Originally Posted by legion

True story.

One day I was printing off an old PowerPoint presentation that a vendor had given us years before. I needed to create some training on a product we had purchased and heavily modified, so I figured I would print out the presentation, and write some thoughts/notes on what had changed and what needed to be added. From there I would create an outline, and then the real training.

While standing at the printer, someone on my project's "communication" team asked me if I was printing out a Powerpoint presentation (which was obvious). I replied "Yes."

She then said: "Those slides do not have company-approved backgrounds. You can't print them. I tried to explain that the presentation was from a vendor, it was old, and I wouldn't actually be giving it......she didn't care. She ended up getting some higher-up to tell me to destroy my printouts of the presentation and to send her the presentation to remove the non-approved backgrounds, and I could print it when she was done.

Fine.

I sent her the presentation. She simply changed the background for the presentation to plain white (which took all of three seconds, including opening and saving, when she got around to doing it) and sent it back to me. It took her two days to do this, during which I couldn't work on my training. And she sat on my aisle, and got up to browse whatever I was printing whenever I printed it. And as a member of the "communications team", she didn't have any real work to do other than policing Powerpoint backgrounds.

To make things even better, during this time period, I actually heard this lady exclaim: "I'm trying to add value, but I keep getting push-back!"

I put the phrase on a t-shirt, and I wear it to work to this day.