[Closed] Tales of cost cutting going wrong your tales of woe.

Place I used to work had three industrial dryers and three washing machines. To cut costs the staff were told to only use one at once. They also did the exact same thing with the lights as outlined above.

I think it would be rather instructive to see the salaries and benefits for the top 20 staff in the health trust - cars/pensions/etc and see if any of the payments are going to be deferred to the next financial year.

Another healthcare one.

Working in a care home. they only recruited to cover the actual number of staff on duty not allowing for sickness and holidays. Regular staff were asked to cover holidays with extra shifts. Usually they didn't so extra staff had to be got from the agency ( legally enforceable minimum staffing requirement) Holidays and sickness are usually around 15 %. the bill for agency was way more than the cost of recruiting those extra people to cover holidays and sickness

We've always done overtime to complete works that can't happen during normal working hours.
New leader banned overtime to save money.Over 12 months he saved maybe £15000 -£20000 and was penalised£100000 for not completing work on time.
He had the cheek to fanfare his overtime savings but swept the fine under the carpet.
Aaaaaggghhh.

and again when i worked in the nhs, the mangement canceled a £20 per year subscription to a magazine a lot of us would read, just went out and bought my own.

Then threw hundreds of quids worth of stock in a skip, and smashed up hundreds of side lockers, because nobody would accept responsibility for selling them to care homes, that asked for them and where willing to pay for them.

tjagain Having been that agency cover many times is beneficial to say the least.

When I worked in the bank- maintenance contract for desktop PCs cancelled as "unneccesary expense". Every desktop PC in bank filled with dust and overheated, slowing down and failing completely. We had one die- IT man came and replaced base unit, wasn't allowed to do anything about the other 15 PCs full of dust until they broke. Caused tons of downtime and loss of service not to mention dead hardware.

Member of slt at a school demoted. Forgetvthe detail but they had to pay her the higher wage for a year or so before the lower wage kicked in. So she got paid lots for a lower role then retired.

Sounds like she had a protected wage deal.

Large insurance company:

Various ancient and incompatable IT systems patched together by sallow skinned chainsmokers with rickets and a deep understanding of how to make it all work.
Sack them all, then rehire them at higher rates exactly a week later after it's all fallen apart.

Sack the team that analyzes complaints and comes up with ways to keep everyone on the right side of the FSA.
Then pay out many, many millions in fines due to procedures not being followed correctly.

I could go on.

Another NHS one - Mrs Jay is a district nurse, job comes with a mobile that can't be used for personal calls, despite the fact that an organisation as large as an NHS trust would have no problem negotiating an all you can eat usage contract.

Gave her a Nokia indestructiphone - as we all know battery lasts forever, great 2G signal etc. Jobbed.

Year later they were taken away and replaced with EE branded smart phones to make use of an app to automate expenses (stupid idea for a few reasons).

Sadly in traditional non joined up NHS thinking the IT security team disabled all web access on it either by mobile signal or wifi, its a non-smart phone with all the downsides of a crap smartphone - crap battery and signal. Useless. Oh and they can't load the app on it.

Rusty Spanner - Member

Sack the team that analyzes complaints and comes up with ways to keep everyone on the right side of the FSA.
Then pay out many, many millions in fines due to procedures not being followed correctly.

Hah. That's amateur stuff, my lot essentially transformed the compliance department into the "evading regulation" department. They came into our office one day and said, right, we're doing a surprise spot check in 3 days time, tell us what we can safely inspect without finding any problems. PS we definitely won't look in that cupboard over there, nudge nudge.

NHS - we use paper cups to bolus feed patients via ng tubes. Paper cups are now no longer available to order because we were using too many for the bean counters in the offices.

We have enough plastic water cups for one per patient. Maybe.

So now on the ward we use the pg tips cups off the tea trolley, throw away the tea bag and create more cost. :-/
2 cups per time. Per patient. 3-4 times a day.

We did argue it but then who are we on the ward floor to know what we need?

Place I am at right now. They want to upgrade a 10 year old version of our product because it's gone out of service. Upgrading to an intermediate version rather than the latest will mean they won't have to re-do a few weeks of work they've already done. Intermediate version goes out of service in early 2018.

Project will take months anyway, so if they go to the intermediate product they'd only have a few months of support left before having to start all over again with another upgrade.

