Your Caltech dollars at work

We have spiffy new door labels. They cost $40 each (though they're really worth something like $5) and this type of label (though not at this price) makes sense for grad student and postdoc rooms because the resident names can be changed by printing new stuff out. Our old labels, which cost $30 (and are also only worth something like $5) can't be similarly replaced. For the sake of uniformity, the faculty were given those labels as well even though they still have the old ones. So, considering only the things that are completely redundant, we multiply this cost by the number of faculty in the building and come up with maybe $400.

Anyway, with Caltech's financial crunch from non-research endeavors, one would think we'd see more efficiency with things like this.