• Marvin the Martian (unregistered) in reply to Manos
    Manos:
    Imagine if your position in that joke of a company involves receiving parcels. You will have to destroy the rubber bands that come with the incoming parcels to make sure you don't exceed the limit.
    Ah, no, don't be silly. There's a special RubberBands[used] and RubberBands[unused] division, where the latter don't add to the quotum.

    Hence: you can leave rubber bands around parcels, or torn pieces of packaging, or bodyparts.

    This may sadly lead to a wave of office looting, hidden as body art. What sad times we live in when even those who arrange and tidy office desks come under considerable economic pressure, and passing ruffians say "ni!" at will to old ladies.

  • Ken (unregistered) in reply to neveralull

    That doesn't sound like a hardship, and definitely worth the time.

    1. I rarely need to use a stapler, and always borrow one
    2. I like to get up for a wander every now and again
    3. The boss's secretary is bound to be hotter than anyone sitting near me
  • Bruce W (unregistered)

    At my first job out of college I was given a standard kit of supplies when I started. The kit included a box of staples. After eight years I think I used a grand total of two "bars" of staples. When I started my current job I grabbed a box of staples that will probably be only 1/4 used when I retire in 30 years.

  • my name is missing (unregistered)

    When I worked at a defense contractor in the early 80's, a memo went around demanding we resuse paperclips to save money. So naturally we raided all the supply closets and tossed out all the paperclips we could find. Your tax dollars at work...

  • (cs) in reply to hehe
    hehe:
    Ryan:
    At one of my previous jobs it took me over a year to finally get my own stapler - despite filling out the appropriate request form every month when they bought office supplies.
    You know you can buy one for under $5 and any local store?
    Ryan:
    Of course, this is the same employer that required we spend 8 hours sitting at our desk, and counted our lunch time and bathroom breaks. When I was "let go" they told me exactly how many minutes I spent in the bathroom over the course of the year.
    Was it more or less then the amount of time you spent reading thedailywtf? Code more, poop less! ;-p
    For some people, these are pretty much the same thing.
  • Jay (unregistered)

    At a previous job I shared an office with our project leader. One day he was on the phone with the president of the company for over half an hour justifying the purchase of a flowcharting template. You know, one of those pieces of plastic with holes cut in it that you can use to make nice neat squares and circles on a diagram. I was thinking to myself, I don't know how much either of these people make, but a flowcharting template costs about $2, and I'm guessing that their combined salaries for half an hour come to more than $2.

    Lest you wonder: In the end, the president refused to let him buy a flowcharting template, but said he would check around to see if anybody on another project had one that they didn't need any more. We eventually did get a used flow-charting template.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Me
    Me:
    I would suppose that the real issue is not the ton of office supplies hidden in murky corners of the office but the one in decentralized warehousing at the various employees' homes...

    It's part of the disaster recovery plan. If the building were to burn down, there would be no need to replace office supplies, as they are located in distributed off-site locations.

    They've even named them - Office Depot, for all your office supply DR needs!

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Until the company starts buying stuff for me to use in my personal life at home, I don't see myself buying resources for the company to be used at the office.

    I buy my own pens because the ones my work supplies suck and make my wrist cramp.

  • Cory A (unregistered)

    Yeah, they did something like that here too, but I kind of understand, they had cleaned out a few cubicles during a recent remodel/rearrange and found some people with full boxes of pens, in every color, full boxes of file folders, an extra stapler in their desk, three or four rolls of tape, etc. It is wasteful to have that much, especially when the supply closet was located in the middle of the building, it was no more than 200 ft. away from anyones desk.

  • pmv (unregistered) in reply to my name is missing
    my name is missing:
    When I worked at a defense contractor in the early 80's, a memo went around demanding we resuse paperclips to save money. So naturally we raided all the supply closets and tossed out all the paperclips we could find. Your tax dollars at work...

    How is that a natural response?

  • (cs)

    So.. a4 ring binders are banned? What if you need one? Do they have the security guards patrolling the halls checking for A4 Ring Binders?

    "No.. no sir.. this is a LETTER-size ring binder, not a4, honest!"

  • Will code for food (unregistered) in reply to Me

    You laugh, but in my company this really is part of the disaster recovery plan. Key employees in distributed locations have bins of materials waiting for the next natural disaster or nuclear meltdown. I have in my basement one bin of backup data including hard copies, and another bin full of essential office supplies which are topped off at our annual disaster recovery meeting. I never run out of paper clips, ever.

  • (cs)

    He's kind of got a point about staplers.

  • (cs) in reply to cparker
    cparker:
    hehe:
    Code more, poop less! ;-p
    For some people, these are pretty much the same thing.
    Roffle-mayo! Okay, that's it, the day is complete. We can all go home now. :D

    Good one, c!

