In my workplace that would get you fired. I assume this person won’t even get a sharply worded letter in his file.
And $1200 for disk erasure??????? Please! Either there is more here than being told (ahem) or Geeks has a very healthy labor rate.
You just can’t run “Format C:” and do this kind of “sanitization.” The seven-level wipes described in the article (and are standard DoD procedure for eliminating classified info on hard drives) require very special software and an expert technician to do them, otherwise, an entire hard drive can be destroyed. $1,200 for two calls to do this specific job on a desktop computer and two laptops sounds very reasonable.