I have a printer-paper-politics story. IT set it up one day that all printers at any location within the company (internationally) would print two-sided by default. This was thought to save the company massive amounts of paper, and reap hella-benefits. This led to an uproar, because written responses produced by certain departments are legally required to be on one-side-only. The law is in place to make sure that my company doesn't purposely structure its letters so that they can "hide" information on the flipside where it's less likely to get noticed. It took months of backlog/executive mediation/legal department consultation/IT wrangling before someone in one of those departments came to me to vent one day.
I'm a data-analyst, and have nothing to do with any of that. I told them, why don't they just change the default setting (like I had done to print to my local printer that can't print two-sided)? They said that that wasn't a solution, because they would have do that every single time they print. Apparently, not everyone in these departments (that generate/print/stuff/send letters) is tech-savvy enough to shut off a default option, let alone to restore the old default. After their their department manager followed me around the two-dozen machines that were on-site, and had me explain each time not to change the settings in the printer dialogue, but on the printers' control panel, she got it. The message went out around the world, complete with screenshots, that there was a "workaround to the two-sided printer problem." Suddenly, no one anywhere in any department was printing on both sides anymore.
IT found out, of course, but it was already too late. When they tried to get it approved to make changing the printer settings locally only available to those with local administrator rights, and therefore one-sided printing could only be done by request ... the executives decided to maintain the status-quo. That was four years ago. To this day, newly imaged machines come two-sided, and are quickly reset to one-sided printing. I had accidentally, but single-handedly defeated the company-wide money-saving world-greening initiative :( I'm sure that IT can't wait for the first OS upgrade (Windows 7, ungh) to try their hand again at putting the kabash on the users.
Added line breaks. -TheShadowMod