  • Scott (unregistered)

    I have in my desk and filing cabinet: 1 pen (no paper, pencils, staplers, etc.) gum salt & pepper Tylenol 5000 forks (from Sams) 5000 spoons (from Sams) 10 knives 5 port hub Binoculars

    I guess I'm ok then.

  • WarlordShea (unregistered)

    William,

    I've spent the last two hours carefully going through my office supplies and returned the following:

    3 rubber bands (1 broken) 12 paper clips 1 Tipex (I don't know what it's for)

    As we spend a lot of money on resources for IT, please return the following:

    36 monitor pixels (12 of each color) 1 keyboard (please use your mouse to type) 4 gigabytes of server storage space (we've already removed your stuff)

    Thank you,

    Network Engineering

  • Steve (unregistered)

    You must notify the supplies clerk at least one hour in advance of any pending bowel movements, at which time you will be issued one square of single-ply bath tissue.

  • Paul (unregistered)

    Oh dear God, this reminds me of the idiotic stationery rules at my previous employer.

    Each team could have exactly one stapler, and one paper punch. Didn't matter if the team was 2 people or 20, you got the same allotment per team, for the use of team members as required.

    Except it didn't quite work out that way. The "keeper of the stapler/punch" would generally treat the items as their own, to be locked securely in the desk drawer lest someone got any fancy ideas about taking them without permission. If they moved teams, "their" stapler would go with them, leaving one team staplerless and one with a surplus. Someone forgot to tell people that there's no "I" in "stapler".

    God help you if you needed to staple or hole-punch something and the "keeper" was off on leave, or sick, or in a meeting (which was quite often the case, boy did they like their pointless meetings), or down the pub for an extended liquid lunch to forget about how asinine the working environment was. Short of breaking into their desk, you weren't stapling anything.

  • Messy Wiper (unregistered) in reply to Steve

    That's ok, I can just use any of the following:

    My hand + the wall The leaves on the rubber plant they keep in the stall My boss Two fingers Elizabeth Hurley The 100s of sheets of printing paper left all around the office Poison Ivy Sand paper A cat's tongue (feels weird but gets the job done) Paper towels

  • St. Mary's Hospital for the Cure of Everything (unregistered)

    The office supply myrmidons will kill me!

    I have some 90 pencils! Some 50 of them coloured!

  • (cs) in reply to James R. Twine
    James R. Twine:
    Time to leave...

    Counting pencils is a sure sign of impending DOOM!

    They started doing this at Google last year. Used to be they had these nice Tech Stop booths. Need a cable? Walk up and grab one. Need a new monitor? Let them know and tomorrow it's on your desk. It was an astounding productivity booster. No screwing around with TPS reports and director approval for a $125 KVM, you just got what you needed to get more work done. Now they have contractors working there. They're nice, but they can't see everything an engineer can, so it's hard to get stuff done in some cases. You can still get supplies, but it's not like it was. I think people started abusing it. The tragedy of the commons, I'm sure.

    They started sending out surveys to see how everyone was using the dinner service. They wanted to "serve us better". Everyone pretty much knew it was them cutting back on dinners. It was silly there for a while. You'd see guys walking to their cars with like 5 to-go boxes in their arms. Grabbing a bite is cool, but feeding your family every night is taking advantage. Yet people did, but there's so much largess around the place.

    Right before I left, they sent out emails saying they were getting rid of the supply cabinets. No more walk up and grab a pen if you need one.

    Despite any best efforts, I suspect that any corporate culture grows up enough to eventually bring in a few bean counters who look to control costs in the more easily measurable, most braindead ways. Google was awash in money, and yet they started getting angsty over how much they spent on name-brand soda or M&Ms version generic granola.

    I'm sure there was some middle management accounting drone who had an OKR to save .02% per quarter or some shit. And rather than curb the useless crap from the sales or marketing guys, or have one less stupid "channel buddy" event with free booze and a huge tent, they started pulling up the accounts payable sheets and started looking for ways to give Office Depot $5K per year less.

    It was pretty sad to see the beginning of the end.

  • Mr G (unregistered)

    So what am I supposed to do with my excess of half eaten pencils with the partially used rubbers on the end?

  • xtremezone (unregistered) in reply to DoctorFriday
    DoctorFriday:
    At a previous employer, our supply closet was locked at all times and if you wanted a single pen, you had to request the key and then had to literally, sign-out what you took from the closet.
    Did you have to sign-out the pen before opening the closet? :P
  • bcammack (unregistered)

    We refer to this 'round these parts as "Jumping over dollars to pick up pennies".

