When you work for a company, you sometimes have to just do what you are told, even if it doesn’t make sense.

What would you do if you were assigned a PC that was also running a critical application, and when you reported problems with it, you were ignored and told to keep working?

That is what happened to the employee in this story, so he did the best he could as the problems kept getting worse until shortly after he left the company, the application was completely lost.

Check it out.

You won’t pay $100 for a new hard drive? Okay, enjoy paying $22k for my time to deal with the problem.

I had a job where I had a computer which was, incidentally, also the web server for a very important internal web application.

I thought this was really stupid that it wasn’t in a server room being managed by IT, but for some weird reason they wouldn’t do it.

I didn’t use this application or have anything to do with it, but it took up a large chunk of the hard drive and made it slow.

(I didn’t even know what it was on the hard drive, so there was a bunch of old development software I could never remove for fear of harming the application.)

This would get old quick.

I was also not permitted to turn the machine off or even sign out nights or weekends so it would be running whenever anyone needed the application, I had to just lock the screen and leave it.

This application was apparently something developed by my department before I joined the company, and everyone involved with it was no longer there, and nobody really knew anything about how it worked other than that this machine had to be running and signed in and it wasn’t developed in our normal system and wasn’t in our code repository.

By the end of my time with the company, they’d had such turnover that I was literally the only person in the department who knew it was even there.

This is a crazy policy.

I was a web developer and I required a vast amount of disk space for my work, for reasons mostly relating to how moronic management was about process.

(I had to keep 3 complete copies of everything the company ever developed.) I often ran out of disk space.

I had to use increasingly desperate measures to deal with this, up to and including deleting anything that Microsoft included with Windows that I didn’t actually need (like the camera app on a PC with no camera).

It quickly got to the point that I had to call IT to tell them my PC was becoming unusable due to disk space and could they please do something about it, and suggested that because of this application they might want to take this PC into management and give me a different one.

Replacing the computer would have made too much sense.

I thought they would do something like replace the computer (identical would be fine as long as it didn’t have this application on it) or give it a larger internal disk or maybe even just attach an external disk (I would still have a slow machine but I’d have had the space to do my work), but they told me that I’d have to remove what I could and defrag the disk to make more space and I would just have to suffer and please don’t call them about this again.

I talked to my boss and was told that IT’s word was final and I would just have to deal with it.

So it’d get bad, I’d remove what I could and start a defragment, and the machine would become too slow for me to use for about 24 hours during which time I could do no work… this happened about once a week, so it took about 1/5 of my time. (Not counting time spent looking for stuff to delete.)

They really didn’t seem to care.

I kept telling manglement this was happening, and they kept telling me to shut up and deal with it, but at least when they wanted me to do stuff and it was “I can’t, my computer is busy clearing disk space and is presently unusable”, they moaned but understood and left me alone.

So, because IT was too lazy to do anything and manglement was too lazy to go to bat for me and the company was unwilling to spend $100 on an external hard drive, they got to spend over $22,000 a year on salary for me to sit around and wait for the machine to make some space so I could do my work.

(That wasn’t my salary. That was the portion of my salary that they were wasting on this problem. Not counting the value of the time of everyone else that had to do my work while I couldn’t.)

How could they not see that this was a problem that needed to be fixed?

Oh, and it was getting to the point that I wouldn’t be able to deal with it at all (there wasn’t anything left to delete and defragging wasn’t reclaiming any more space and the company’s internal software took up more and more space every day and I estimated I had about a week left before it became fully unusable), when I had a heart attack and a stroke and never went back.

I occasionally think (with, admittedly, some glee) of the panic it must have caused when they no doubt turned off the computer and sent it to IT to be wiped, and a few hours later panicked users started calling demanding to know where their precious application that they couldn’t live without was, only for my evil manglement to say, honestly, “what application?”

It is amazing how poorly run some companies are.

It is a wonder that they are able to stay in business at all.

Let’s see what the people in the comments had to say about this story.

Sadly, companies often don’t give employees what they need.

It would have been so simple.

Here is a programmer who has a fun story.

You would think someone would have fixed this.

This person went through something similar.

How companies think they can get away with skimping on IT forever is mind-blowing.

Sadly, it happens all the time at all types of companies.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.