My first job out of college was working as a temp. My primary assignment was at the temp agency’s corporate headquarters. Just graduated = June = summer in the northern hemisphere, so I showed up in slacks and a lightweight button-down shirt. Imagine my surprise when everyone in my cubicle block was wearing sweaters and fingerless gloves.

Come to find out, once upon a time, there had been a middle (micro)manager who convinced the architect to put the thermostat in his office, so he could control the temperature for everyone.

Micromanaging dude was long gone, but the thermostat was still in his former office, now occupied by the I.T. team. Three people, each with two computers, plus another couple of rack-mounted servers for their test environment, generates a lot of heat. The thermostat was convinced that it must be Very Hot Everywhere, and proceeded to blizzard blast the rest of the floor. The I.T. folks had learned to keep the door locked when they were away, because anyone who didn’t want to be an icicle would go in and shut off the air conditioning.

I asked if they had considered installing another zone, but my cube neighbor, Deb, said the price was quite high and no one could agree on which cost center should pay for it. The I.T. folks were perfectly happy with the temperature and did not accept responsibility for everyone else’s discomfort.

I asked Deb if I could borrow her office catalog, and quickly found a solution: a roll of magnetic whiteboard material. “Please order this. We’ll cut off a 24-inch square and slap it over the AC vent.”

Other folks around the floor noticed that we weren’t bundled up for winter anymore, and asked our secret. The word got out and we shared our supply. Within a few hours, all the AC vents had been blocked, except for the one in the locked I.T. office. The entire output of the air handler was now routed into this relatively small office. Luckily or unluckily, they had a return vent as well.

The I.T. team was out on an offsite meeting (eating Monte Cristo sandwiches at Chotchkie’s), so they didn’t immediately notice that there was a tornado in their office. This was in the 1990s, so there was a lot of paper, including lots of the accordion-fold green-and-white line printer paper, originally stacked up but now whirling in a paper blizzard. When they got back from lunch and opened the door, it all blew out into the hallway.

They came over to me (somehow, they knew it was me) and said, “You win. We’ll pay to install another zone.”