My caring boss treats us like children and costs the company millions of dollars.

Many years ago, I worked for a company that hired an increasingly obtuse financial department

who took over when they first reorganized. It used to be a loose collection of managers,

but the year after I started, they went to a more organized and separate structure. To be fair,

this is more about my boss than myself. We had a travel team, a group of volunteers from sales

and IT, who would go in mass, with equipment and text to do setups, displays, and network

at trade shows. We had a booth, some sales guys would be there, and networking would commence.

There was always a set of volunteers from IT department because some of the shows would be in big cities,

and we'd get to attend vendors, parties, and hang out with the sales guys who were mostly gay

alcoholics for some reason and super fun. There was this kind of seniority of who got to go

volunteer, but nobody really complained and everyone rotated who got to go. You got to go to

DEF CON last year, it's my turn now. The travel team lead was also a volunteer position,

but commonly someone higher up like a manager. Their job was to orchestrate equipment, rentals,

expenses, travel plans, convention center fees, and shipping. They also ended up getting a lot

of the free stuff too, from sales and our partners, which they'd pass along to the travel team.

It was all kind of a perk, to be fair, for everyone involved. But when the new director of

finance started, she put in some new and strict policies. Some of their policies started with,

travel team is no longer allowed to get reimbursed without explicit approval, and nobody was

approved post-event. Travel team does not get a credit card of their own or even a company card.

Travel team gets gift cards for a set amount, like $150, which was to be used for all expenses.

Sadly, places we needed these four, like airlines, rental agencies, hotel rooms, gas pumps,

and toll booths did not accept gift cards. Financial denied that these were gift cards,

...