NHS again.

Rolling out a system into an AHP department, they weren't allowed to buy an extra PC so they used one in another office (down the corridor) to print, cost probably 5 mins per hour per Band 6&7.

A basestation PC costs less than £5 per week to buy/run...

My previous company bidding for work at stupidly low rates, then expecting us to do it at stupidly low margins then looking to make redundancies as profits were shite so we have to cut costs. Oh, and when as a department we said we weren't going to do the work as it was going to be loss making we were threatened with disciplinary action. Total bell ends!

But nearly three years after leaving, my old work phone still works and is on a contract It's now my biking emergency phone as the battery lasts weeks and I don't care if I smash it in a crash.

Post private equity buyout vultures with an eye on cutting costs...

Cancelled plant (yucca etc) maintenance contract. One month later all plants now brown and dead. Replaced all plants, restarted contract.

Replaced paper stock with 80gsm thin-as-u-like shite (was 90-100 before). Printers get dusty inside and start to jam several times daily.

Scrutiny of expenses down to the mile - had a phone conversation around 2 mile difference between claimed mileage and what multimap said. Took around 10 mins @ £30 per hour to resolve "just this once". Cost of claim? 28p.

All new stationery bought from cheapest range; scissors would break, staplers not staple, pens run out etc etc. I still have my liberated stock of decent stuff 😉

Insurance co - "new" IT system ordered and put into place across 300+ offices many in very rural locations. No pilot or real test. Needed broadband to run when some offices still on isdn and some even on dialup! Utter shambles - cost a main board director his job albeit with a 200k payoff. They still have it and spend is 50m+ apparently. They also have to develop it in house as it's so old the developer doesn't support it anymore... and they were offered the chance to buy the software company but refused as it was too expensive.

So much for private sector efficiency! Seems to be a fair balance on here.

I work for a well known insurers, where we will happily pay people like James Corden to appear at whatever ridiculous fee he asks to sell our policies, but may of our systems cannot talk to each other and are from the 80's (think black screen and green writing!)

Moved to a fantastic new office, but with nowhere near as much parking as old, so we now have to park 2 miles away and they pay £1000 per member of staff to park there and have to run a bus service every 20 minutes (often empty except 9am and 5pm) because you have to walk across two busy A Roads to get to said car park otherwise!

My wife worked for NHS in Guildford hospital, they kept losing staff to London hospitals as it was an easy commute, so they paid them a "london retention bonus" after a few years, they decided that this costs too much, stopped it, lost loads of staff and had to employ loads of less skilled agency staff and a lot more than the bonus was.

Oil industry is king of this.

E.g.
Permanent replacement chemical pump = ~£10,000
Temporary chemical pump = £~£600/month. For 60 months and counting.

Something to do with one falling under OPEX and one falling under CAPEX, and the two being different budgets, but when it ultimately all comes out of the same pot I don't quite understand the thinking.

Chemical lab I used to work at was outfitting the new wing. They asked the staff for suggestions, especially around efficiency, cost-saving etc.

Loads of suggestions like solar panels, a wind turbine out the back and a water-recycling system for the condensers. We'd had that at my old place and it worked like a central heating system in reverse. A closed system pipes water round the reaction coolers and condensers, returns to a chiller unit and comes round again. Putting that in at new-build phase is easy and far cheaper than retro-fitting it although obviously still more expensive than not having one.

So they went with not having one - basically the water cooling simply used regular taps being on all the time and discharging the water straight to the drains.

Then the company got fined £50,000 for putting more than it's legal limit of water down the drains (bear in mind this is essentially drinking water and all it's doing is going round a cooling jacket then down the drain at the rate of about 250,000 litres a week). Criminal wastage of water. Also, the fine was way more than the cost of putting in a water-recyling unit.

[i]Something to do with one falling under OPEX and one falling under CAPEX, and the two being different budgets, but when it ultimately all comes out of the same pot I don't quite understand the thinking. [/I]

This.

NHS again. Endoscopy unit reception, it's all gel dispensers and 'Infection Control' posters. Patient toilet cleaning rota:

[img] [/img]

Good to know the bogs have been cleaned this year. Just.

Oil industry is king of this.

