I’m lucky to work in a company where I can just sign in to my company Amazon account and buy more RAM. I might sanity check with a colleague before doing so if the expense is over £50.

One of my old colleagues came from Amazon where he had to buy his own RAM upgrade to do his work as they wouldn’t give him more than 4GB and he did heavy Excel work. They did not let him expense it.

I've simply ponied up for the extra RAM myself and neither asked for permission nor forgiveness. The €70-odd it cost was worth it to me. I left the RAM in place as a nice surprise for whoever inherited the laptop after me.

I did the same at my last company and used some old RAM from a laptop that broke. Just switched jobs recently and now I’m realizing I forgot to take it out before I turned in my laptop.

Luckily my new company provides spec-ed out laptops with more RAM for software engineers. It’s also easier to get more RAM at my new company as long as your job code is engineering.

I mentioned to the IT guy that I was going out to buy my own damn RAM. He nearly had a heart attack - "Don't open the case!" I think the remote India IT lords would know if I opened the case and he'd hear about it.

At a previous job a cow-orker spent literally months trying to get a bigger HD. I had the same issue, so I asked one of the department secretaries to order me a whole new PC that happened to have a bigger disk in it, and it arrived a few days later. This may seem profligate but it would have been much, much cheaper for the company than the hours my colleague wasted dealing with the bureaucracy.