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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/firakti on 2024-10-16 19:44:56+00:00.

I work in a small office, and like a lot of companies, we’ve got that one manager who’s obsessed with cutting costs—ours is “Mark.” Mark wasn’t a bad guy, but he had this laser focus on reducing expenses, no matter how small. One of his biggest obsessions was paper. He was convinced we were blowing our budget on printing, so he implemented a new policy: Everything had to be double-sided.

It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a hard rule. Mark sent an email to everyone in the office, cc’ing HR to make it official: “From this point forward, all printing must be double-sided—no exceptions. If we catch unnecessary single-sided printing, there will be consequences.”

Most of us didn’t see it as a big deal for internal documents. But there were times it was a problem. We regularly worked with contracts, legal forms, and client documents—things that, for whatever reason, often had to be single-sided. A few of us raised concerns about this with Mark, but his response was always the same: “Rules are rules. Double-sided saves us money. Stick to the policy.”

Now, here’s where the compliance comes in.

A couple of weeks later, we got a massive contract from one of our biggest clients—let’s call them GreenTech. The deal was huge, easily one of the biggest projects we’d handled all year, and it came with a lot of paperwork. The instructions from GreenTech were crystal clear: the contract had to be printed single-sided to meet their legal department’s standards.

I figured this might be one of those rare cases where Mark would make an exception. So, I went to him, explained the situation, and showed him the client’s instructions.

Mark just shrugged and said, “Company policy is company policy. We’re not wasting paper. Double-sided.”

At this point, I knew where this was headed, but fine. I followed the rules. I printed the entire 80-page contract double-sided and sent it off to the client. A couple of days later, we get an email from GreenTech. They weren’t pleased. In fact, they were asking us to reprint the whole thing—single-sided this time—or they’d reconsider doing business with us.

When I showed the email to Mark, his face turned red. He had no choice but to backtrack and scramble to fix the mess. We ended up having to reprint the entire contract correctly and rush ship it to GreenTech overnight, which ended up costing us more in fees than the printing savings Mark had been so focused on.

The best part? After that fiasco, Mark quietly rolled back the “no exceptions” rule for double-sided printing, and we were all allowed to use our judgment on a case-by-case basis. Funny how a little compliance with bad policies can show why they don’t work in practice.