E.g.
Permanent replacement chemical pump = ~£10,000
Temporary chemical pump = £~£600/month. For 60 months and counting.

Something to do with one falling under OPEX and one falling under CAPEX, and the two being different budgets, but when it ultimately all comes out of the same pot I don't quite understand the thinking.

could write a book on this .... but in a skeletons in the closet kind of way id probably get sacked for opening the door on the closet the managers have been hiding these sorta things in.

Patient toilet cleaning rota:

FFS. That is disgusting. It would get done more often if the patients were roped in to do it.

Or are they doing it, but not recording the fact?

This is a beaut-

Myself and the neighbours have got a communal patch of land that we commonly look after, and we'd had a fairly well-observed but friendly set of rules that we all adhered to. Nothing onerous- it worked on a kind of barter system really- I'd mow the big lawn one week, the one we all looked out on, in return Paolo across the way would take all the bins in. It worked really well, and things got even better when one of the neighbours suggested at a meeting that we build a communal vegetable patch in the middle, barter the contributions, maybe even sell the rest on.

The produce from it was awesome; some of my neighbours are quite cosmopolitan and had contributed all kinds of things. The best thing about it though was everyone kicked in- we had all kinds of stuff growing there, and as long as you were contributing, you could take from it. We'd even got a little system going where some of the less-well off neighbours could take a wee bit more- they'll turn the corner at some point and we'll all get the benefit then. Somehow, after we got the rules up and running, everyone pitched in.

Well, you can guess what happened next. One of the neighbours- we'll not mention his real name, but John will do- fell on hard times. It was his own fault; he'd got mixed up in some shady business deals, didn't really read the T&Cs, lost a packet.

Suddenly, he's wanting to know why he's having to kick in all this effort when he's getting nothing back. Suddenly, its all: what am I getting from this, you guys are ripping me off, and I didn't agree to any of this bartering vegetable stuff, it started out as grasscutting! Well, what could we do? If he really wanted to stop pitching in, then we couldn't really give him free veg, could we? That was the nature of the deal.

So of course he's doing his own thing now, buying from the greengrocer in the town, who knows that he can't get any from us and makes him pay full market rate.

All for the sake of him maybe just realising that he had a good deal, and got something well worth having out of it. The berk.

That toilet cleaning rota is either not being completed or there's something else wrong as they have to be done at once a day.

We've struggled to meet targets this year due to UK government psychopathy, brexit, increased competition, and economic downturns in oil countries, and our overseas operations have all effectively become more expensive because of the slump in the pound. So we're getting a budget cut for next year to help us counter all of that. I'm not sure if this is allowed in this thread, because it's not gone wrong yet.

NHS - make the band 2 admin girls redundant. Make the band 7 managers do the admin; now we need to pay them OT at x1.5 because there aren't enough hours in the day to complete the donkey work admin...

The best I've seen in O&G is the platform that decommissioned their drilling rig including parts of 5 good generators knowing they had power issues. They have subsequently gone through millions of pounds worth of hire and long term temporary generators to supplement the dodge main generators and a multi million pound project to get a power back feed from another installation that to this day has never provided a single volt for an issue that could have been solved for a fraction of the cost by re-building just 3 of the drilling generators. They would have even had spare parts to keep them going.

The mind boggles.

That toilet cleaning rota is either not being completed or there's something else wrong as they have to be done at once a day.

You'd have to assume so wouldn't you. The 6 day old newspaper and used wet wipes in reception look a bit iffy tho. Sad times 🙁

Won't mention companies involved, but deadlines in their business cant be moved, whatever the scenario...

Company A was getting quite close to meeting it's deadline needing to get about 20 pretty large parts machined, the tolerances needed for these parts are ridiculously tight but company A has spent years developing it's machining method and order or processes, with a team of 5 very skilled machinists to manage it each year, each part costing in the area of £25000 in materials and time.

Some bright spark at company A sees company B does "precision machining" so gets a quote for these parts, company B claims it won't take as long as company A claims and undercuts by about 50% of the in house machining costs of company A, promising to meet the tolerances and timescale with no problem.

