CHEAP people....let's see your stories about those frugal folks that were smart or really annoying!

When I was the IT project manager for the county, whenever we replaced remote site servers or core switches (usually in batches of 10, 20, 30, etc), I'd keep at least two working examples of each model for models we still had a fair amount of in production. I even had a room dedicated to my "spares" collection.

About 3 years before I left, we had a department admin change (that resulted in mass chaos and ineptitude), and six months later I got demoted back to line/area support. One of the first things the person that ended up in my old job did was throw out all of my spare parts.

Three weeks later, an older remote site server lost its main board. "That person" came looking for me to see if I still had a spare. I said "I used to, but you threw them all away".

It cost the county almost $10,000 to buy a new server, and they had to load it and restore backups under emergency conditions for about 36 man hours, plus that site was off line for almost a week and basically closed for business- not a good look to the public.

Had "they" kept me or at least my parts, it would have been about an hour of labor to install that free part and the site would have been back in business.