Of paper planes and pen fights

It started out as something quite harmless. That one page application that he needed to submit to his university – why not take a print from the office – it is just one page after all. Next week when the eight page copy-pasted assignment needed to be printed out, the office printer was again the obvious choice. This time the boss saw him, but what's eight pages, right? But soon this turned into a habit – he had to take print-outs of everything, from the funny picture from 9Gag that he just had to print and hang on his desk, to the entire Wikipedia article on spells mentioned in the Harry Potter series that he still thinks he will get to reading sometime soon.  The habit soon turned into a compulsion, entire stacks of A4 paper disappeared over night as he printed out entire pirated e-books for his university courses. A vicious cycle developed, he printed anything and everything and his parents had started to worry about the stacks growing in every corner of his room. Then one day, his colleagues decided to intervene – he made paper planes and threw it at them. He was soon fired.

Now most people are saner than that but the fact remains that everyone has at times misused office supplies. Although it starts out as something small, at times it reaches beyond the acceptable and even if your superiors do not point it out, who wants to go through their career, known as the guy who stole all the red markers from the office cabinet?

Office supplies are there for a reason as obvious as it sounds. So pinching a drawing pin to put up that poster on your cubicle is not going to be given a second thought but using the office stapler to vent your rage and thus waste all the pins is not. There are those who treat the printer as a free Nilkhet, but again ink is costly and when everyone is trying to save the trees by cutting down on paper usage, wasting A4 stacks on one side prints of your favourite Pokemon characters is not going to help you in your career.

But office supplies are not confined to the stationary. Computers are considered part of the same and while I don't know of people who had taken office hardware home, misusing computers does come in many forms. Here's a simple way to remember the dos and the don'ts. You are pissed. Okay to punch the walls and get knuckle surgery – not okay to punch through the monitor screen and miserably fail. Again okay to kick the wall, not okay to kick the chair so that it hits the CPU and breaks it. And definitely not okay to stay back after office hours to talk to your romantic interest on the office line or worse still (and this has been known to happen), use someone else's computer for personal use and then leave a box of tissue paper and an undeleted browsing history. Seriously – not cool.