So, at my first company fresh out of school, I was invited to go on my first business trip. It was a sales trip, and as one of the engineers on the team, I really had only one purpose to basically silently sit there and look smart. As such, us engineers were sat down with HR and given a strict per diem of $30 a day that we should absolutely not go over, with penalty of being fired. We took this seriously of course.
Well our first day out there we were taken to a restaurant with the client. So us engineers were sitting there off the main table at the functional equivalent of a kiddie table looking at the menu and quickly realized we had a problem. See everything on that menu was well over $30. The waiter starts going around taking everyone's orders and our client and sales reps all basically said "I'll take the steak" ($100ish dollars) one by one and it finally gets to us. We're basically heavy sweating and hyperventilating at this point. Seems like everyone in the restaurant is looking at us and we're like, "uhhhh, we'll have the steak."
Several hours later, our sales reps are buying bottles of champagne and these like $300 seafood platters and us engineers forever realized that if you ain't going over your per diem, you ain't ballin. Never worried about it again, lol.
In any case, yeah $10,000 is a lot and will probably get you fired, but it's a good life lesson you learn from. If that's the worst he's done, not only have I got no issues, but hell, we should hire him back as our NIL closer for recruiting, lol. Tell him to take that kid out for a night in Champaign that only Dee can show him. Can't say no to that