Sometimes the stupidity of the human race, and particularly that of my coworkers, astounds me.
As you may or may not know, I work for a subsidiary of News Ltd which produces and distributes free local newspapers in Perth and its surrounds. I'm in the "distributes" part which means it's my job to see that, once the articles have been written and the ad space sold, the paper (not all of them, just the 5 northern suburbs ones) gets out to as many people as our sales reps told their clients it would. Just before I started, they launched a website which brings together articles from the various papers and other little bits of interest - blogs, videos, games, etc.
Launched just after I arrived was a national initiative in which the staff of News Ltd's local newspaper companies around the countries can go to a website and submit and discuss their ideas to improve the company - basically a national suggestion box in which nothing is anonymous. When I have a spare moment, I often check up to see if there has been any developments here, because they are usually amusing, sometimes breathtakingly immoral and horrifying, and very occasionally good. For example, there's this one guy who submits all these ideas like, "someone should monitor how much stationery the staff are using to cut down on costs" and "we should cut down on after work drinks because it's costing too much". FFS, dude, I think Rupert Murdoch's not going to notice a couple of extra Coronas of a Friday. Then there was this girl who put one up suggesting that we go into schools and give seminars, under the guise of teaching kids about money-management and work ethic, and encourage them to sign up to do paper rounds with us. I think if the management had actually taken on that idea I would have had to either quit immediately or drown in a pool of self hatred.
So anyway, the site was a little quiet over the Christmas break, and I ended up giving up and hadn't checked it at all this year. So I logged on this afternoon and found about 20 new ideas up there. A few of them were by a woman in my office who I very much like and who, so far, has produced ALL the ideas that have not caused me to either laugh riotously or feel sick in the stomach. One was from a guy in one of the other offices whom I suspect will be shunned in the toilet blocks from now on, as he suggested the company switch to WATER FREE URINALS. A few were so incomprehensible that I wondered why literacy was not a requirement for getting a job at a NEWSPAPER.
While I was perusing a site I got an email from one of the company's main managers, informing all staff that they had booked a company called "Green Advantage" to assess our offices and tell us ways in which we can be less harmful to the environment (incidentally the money situation's not so dire then?) I LOLed, and then continued reading my coworkers' suggestions. And came to one that floored me.
It was about how we should not print emails, and handle everything possible through email memos rather than internal mail, and that we should encourage clients to send us things through email rather than by fax. And the heading of this humble suggestion?
"A PAPERLESS OFFICE".
Right. A paperless office in which we, um, produce... newspapers. Yep, I'm sure turning a couple of lights off and not printing out that funny forward Joe in editorial sent out will definitely offset the TONNES AND TONNES OF PAPER we are producing every week to distribute unsolicited.
Fuuuuuuck.
Linda, whose ideas I always like, by the way, had a similar suggestion, but hers was a little more far reaching. She suggested that we phase out the newspaper in favour of putting more energy into the website. Which is absolutely the only way we are ever going to be environmentally friendly as a company.
Really, to give any more than a token glance to the idea of environmental conservation we would by definition have to cease to exist as a company.Not that the people instigating these short-term measures care of course. A token glance is all they care to give.
Every day, I feel more and more like I work at Dunder Mifflin.
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