One Marque Gumbs, a receiving clerk and creative thinker employed, until recently, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, has admitted to embezzling $1.2 million from the hospital via a rather ingenious method: He ordered printer toner on the company dime, intercepted the packages, and then resold them for personal profit. Now, as anyone who has ever been in charge of ordering supplies for an office knows, this wouldn’t work with just any old item — no one gets carte blanche with the Post-Its, believe us. But toner is like the toilet paper of a modern American office: Someone might raise an eyebrow at the volume you’ve gone through, sure, but it’s something that you can’t actually put off buying without things descending into the Dark Ages, a state-of-nature condition that no one wants to see. Any supervisor who refuses to authorize a toner purchase is risking across-the-board mutiny. People get angry, and fast, when the toner is out. We’re actually surprised they caught this guy as quickly as they did.
