"What All Men Own, No Man Owns"

     The problem with shared resources in a workplace is, they're shared.  Tools, for example, are often subject to loss or abuse.  People use them and leave them wherever they were working -- or, if they are diligent and frustrated, they hoard company tools, piling them up on their desks or in a drawer.

     At one time, I had a coworker who would lock up miniature side cutters and needlenose pliers in his desk.  It worked well for him, but over the course of a month, every available set of small diagonal cutters and needlenoses would vanish into his custody, and you'd have to remind him that the other kids occasionally fixed stuff, too, and would he please return his accumulation to the marked drawers in the toolbox?

     Another coworker would complain bitterly about how nobody ever bothered to put tools away -- and walk out at the end of his day, leaving the workbench littered with tools he had used.  Asked about it, his reasoning was that if no one else returned them, why should he?

     I don't know.  Nor is is my job to hector people about their habits.  Frustrated by the ebb and flow, one of my first projects was to sort out, organize and label the toolboxes at my employer's various sites.  Finding the right screwdriver should not require checking every single drawer!  Over the past 37-plus years, I have bought my own personal tools for work, especially after the day I arrived with a relatively urgent project all planned out -- and found every one of the specialized crimping tools I needed for video cable had been taken across town to rewire a location used twice a year.  But I also routinely put away any tools I find lingering on the workbenches and elsewhere -- not because I'm such a wonderfully superior person or in an attempt to inspire anyone else but because it increases the odds, however slightly, that if I do need something from the company toolbox,* it'll be there. (At home, I am sloppier about this -- after all, it's just me, and why would I hide stuff from myself?  Yesterday's blog post illustrates how poorly that can work out.)

     Other than the basics (screwdrivers, pliers, diagonal cutters), there's not a lot of overlap between my work and my home stuff.  The plier-driver-and-knives multitool I carry every day (a Wave) covers most simple tasks, with a "green tweaker" analog† handy in my purse.  My work toolbag includes two kinds of tin snips, video coax cable strippers and crimpers, soft-jaw channel-lock pliers to loosen stuck connectors, a compact "drive everything" Wadsworth Falls toolkit (I'm not sure what's up with them these days) and a modern "Yankee" type push screwdriver (they are incredibly handy, subbing for power screwdrivers; recent ones use 1/4" hex drives, so driver bits and small drills that fit them are readily available).  I rely on work for wrenches (too heavy for the small amount of use they get), nutdrivers other than 1/4" and 5/16", and power tools.  In my very first radio job, the station manager was of the opinion that an engineer who was worth a darn would have their own tools (and he was cheapskate enough to not want to buy any from the station budget).  The lesson I took from that was that you can't count on having what you need unless you brought it yourself.  Other people in my line of work are of the opinion that if an employer wants the job done, they'll provide the tools, which strikes me as both optimistic and obstinate, a recipe for frustration and disappointment.

     Shared resources are yours while you're using them, and ideally, everyone would treat them that way.  But that's not what happens, and I try not to set my expectations too high or insist that everyone do as I do.  There are plenty of other things to go be annoyed about, if that's what you want to do.
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* Don't picture something like a tackle box or oversized lunchbox.  These toolboxes are a yard wide and five feet high, chock full of soldering tools, wrenches and drivers of many kinds, twist drills, crimpers, specialized installation/extraction tools, hammers and punches, taps and dies, punchblock and wire-wrap tools, crimpers and wire strippers.
 
† Mine is the smallest reversible wooden-handled "pocket screwdriver" Starrett sold. They're well-made, with hollow-ground tips and complete overkill for the uses I put it to -- but it'll never accidentally get mixed up with the company tools.  It's nicely designed and a delight to use.  I also carry a cheap "freebie" tweaker for situations with a high risk of loss.