When people in management are looking to save money, they often look at those recurring costs that add up each month.

While sometimes it can make sense to cancel them, you really need to understand what they are covering.

When the manager in this story cancelled the $150 a month service contract on IT equipment, he ended up having to pay out thousands in new hardware and employee downtime.

How to save $150 a month by spending $2800

A little background: I’m a paralegal at a small law firm who is slightly more tech savvy than anyone in my office.

What a nice arrangement.

About 9 months ago, my boss gave me a raise and a small reduction in my required billable hours so I could make IT stuff a part of my job.

Overall, I like the new role and additional responsibility, but to be clear I’m not especially tech savvy, I basically set up hardware and people call me with their problems to see if I can solve it.

Anything he can do to minimize calls to their help desk likely saves money.

Most of the time, I just have them call our third-party IT company, I just know that the HDMI cable goes into the hole shaped like an HDMI cable

My boss, we’ll call him Dave, is a wannabe hard nose in an extremely not-hard nose law firm and has been on a bit of a tear lately over IT costs. Dave is a lawyer. He’s not an accountant or IT guy.

This would get old quick.

He’s been micromanaging, sending me contradictory emails within minutes of each other (almost every 2 weeks he tells me to start looking for a new third party IT company and then recants within the hour), and becomes angry when he gets any pushback or suggestions whatsoever to his ideas.

Last month, the big thing was the number of computers being serviced by our IT company. He gave me a list of ten computers that he wanted taken off service with our IT company.

There is always a failure rate with any technology.

I mention that maybe we should keep a spare or two in case something goes wrong with one of the 75 other computers we have at the firm (Our IT company expressed this concern as well).

He is not interested and tells me to “just get the computers off service. I can’t believe we’re still paying for this stuff.”

Sometimes you have to do what your boss says, no matter how dumb it is.

So, I do. Every computer he listed is taken off of service. The firm saves about $150 a month in IT costs.

Fast forward about two weeks to yesterday:

Well, no surprise here.

An attorney’s laptop died and needed to be replaced, and an offsite office had a similar issue with an attorney’s desktop.

I call our IT company to get two computers put back on service, but for reasons beyond my tech understanding, there were issues and it took almost four hours to get everything up and running as needed and out to the proper parties.

Here’s the thing:

They are getting a good deal with him.

The firm charges $115 an hour for my paralegal work. They charge $0 an hour for my IT work.

The firm lost out on $460 in my billable time as well as $2400 for the two $300 an hour attorneys without working computers because the boss wanted to save $150 this month.

Nope, keep that to yourself.

The best part? I’m not telling anyone. Not Dave, not accounting, not the partners.

I don’t care and it’s not like any money saved will be used for future raises (I hadn’t gotten one for about 3 years before the IT role came along).

Sometimes it is those behind the scenes types of revenge that are the most satisfying.

Let’s check out some of the comments below.

This commenter has a very good idea.

This is so common with management.

You know this is true.

Yup, this is exactly right.

This commenter makes a good point.

Losing a dime to pick up a penny.

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.