Turns out company B didn't actually have the capacity due to taking on very similar work from a few other companies, so contracts company C and D to do the work, inspecting the parts them self to cover their backs. 2 Days before deadline parts come back to B from C and D, nowhere near tolerance, some from D even having a major feature completely wrong by about 2mm (we're talking 0.005mm tolerances here)

Company B forwards these items to A, a day late and with a note in the truck (handwritten) apologizing for a "few rough edges" but saying they will knock 10% off the price.

Company A decides to do their own inspection to find zero out of the 16 parts that have turned up (20 ordered) are to spec, company B finally comes clean and offers to rectify problems within 30 days.

Company A ended up machining 12 of the parts in house, running a 24/7 rotor to get them done, shipping them out to the deadline event by plane 24 hours before they were needed costing at least double the original cost, and still having to pay company B for the 8 they made.

County council:

Process requires just 2 labels for files.

Individual label printer: £150

Throwing away almost a full A4 sheet of labels every time you need just 2: priceless

This story was brought to me by someone in the audience after I did a talk on how much I hate "fun" offices:

A startup had a glass wall around the space under a staircase, and people kept walking into it. Instead of putting some decals or something on it to make the glass more visible, they decided it would be cooler and more "startuppy" to have a ball pit. Except, that many ball pit balls are expensive, so they filled the space up with cardboard boxes and just put balls around the sides and on top. A symbolic ball pit then. The boxes were warm and dark, so in no time at all it attracted rats, and they ended up with a fake ball bit concealing a load of shit and piss.

Years ago, I was "IT Manager" - in reality the IT department as I was the only one there - for a multi-site civil engineering company for whom "IT" was a dirty word.

Whilst there I developed an Intranet system from scratch. The main focus was calendaring system, where HR could record staff leave and holidays and the like, but there was a (fairly crude TBH) document retrieval system and a few other odds and sods. I suppose it was agile development before such a thing existed; I had the radical idea of talking to the users before I started and then making changes based on their requests, so whilst it had its flaws the design and workflow was exactly what they wanted.

Anyway. Out of the blue one day they dragged me into the office for a disciplinary, where they presented me with a three-page long document cataloguing my "misdemeanours." All trumped-up shite; a random example was "spending all day on site to fix one PC." That day I'd gone to site and, as anyone who's ever done this will know, I was immediately jumped upon with a load of "whilst you're here" requests that they'd been saving up for me. I fixed three printers, five PCs and a handful of other random requests, something that I could've happily explained later had anyone actually asked rather than my manager just adding it to his little shitlist.

So we went through this list and all bar one of the accusations I had an explanation for. The one that was actually true was being late one day - it was over an hour's commute and there'd been a smash on the M6 resulting in massive tailbacks. They said "well, you knew where you lived when you took the job." I replied, "you knew where I lived when you offered it me."

At the end of it they said something like "well, we don't think you've got a future at this company" and offered me something like three grand to go away quietly. I hated the place, I was run ragged for little thanks and it was making me ill, so I grabbed it.

It later turned out that one of the driving reasons they wanted rid of me is that that they had someone lined up in another department to do my job only on a lower salary. I've no idea what they saved but it couldn't have been that much, I wasn't on a massive amount; about 20K in 2001 IIRC.

Fast forward several years and by chance I bumped into my replacement, and asked him how things were. Turned out that after I left no-one knew how to maintain my hand-coded Intranet system - I was never asked to document it and my in-line comments were aide memoirs to myself which would make little sense to anyone else, and the heavy lifting for the security authentication hinged on a custom .DLL file written by a mate of mine and living on a different server entirely - so they'd bought a commercial offering to replace it at a cost of fifty grand.

On top of this, they then threw who knows how much on subsequent maintenance costs to make bespoke changes to it. Despite all this they couldn't get it to do what they wanted it to do, everyone was still using my system instead as it worked and the users loved it.

I laughed. A lot.

A university friend thought he would save a few quid in buying a can of oil for his car - he could top up from his dad's supply when he got home for Christmas the next week.
The engine siezed on the way home...

Love some of these stories - genius 🙂

Freelance engineer with a major contractor, they wouldn't pay me an additional £3/hr for my own survey equipment as they wanted me to use their kit, so I used to wait up to 3hours every day to use their shared kit, at £26/hr, sat in the van listening to the radio, every day for 9 months.

Happy days.

