Are you a manager or are you a mouse?

In case you’re wondering why US corporations seem sludgy and slow despite all the posturing and demands for taxpayer largesse over the past few years, let me tell you about my request for a mouse.

Yes—I requested a mouse. Because when I started this gig with one of the giants of telecoms, I was issued…a single, clapped-out laptop. (And it took more than a week for me to get set up in all required internal systems; but that’s a different kvetch.) No monitor, no external keyboard, not even a mouse stirred at my cubicle desk.

When I asked the jumped-up onsite “administrator” (read: coordinator) for my agency, she informed me that there was “no budget” for such accoutrements. This was her way of telling me, “we don’t want to spend anything on giving you basic tools for getting your job done; we’d rather keep every nickel possible, so just leave me alone.”

However, there was one conference call where I was walking colleagues through a lengthy document with a raft of tables in it, and I drove them completely up the wall because the finger pad on this POS laptop made scrolling impossible and the screen view kept jumping to different places in the document.

Following that painful experience one of those colleagues told me he would order me a mouse. Which he did—invited me to his cube to pick out what I wanted and he placed the order. Today he sent me the order trail from the procurement system.

And here’s where corporate America just swirls down the drain:

There are five levels of approval on the request for a $17.93 mouse. It’s not even a wireless mouse. I’m surprised they didn’t run it up to the CEO for check-off.

I know times are tough; and; two months ago said CEO announced that, to make up for a less-than-stellar quarter, the company will cut costs (CEO-speak for cut jobs) and blah, blah, blah. But to require five tiers of approval for a bleeding mouse is absolutely beyond the beyond.

I only hope the shareholders appreciate all the money saved by involving so many managers in the ordering of a tiny productivity tool.