The project had been a mess from the beginning. I want to say that up front because I am not trying to make myself look good here — I am trying to tell you what happened. We had been hired by a mid-sized manufacturing company in Ohio, a family business in its third generation, to replace their inventory management system. The original contract, as signed by Vincent, was for eleven months and four hundred thousand dollars. The original scope, as defined in the statement of work I had been handed, was for a system that would integrate with nine different downstream tools, support six thousand SKUs, and be deployed across three warehouses in different states. From the first week of the engagement, it was clear to me — and to every engineer on my team — that what Vincent had sold the client was not deliverable in eleven months. Or twenty-two months. Or ever, honestly, in the price range Vincent had quoted. Vincent had, in order to win the deal, told the client we could do something we could not do, at a price we could not do it for, on a timeline that did not exist.