Let's get ethical!

It seems like more and more companies are focusing on their ethics policies, and Dunder-Mifflin is, of course, no exception.

Last week Kim and I watched another entertaining episode of The Office and we still have the "Let's get ethical" jingle that Michael and Holly performed playing in our heads!

Well, along those same lines... I just finished explaining to Kim that I had recently registered to attend a Microsoft launch event and that I was offered several options during the registration process to help me comply with my organization's ethics policy:

1. I could choose to attend the all day event and eat the provided lunch for free, or


2. I could choose to attend the all day event for free, then either pay $50 to eat the provided lunch or just forego the provided lunch, or


3. I could choose to attend the all day event and eat the provided lunch for $150 combined

After crunching the options through my ethics subroutine several times, I realized that it might need to have that new Y2K8 patch applied to it to prevent it from crashing when:

// passed in values: fee=0.0, msrp=150.0 and ethics=truevoid pay(final double fee, final double msrp, final boolean ethics) {
.
.
// exception occurs here trying to assign a value to a finalif (ethics==true && fee==0.0) fee=msrp;
.
.
};

I chose to attend for free and eat the provided lunch for free - but how cool is it that we can now be offered the ability to pay for free things?! This is really neat stuff! (Just maybe not free stuff anymore).
To think that I thought that last week's episode of The Office was just a funny episode - when it's oh so much more than that!
Pressured or not, Microsoft's example is just the beginning of a beautiful new era we should look forward to! Imagine what could be avoided if we all took the opportunity to pay for free stuff in order to make sure we don't violate our organization's ethics policies.
Oh - and speaking of ethics... I actually borrowed the picture for this entry from Tom Coombe's blog. I think that maybe he borrowed it, too - possibly from here.