A Stanford professor walked into a job interview. They thought she was a spy.

I was— I went to a startup company and they asked me to go to a conference week being held by one of their competing companies, but they asked me not to tell them that I was representing the company. They asked me to go as a Stanford graduate student, say I was a PhD student at Stanford. And so they asked me to misrepresent myself. And because I had not taken the time to think about it, I said, sure, right? The president of the company was someone who was my, you know, superior. He had a lot of authority, made it sound like this was something everybody did. So I went to this meeting and because I was familiar with the product and more familiar than a lot of other people in the room, I was asking a lot of questions, which made them very suspicious. And so they called up the company I worked for And they said, is Tina Seelig there? And the receptionist said, well, sure, no, she works here, but she's at a conference. And they came into the elevator with me, hit the stop button, backed me in the corner and said, are you a spy? And I, at that moment, it's like, you know, I didn't realize that what I was doing was spying. You know, I didn't realize what I was doing was not ethical and was dishonest. And, you know, I burst into tears and I left with my tail between my legs, but it really forced me to think about the choices I made. And I think oftentimes it's not until you're put in a situation where you're tested that you realize, uh, what am I doing here?