Adult Social Care- purchase senior practitioner grade up smart phones, so they can work more effectively (ie get emails....sigh). Joint fund an adult safeguarding app, so that when social care manager's update progress, both health and social care workers can see the progress. Less time info sharing. App only works on Android and iPhone's, adult care bought window's phone's.

V8ninety, that would be funny if it wasn't the exact situaion I'm in right now, only without the overtime payment!

again nhs, external boiler room installed at great cost in new hospital, boilers filled all pipes charged up with water and left overnight but switched off, massive burst, due to no heating left on in boiler house.

Large nurses home, new boiler installed just big enough to heat radiators and some water for sinks, then staff got back off shift and wanted a bath, no hot water due to lack of capacity, then home closed a few years later and got demolished.

another hospital a mortuary built above the kitchens pipes leaking into kitchen.

Former NHS employer bought a couple of thousand AED's (defibs). Ancillaries were expensive so bought thousands of defib pads and batteries from a different supplier. Of course, non compatible!.

Same employer in the late 90s when through a project of building new ambulance stations with roller shutters that closed automatically to save vital seconds. Early 2000's spanked millions on a new fleet of super ambulances that wouldn't fit through the doors of the modern stations.

Disposable suction filters that didn't fit our suction machines? check
"New" cheaper syringes that were a different size to cannula ports and so couldn't be used to give injections? check
I could go on and on and on, but now I work for an acute trust and its even worse!

Worked for a company who made one of their top software engineers redundant at great cost on a Friday and hired him back at four times his previous hourly rate as a contractor two weeks later. He contracted for 3 years and earned the equivalent of 13 years wages including his payoff. Genius.

On the plus side, a different director was told that a specific SCADA project would take 5 months on a 486 and half the time on a P100. He signed the req instantly.

This thread has cheered me up massively!

Until 6 months ago I worked for a major fintech company. Over time they had acquired many other companies that do the more or less the same thing, with different software stacks etc. So we had 12 different software systems and APIs that at a high level did the same thing (each system used by different customers).

A new boss came in the door and decided this was rediculous (no disagreement there) and we should have one system that consolidated the functions of all the other systems. Again, seems sensible at a high level.

His prior job, however, was the CEO of an offshore sourcing firm, so guess where the work went? In fairness 30 Indian developers turned up onshore to do it after many warnings were issued about how much of a disaster prior offshoring attempts had been.

After 9 months, lots of unfinished software and a few £million spent they realised they had no plan for the migration of customers from the old platforms (a fairly fundamental thing) and the projects were quickly shelved. The "new" boss was immediately fired.

Unfortunately, since the money had been spent on the software and it was technically an "asset" we had to maintain it indefinitely going forward even though it's never going to see the light of day and was a screaming horror show...

I should have mentioned that the 12 different systems each had a development team somewhere in the world attached to it and the original cost saving would have come from removing those developers (and also perhaps a small saving on infrastructure).

Cougar, yours sounds not unlike the last place I was at, new admin people and outside investment brought in to 'grow the company' from the initial family firm that I joined.
Result is continual scrutiny of everybody's work, every little so-called misdemeanour and non-observation of procedures that someone had decided had to be followed exactly to her specifications, rather than the way it had worked perfectly well for ages, all these 'errors' gone through in detail at personal assessment meetings with explanations demanded as to why they'd happened and how they were to be rectified; in most instances it was down to ever more work being piled onto people in the same number of working hours, so errors crept in.
The stress this created was making me ill, so it was a huge relief to get booted out, after being at the firm for eleven years, doing a bunch of different jobs that no other single individual could actually do.
I have no idea how they're managing, I guess by having to find other people to cover what I was doing, which in most instances was covering for staff who were away sick or on holiday.
And I couldn't give a toss, because now I'm doing a job that has no stress and I'm enjoying more than I've enjoyed a job for, well, about twelve years.
Oh, and they're having a big new s****y building designed and built, which I'm certain is the sign of the business circling the plughole.

