Did IT for this company a while back, small oddball company with no real standard practices for anything.
At one point at the beginning of their financial struggles they wanted to save some money by axing their Dell account.
Dropped support for the computers they did have and no longer bought computers from Dell.
They wanted me to buy off the shelf stuff and throw it on their domain.
They gave me their budget and target performance specs, they sent me some pre-builts, essentially, and said anything you don't spend ends up as your bonus at the end of the year but they must meet all of these specs. It was tight but I managed to do it and exceeded specs just slightly to let them know I wasn't trying to rip them off.
So I bought all the parts, professional looking cases, matched the prebuilt specs and did it under budget and I was gonna get something like $1200 as a bonus pre tax. Or so I thought.
6 months later they announced the company was bought out and going to merge with another larger company. I was going to be laid off because they already had an IT team and didn't need me. I was fired and ** I never got that bonus.**
I locked the bios down on those machines with a password and disabled hardware changes and tamper protection. Higher ups of the company ended up keeping those machines as they were much faster than what the company was going to give them but the new IT department required that they destroyed the old hard drives for security. Well that ended up locking out those machines.
So they called me to ask what the bios passwords were.
I told them did not memorize them, I randomly generated each one and kept it on my work laptop which got locked out and wiped when they fired me. (this was before cloud storage was really much of a thing)
I told them I could find out and give it to them, if they gave me that bonus they promised me in writing or give me one of those machines, sans harddrive.
They said no and apparently tossed those machines.
The thing is that I printed out a spec sheet for each machine, with what model parts I used, how much they cost etc. and what the bios password was and I taped it to the inside of the case where the motherboard goes.
refusal to pay me the $1200~ cost them $20k+ in computers