  • (cs) in reply to Messy Wiper
    Messy Wiper:
    That's ok, I can just use any of the following:

    My hand + the wall The leaves on the rubber plant they keep in the stall My boss Two fingers Elizabeth Hurley The 100s of sheets of printing paper left all around the office Poison Ivy Sand paper A cat's tongue (feels weird but gets the job done) Paper towels

    OMG, I think I just ruptured something laughing at this one. I salute you, oh unknown messy one :-D

  • (cs) in reply to Mr G
    Mr G:
    So what am I supposed to do with my excess of half eaten pencils with the partially used rubbers on the end?

    You should never partially use a rubber. Once used, they must be disposed of!

  • Mizchief (unregistered)

    I buy my own office supplies for the most part. I would rather have a quality pen and mechnical pencil that last me more than 5 years than crappy plastic Bic stuff. I also supply my own wireless keyboard and mouse since i'm very particualr about those things and would rather just buy it than have to argue over why I need a $50 keyboard. (Try to take away my MS natural wireless and I will cut you!)

    I remeber the last time I needed pencil lead refills. At the time we had a person who would order office supplies and on my way out to lunch she happend to overhear me saying that I was going by office depot to pick up some more. She piped up and said not to worry she would get them for me.

    2 weeks later my refills finally arrived and I was happy to be able to erase things again only to see that he lead would barley make a mark on the paper, and that it was difficult to erase. I take a look at the package and it's 0.5mm for film. So I ended up just buying some at office depot that day.

    I would rather my employer take care of my salary and i'll take care of the < $10 a year I need for office supplies.

  • Bobble (unregistered) in reply to Mr G

    I take my partially used rubbers into work and hang them on my cube wall to dry. After they've dried I re-roll them and staple them back into the wrappers with my company-supplied stapler.

  • (cs) in reply to Mr G
    Mr G:
    So what am I supposed to do with my excess of half eaten pencils with the partially used rubbers on the end?

    This should be obvious to you, Employee. You should glue them together to make whole pencils. Note that glue is not part of your standard requisition pack, so you will need to purchase that with your own funds. Don't let us catch you wasting half pencils.

  • sd (unregistered) in reply to Scott
    Scott:
    I have in my desk and filing cabinet: 5000 forks (from Sams) 5000 spoons (from Sams)

    You insensitive clod! You should have used sporks, and saved 50% office space...

  • (cs) in reply to Mizchief

    I tend to do the same thing if only because it's more of a hassle to request something "out of the ordinary". I have a mouse pad with gel-wrist support that I bring with me job to job. I got it because "there's plenty of mouse pads laying around, just use one of them".

    Those mouse pads were all from trade-show vendors, whose logo all looked like a hyperactive four year old ate a kilo of Skittles, went on a tilt-a-whirl, then barfed on a Andy Warhol painting. Optical mice do not like them. And none of them have wrist support. My tunnels of the carpal variety don't like that.

    So $13 on a custom mouse pad, and $0.25 on a permanent label on the bottom with my name on it == path of least resistance.

  • ifatree (unregistered) in reply to Bruce W
    At my first job out of college I was given a standard kit of supplies when I started. The kit included a box of staples.

    TRWTF??

    apparently bill's company wants you to have a stapler, but you're not allowed to keep bars of staples (not on list!) much less boxes of bars of staples!

  • (cs) in reply to Bobble
    Bobble:
    I take my partially used rubbers into work and hang them on my cube wall to dry. After they've dried I re-roll them and staple them back into the wrappers with my company-supplied stapler.

    When I got here, there were three staplers and two tape dispensers in my desk. I tried bartering the three staplers for a pair of scissors, but no dice (I'm still scissor-less). I kept the best of each but I couldn't offload the others on anyone else so they remain in my drawer.

    We don't even have a supply cabinet. All of my pens are give-aways from other companies. I don't think I've ever used a paperclip and I doubt I've used more than a couple dozen staples in my 10 years.

  • Burns (unregistered) in reply to Paul
    Paul:
    Someone forgot to tell people that there's no "I" in "stapler".

    There may be no "I" in stapler, but there is a "steal" :)

    My office changed to the Boston stabler, but I personally kept my Swingline, it didn't bind up as much. Hopefully nobody steals it!

  • A Gould (unregistered) in reply to DoctorFriday
    DoctorFriday:
    Sounds like a huge WTF of micro-management until you realize that the local pastime was office supply theft.

    I always treat office supply theft as a symptom of poor working conditions - if workers are happy, they don't feel the need to steal something as petty as staplers.

    And hoarding around here is generally due to the fact that if you don't grab that extra pad of paper now, it could be months before the supplies are restocked. (Took me most of a year to get a new stapler.)

    And of course, after sending the directive Bill went out and had a "working lunch" for a few hours.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Ryan
    Ryan:
    I finally got one, after I refused to stable anything - instead doing the whole tear and fold the corners thing. People hate that.

