raisputin,
I am glad you found our story line humorous as that was the intention. We hope it is effective. No, this wasn't taken from your or anyone else's real world experience. We did think it very plausible and that was what we were going for.

We are encouraging participants to bring their real work related issues as the topic for a lesson at work. Working on something real often reinforces a lesson much more than some contrived example from a book. Unfortunately, this won't work for our "homework" because of the sensitive nature of what we work on. We still wanted to provide examples that were realistic, practical and left some questions intentionally unasked to encourage people to go out on their own.