I was a contract engineer for Sprint PCS. In 99 as lead network engineer for the Motorola CDMA FoA (fist outside application).
Digital radio was new to cellular and not well understood by management. As a CDMA expert I had wide latitude as a contractor.
We had a pack of software guys from India analyzing stack traces and core dumps,to say this 50 million dollar switch was less than stable would be an understatement.
However we had a test cell at the MTSO and several adjacent for basic functionality testing. This however didn't stop corporate from parading visitors through my facility that was not inspection ready. The engineers were not very presentable and some of the staff had deferred personal hygiene.
So one afternoon a parade of suits were in the facility when we had the switch go offline. Some guy in a cheap suit runs into the control room wanting to know what's wrong. I am standing by the alarm printer trying to find the root cause in the hundreds of alarms so I reply "it's broke" hoping he will apply. He asks what O am going to do about it. I replied "fix it". Instead of going away he asked me what kind of idiot I was and who I reported to. When he saw my contractor badge he thought I was with the vendor. He took my badge and had me escorted off the property.
My boss called a little while later, I thing I was already half lit up at the bar with a some key folks from the project. After an exchange of expletives I asked if he had a better idea. He suggested I make up a technical explanation.
The moral is Mike is right. This guy was a senior VP. I could have explained real process issues, vendors forced into deadlines that doomed them to failure then blamed for the companies failure to plan. They didn't want to hear that.
Sometimes plausible deniability requires daily bathing in ignorance.