Manager allows employee to take work laptop home for maternity leave, and his boss demands it be returned during 9-month-long leave even though no one will use it: ‘It isn’t her fault this situation happened – if anything, it’s mine’

Government offices are like regular offices, only that they take the regular parts to extreme extremes, so even the trace amounts of common sense you find in your run-of-the-mill corporate aren’t there, so it’d take quantum-level equipment to find any logic in gov ones.

At some point, in this specific office, someone decided laptops must be returned during extended leave, and even though nobody can find that policy written down anywhere, the admin team enforces it anyway because audit season turns everyone into compliance zombies. 

And what I love about this story is that everyone is so, so wrong it just feels right. Which sounds like the pre-chorus of an 80s power ballad about a forbidden affair, but with none of the romance or pathos, all of the ridiculousness and much more bureaucracy and stupidity.