A collection of small stories that make IT feel more human.
A few years ago, Lilly decided she needed a new hobby. She was spending far too much time around computers, and her brain needed something that did not involve screens, systems or error messages.
So, naturally, Lilly took up hiking. At the time, she decided no distance was too far, no mountain was too high, and no trek was too ambitious. That confidence lasted right up until she took on Yr Wyddfa, more commonly known as Mount Snowdon.
It was on the descent, coming down from the highest peak in Wales, that Lilly’s £45 hiking shoes from Amazon gave up. The sole started coming away, and by the end of the walk, they were barely holding themselves together. So, she did what many people do when a cheap purchase fails. She ordered another pair.
To her disappointment, but probably not to anyone’s surprise, those broke too. This time, the “waterproof” shoes started filling up with water. Not ideal when you are halfway through a walk and your feet feel like they are slowly being introduced to trench warfare.
And so the cycle began. Shoes broke, Lilly replaced them. The next pair broke, so she replaced them again. Each time, she told herself, “It’s fine, they were only £30 or £40.”
Except it was not fine.
Over three years, Lilly went through five different pairs of hiking shoes, with none lasting much longer than nine months. When she looked back, the mistake was obvious. She had avoided spending £100 on a proper pair at the start, thinking she was saving £55. In reality, she had spent more, wasted time, caused herself unnecessary frustration, and turned something she was meant to enjoy into something far more stressful than it needed to be. In Lilly’s defence, we are all guilty of this in one way or another.
So really, cheap became expensive. Not just financially, but practically too.
By this point, the comparison becomes clear.
It is easy for a business to say, “We don’t need external IT support, Jim is good with computers.” Meanwhile, Jim, who once fixed the office printer and now seems to have inherited the entire IT estate, is quietly wondering how this became his job, especially when he is in marketing.
At first, it feels like a saving. The business is not paying for a proper managed IT service, it is not committing to regular support, and nothing appears to be urgently wrong. Everyone can still log in, emails are still sent, and the Wi-Fi mostly works if you sit in the right part of the office.
But that is often where the problem starts.
Because cheap IT rarely fails all at once. It usually becomes expensive slowly. A laptop takes longer to start. Someone cannot access a file. A licence is bought twice because nobody is managing what is already in place. A leaver still has access to a mailbox. A backup exists, but nobody has checked whether it can actually be restored. A system gets patched late, or not at all, because it was nobody’s specific responsibility.
Individually, each issue looks small. Together, they become a business problem. Suddenly, the money-saving option does not feel quite so cheap.
The cost is not just the emergency fix. It is the lost time, the frustrated staff, the delayed work, the security risk, the poor client experience and the stress of trying to solve something reactively that could have been managed properly in the first place.
That is the real comparison with hiking shoes.
The first cheap pair did not feel like a bad decision when Lilly bought them. They looked fine. They did the job for a while. The problem only became obvious when she actually needed them to perform under pressure.
IT is the same.
Most businesses do not find out whether their IT is good enough on a quiet Tuesday morning. They find out when a server goes down, an email account is compromised, a key person leaves, a client asks awkward security questions, or the business needs to grow and the systems cannot keep up.
The point is not that expensive is automatically better. It is that value matters. The right solution, properly managed, should last, protect the business, increase productivity, reduce stress and prevent avoidable problems before they become expensive ones. That is where good IT support earns its place.
A good IT partner will not just fix things when they break. They will tell businesses what needs attention, even when it is not the easiest conversation. They will help keep systems secure, connected, reliable and fit for the way the business needs to work.
They will also help businesses see the things that are easy to miss when everything looks fine on the surface. The unused licences, the unmanaged devices, the outdated policies, the access nobody has reviewed, the backup that has never been tested, and the small operational gaps that could become costly later.
At TWC IT Solutions, that is exactly how we approach IT. Honest advice and support, engineered to help businesses avoid the avoidable.
Now, Lilly just needs to buy a proper pair of hiking shoes before she takes on Ben Nevis next week…
