I want to get this out of the way right at the start, he wasn't literally paying me 6p an hour; I was at least being paid minimum wage for my time. Clickbait title, I know, but stick with me.
So, for some background: my job is 3 smaller jobs in a trenchcoat. It used to be 2 jobs; a retail shopfront, and an almost deskjob-like sales job. Both were run through completely different computer systems, so although the products we sold had some overlap. They could almost be separate businesses, but neither made enough money to survive on their own, so both were rolled into one, with a single worker doing everything (and only 3 staff in total). The 3rd job arrived when the software for the sales system got a major update.
See, this software was old. Like, older than me. The team behind it had been working on it, but we had never updated it. The boss was a dinosaur, he didn't like change. But late into 2017, the old hardware was recalled (back to a museum, I imagine), and the replacement had fully up-to-date software. It was almost unrecognisable, but most of the backend worked the same way, just with a shiny new UI to work with. There was one small problem though.
At the end of every night, we'd print the sales data onto some labels. The software would sort this out for us automatically; click a button, stick some label paper into the printer, and out comes a few sheets of labels, with all the information we need on them. These were then put on the products, ready to pick up first thing the next morning. This function was changed, very slightly. The labels were printed in a different size; still 48 labels to a sheet, but different sized margins at the edges. Nothing too serious, we just had to get new labels. But in the meantime, we had to find a template for the old labels, and type them all out into that. This was no big deal short term, but it took about 5 minutes per sheet. Maybe 10-15 minutes per day. So we found the new labels, ready to order them, but the boss seemed hesitant. I guessed that he just wanted to use up all the old labels first.
A few weeks later, we're almost out of labels, when the new boxes arrive. Boxes. Plural. This was strange, we only usually ordered 5 packs at a time, 100 sheets to a pack, for a single small box. Turns out, this order was for 50 packs… of the old labels. So I called the boss to see what was going on, and he confirms that yes, he ordered the old labels. Now, I'd found the listing for the new ones for him, and from the same supplier as the old ones, but he refused to get them, because they were 50p per pack more expensive. And he vehemently refused to back down on this. So this short term data entry job became permanent. Now I should remind you, this guy was ancient. Basically no computer knowledge at all; he couldn't write these labels. He didn't know how to use Word to type them up. So instead of doing it himself, he'd either have to call one of us into work just for that one task, or we'd have to try to predict the sales for the next day, and he'd make any changes by hand after they were already printed (we had a lot of repeat business, so the sales were pretty easily predictable, but it was never perfect)
So lets analyze this: an automated system exists, which can flawlessly copy the data over in seconds. But instead he'd rather have his staff copy it across, sometimes making mistakes, and other times wildly guessing, for the sake of about a penny a day. 0.5p per sheet, multiplied by 5 minutes per sheet, 6p per hour. And he was so sure about this, he ordered 10x the usual quantity, to really lock in his decision. In practice, this rarely led to actually spending more time in work; business was quiet enough that we had the time anyway. Luckily, he had to pay us minimum wage for our time, but I can't imagine what he'd try to pay us otherwise.
By the way, 4 and a half years later, we still have those damn labels. Opening the last box when closing tonight inspired me to make this post. We've got a new boss now; to be clear, he's terrible in a whole host of different ways that probably deserve their own posts, but at least he's finally buying us the right labels