"Productivity-Killing Idiocy"

I’m attending a technology trade show at Chicago’s McCormick Place. My cell phone battery is low, and so I look for an electric outlet. Spotting one, I remove the charger from my bag and discover it won’t fit into the outlet. In fact, the outlet is oddly shaped, unlike any outlet I’ve seen. It looks like some kind of foreign outlet. I ask a security guard about the funny outlets. He says: “I’ll call up the man with the connectors.”

“The man with the connectors?”

“It’s in the union contract.”

McCormick Place installed odd electric outlets so that a union worker would have to be summoned each time you wanted to use the outlet.

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