I worked for the Home Office (Directorate of Telecommunications) back in the '80s ... we bought new main transmitters for all the Police and Fire Service hilltop sites .... the wheeze then was to cheapen the deal by not having a warranty but relying on us engineers and the generous spares package instead (actually made sense as we were on the payroll) .... however the management were in the grip of 'efficiency savings mania' ... which included carrying the minimum stores stock for some book-keeping reason ... if something in stores hadn't been used in a year it was skipped .... a year down the road and the storemen were ordered to skip the entire spares package for the brand new transmitters as, because they were brand new, the spares hadn't been needed yet ... no amount of logic worked against the management dogma so we all 'worked late' one night and hid the all spares up in the false ceiling of the workshop 🙂
We also ran some very high power and wonderful old valve tech for which our spares stock was literally unobtainable at any price ... that went up there too.
The madness of desk-jockeys!!
K
