Working as an intern in 1999, I was tasked with writing a standards document for VoIP telephones for the TIA working group working on this space. The standards

Working as an intern in 1999, I was tasked with writing a standards document for VoIP telephones for the TIA working group working on this space. The standards organization had a Word template that everyone used, but as an engineering student, I had been working with and loving LaTex for some time and so naturally I thought… “why not just use LaTex? The final output will be in PDF anyway and the formatting will be better.” The LaTex output was indeed better. My boss loved my work and had no idea that I wasn’t using Word. Feedback from the working group members was also positive. Wow, this kid has real talent! As a startup, making a positive impression on the giant companies represented in the working group was extremely important for the future of the company, if not its survival. Unfortunately for me, one day my boss said, “could you send that Word doc over to big-whig so-and-so at massive-company-we-might-be-acquired-by? They want to use it as a template for a new document they’re writing.” I got that sinking feeling similar to when my mom found out my friend and I had peed in my closet as an experiment at age four. I then hired a friend to work all weekend painstakingly rewriting it in Word. Boss man got the document. Company was acquired for $100M 18 months later. Either way, LaTex still looks 1,000x better than Word.