[lelanthran]

> I don't know if this was IT shrugging me off or if it was something real but some IT person at this big ISP I worked at told me that they cannot just buy an SSD — my windows box at work was running off of a hard disk in 2019 — and that there was some contract that said any computer hardware we bought had to be through HP or something like that and it takes many months it something like that.

Plausible - the hardware might be leased, and so you have no right to modify it. You have to pay them to modify it.

Same as if you leased a car, you cannot do the services yourself, you have to pay them (and an approved agent of theirs) to do it.