(Okay, *I* would have got myself fired, but it's more exciting phrased that way :D )

It's because I, like others mentioned here, printed stuff out. :)

So in those days I was working as a consultant, and when I wasn't out in the field putting out client fires I was twiddling my thumbs at the office waiting for client fires to spring up that I could go put out. I remember it being a very slow day, and I had the pleasure of seeing _Christmas Rose_ waiting for me. So of course I dived right in.

And then the phone rang. One of our clients, payroll, yadda yadda yadda, arrgh. Because I was familiar with said client I knew that once I got on-site I wasn't going to be back in the office that day, but I also knew I'd have literally hours of waiting for Technical Bullcrap (restores of backups, frantic searching by the local admins for said backups, so on and so forth) with nothing to actually do except look professional.

So I printed it out... except in my haste I sent it to the wrong printer. Which I didn't realize until after I'd printed it *again* to the correct printer this time.

Then I gathered up my things, stuffed the printout into my briefcase, and spent the rest of the day alternately walking the client through the process they'd documented a dozen times before and reading Symphony.

Next morning, walk in and my boss is waiting for me with a certain familiar printout. I should note my boss was an accountant-turned-IT-manager and was... let's call him 'intense'. Also he had very little sense of humor to begin with and considered any time not spent billing clients to be wasted and therefore a direct attack on him, his business, his family, and his ancestors.

(It was not a happyfun place to work, but I had a family to support and no degree to get anything better with, so I felt kind of stuck)

So yeah. I got reamed for wasting company time and resources (guilty on the last, I suppose, paper and toner is a resource...) and the only reason I wasn't fired was because I was able to tell him "Dave, I was able to bill for the entire time I spent reading that yesterday."

--sofaspud
--see why I say "gryph almost got me fired"? sounds better, I'm tellin ya