Bad

So this marks my triumphant return to this blog. My office rage remains unabated. The crazies around me still providing all the content one blogger could possibly use.

A crisis has slowly been creeping up upon my department. The issue is easy to forsee and completely preventable. However, office behavior being what it is, no one (even me) will do anything about it. We're too busy to be bothered with trivial details, after all.

You see, our admin left and hasn't been replaced. She belonged to everyone, so naturally, no one will take responsibility for her replacement. Secretly, people are probably pleased at the budget savings. But the result of this exit will soon push us over the edge because:

We has nearly run out of paper for printing and copying (not that we do much copying because the copier is almost always broken or jammed). As an astute observer of the office worker in the wild phenomena, I am facinated to see what will happen. How low will the drones stoop to avoid taking on a paper shortage? As in nature, there is a hierarchy of needs:

First: Paper is stolen from the fax machine. Fax is so passe anyway.

Next: Steal the paper from the other printer which that prints so slowly, that people actually walk farther to use the main printer.

After that: People began rifling through the drawers looking for any paper at all.. even a few sheets. I can almost see the bubble above people’s heads: “just let me find enough to get me through what I need to print!”.

When desperation really began to set in: Someone found a supply of paper with holes in it (as in 3 hole punched) and people were happily using that (though it isn’t the best for reports because you do miss whatever should have printed where the hole is. I saw one guy put paper in the printer from a secret stash of paper he seemed to have in his drawer. My boss has her own printer, so I’ll just have her print out things for me if I have to (assuming her paper stash wasn’t ransacked).

Finally, the low point: someone stands guard while a co-worker steals paper from another departments' printer.

Now, sadly I am no better than my co-workers on this issue. I have no willingness to find out how to order paper. I did ask a guy in my dept. if he knew who ordered paper and he replied: anyone can do it. And yet, no one seems to know how or is willing to take the initiative to figure out how. I feel I did my duty by taking on refridgerator duty (because a smelly refridgerator just skeeves me out). But to be honest, I find it amusing to watch the ways that people will avoid this issue. Someday soon, there will be no paper and a reckoning must come. Who will be the person who gives in?