@Ronald said:
The story was not about ordering the wrong part
I see we're taking pedentic dickweedery to a whole new level. My post was in reply to everyone saying "Oh it's only $100, who cares?". My point, which I explained at the time, was that $100 can add up and everyone was just assuming that the guy was only buying one server. I'm not sure I need to explain the context when it's already all there, just a few posts up, but apparently you continue to spectacularly miss the point.
A (my department) ordered the wrong part, B duly obliged and built 20 racks of servers with that part in them, then A realised its mistake and it will cost $250,000 to put right. B isn't going to take the old parts back; they've been inside a server for over a year at this point. The cost to clean them up, test them and repackage them for resale would exceed the money we could make from reselling them, and even if we did that I doubt other customers would be happy to receive second hand parts sold as-new. That's even assuming the accountants wouldn't have kittens at the idea of re-stocking a thousand items that were "sold" in an entirely different financial year. The number isn't made up: it's precisely the figure that was costed up by people more senior than me, and I was on the call when they delivered the bad news to the boss.
This really is the kind of shit that happens in large companies.