Charities rely on donations to do good work, but sometimes, poor spending decisions can make employees question where the money is really going.

So, what would you do if you worked for a charity and saw thousands of dollars wasted on unnecessary upgrades, leaving you frustrated by the inefficiency?

Would you speak up and risk backlash?

Or would you find another way to fix the problem?

In the following story, one employee finds themselves in this exact situation and opts for the latter.

Here’s how it all unfolded.

I stopped a charity using a TV for no reason

I used to work for a very large charity in the UK.

While I really liked the work they did, I was constantly annoyed by the appalling use of donation funds.

I was also irritated by the bureaucracy and rules that seemed to have no function other than to make certain people feel like their job was important.

(9/10 people there were ‘managers’ who managed other managers and so on until the 1/10 person actually did some work).

Every inane rule was followed meticulously and never questioned.

One time I saw they had recently purchased something like 30 huge flat screen TV’s, which I am pretty sure would have been discounted but would be a minimum of £50k.

If anything, they just slowed things down, as a two-minute conversation now took ten minutes of people trying to connect a laptop to a TV to show a thing that could be explained in a sentence.

These replaced the other perfectly fine, modern TV screens already wired up and convenient to use in every meeting room, which were also seldom used.

Fed up with the TV situation, they had a sticker made.

The only reason the new ones were attempted to be used was to try and rationalise their huge cost.

My petty action/revenge was to get a sticker maker and printed out a sticker that said “DO NOT REMOVE THIS STICKER.”

I then placed it over the IR receiver on the TV in the room I used the most.

For the next two or three years, I chuckled to myself every time someone tried to use the remote; they would soon give up, and meetings became efficient once again as we just said what needed to be said and left.

It baffles me how compliant people are to ridiculous rules, I thought the sticker would maybe a last a day or two but it was still there when I left.

Too funny!

It’s amazing no one realized the sticker wasn’t supposed to be there.

Let’s check out what the people over at Reddit had to say about this.

This person loves the story.

Great point.

Here’s a perfect comparison.

Most people probably don’t know this.

Good for them!

Charities wasting money like this is enough to make people not want to donate.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.