They want to upgrade a 10 year old version of our product because it's gone out of service. Upgrading to an intermediate version rather than the latest will mean they won't have to re-do a few weeks of work they've already done. Intermediate version goes out of service in early 2018

"Anyone who knows anyone we made redundant, but who used to work on this platform, please reach out to them via facebook or whatever and ask them if they're willing to come back to help us troubleshoot this"

Found the quotation that I was looking for, by C. Northcote Parkinson, he of Parkinson's Law;

Perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.

spekkie - Member

Worked for a company who made one of their top software engineers redundant at great cost on a Friday and hired him back at four times his previous hourly rate as a contractor two weeks later. He contracted for 3 years and earned the equivalent of 13 years wages including his payoff. Genius.

Back in the bank, in the BACS team, we had a fairly bloated middle management staff. So they decided to keep all the middle management and cut the most experienced analyst, for reasons.

So she was given her huge full-fat redundancy package, a month's pay for each year's service which was many (and a 6 month no-compete, no-return clause). Everyone except the middle managers (who knew if she stayed, would be next in line) said it was a disaster... I was the next most experienced analyst and I ended up giving them in writing "I can't do what she does, I'm extremely good but she is godly, don't ask or expect me to fill her shoes"

Anyway. 1 month later, "Please come back! It's exactly the disaster we expected!" "Oh well I'd like to, you know, but I signed this 6 month no-return clause on my redundancy". So she came back 6 months to the day after she left, on crazy contractor rates with a golden handshake. And that's to say nothing of the business losses.

Today found out whilst trying to decide what software to have the central people roll out that development is 'siloed' meaning each area is largely autonomous. This means that with a dozen silos they all work to solve the same problem 12 times in 12 different ways with 12 different sets of tools.

Great!

Perhaps this is something of an urban legend, but it makes a good yarn...

Some years ago the Army Air Corps were waiting delivery of their Gucci new Apache helis, and decided that they better have somewhere warm and comfy to park them. Cue a large (and very expensive) contract and lengthy construction of hangers for the helis - bear in mind that we have 50 of them. Anyway, hangers all built with the latest bells and whistles - fancy roller doors, underfloor heating, you name it. The first Apaches arrive and are about to be rolled in, when some bright spark points out that the 'lump on the top' looks like it is going to hit the top of the doors.

It transpires that someone had 'forgotten' that the British version of the Apache had an avionics dome above the rotor, and had designed and built the hangers for a standard heli without the dome. Result - 50 hangers with doors too short for their helicopters.

I seem to recall that the solution was to dig out the floors by a couple of feet, and suffer flooding whenever it rained...

Royal Mail... worked at the delivery office for 11 years and in that time they spent so much on new systems of work, that didn't, it's beyond stupid.
Here's an example. Old system... mail comes in, everyone sorts it, when finished take it back to your delivery frame and sort it again into your delivery route. New system. Half the people sorting general mail, some items of mail went through 3 sorting processes instead of 1, took far longer (up to 2 hours) and seldom completed. Cost for equipment £50k trial cost £20k. Trial failed because it didn't work. Upper management still implemented it because of the cost it took. After 6 months it was scrapped and the 50k of equipment went in the skip!

Last place I worked at employed a small software company to do pretty much all of the software work that needed doing & had done for the last X years.
The company was pretty much dependant upon this software company and eventually bought it out....they were pretty much buying the people who worked their & their experience.

First thing they did was insist that they worked from the office in Letchworth, even though they were all based around Cambridge, so they all had to drive to Letchworth everyday, which didn't go down well.
I think they also switched them onto a new pension contract that wasn't half as good as their previous ones.
They then bought in new rules about staff appearance & insisted that blokes should wear shirt & ties to work. Several (including me) argued that this was potentially dangerous for those having to work in the office area & the production area, but this was ignored.

Within about 3 months, the entire software team had found new jobs, including one bloke whose sole reason for leaving was because he was forced to wear a tie to work....

I've said before I work for the blue supermarket, but cost cutting is a joke on maintenance issues, yet we spend millions on crap like davids hot curry.

Prime example is the main back up freezer door, its a big old door with heated surround, safety exit lever etc...a fair cost. The door has been there 20 years maybe and developed a crack meaning it wasn't keeping the cold in. We had snow on the roof of the freezer which was nice in the Christmas season. Called the maintenance team out to sort, they sent a specialist company for the doo, the assessment was door needed replacing plus all the extra's needed fixing as the door was on its last legs.

So what did we do, yep get the door refurbed, £100 cheaper than a new door but likely to fail again within 5 years, crazy cost cutting.

