A work anecdote

Several years ago, Congress passed a series of corporate reforms known collectively as "Sarbanes-Oxley". The provisions of SarbOx are designed to keep publicly traded companies from wildly defrauding their shareholders by requiring companies to provide multiple layers of accountability and supervision within the company.

One of the consequences, at least at my company, is that every department has a person who is designated as responsible for opening the mail, to make sure that employees aren't, for instance, ordering thousands of dollars in electronic equipment, billing them to the company, and making off with them, or doing other things that would leave the company liable in some way.

In our department, the mail opener is a young woman named Chairo. When I order books from Barnes and Noble, I get them delivered to the office (because they can sometimes come the same day), and she is always interested in seeing what I get from them. (She's a big Harry Potter fan, but discovered him through the movies; it had never occurred to her to read the novels until I loaned her our set. She's alway hoping to discover that I've tumbled onto something else that good.)

Last week, she came over to my desk holding a B&N package. Clearly stamped on the front was "This package has been X-RAYED"--not something that is routinely stamped on such packages. Further, something about the font made it very hard not to mis-read it.

"So," she says. "Why are you ordering a book that's X-RATED?"

I took the package from her and ripped it open. "It's not X-RATED," I said. But . . .

( And the punchline is:  )

A testament to the online world

"If there are one or more people on your friends list who make your world a better place just because they exist, and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the Internet, then post this same sentence in your journal."

From esmeraldus_neo.