Why You Shouldn't Ask to be Reimbursed

The theme today is "think like it was 1950". So here's some food for thought. Asking to be reimbursed shows weakness. Here's why.

1. Work is a meritocracy. Once you prove your worth, you get reimbursed. If you can’t prove yourself within one month of working, not only should you not be reimbursed for office supply runs, plane tickets, and other things I don’t have time to do myself, you should also just be fired.

2. Expense reports are a waste of time and accounting red tape lowers office productivity. Instead of submitting 10 pages of receipts to be reimbursed for a hotel, plane tickets, meal incidentals, etc, and waiting 2 months for it to go through, there's a simpler solution. We keep one drum of gasoline out on the front lines. You are allowed to fill your car to the brim, and it’s as far as it gets you, no questions asked. My colleague Rand once made it to Oklahoma doing the old “push 100 then flip to neutral” trick. He also siphoned a few tanks from Pringles trucks.

3. Filing an expense report is a passive form of office braggery. Now, I try to snub office arrogance every time I get a whiff of the stuff, and reimbursement requests reek of it. Asking to be reimbursed is no different from asking to be rewarded with a cookie for doing your job. Most expenses should fly under the radar, good employees shouldn’t bring this unwanted attention their way. Hell, I used to fill the office printers with fresh paper every morning before anyone showed up, all on my own dime. No one knows about this, not even my CEO. One day he set all of the office paper on fire before lunch, as he had suspected that a mythical printer fairy was at work (his thoughts became rather lucid near the end of his tenure as is well known). Upon his return, obviously, the printers were filled with high grade mahogany bond paper. Now do you honestly think I filed an expense report for that?

-paddy