When a company is struggling, every dollar counts, but refusing to spend money on necessary repairs can be a recipe for disaster.

Now, imagine you’re responsible for keeping critical machinery running, but your boss demands you “fix it without spending any money.” Do you push back,? Or do you let the inevitable happen and watch the consequences unfold?

In the following story, factory workers finds themselves in this exact dilemma. Here’s what they did.

Fix this machine at all costs, but don’t spend any money? Sure!

About 5 years ago, I found myself as a 2nd shift supervisor at a small manufacturing plant. We had a line of 8 machines with 4 others that could be added to the end of the line with a series of pipes and blowers.

It all started when my boss (Plant Manager) said “I don’t really read the report that you send to me at the end of the day.”

He was trying to get a 2nd, much larger, plant running to make our small plant redundant and increase our capacity by around 8 fold so he decided not to even be involved with the small plant.

Okay cool!

It was a lot of work for little pay.

Well, the company wasn’t doing too hot.

We had a ton of demand, but the orders were so large that we just didn’t have to capacity to fill them.

I, along with about 5 other people worked 8 weeks straight from the beginning of July to the end of August with only 2 days off during that 8 weeks and as salaried employee at $30,000 a year and not eligible for OT.

I was not a happy camper.

They didn’t have any other options.

With the plant running around the clock, a lot of preventative maintenance was being neglected.

I went to the Plant Manager and said, “Hey, if we don’t shut down for a day or two and replace the bearings in the rollers in the 6th machine in the line, they are going to freeze up, and the motor that turns those rollers is going to burn up.”

He said, “Just fix it, but don’t spend any money.”

So at the end of the night, I put in my daily report that if the motor burned up, I would ask Maintenance to pull an identical motor from one of the machines that were not connected to the current line configuration, and that way we could finish this order and to please respond if he wanted to do something different and CC’d the head of maintenance on the email.

He entered a maintenance request and it was business as usual.

I never heard back from him, so after about a week, the bearings froze up, and the motor quit working.

I put my request in to Maintenance and they pulled the motor of the machine not being used and replaced it to finish a major order.

The day we were finishing the major order that we had been working on for months, the plant manager walked up to me and the head of maintenance and said, “You all need to hook those 4 extra machines up and start on the next order as soon as we get this one out the door.”

The plant manager should’ve checked his email a little closer.

The maintenance head and I looked at each other, then back at him, and I said, “Sorry, we can’t do that. We don’t have a motor to run the last machine. I sent you an email about it a few weeks ago and you never replied that you wanted to do something different. It is probably around $10,000 for another motor and we can hook it up tomorrow if you overnight it.”

Well, the Plant Manager blew a major gasket because we all knew the company was on its last legs.

4 days later, the CEO called a mandatory meeting at 4 o’clock on the last day of the pay period and let the entire staff go.

I got unemployment and took it easy for a few months before starting my MBA and getting into data analytics.

Wow! At least it ended well for him.

Let’s check out what the folks over at Reddit have to say about it.

Here is an excellent point.

You’d think they knew better.

Don’t think this is the right place for career advice.

This could be some good advice.

Sounds like the outcome was inevitable.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.