A memo recently came down from corporate at my retail job, instructing us on the new order in which our desk drawers should be arranged.

After cutting the profanities out, my initial response sounded something like this:

Who the hell do you think you are!? You are a thousand miles away, you’ve never seen my desk, you’ve never done my job, and you think that you have a better idea than I do of how the drawers should be arranged? What kind of idiot are you?

Don’t you think I have better things to be doing than justifying your paycheck by coming into compliance with a new schematic for drawer arrangements? You know, stuff like my job, which I now have that much less time to accomplish thanks to your ridiculous organization fetish.

So long as you are completely incapable of correlating drawer arrangement with job performance, and I know you are because my filing system has nothing to do with my job duties, how about you keep your mind off whether my TPS reports are in the top or bottom drawer and actually try to make decisions that will make a real difference to this company’s operation?

If you need some sort of suggestion for real work to do, I can point out a dozen different pieces of broken or obsolete equipment in my office that I’d like fixed or upgraded. Maybe you could start there. Or are you just the Executive Vice President of Drawer Arrangements? Please, God, don’t tell me you make six figures.

If you ever wonder why your front-line employees hold your corporate office in contempt, look no further than these edicts for ridiculous, meaningless changes.