For 2 years, I built up a strong business case for a major equipment and lab investment (close to 400k). Gathered a fair amount of support across the business and had it approved. I then set up the lab, quality systems and research programs. Only two people could operate the equipment (myself and a technician). There was a limited pool of staff available who were interested in actually operating the equipment. I was forced out 6 months later due to my salary and the responsibility went to the technician.

So far as I'm aware, it's now mothballed because the technician can't be responsible for the lab and they won't hire somebody to lead it. So why build the lab??

In my new role, I'm being drafted in to fix a million pound device at a supplier. I'm the customer! I can change the job, but the problems are the same.

Needed a driveway at work, were 30kto50k.

We knew the 50k company they had done work before that had lasted 20 years. They chose the cheapest, less than year later it needs major repairs, and builder refused to do it, and left his 1k deposit.

Built a new fence, 400m. To secure the site. To save money they have only done the visible part, and put a barbed wire fence through the trees, saving made of 1kgbp

I pulled all the barbed wire out yesterday to test security and walked into the site.

Ffs

My old man worked for BAe for 27 years. Was made redundant (back in the mid 90s) with a big settlement but as he was in the middle of a big project, was taken back on as a short term contractor (on literally double the money) starting the Monday after he 'finished'. That initial contract lasted 5 years and then he got another one working on Typhoon which lasted 8 years until he retired! Best thing ever for him, but possibly not so good value for the MoD.

We had snow on the roof of the freezer which was nice in the Christmas season.

😆

Took a promotion but the role I left was not filled and I was expected to do both.
They simply wouldn't accept that my workload was too great, so I eventually left as I couldn't physically do both jobs.
They replaced me with three people, failed to maintain their quality accreditation, lost their biggest customer because of this (just over half the turnover, ~£1.5m) and had to drop to a three day week to stay open.
All because they wouldn't let me employ one person on £17-18k.
I saved over £90k worth of scrap in my first year, FFS.

Nortel Networks, 2000 ish, Harlow Site which had been there for decades, had 2000 staff, excellent facilities inc a comprehensive library with every journal going back 50+ years.

Some HR director in the US decided that he wanted all staff to have access to the same quality of reference material and as some new sites didn't have 30k journals all immaculately indexed he would solve this issue...

The solution was to shut down all on site libraries and put everything in skips.

We then had to use an outsourcing company and would request a journal article via the web, they would then photocopy it and Fedex it to us, from the US, at about £30 a pop, when previously we would just walk down the corridor and find it on a shelf...

Company folded a few years later (by applying the same mindset to everything and fiddling the books).

Genius some of this. Had many myself, I worked on a system as a subcontractor company. When we finished it was all beautifully documented and worked well. They needed changes done and we pitched but were too expensive so they hired a couple of inexperienced juniors as contractors and battled on. A year later it fell apart, I had a 10pm phone call to rescue them which I did but it cost , and I remember it distinctly, 17 times the original cost we proposed. I'd love to say that it's uncommon, it's not.

Of course the greatest of all these is the thatcher years - close " loss making" industries not accounting for the costs of paying unemployment to all the folk who lost their jobs then spend all the north sea oil money on paying unemployment! Wasted hundreds of billions.

We bought a nationwide gsm network. Installed it and didn't use it for between 5-7 years. We didn't buy enough spares so we're having to buy the last production run of later model 2G radios to install and free up spares.

Same sites had standby batteries installed that were not left on charge and the sites aircon was off. When they tried handing sites to maintenance the new batteries were tested and most found to be dead. £3 million pounds to replace dead batteries and counting.

I could go on, the amount we waste is horrendous.

I work in South America (Guyana) and my company insists on flying us home via the chaepest route. This involves taking 2-3 flights across the caribbean with Liat, the worlds most unreliable airline, to catch BA flights out of Antigua or Barbados.

At a guess, around 50% of the trips are cocked up due to delays etc, so we end up having to be put up in hotels, usually expensive, and have new flights booked (split bookings, so Liat don't get involved once they have dropped us off in Antigua/Barbados). And an extra days pay for the lost leave.

Last time this happened I reckon it was and extra £16,000 -18,000 to get our crew of 12 home! 😯

I give you Rochdale Council, who decided that the old(ish) boiler in the building they leased from us used too much gas. So they replaced a normal sized combi boiler (suitable for driving a big house) with the same sort of installation you might put in a large secondary school.

