[Colonel Flagg]

These two stories gave me whiplash.

I was once involved in a demonstration from a vendor trying to sell us a piece of fairly expensive ($50k) equipment. The vendor was a garage business, as far as I knew the only employee in his business. I was fairly new in my position, so I was reticent for most of the demo. However, it became clear to me after a half-hour or so that he was selling us smoke and mirrors. So I thought of a pretty good question to ask the guy that could expose the weakness in his equipment. I asked, and he looked ready to answer, when the Director of Operations looked at me and screamed (no hyperbole) at me to shut the hell up and let the guy do his demonstration, and stop asking stupid questions. I was so appalled by this situation that I clammed up - probably not what I would do at this point in my career, but there you go.

Later, the same director sees me in the hallway, and states that he was just trying to give me some "coaching".

As it shook out, the company wasted all told about $250k in goods, materials, software and hardware, and man-hours trying to generate useful information our of a device that I knew wouldn't work before it was purchased. As a sidebar, the DO was fired 2 years later for unethical business practices. Go figure.