The Hindu Business Line : The other side of one-side

COST-CUTTING at workplace takes various forms, ranging from deferred increments to downsizing. If you were to ask experts, they would advise you to manage costs, rather than cut, because the latter can be more expensive in the long run, though easier in the near term.

One of the obvious effects of such trimming exercises shows in the form of dark hallways in late evenings, if you are one of the unlucky visitors during late hours. The logic is simple: Conserve electricity. But what you save on electricity may be more than offset if you stumble and fall, or trip so badly on a desktop to push it off the table.

Thus, during peak summer, don't be surprised if you get into a stately bank or supermarket to find that their air-conditioning is turned off, or simply put on in the `fan' mode.

Since most of these establishments switched over to AC at great cost, after sealing windows that were once offering natural ventilation, what you have when the cooling solutions are frozen is nothing but unhealthy air.

While customers have the benefit of fresh air outside, once their transaction is over in 15-20 minutes, the plight of staff is miserable.

That's why when a reader complains about how a shop attendant in a popular departmental store omitted to give a `free' product with his purchase, I would not blame the beleaguered chap, because breathing in and out in a stuffy hall, he would have been sufficiently disoriented already.

"India's domestic retailers are wholly protected from foreign direct investment by global best-practice retailers," writes William W.Lewis in The McKinsey Quarterly, making one wonder if it is a matter of time before the big shopping worlds here get gobbled up by MNCs.

Another popular form of cost cutting is the use of one-side paper in offices. I am sure it must have been an accountant who first found out that the cost of all those A4 sheets gobbled up by laser printers and copiers soared steadily in spite of increasing computerisation, while the amount he booked under `sale of old papers' inched up too, though in baby steps.

Nobody has patented this technique but the use of papers till they really breathe their last is an ubiquitous practice now. Though technically, you can't have a one-side paper, as much as you can't have a one-sided coin, unless you are discussing some Zen question, the idea in this cost-saving measure is to turn the paper over and use the blank side.

Gresham's Law (that bad money will drive good money out of circulation) applies with a vengeance to paper too. That is why whole offices are filled only with OSPs, to resort to an abbreviation. A friend tells me of a new form of entertainment: "We give print commands of whatever needs to be printed, go to the laser printer to collect our printouts before somebody trashes them or it falls in wrong hands, and then the fun starts." How? "We first read all those stories on the other side!"

No different from people picking up eagerly tickets from weighing machines and reading not their weights but the forecast printed on the reverse.

Another reader shares an interesting anecdote: when he sent in a requisition for leave, his friend got a loan sanctioned. "How?" I ask. It seems the admin took action on the `other side', unwittingly.

Does the solution lie in peeling the two sides, or writing at the end of communication, `PDTO', short for, `please don't turn over'?

E&OE@thehindu.co.in

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