- Never put a part back in the supply cabinet
The Great Green, another excellent manager from my IBM days, mandated that very simple stockroom rule.
He knew, even if we didn’t, that the next engineer would spend two days figuring out that the part you returned was defective, costing far more in the long run than just tossing the part.
Of course, we never tossed the parts…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
One response to “Monthly Aphorism: On Supplies”
That’s also one of the ten commandments of chemistry. In fact, if you catch someone pouring stuff back into supply bottles you’re supposed to shank ’em with a pipette. In undergrad labs we’d end up putting pump dispensers on all the liquids so they *couldn’t* pour their leftover-god-knows-what back into the scintillation-grade acetaldehyde, and all the solids we’d pour out into little pre-measured vials. GAH.