Boxing Day

I work, as some readers know, for a large corporation. (We're trying to keep this thing at least nominally anonymous so, please, those of you who know which one, don't go shouting out the answer -- or even any hints. Thx.) I work in the corporate headquarters building. As corporate headquarters are wont to have, it has corporate security. They are perfectly nice fellows, so far as I have interacted with them, but they are most definitely carrying out fairly specific rules that have been given to them. I ran into one of these rules in a rather amusing way the other day.


A few weeks back I ordered some t-shirts online. They were too small but the store has free exchanges: you print out a packing slip, rebox it and drop it at the post office. Since there is a post office that is very convenient to my office, I took the boxed t-shirts to work to drop off during a spare moment.

Now, this box. It was a brown cardboard box just the right size to hold the 4 or 5 t-shirts it contained. So, a small box. Too small to put, say, a ream of paper in. Just about the right size to put one desk phone in, maybe.

So about 3:00 I decided to pop out to the post office with my box. As I walked through the turnstiles at the main entrance, a security guy stopped me and asked about the box.


"Where are you taking that?"
"To the post office."
"The mailroom or the post office?"(fn1)
"The Post Office."
"Are you bringing it back?"
"No, I'm mailing it."
"Do you have a form for that?"

A form? What? I was befuddled. He directed me to the security desk. I got over there and the nice security man there asked me about the box. It's my box, I said, with some shirts that I'm returning. He explained that no one may remove "anything" from the office without filling out a form saying what it is, why you are removing it, who approved the removal, and your supervisor's name. He gave me the form and told me to put my name down as "removing" and also as "authorizing" and whatever.

I asked him, "If I remove 'anything'? Because I brought this box in this morning, what if I brought in a gym bag, would I need a form to take it back out?"
"Yes, anything."

So as I finished filling out the form, as luck would have it, a lady was leaving the office and had come through the turnstiles behind us. She was carrying a large purse-like bag and also a large Duane Reade bag. And was, of course, just walking out, hassle free. Each of the two bags could hold maybe 3 boxes of my box's size. So I pointed her out and asked the guy, "See her? Why doesn't she have to fill out a form to remove those bags?"

"Those are her personal bags."
"So, to be clear, if I had put this box into a Duane Reade bag I would not have to fill out a form and we would not be having this conversation?"
"We don't search personal bags, you have a box."
"It's my personal box."
"It's not a bag."
"Again, I just want to understand, if I put this in a bag, you don't care. It's only because it's in a box."

The guy was confused so his supervisor who had returned to the desk as we were talking came over to see what was what. I asked him about the box-bag distinction.

"That's right," he said,"it sounds stupid, I know, but that's the rule."
"I think it sounds stupid because it is stupid," I said, "But now I know: take things out in bags, not boxes. Good to know."

fn1: Our headquarters is large enough to have its own mail system but we are not supposed to use it for anything but official correspondence and I am nothing if not a fastidious follower of corporate rule-making.