Company surplus - a rant.

The place I used to work at was real big on throwing good stuff in the trash too. I asked my boss if it was OK to take stuff out of the trash home with me. He said that he didn't know of any company policy that specifically forbade it, but that I shouldn't just start taking things home willy-nilly right in front of people. Might not look good. Might be hard to prove that it came from the trash. As long as I brought the item to him and asked if it was ok to take home and he said yes, every thing was good. My butt was covered. Though it was on the up-&-up, I was discrete about it, only taking stuff home on the night shift. All it would take is one person seeing me leave with something that they wanted, and causing a big fuss about it. "Hey, how come HE gets to take a scope home and I don't? I want a scope too!" And I think this is (partially) where the company's policy comes from. What supervisor wants to mediate arguments about who gets to take home what stuff? They don't have time for crap like that. Then there's the possibility of people to claim things are broken or unneeded so that they can walk off with them. And who's to challenge them in some cases? As Tindel said, it sounds like almost every person above him in the chain of command has no clue how a scope works. He could just say it's broken and they have to take his word. Then he gets a new (used) scope.