FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for September 17, 2020

how bad is it, Roger, if she “forgot” the decimal?

Well, it will take 11.5 years for the company to break even on her fee, at $1,000/year. That’s how bad.

$11,500 to tell him not to use 2.5 pencils

Before you go… I think you remind me of somebody. Don’t you have a brother that is a lawyer?

Yes the decimal point is off. Should be two more to the right.

I recently investigated putting solar panels on the roof of my house. It had a great return on investment. They would pay for themselves in 12 1/2 years – after that essentially free electricity for life.

12 1/2 years from now I’ll be 84 years old. I think I’ll spend my money in some other more fun way NOW. I’m getting old enough to consider my mortality in my business making decisions.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how business is done!

I quit a job once because they ignored every suggestion I made, then brought in an efficiency expert who made the exact same suggestions.

typical

Reminds me of when my company decided to close one of its three datacenters to save something like $6,500 a year. That made applications slower for all of us who had been using that particular datacenter, because suddenly we had to use datacenters over a thousand miles away. I added up the additional time spent waiting for queries to come back on one particular database after it was migrated out east; if we bid our usual labor rate, the additional time (not counting frustration) worked out to $10,000 a year for just me. And that’s just for this one tool; lots of tools were inflicted with similar pain.

Unfortunately, it would cost far more than that to recommission the data center, since by now all the equipment is gone. It’s cheap to shut something off, but expensive to turn it back on again when you realize it was a mistake.

sometimes consultants are a racket … it was all the rage in the late 80’s and 90’s.

A company I drove for once brought one of these con artists in less than a month after they told us that they could afford to give the drivers and the carpenters in the shop our customary $150 annual bonus. It still warms my heart to recall the abuse we heaped on the scammer. (Not surprisingly, they did not ax the 10%-of-annual-pay bonuses for sales & management…..)

Until then they’ll carry a replica of your head on a pointed stick…

A consultant is someone who takes your watch away to tell you what time it is.

you can tell this comic was made before yelp was a thing, as a job like this would have DESTROYED her reputation if they were able to post a review.

Is that a guy dressed in women’s clothing ?

I think everyone’s missed the obvious here, saving $1000 a year for even a small company is nothing!