Back in my college days, I had this crazy business professor who had an interesting theory on the working world. He explained that you are only as important as the trash can you use. While this seemed like nonsense, there was a bit of logic behind his rant.

• If you work in a factory (which I did as one of my first jobs) then you likely throw your trash into an old barrel or some other random container. You don’t have a trash can per se, just more of a place where everyone throws their junk.
• If you work in a call center or some other shared work environment where you don’t have a your own desk, you likely have to share a trash can.
• If you move into a desk job, you might get your very own top of the line plastic trash can. And if your company is environmentally friendly, you might even get a recycling bin to keep your trash can company.
• When you move up in the ranks, your plastic can gets upgraded to a metal or brass trash can.

And so, the logic in all of this is when you are important, even your most worthless stuff (in this case your trash) gets treated better than the trash of someone else. And that all got me thinking about some of the most egregious abuses of power I’ve seen in the corporate world. These are all true.

1. I worked for an executive who was distracted by the number of people who would walk past his door. To solve this, he had the maintenance crew seal up the existing doorway to his office and then had a new office door cut into the wall 10 feet away. Apparently this solved the problem of hearing all the foot traffic in the hallway.
2. At a previous employer, all of the VPs and above had a garage door opener device installed on their office doors. This way, they could close the office door at the touch of a button in case their secretary was talking too loudly on the phone.
3. I saw an exec park their car on a freshly paved parking lot. Some poor guy then walked out and painted the parking space lines around the car. It is now my mission in life to be so important that people pain the parking space around my car. How much better is that than to have an assigned space?

What abuses of power have you seen in the corporate world? Or better yet, what kind of trash can do you have at work? Tell me about it in the comments below.