When it comes to IT equipment, things can get really expensive really fast.

What would you do if your management decided to rent a piece of equipment rather than buying because they wanted to save money, and they didn’t listen to you when you pointed out that it was $4000 per month to rent or $15,000 to buy, so it is better to just buy?

That is what happened to the IT professional in this story, so after the company wasted a huge amount of money, he again pointed out their mistake so they could finally just buy the equipment.

“The $15,000 equipment is too expensive for your department to purchase. Why don’t you just rent it for $48,000 a year?”

Back in the days when 33.6kbps modems were hot stuff, I worked for the engineering department of a growing company.

This company had started small.

It was privately owned, and the VPs had all put in a portion of their own money to start the company.

By this time in the story, they were finally making a respectable 30-40 million a year in profits.

Sometimes penny pinching is very expensive.

But they still acted like a small company.

Penny pinching.

Our engineering department was designing circuit boards with embedded computer systems.

And to program these, instead of soldering the microcomputer to the board, we would solder on a microcontroller socket, and then plug in an “In Circuit Emulator” that would pretend it was a microcontroller, and allow the programmer to create the required program.

This In Circuit Emulator, or ICE, was made by Hitachi.

It plugged into a free PCI slot on your PC, and had a ribbon cable that would attach to the specialized microcontroller die that plugged into the socket.

It was a mess.

It gave our tiny IT department headaches.

And it cost $15,000.

And it was an absolute necessity for most of our most popular product lines.

And there was only one of them.

Wow, that is expensive for a rental.

And we were renting it. It cost $4,000 a month.

The first month we had it, our CTO and Marketing VP planned our whole new product line around this family of microcontrollers.

So, at the end of the month, us engineers ask management to buy this for us.

Since we would be using it for a while.

The Engineering VP saw the price tag, and told us to just rent it.

Surely we would be done with it soon.

Engineers, being practical, forgot about the objection and just put our noses to the wheel.

The CTO and Marketing made plans to keep us busy using this microcontroller line for a while.

They pre-ordered a few million chips.

He should have looked into that before.

After a year, the VP of Finance asked about this recurring contract line item.

They called the engineer who had originally started the contract.

The engineer helpfully forwarded the approval from the Engineering VP, and his later email asking to buy it, and the VP’s reply where he demurred.

By the end of the week, this toy was ours.

Along with a second one, since finance determined that product rollout was being affected by not enough access to the equipment.

Hitachi just gave us the first one.

Stopped charging us, and never asked for it back.

We paid $15,000 for a second one.

No one got fired or demoted.

Oh, now they don’t have the money?

But at the next department meeting, the Engineering VP tried to tell us that we didn’t have enough money to upgrade our PCs.

That one engineer spoke up, “Would $40 thousand cover it?”

The company found the money.

How does it make sense to spend that much money just to rent it?

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

Here is an example of something similar.

This is way to common.

Now that is a genius move.

And they will never admit it was a bad decision.

It really doesn’t make any sense.

And they wonder why they aren’t making more money.

It’s a puzzle, right?

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.