How The Corporate World ... um ... Works

Three examples from the past week.

1. Like most big institutions my employer uses a version control software. Every little change to a program is saved for prosperity. There are dozens of us programmers that use this software. Not daily, but probably weekly or biweekly. The thing is, we don't have enough software licenses for the product for all the programmers. So the admin rotates licenses. He takes some away and gives them to other people. If you happen to need to use the software that day and don't have a license you have to call him. He never tells us what he does but we get a "Try it now" message. Sure enough, good to go. But this week he was on vacation and no one else could transfer a license.
   
   
   
2. Our system produces probably over 100 paper reports a day. Some are small. Some are big. But over all way too many. Each report gets a banner page that says what bin they are supposed to go to. The bins are really just huge mail boxes like you see at the UPS store. I learned today that the guy who delivers them in the wee hours of the morning just throws away any reports that don't fit if full bins.
   
   Rare is the complaint.
   
   
   
3. I went to get a new mechanical pencil today. The last one was jammed. The pencils took 0.7 lead. All the lead we had was 0.5.