    Lo and behold.

    captcha == haero

  • green-rage (unregistered) in reply to sd 
    <BLOCKQUOTE class="Quote"><div><i class="icon-quote"></i> <strong>sd:</strong></div><div>
<BLOCKQUOTE class="Quote"><div><i class="icon-quote"></i> <strong>Scott:</strong></div><div>
I have in my desk and filing cabinet:
5000 forks (from Sams)
5000 spoons (from Sams)

    You insensitive clod! You should have used sporks, and saved 50% office space...

    You're toying with powerful forces here. http://xkcd.com/419/

    captcha: esse

  • (cs) in reply to Burns
    Burns:
    My office changed to the Boston stabler, but I personally kept my Swingline, it didn't bind up as much. Hopefully nobody steals it!
    Man, what are you guys stapling? I write software. I type it on a keyboard, view it on a screen, check it into a source control server where it's accessible to all electronically.

    There's a stapler on my desk; it's been there for years. I've never used it. There are also two scotch tape dispensers. I have no idea when or from where the second one appeared. All three of these are down at the end of my desk, freely available to anyone who should be walking by and need to use them. I certainly don't.

    Okay, I admit, sometimes I use a little tape to stick up a reminder of a doctor appointment under my screen.

  • ballengee (unregistered) in reply to gabba

    very funny!

  • Lucky Guys (unregistered)

    You guys are lucky.

    One of my previous company decided to save on toilet paper where each will be given one per month. Stupid HR.

    After one month, the new rule was shot down by the boss when the customer were screaming that there were no toilet paper! LOL

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    Burns:
    My office changed to the Boston stabler, but I personally kept my Swingline, it didn't bind up as much. Hopefully nobody steals it!
    Man, what are you guys stapling? I write software. I type it on a keyboard, view it on a screen, check it into a source control server where it's accessible to all electronically.

    There's a stapler on my desk; it's been there for years. I've never used it. There are also two scotch tape dispensers. I have no idea when or from where the second one appeared. All three of these are down at the end of my desk, freely available to anyone who should be walking by and need to use them. I certainly don't.

    Okay, I admit, sometimes I use a little tape to stick up a reminder of a doctor appointment under my screen.

    You sir, are a shining example of the true paperless office. I salute you.

    captcha / sagaciter

  • baronzemm (unregistered)

    This email was obviously sent out due to a select few people with stationary supply stores worth of stationary at their desk.

    As such I really don't see the problem, there is no good reason to burn money on pointless excess office supplies imho.

    Like one of the posters above, I have a few pens (mostly show swag pens) and a single notebook (also show swag) on my desk.

    Saving even 100 dollars a year in stationary is 100 dollars that can be put towards departmental parties etc.

  • Milton Waddams (unregistered)

    but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it's not okay because if they take my stapler then I'll set the building on fire...

  • Zap Brannigan (unregistered) in reply to Bobble
    Bobble:
    I take my partially used rubbers into work and hang them on my cube wall to dry. After they've dried I re-roll them and staple them back into the wrappers with my company-supplied stapler.
    I'm not sure I want to know, but here goes: How do you partially use a rubber?
  • Barnaby (unregistered)

    I'm using this mouse pad:

    [image]
  • Brompot (unregistered)

    This one is a bit silly, but remember when floppy disks cost like $5 a piece? (that was in the 5.25" time). $5 was worth a lot more back then.

    We would buy several cases containing 10 boxes of 10 floppies. That's $500 a case, or several $1000 per purchase. They evaporated. We had to amke several purchases a month.

    We placed them in a locked cupboard. All people had to do was ask for them, they would be supplied and the usage written down. Nothing was done with the list. Everybody knew that. Floppy disk consumption dropped by over 90%.

    So micromanaging paperclips and rubber bands may be overdone, but some supplies require some managing. It's too bad some managers don't know where to draw the line.

  • Brompot (unregistered) in reply to Zap Brannigan
    Zap Brannigan:
    Bobble:
    I take my partially used rubbers into work and hang them on my cube wall to dry. After they've dried I re-roll them and staple them back into the wrappers with my company-supplied stapler.
    I'm not sure I want to know, but here goes: How do you partially use a rubber?

    Rubbers have three uses. The inside, the outside and the third time as chewing gum. Rubbers that have not been used the full three times should be returned to stores to utilize their full economic potential.

  • Vlad P (unregistered)

    Imagine the same kind of hassle in the USSR. I was fighting like hell with those bastards that walked around once a quarter giving you your share of pencils (1) and pens (one every other quarter). Then our IS department got a special permit to buy as many pens as we like and attach them to the desks, so that nobody could take them, and they would be always accessible. The argument was that the two seconds an Engineer spent standing up from their chair costs more than their ****ing pencil. It worked even in the USSR!

  • (cs) in reply to Burns
    Burns:
    My office changed to the Boston stabler
    Is that anything like the Boston Strangler?
  • Mark Wilden (unregistered)

    I was once dinged for using too much water.

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