Sometimes tools can be surprisingly expensive

Sometimes people being salaried (note; in Finland this means that monthly salary and work time are fixed; overtime is still compensated) seems to seriously twist the peoples' idea of how expensive time spent can be.

For example, at one time an engineer wanted to buy a small torque wrench for some reason but it definitely was work-related and justified (in my opinion at least). I don't remember the exact cost of the tool but it wasn't particularly high - something like 20eur or so.

So this engineer asked his boss for this wrench. Boss said sure, but he'd need to ask his boss in turn. So he did.

As a result there was a 30-minute ad-hoc meeting (not including above preliminaries) about whether this wrench was useful enough to be bought. Attended by three highly paid engineers (me included) and two even higher paid managers. If this had been billable meeting the cost would have been in neighborhood of 300€ (just a quick estimate, I don't know the exact costs involved).

That must have been one of the most expensive wrenches that were never bought.