Must have cost ~£150,000 to spec, design, build and install, used five times more gas (at least!) and they lost the money because they moved out a year later.

Pretty sure that someone on the council also had an interest in a commercial heating installation business.

Ever wonder why your electricity bills are so high?

Can't say much but suffice to say the wastage is phenomenal. Apparently the station across the way was refitted with a modernised control system before being shut down for reasons best known to whoever ordered it. The fact it was, at that time, the best performing station in the world seems not to have mattered.

I worked for the equivalent of the electricity board in South Africa. Covered several of their power stations. If I could have kept 10% of the money I saw being wasted back in then I could have retired and never worked again.

That day I'd gone to site and, as anyone who's ever done this will know, I was immediately jumped upon with a load of "whilst you're here" requests that they'd been saving up for me

Working on a location based film - there were plans to film the majority of it in one particular town. The only fly in the ointment was it was a period drama and there was scaffolding up on on the buildings in the townscape. The producers baulked at the idea of paying to have the scaff taken down and put back up again. The result was that instead of filming in one town we filmed in dozens - in three counties one of them separated from the other two by quite a wide bit of sea.

One sequence - man knocks on on door and enters - goes up flight of stairs - arrives in room. Three locations 40 miles apart each needing to be altered to match each other for continuity and then reinstated afterwards. For every location each I had to recce, return to check again once the treatment was devised, travel back again to set up, travel back again for the shoot, travel back again to reinstate. So thats at least 5 trips assuming any of those jobs can be achieved in one visit. Except on all these days I've got the same kind of commitments for other locations - there was always at least one location to prepare, one that was shooting and one that was being reinstate and all between 20 and 100 miles away from each other. And to rub salt in the wound on every day I'd pass through the one town where we could have filmed everything and where we ended up filming nothing.

A recce trip prior to filming took three days to travel around and they failed to complete that on schedule. By the second week of filming I'd clocked up 5000 miles darting back and forth between locations and spent most of my working time in lay bys catching up on missed calls and leaving messages for other crew who inevitably were driving between locations all the time - some days I was spending 8-10 hours of a 12 hour working day just driving. By the end of the shoot I'd spent over £2000 on fuel and mine was just one of the 60-odd vehicles running around like this.

So with all these examples of money just waiting to be wasted, I feel the need to get into a business where people will pay me to do things wrong. (A service I usually "throw in" anyway)

🙂

@spekkie - they're called management consultants or sometimes 'change managers'.

It's great gig if you can get into it - you waltz in without knowing a thing about how anything works or why - avoid speaking to anyone on the front line, or their line mangers - stick to the board, makes things easier - ask them what they want - invariably "oversight" "management information" "reduced costs" "increased productivity" - this means "make sure I can tell if anyone isn't working hard enough, make my job easier, do more, with less".

Then recommend a plan which means anyone actually making money for the company spends 25% of their time doing their job and 75% of their time telling the board what they did using systems and procedures which make perfect sense on a PowerPoint as long as your audience only wants the above and has a hypothetical knowledge of how their company actually makes money and then impose it without asking for input or feedback - to a workforce who'll have to work around it, rather than with it - but won't say as much through fear of being labelled as "not a team player".

Then ask for £20,000 for your efforts - if you face any static after the deed is done, just remember "I'm sorry sorry but British workers are fearful of change and grown lazy - off shore it"

In the 90,s worked at refreshing nhs Gp surgeries, the computers where still starting to arrive and patients notes being put on them, if we needed the screens or cables moved wwhere not allowed to touch them or read what was on the screen, so a chap had to come out disconect the thing after switching it off , we drilled and he repeated the above in reverse order at 60 quid a go.

Then there is a block of flats i worked at,i advised removable rails accross large opening windows to be used as fire escapes, the window company used wardrobe rails and their fittings,totally unsafe but as they had been paid for they had to stay and residents had to be careful, even though residents where never told of the dangers.

Local council o save cash used internal hollow core doors on exterior frames eg rear doors on houses to save cash, some neferious residents relised and soon kicked in a theif sized hole, council then refused to replace them as it was theft, and should be covered by residents insurance