Here's a story that I received secondhand, so I cannot verify its authenticity. A man exited the Navy, and got a new job with a private Navy-supporting contrac

Here's a story that I received secondhand, so I cannot verify its authenticity. A man exited the Navy, and got a new job with a private Navy-supporting contractor. He reports for work, and his manager tells him what he'll be working on. So he gets right to it, sets up a cot, and hammers away for a few days, until the problem is completely fixed. As one does when trained by the Navy. He then tells his manager that he's finished. Manager just goes berserk, and tells him to not show his face at the worksite again; just fill out the time card remotely, until instructed otherwise. So he toddles off, to go SCUBA diving every day, for about six months, until the work hours allocated to the project were finally used up. After that, he played the game correctly. This story aligns perfectly with my anecdotal experience, though it is not uniform across all contractor companies, or even across different work groups within the same company. Even the estimates for the work required to pad the estimates are padded.