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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/JustSomeGuy_56 on 2024-05-31 16:22:57+00:00.
In the mid 1980s I was working as an IT contractor at large company. This was before cell phones so we occasionally used our office phones for personal calls. As long as we weren’t spending hours on the phone calling relatives in Europe, no one cared.
Then the site manager decided that contractors should reimburse the company for the cost of personal phone calls. Each month we all received a report listing the calls made from our office phones and we had to go to the woman who handled petty cash and settle up. The typical bill was less than $5.00.
I was talking to a guy who worked in Corporate Accounting. He said that with all the overhead it cost the company about $4 to process a paper check, and almost $7 to write one. So the next month when I got my bill for $4.87 I wrote them a check for $5.00. And sure enough, 3 weeks later I received a nice check for $.13. All the other contractors started doing the same thing. It took about 6 months before corporate told our site manager that the cost of these paper checks was coming out of his budget and the bills stopped.