Jo's Cafe

The one liberal, tree-hugging bone in my body has been screaming to get out lately, so here goes.

I can’t stand waste. Period, but when it comes to using up trees for paper products, that really sticks in my craw.

Recently, the company I worked for was bought out by a bigger company. No big deal really, better, although more expensive, benefits and other good things that come with it.

But the waste is enough to make your head explode.

We were all given new business cards. No one asked us how we might want our names on said cards, they just printed 500 up and sent them out to everyone. There are 25 people in my office — and the whole company has over 1,000 people for sure. Well, they left off my middle initial. I have used my middle initial in my signature and my printed name since – I can’t remember when. We were told if the cards were wrong, or we preferred our name displayed in a different way to simply let them know and they’d fix them. So dump 500 cards and get new ones because my middle initial was missing? I don’t think so. I can deal. I can understand if they spelled it wrong, but not for just missing something like that.

Wasteful.

Then comes the millions of documents we have to read on the intranet. Not only do we have to read said documents and agree to them, the company then prints the damn things out and mails them to us. One is 2 inches thick. I’m going to bring it home and use for a doorstop or to hit someone in the head with should they break in.

Wasteful.

Back to the business cards. Now the company has changed an “internal” identifier that is on our business cards. No one I give one of my cards to would have a clue what this number is for, only someone that works for the company. So now they’ve changed our internal identifier for our office and in May, they are — yup — going to “reprint” our business cards again with the new identifier on it. WHY? Anyone that is within the company that wants to know my officer internal identifier can look it up under my name on the intranet. It doesn’t need to be on my business cards that go to people outside the company.

Wasteful.

On top of this? They won’t pay for coffee or the water cooler. Please — save the trees, save some money; pay for the coffee and water cooler. That would make us all a lot happier in the end. Happy employees are productive employees.