You are invited to top this with comparable business stories

[Goshute]

(Until Admin gets sick of it and locks the thread.) Must be first-hand true stories. This happened about 15 minutes ago.

Salesperson: "John, this customer doesn't want a monthly per-employee fee, they want a fixed annual fee."
John: "OK, but some of the conditions have to change; if the employee count grows we could lose money. Please review the attached price schedule revision."
Salesperson: "John, how often would they have to pay the fee, monthly or quarterly?"

[ChrisGreaves]

Must be first-hand true stories.

From 1970.
Australia's largest private enterprise BHP, Newcastle.
Twin CDC 330s have just been installed, with a COmpressed SYmbolic ("COSY") editor that reduces a 2,000 punched card source COBOL program to about 400 cards, easier to carry in the rain between the computer building and the programming building.
Me: Let's use COSY; we'll have fewer dropped card decks and automatic line-sequence checks.
Director of IT of same large commercial firm: No way. What if Control Data Corporation stops supporting COSY. We'd be stuck with unreadable card decks.
Me: Quits in disgust a short time later

From 1988.
A large commercial firm with a DG Nova system, klutzy editor.
Me: (In charge of fixing a 4,200 line heavily-patched COBOL program) I'd like to get this file copied to a PC so I can get all the editing done at home using Mike Wallace's PCWrite. I can get the edits done in a day instead of 3 days here.
Director of IT of same large commercial firm: No way. A virus might transfer itself via your Citizen 180D dot-matrix printer and come back here on the floppy disk.
Me: Quits in disgust a short time later

From 2006.
A huge Insurance firm in Toronto.
Me: (Preparing a report for a $4,000,000 COBOL project) Let's implement COBOl programming standards.
Director of IT of same large commercial firm: No. The extra work will only confuse the new programmers.
Me: Quits in disgust a short time later


From 2010.
A large engineering form in Toronto.
Me: (standardizing seven Excel workbooks created by 7 VPs) Let's offer some training to introduce your users to things like Range Names and Styles.
Project Manager: We don't have time for training; let's do that after the project is complete.
Me: Continues to accept their cheques on a monthly basis.

From 2011.
Oh, right. Not there yet.
Watch this space ....

[BobH]

From sometime in the early 1970s:
We printed thousands of pages of account data tfor ~3 million to be used for credit card authorization when the mainframe system went down (a frequent occurrence with IBM370s in those days). These were printed weekly on 6 part carbon-interleaved, continuous, bi-fold paper. They were rarely referenced but essential without computer support. Our computer room manager turned in a suggestion that we could save tons of money if we just put the reports online in a background partition.

He didn't last long.