Fixing Shared Company Devices

From this Reddit Post:

... I almost got fired for replacing a tensioner spring on a commercial printer. I was a computer operator in a tax processing data center, we had a several hundred page report due to the state dept of tax each morning with the results from the previous day processing that only printed to a single printer specified for that report. About an hour before the courier came to pick it up it hadn’t printed yet so I went to see why. Nothing seemed out of sorts so I looked at the printer closer to make sure there wasn’t a jam and noticed a spring had come loose so I just reset it and everything went smoothly.

The next day I got called into a meeting after my shift (I worked third shift 12am-8am) with my boss, the vp for my region and the vp of Microsystems (dept in charge of printers) and I got literally yelled at for touching a Microsystems machine without authorization. The vp of Microsystems wanted me fired but when I explained that I called the on call and no one responded and that we would have missed the deliverable to the state if I hadn’t done what I did the regional jumped in to tell me if I did it again I would be fired but that for this one time they would let it slide.

This is not a nice outcome because there are other parties in this context with their own set of needs and rules. For example, there are probably some regulations that require the company to have a certain level of control over their devices and only allows "authorized" personnel to touch them. This rule is in place because there has been a time when grass was greener and we used to trust each other but some parties took advantage of this trust and (probably illegally) profited from it.

This, from one of this comment's replies, can also be another factor:

You don’t even have the opportunity to break something under someone else’s warranty, thus not costing your company money specifically, and your legal department sends the government’s bill directly to the repair company under a failure to perform clause in the contract with them. The contract which likely says "only our technicians are allowed to do anything mechanical to these machines not required for daily company operations"

Again, there was a simpler time where we had the time to take responsibility for our own devices, but when the scale of operations grew, it became more efficient to outsource the work and with that, comes the limitations of the lack of control over the devices. In larger scales, there's also the need to reduce destructive actions. This is a good thing that the printer was fixed in this case, but from the perspective of someone who doesn't know the people involved, allowing access to the device means anyone with any level of knowledge would be allowed to do so which is a huge risk for the party responsible for the device.