Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...

Friday 11 September 2015

Office Depot and Fair Treatment

If this story turns out to be even faintly true, I smell big trouble brewing for Office Depot/Office Max.
Last month, Maria Goldstein, 42, ordered 500 copies of "A Prayer for the Conversion of Planned Parenthood" at an Office Depot in Schaumburg to distribute at her parish the following Sunday. The handout also included statistics about abortion in the U.S. and at Planned Parenthood, a non-profit organization that provides women's and reproductive health services.
The prayer, composed by the Rev. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, an anti-abortion group, calls on God to "Bring an end to the killing of children in the womb, and bring an end to the sale of their body parts. Bring conversion to all who do this, and enlightenment to all who advocate it."
The prayer also decries "the evil that has been exposed in Planned Parenthood and in the entire abortion industry."
Karen Denning, a spokeswoman for Office Depot, said company policy prohibits "the copying of any type of material that advocates any form of racial or religious discrimination or the persecution of certain groups of people. It also prohibits copying any type of copyrighted material."
"The flier contained material that advocates the persecution of people who support abortion rights," Denning said.
I suspect Miss Denning didn't think this through, and has no clear idea what "persecution" is.
I know any place that has copiers or copy service has trouble educating its employees on what it is and is not appropriate to copy, (I once, in a small town where a national office supply "Big Box Store" was the only game in town, could not get the clerk behind the counter to understand that, yeah your boss said not to copy "music" but that didn't mean my hand written manuscript, on which Lookie! the name of the composer was the same name on my driver's license.)

My piddling amount of business doesn't mean much to the company, but they have, at least temporarily lost a customer.

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