How not to save a Tree

I try not to rant about my job and my boss here too much. I don't want my blog to be so full of negativity, but this is something I need to bitch about as it happens regularly.

I don't pretend to be a nature enthusiast, I don't recycle, and my car is defiantly not green. But it still bugs me when people are wasteful with out a second thought.  Especially when it effects the budget at my workplace that is so far in the whole we are facing layoffs again.

A large portion of my job revolves around printing out documents for my boss. For some reason she is unable to review these documents on the computer like most of the rest of the people in this office. So I'm constantly printing stuff off for her, most of which she never even reads or looks at, but she needs the items for her meetings. I do my best to print double sided and black and white to save ink. Despite what the companies that do color print tell you, printing in color does cost more when a color printer takes 4 ink toners that all cost the same amount as the single ink toner needed for a black and white printer.

Now my boss seems to think that if there is one single spec of color in a document it needs to be printed in color. I don't know why, but that's how she thinks. I've gotten into the habit that no matter if there is color in the document or not I do NOT print in color unless she specifically asks for it. Well today she sent me 2 documents to print, in color. Both of these documents were 50+ pages long! And the worse part is that my color printer will not print double sided. I've had one of our IT guys look at it, as he says it should be able to, but it just won't do it. So that's 100 wasted sheets of paper to print off two nearly identical documents that she'll probably never actually look at.

And what does she do when she finally cleans these 100s of pages off her desk? She throws them in the trash! We have a recycle program in our building. There are bins in 2 places on our floor alone. 3 small ones for plastic, newspaper, cans, and then a very large dumpster for white paper. Most of the employees here keep boxes under their desks to toss paper into rather than tossing it in their trash. This saves them from getting up to go to the dumpster every time. They can just fill the box then make a single trip. But not my boss. No. She just tosses it all in the trash after its sat on her desk for months.

Under normal circumstances this wouldn't bother me all that much. But the fact that the agency is looking in every nook and cranny for ways to save money in the hopes of not having to let people go, and here she is wasting paper and ink and who knows what else (though time comes to mind). I'm sure she isn't worried about any of this one bit since she can hide behind her "disabled" label and probably not have to worry being one of the ones let go. It just frustrates me so much to see her constant neglect and disregard for things that others around here take seriously.

/sigh