65 points

I’ve heard that some grant money is earmarked to be spent in stupid ways. “Here’s $2M for technology” means they can put a Threadripper on every desk, but not replace the desk, or the 30-year-old textbooks within it.

I’m surprised there aren’t an ecosystem of crooked vendors that know ways to help cashout such grants. Buy these garbage PCs for $1000 each, and we have a “surplus trade in programme” to buy them back for $600 cash each in 3 months, giving you no-longer-restricted cash to actually fix the hole in the cafeteria floor that’s already swallowed Mrs Baxter’s third grade class"

permalink
report
reply
50 points

I’m surprised there aren’t an ecosystem of crooked vendors

I bring good and a bad news.

permalink
report
parent
reply
14 points

Ed tech has some of the worst fucking products.

permalink
report
parent
reply
14 points
*

Most grants I’ve seen require that you keep the devices for a specific time (5-10 years generally, probably depends on region). Our storage space is full of long outdated tech that we can’t toss or use in any realistic capacity.

permalink
report
parent
reply
16 points
*

my old School got a glass Tunnel for 20 meters one year after i left, mY current School has so little money we had 3 hours a day, for 2 weeks because one teacher is sick. Nonetheless we still have 1 of these unusable “smartboards” for every 1.5 rooms or so. This is Germany btw

permalink
report
reply
2 points

unusable “smartboards”

What’s wrong with smartboards?

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

theyre not very smart, plus we already have beamers which do the same job

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
*

PC projectors don’t have as much functionality for standup and interactive presentations.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

My guess is they never ran power drops for them, or they never taught teachers how to use them. Happens a lot - “hey we got cool new tech, but the grant is hyper-specific that it has to be spent on new tech, NOT training for that new tech.”

permalink
report
parent
reply
39 points

It’s not just in education.

Retail pharmacy. My company ~2 years ago decided to start offering clinical services to patients - great! In my store, they walled off part of what used to be the stockroom, expanding our waiting area and giving us a dedicated vaccination room (previously in a sectioned off part of the waiting room) and a health care room (where all the new services went).

To support these new services we got all kinds of really fancy tech - 20 inch 1440p (?) touchscreens for check-in. Very high end blood pressure machines. Two (2) computers in the healthcare room for the one (1) healthcare provider, because, you never know. These changes can be seen in a majority of this company’s stores.

If you haven’t guessed by now, they’ve decided to not go through with those clinical services. All of the tech we bought (if I had to estimate, very conservatively, $15k USD for my store) is either reboxed or installed but powered off on the sales floor, has been for ~12-18 months, and has no plans of ever being repurposed or sold. The vaccination room serves zero additional purpose to the area we had before, and the “healthcare room” is now used as the pharmacy stockroom (since, y’know, they removed part of the stockroom to build it). This is all ignoring the money spent on actually building these rooms (with lighting and climate control nicer than the rest of the store) and profits lost during construction.

But we don’t have enough money for raises, or enough hours to functionally staff the pharmacy 🙃

permalink
report
reply
17 points

The most efficient economic system ever conceived

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

One time annuitised vs recurring costs.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

If the company wasn’t constantly buying stupid shit like this and spending money on the most inefficient systems ever, I’d be more inclined to agree with you.

Idiotic business decisions are the recurring costs.

Example: We have a new program in place that is supposed to “balance” inventory across locations. My pharmacy has sent and received the same specialty medication back and forth to another location on the other side of the country 3 times now, with neither location having actual need for the medication. I’m sure we’ve got a good corporate deal with FedEx, but there’s expenses outside of shipping costs (namely pharmacy labor hours) that we’re expending to literally just ship a box back and forth across the country. And if we don’t do it, they’ll come harassing us to see what the “issue” is.

permalink
report
parent
reply
12 points

If it makes you feel any better an executive got a bonus for having the great idea and another got a bonus for realizing it was dumb and pulling the plug before more money was spent.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Walgreens?

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

Don’t forget trump bibles 69$ each

permalink
report
reply
6 points

My school back in the day used its funds to teardown the old huge playset and replace it with an even bigger caged football/basketball field. Needless to say, we went out a lot less during lunch hours since.

permalink
report
reply

Bikini Bottom Twitter

!bikinibottomtwitter@lemmy.world

Create post

Are ya ready kids?!

Community stats

  • 1.9K

    Monthly active users

  • 423

    Posts

  • 1.8K

    Comments