Back in high school I worked at a printing press. In all honesty, it was a great high school job. $10/hr in 2006 was good money for a kid, ultra flexible hours because there was always work and machines don't care about the sunrise and sunset, and everything in the entire place was simple.
But the managers were all just… vacant. So out of touch with reality that they were basically caricatures of humans.
We had a machine that took rolls of paper and crinkled it for packaging. Not sure how to describe it or even what the name of the machine was. But anyway, the machine was made in Germany (as was most of our machinery for whatever reason, this job was in Ohio) and the manual for the machine was written only in German. I grew up with PA Dutch as a primary language in my house, and I speak German fluently.
As machines do, this paper machine malfunctioned one day.
Boss calls in the maintenance crew to take a look, per protocol.
I watch from my spot at another machine while the maintenance crew struggles for several hours to accomplish absolutely nothing because they cannot read the manual.
I wander over to the crew and tell them that I can read the manual for them if they want. They happily agree. I start going through it with them and translating the critical parts, and we're making progress.
Boss comes over and is pissed that I'm not at my station doing my task. I explain the situation, and he tells me I'm ordered to write a complete translation of the entire manual (like 40 – 50 pages, I don't remember exactly) that they can keep on file for future breakdowns. I ask him what he's going to pay me for it.
Que shocked boss face.
I tell him I'll simply do it for double. Just $20/hr, and it'll probably only take me 2 – 3 hours at the very most. That's a stupidly low rate, but hey, I was in high school.
Boss says no.
I walk over to my station and return to my previously assigned task of putting shit into boxes and taping said boxes on a conveyor belt.
The guys cannot fix the machine. Without a manual they can read, they're lost. This machine is pretty large and complex, and it cannot simply be “figured out” as some machines can. You need to know what you're doing.
A week goes by with the machine down, and it is starting to seriously affect work output as the machine's task must be replicated by a human which is much slower.
Finally, boss had to call in a maintenance tech from the actual company in Germany to fix the machine. The guy was there for a grand total of maybe 2 hours to fix the machine before flying back home across the ocean on the printing press's dime.
For a bonus: we had a (monstrously large) printer manufactured in Israel that came with a maintenance manual printed in Hebrew and German only. It broke down some time after I left for college, and apparently the press had to bring in a whole team of techs from Israel to work on it because the maintenance guys still couldn't read German.
TL;DR: Boss makes the brilliant business decision of spending a few thousand dollars to fly in a tech from Germany rather than pay me $60 to translate a maintenance manual.