Spectacularly Stupid Stubbornness Over Speedometers

Years ago, before I retired, I was the maintenance manager for a branch office of a state-wide corporation. We were big enough to have a car pool with the cars provided out of the main corporate office. We did the maintenance and mileage accounting.

Each driver was given a form to note beginning and returning mileage. I didn’t travel often, so I didn’t notice, but another employee mentioned that the mileage form asked for the “speedometer” reading rather than the “odometer” reading. When replacement forms were needed, I had the office clerk replace “speedometer” with “odometer”.

A few years ago, I revisited my old office for the retirement party of a former colleague. I noticed one of the travel forms on the office clerk’s desk. “Odometer” had been changed back to “speedometer”.

Me: *To my former colleague* “Why did they change this back?”

Colleague: “A representative from the home office visited for a couple of days and needed to use one of the branch’s cars. He complained that ‘odometer’ was not a real word, and he demanded that new forms be printed with ‘speedometer’. The corporate rep said that all forms had to be consistent at all branch offices, and this branch wasn’t allowed to be different.”

Bureaucracy at its finest.