Reducing costs sounds like a good idea on paper, but it doesn’t always add up IRL.

When a manager denied one employee’s cost for a rental car, they were about to learn just how much costlier it could be for an alternative method.

Read on for the full story!

Don’t waste money on a hire car!

I’m a contractor but work for a government department.

Work sometimes requires us to travel, which requires us to draft an itinerary with a travel budget before a senior manager signs off on it.

I placed a budget in front of the manager for a 7-day trip.

Right out of the gate, the manager was having none of it.

Manager: “What’s this? You are getting a hire car? We are not paying for a hire car!”

Me: “But…”

Manager: “I’m going to stop you right there. We’ve been told to cut spending. This means no hire car for you.”

Context: I’m working on a project worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

So the employee decides to comply… maliciously.

Me: “Ok then, no worries, boss!”

The hire car would have been on a corporate rate, $70 per day for 7 days.

By the department’s own rules, I was not allowed to carry confidential documentation on public transport, so I legally had to use taxis.

So then they effectively told their boss to read it and weep!

Which is what I did, liberally.

Between the airport, my hotel, and the half dozen or so sites I had to visit, it ended up costing well over 10 times what it would have cost to just give me a hire car.

The manager may have thought they were saving money, but that ended up being a major miscalculation.

What did Reddit think?

Sometimes managers do better with cold, hard numbers.

Sometimes you just have to show negligent management the consequences of their actions.

There’s definitely such a thing as too much red tape.

The corporate golden rule: Get it in writing.

Not just anyone should be in charge of budgeting.

In the end, the manager’s attempt to cut costs only drove the price up.

Cutting corners doesn’t always cut costs!

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.