Flustering/stressing out candidates in an interview is not always a bad thing, though. I guess it mostly depends on the job that you're interviewing for. If it's for a sys admin or webmaster or programmer who will have to quickly fix broken production systems, I'd want someone who can think on their feet. I'm not a fan of finding out at a bad moment that someone chokes up & can't hack together code when they're stressed. So there's no point of unnecessarily stressing out every interview candidate, but if it's useful for making a hiring decision, I'm all for asking tough questions that they might not know the answers to & getting them a little stressed out. -- cat