Who, Me? Boss bought cheap 'printer' from a catalog and was left without a leg to stand on

Attempt to prove procurement prowess ended up gathering dust

Working in tech can produce a catalog of woes, and each Monday The Register shares yours in "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column chronicling tech-related mistakes, heartaches, and back-breaks.

This week, meet an Italian reader we'll Regomize as "Marco," who took us back to what he called "The Roaring Nineties, when big computer companies sold pretty much everything, from graphics workstations to enterprise laser printers."

They sold it all through hefty paper catalogs, because this was before broadband and Marco's company had only a 19k baud dial-up connection.

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Marco's boss, whom he described as a "sciagurato" – Italian for a wretch – kept one of those catalogs on his desk.

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"He perused it every day, like a kid waiting for Christmas," Marco told The Register. "One day he found an exceptional laser printer at almost one-seventh the cost. It was such a good a deal he ordered two of them."

Marco said the boss told anyone who would listen that this feat of cost-cutting would surely propel him out of the tech team and into management.

"The wiser among us were already counting the days until the disaster," Marco wrote.

Disaster duly arrived with the delivery.

"When the courier delivered the printer, it came in two huge packages, but not big enough for a laser printer," Marco observed. After wrestling with the packaging, the horrible truth emerged.

"Our boss had bought two laser printer stands," Marco wrote, "because the catalog showed the stands with the printer on top."

The company therefore had two stands and no printers. The boss's claim to promotion-worthy procurement prowess had collapsed.

"We promptly hid the two pieces of junk in the darkness of our 'obsolete hardware store' and they are probably still there," Marco wrote. He suspects they are not alone, but surrounded by "other good deals, all waiting for the mercy of incineration."

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Have you or a colleague ordered the wrong thing? If so, click here to send your story to Who, Me? We'll put it on display rather than hide it in the back room. ®