Its Only Cheaper If I Say It Is!

What to do, what to do. When I was a kid I loved the movie, Cheaper by the Dozen, starring Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy as the time and motion experts, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. The title of the movie comes from a running gag Frank used when asked why he had so many kids. "Why don't you know that they're cheaper by the dozen?", he would reply. I guess we have all come to understand the economy of scale of most items. A dozen doughnuts usually costs less than 9, 10, or 11 individual ones. Canned soda costs a buck a can, but about $3 if you buy 6 pack. We all know this, mostly we do. I am in the business of designing something in the telecommunications field. I design my solution to a given problem and then have to submit it to my boss for approval and funding. If it proposes spending a lot of money, his boss or his boss's boss, may have to sign off. Our corporate value is absolute control. I can approve all expeditures of less than a penny though. When I got to work today, I had an email from my boss, which lead me to think he may not be entirely familiar with the cheaper by the dozen concept. He had concerns about how many widgets I was buying compared to how many I needed on a particular project. I needed 75, but it was cheaper to buy 100, so I did. I called the lovely Mrs. Sneed at work to tell her I might be about to quit, something I do a least twice a week, and then I trudged to his office, hoping I had misunderstood his concern. No siree, we had to have a discussion about it, where I got to explain the cheaper by the dozen concept to him. It was one of those times when halfway through an argument one side (him) realizes he is completely wrong. Attempting to defend the indefensible, he finally resorted to a weasel out. He tried to get me to buy the idea that he knew it all along, but someone up the chain-of-command might not. Just looking out for me. Yep, I believe that. He was literally asking why I chose to buy a 6-pack when I only needed 5 beers. Duh! This is looney. When you demand absolute control over everything as a manager, you usually get more than you asked for. I have very little incentive to innovate or even to use good judgement if I think that the boss is going to give me a load of grief for my trouble. I think this behavior is really just about the bosses letting the little pople know that they are smarter than us. Years ago I had a boss who insisted upon personally checking the work of everyone in the office. He would put yellow post-its all over the work indicating things that were wrong. The little people quickly figured out that it was his way of showing us he was smarter than us, so we would make obvious errors that he could find quickly and send it back to us for correction. That seemed to keep him happy and the work moving along. It is a good thing that I get 35 days a year off, not counting holidays, or these guys would be too much to bear. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong and sometimes just full of it. Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor