers. We even have copiers that will do all the stapling and sorting you could ever want. But we didn't want to have to stand there and press three buttons to get it to start feeding our document into the copier, and we didn't want to have to deal with the hassle of coming back to the machine four minutes later when it was all done. No sirree. We outsourced the job and spent a lot of money to have some other person hit those buttons and drive it back.

The people I work with amaze me with their propensity to do as little as possible themselves while paying somebody else two to three times as much to do it. Absolutely incredible.