Story time....

Once upon a time my office wanted to by a copy machine. We told the purchasing folks to buy a copier and figured that was that. Oh, no! They wanted us to spec it. So we through some specs at it (must hold one ream of paper, X pages per minute, blah blah blah). Purchasing still came back and said that our specs were inadequate. After a few more rounds of this (yes, seriously... I think someone at purchasing was pissed at us for some unknown reason) one of the guys got pissed and jumped into the "malicious compliance" pool with both feet.

See, this guy was a PhD Aerodynamicist. On his desk he had the no-shit specification for the AIM-9X missile (he was supposed to be doing a tech review of it). So what does our hero do? He starts rewriting the spec. Everywhere it said "missile" he changed it to "copy machine". Everywhere there were tech specs, he changed the numbers appropriately.

When he was done he had something like a 300 page spec sheet for a copy machine. It had temperature requirements. Vibration specs. Weight. Length. Electrical interfaces. You name it, he had speced it.

He turned that in with a memo that said in essence, "This is good enough to buy a missile. Don't even try to tell me it isn't good enough to buy a copy machine!"

They bought the copy machine.

And it didn't even meet the spec.