The job of the person drinking the milk presumably has nothing to do with moving cards to people's desks. The job of the office manager is literally to keep the milk stocked. When keeping the milk stocked becomes a sidequest for every other employee (who have other jobs to do), what is the office manager actually doing? Bringing the card to the office manager's desk doesn't actually sound much harder than ordering more milk. Why don't we just have the card say, "If you see this card, order more milk" with instructions for how to do that?

> Bringing the card to the office manager's desk doesn't actually sound much harder than ordering more milk.

Bringing the card takes 5 minutes, 10 if you include time to a joke like "We are drinking too much milk, we should buy a cow next year."

Buying the milk includes going to the shop or calling the correct provider. Not the provider you used until two month ago because they usually deliver the requests too late at 5:05 when everyone is going home. Are you paying with the company card or your card and get reimbursed or they have to send an invoice and get paid later? Does the invoice need a magic tax number? Ensure they security guy and the payments department know about this so there are no surprise. [1] [2] This looks like half on hour at least.

When someone ask me to implement a trivial feature in software, I estimate "4 hours". Open the editor, find the correct file, take a look, make the obvious change, run the automated test, fix the obvious bug, cross the fingers, run the test again, [does it need new tests?,] write a nice commit message, google how "thoughtfully" is spelled, commit the change, close the editor, and it's done. Probably 2 hours, but I prefer to say for 4 hour in case there is a surprise.

[1] How many milks? 1%? 2%? 3%? Which brand? This may be included in the instructions, but in the second week of December you may want to buy less, and if there is a discount you may want more.

[2] Do you piggy back cookies or soap?

I'm interrupted in the office a hundred times a day.

It is guaranteed to happen that as I grab the paper and walk to the person's desk, something more important comes up as somebody sees me, and then I have a meeting, and the piece of paper simply isn't important enough to remember next to my other responsibilities.

Employees are paid to do the work they're best at. It's a bad use of resources to have them tracking office supplies, emptying their wastebins, vacuuming their floor area, restocking toilet paper, or alerting the office manager when milk is low.

For a tiny, cash-strapped startup they might have to do all those things, but generally it's not optimal.

Edit: just to be clear and in response to downvotes, this isn't an ego or self-importance thing. It's just the fact that when in conflict, it is genuinely more important for the company for me to address an urgent technical issue, and show up to an important meeting on time, than to finish running across the office to drop off a post-it note about milk. I already never have enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to get done for my job, and everything is a question of prioritization. I'm just trying to give a realistic perspective here, that we separate out job responsibilities for a good reason.

We outsourced all of those things. The office managers are gone.

There's no milk.

Also, anecdotally, my dad worked at a place where, if you needed something to be plugged into an electrical outlet, there was a person whose job was do do that. And if that person needed tools, there was another person whose job was to carry his tools.

Decades ago my first real job was as an IBM engineer fixing computers at a heavily unionised timber mill.

One of their many rules was that nothing could be plugged into any electrical outlet on site unless the device had been inspected and signed off by a union electrician.

In a hurry to diagnose a problem with a printer I furtively plugged my non-approved oscilloscope in to a wall outlet. But then I inadvertently grounded a power line with the scope probe and caused a circuit breaker to trip somewhere on the main board. Shit!

A pompous electrician appeared and told me they would be shutting down the entire mill (10K+ workers) while the union decided how to punish me for my rule breaking.

It took much begging and pleading before he relented. My only leverage was that the printer was also used to print pay slips and he would not have got paid that week unless I fixed the printer.

When I was in the army we had a simple system to determine who fell asleep on guard duty during training exercises[0], who was in possession of the squad leader's watch when everyone woke up.

Nobody really took guard duty seriously when it was just the platoon spending the night in the woods and between the three squads plus 'radio watch' there was always bound to be someone awake the penalty for falling asleep was usually just being assigned to the next shit detail so this system worked quite well.

I suspect this system is quite similar, if you want milk and the sticky note is on someone's desk because they can't be bothered to walk it over to correct person's desk because they are 'too important' then maybe people will start to question that person's true importance to the organization.

[0] during our time in Saudi Arabia/Iraq everyone took guard duty seriously and the leaders would make sure people were doing their jobs up to and including punishing people for petty infractions.

That's not a relevant analogy. In your example, staying awake during guard duty is your job and it's a proper responsibility. You should be penalized if you fail at your job.

I'm saying that tracking milk shouldn't be part of your job, because it's not a good use of people's time. None of it has anything to do with "importance". It's about what is best for the business.

So... how is café latte "best for the business"?

Would the business fail if the milk supply ran out?

Are you really asking if an office would suffer if coffee was unavailable?

And you understand that a lot of people don't drink their coffee black?

It seems pretty obvious to me that yes -- having coffee with milk available is very much best for the business. Kind of like having restrooms, chairs, and air conditioning are also best for the business.

To each their own, but wow. In healthy environments people are paid to do what makes the team most effective.

Here are some things that are not that in software teams:

- managing your own calendar, meetings, memos

- organizing transport and stay on business trips

- tracking and later correctly filling in forms to expense the above

- and yes, tracking supply of office consumables

This and many, many more things have been dumped on everyone by short-sighted beancounting. Salaries of secretaries, graphics departments, finance people, etc. are legible, therefore cutting them is a "big efficiency win". But their work does not disappear - it gets spread out, distributed in tiny pieces to everyone else. Then you have specialists with 10x the salaries of aforementioned departments getting constantly distracted by work that is not the reason they were hired. And people are surprised that productivity doesn't track promised economic improvements, and that everything gets slow to build and expensive for "unknown reasons".

But that's what I'm saying. An office manager makes a team most effective. A team that has to track a bunch of office maintenance tasks makes them less effective. Their team priorities should be top.

Don’t have to track it. Just have to put the slip on their desk.

Finish the one before you start the next.

As long as you’re holding the slip of paper in your hand, you won’t forget about it.

Then don't drink milk. You have more important things to do.

In a 20-person office you'll pass by like 2 people on the way with the card, so it's not a problem. If the office was bigger, and it was a problem, you could just designate a spot for the card next to the pantry.

I totally agree with you. I'm actually (despite downvotes) totally fine with bringing the paper tag to someone from time to time. My ego isn't hurt either.

The issue is with creating random bespoke processes, that save maybe 60 seconds of work for that office manager per week, but now involve literaly every person in organization.