Shedding light

I know times are tough, and businesses are trying to cut costs wherever they can. A my current place of employment has certainly had its problems recently, resulting in not only laying off more than 10,000 employees but also (even worse) senior management embarking on “transformation initiatives” to try to save the corporate bacon.

(You’ll recall that this is the company that needed five layers of management approval to authorize spending $17 on a mouse for me.)

But I do think they’ve hit the bottom: cubes here have a personal light embedded in the cabinet over each desk, which is kind of necessary because the company seems to have rigged the overheads so our floor resembles nothing so much as a mushroom ranch. I don’t use mine a whole lot, but occasionally I need to see something besides my clapped-out laptop.

So imagine my surprise when I went to switch it on yesterday morning and found that someone had removed the light bulb. The one in the lamp over the other desk in my cube was also missing. As were the bulbs in several unoccupied cubes.

Seriously? Are they collecting these things to sell on eBay? Does the CEO need an extra Aubusson rug for his house in Santa Cruz?

(And yes—I did find an empty cube that still had a bulb and I nicked it. Sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.)